Faithful to Preach - Session 1

Introduction: The Charge of Love and the Power of the Word

Let's open our Bibles to 1 Timothy. At a pastors' conference, it seems right to go to the Pastoral Epistles. Look at chapter 1. Let me read verse 5, and then I will lead us in prayer.

Now the goal of our instruction is love that comes from a pure heart, a good conscience, and a sincere faith.

> — 1 Timothy 1:5 (CSB)

Let's pray together. Lord God, we thank you for every opportunity you give us to pray together. We come to you in the name of Christ. Lord, it is Him that we would glorify. We pray, Lord, that you would give us wisdom, that we would be able to know what is your will as we look at your Word during this day together.

We pray, Lord, that you would cause our trust in you to be sincere. Lord, we pray that you'd cleanse our consciences, convict us of sin, and make us more like yourself, even through this time together. Purify our hearts, we pray. Wash them even with your Word as we spend the day together. Thank you for the charge that you've given those of us who are elders and pastors here. We pray, Lord, that we'd be instructed and encouraged in that charge by our time together. We ask this in Jesus' name, amen.

If you have a copy of God's Word with you—whether you're going to be consulting a physical copy of a book or reading it on your phone—please stand. If you are seated, does that mean you have no access to God's Word? That's what I'm understanding! Oh, alright, thanks for standing.

Now, here's what we're going to do, guys. Keep your Bibles open to 1 Timothy, and now turn over to 2 Timothy. Look at chapter 4. We're going to read verse 2 aloud together, but we're going to do it by translations. It's going to be fun, isn't it? We're going to see what translations are represented here. Now, if you're reading a Spanish, Korean, or Chinese translation, just keep that to yourself. We're glad you have that and that it's useful for you, but this is a meeting in English, so we're just using English translations for the purpose of this exercise. We're very thankful that the Word is translated into other languages, but we are thankful particularly here for the translation into English.

I'll begin by reading what I have here, which is the ESV. If you have the ESV with you, read that aloud with me, and then when we're done, we'll have you be seated and see what else we have in the room. This is one way to meditate on God's Word together—kind of a fun way to do it. But even after you're done with the ESV reading, keep it open so that if some brother reads another translation, you can read along in your ESV and see what is different. Alright, here we go. Those of us who have the ESV, 2 Timothy 4:2:

"Preach the word; be ready in season and out of season; reprove, rebuke, and exhort, with complete patience and teaching."

Please be seated, those of you who have the ESV. So interesting. Brother, what's your name? Paul? What church? Great. And what translation do you have in front of you? The CSB? Okay. For those of you who have the CSB, Paul is going to lead us in reading 2 Timothy 4:2. For those of you who have something else, just look down at your translation and see what's different. Paul, go ahead.

Preach the word; be ready in season and out of season; correct, rebuke, and encourage with great patience and teaching.

> — 2 Timothy 4:2 (CSB)

Great! Please be seated, if you have the CSB and brought that with you today. Oh, look, there are still more translations running around. Host Pastor, you use neither the ESV nor the CSB. Are you really the King James Only man we always knew you to be in our hearts? You have the '84 NIV—the translation that upsets everybody! It's kind of conservative for the liberals. Excellent. Alright, if you have an '84 NIV with you, you guys can do a duo. Do it, you and John. Guys, get your eyes down, look at your translation, and see what's different. 2 Timothy 4:2:

"Preach the Word; be prepared in season and out of season; correct, rebuke and encourage—with great patience and careful instruction."

Please be seated. It sounds like you're the only one who had that. No? Two other brothers? Three other brothers? Okay. Brother, what's your name? Rich? What translation do you have? The 2011 NIV? Alright, that's what we always said was going to happen to it, and there it was—it happened! So if you have the NIV 2011, please read along with Rich:

"Preach the word; be prepared in season and out of season; correct, rebuke and encourage—with great patience and careful instruction."

Not a lot of advance in the Greek in those thirty or forty years, was there? Alright, please be seated, brother. Thank you. Yes, brother, what's your name? Raymond? What do you have? The NASB? Alright, if you have the NASB, please read along with Raymond:

"Preach the word; be ready in season and out of season; reprove, rebuke, exhort, with great patience and instruction."

Okay, now before you guys sit down—you NASB guys, because I know you guys are a proud lot; no idioms for you, just word-for-word literal—let me ask you to keep your eyes on yours again. Let me just read you the ESV again while you're staring at the NASB: "Preach the word; be ready in season and out of season; reprove, rebuke, and exhort, with complete patience and..."—that liberal word—"teaching." Alright, NASB brothers, please be seated.

There it is. I hope you're noticing how similar the English translations are. Anytime you hear a publisher trying to sell you on their translation because it is "the real, reliable one," you know they are trying to get us to doubt the clarity and perspicuity of the Scripture. The Scriptures are clear, brothers, and any major committee translation is going to tell you the same stuff. From this verse, brother, what's your name? Ian? What do you have? The Legacy Standard Bible? Okay, which is the New American Standard, but they use "slave" instead of "servant." Alright, go ahead. Everyone who has the Legacy, just read with Ian:

"Preach the word; be ready in season and out of season; reprove, rebuke, exhort, with great patience and instruction."

Ah, "great patience" as opposed to "complete patience." I caught the nuance there. Thank you. Alright, Legacy brothers, please be seated.

Now, brothers, please understand: this mocking is not aimed against any translation; it's in favor of all of these committee translations. Back when Crossway first came out with the ESV, they had a way of marketing it that I was concerned would undermine evangelicals' confidence in the clarity of Scripture, and I asked them to please stop marketing it that way. You don't put a major translation of Scriptures forward to Bible-believing people by undermining confidence in other major translations. You can have slight preferences for this rendering or that, but brothers, on the whole, the translations the Lord has given us in this language are just amazingly good.

Brother, what's your name? Ben? What do you have? The King James? Alright, please give us the King James, brother. Anybody else with him?

"Preach the word; be instant in season, out of season; reprove, rebuke, exhort with all longsuffering and doctrine."

Amen! Please be seated, if that's what you have. We still have two people saying, "Is this the New World Translation? What's going on here?" Alright, brother, what do you have? The New King James? Alright, you want to give it to us? Everybody look down at your translation and let's compare:

"Preach the word! Be ready in season and out of season. Convince, rebuke, exhort, with all longsuffering and teaching."

We emphasize that longsuffering! Amen. Alright, please be seated.

The Importance of Clear, Direct Sermon Introductions

Well, friends, in the time we have together in this first session, I am to speak about preaching. I thought, "If there's any group of people who are going to know everything that I would say about preaching, it's a group of pastors in Los Angeles who are going to come to a pastors' conference on a Saturday morning." So I thought, let's do something a little more specific, enjoyable, and different. For our time this morning, I want to share with you one of my own interests as a preacher that I have found helpful over the years, and that is particularly the way faithfulness was shown in the kind of sermons that the Puritans would preach—specifically in the sermon's introduction, structure, and content. So, what you're getting right now is not a general talk on preaching, but a specific look at the sermon, particularly as the Puritans approached it.

I had a brother from Australia text me a picture of the Banner of Truth website last night. It had a picture of past speakers from a conference. I'm thinking about this because I gave a version of this talk years ago at a Banner of Truth conference. This friend of mine asked me about the photograph: "Is this you?" I looked at it and thought, "Hey, that's what I look like right now!" But I was thirty years old. He asked me how old I was when that photograph was taken, and I was thirty. It is amazing how much time changes us. That was for free; it has nothing to do with the sermon, but it's just what came to mind because when I gave a version of this talk last, it was at a Banner of Truth ministers' conference.

Let me turn first to the sermon introduction. The Puritans said that introductions should be short and related to the text. They should be brief and clearly related to the topic of the message. If you look through Puritan sermons—Jonathan Edwards' sermons, for example—you'll see many introductions are no more than a few sentences, or last no more than a few minutes before he gets into the doctrine that he would preach. It's the same whether you are reading the sermons of Samuel Bolton, Nathaniel Vincent, or Thomas Watson. The Puritans got right to the point in the pulpit.

I am someone who can sometimes have a wandering, ten-minute introduction to try to get non-Christians or non-religious people involved in what I'm going to say, and I'm always challenged by the assumption that the Puritan preachers were making in their preaching. They let the hearers know right where they were going, and I appreciate the honesty and transparency of that.

If you've never read the Westminster Directory for Public Worship, raise your hand if you know of this document. Raise your hand if you know of the Westminster Directory for Public Worship. I'm not asking if you've memorized it. Now, raise your hand if you've never heard of it before. Okay, keep those hands up for just a moment. It's a Christian conference; we're all humble here. Keep your hands up. These are hands of ignorance. Now, if these hands confessing this particular ignorance have heard of the Westminster Confession of Faith, put your hand down. Okay, almost everybody can put their hands down now.

So, that's almost everyone. If you haven't heard of the Westminster Confession of Faith, I would encourage you to read it this afternoon or this evening when you get home. It's a great thing. Or, you can read it during my second talk! The other thing, though, that you brothers who know the Confession might not be aware of is that the Assembly of Pastors in England in the 1600s also put together, along with that Confession of Faith and the Catechisms, a Directory for Public Worship. It is pretty short, but it tells you a lot of what you want to think about for your Sunday gatherings. I would encourage you to get that and read it, maybe read it with your church leaders or your elders, and see what they say about it.

Anyway, in the Directory for Public Worship, they specifically say: "Let the introduction to his text be brief and perspicuous"—which ironically means clear—"drawn from the text itself, or context, or some parallel place, or general sentence of Scripture."

I think the Puritans captured the feel of Scripture in their approach to introductions. The sermons or summaries of sermons that we see in the book of Acts are quite direct. Or, if you look at the Epistles—which in many ways are written sermons—Paul was very direct with the Galatians. He just gets right into it. James was very direct in the letter that he wrote. The letter to the Hebrews is very direct. If you look at all of these, they are all disciples of Jesus. When you go back to the teachings of our Lord, our Lord used parables, but even those parables get to the point very quickly. Jesus was heard gladly by the people, and you can tell why.

I think for us today, we have to think: "Where are our hearers?" That's one way I would justify my sometimes longer introductions. I'm trying to help people who may not come in believing the Bible is true, but who are respectful of a Christian family member or friend, or who are curious, or who wonder what's going on in this old building. For whatever reason, they've turned up, and so in my introduction, I'm trying to help them think through things that they might not be used to thinking about.

For instance, I believe that people are depraved and sinful. Yet, certainly, our public education system is built against that today. What everybody is being taught by the culture at large is the opposite of what we know from the Bible is true. Because of the biblical ignorance of our contemporary audiences, we may need to bring them a bit further in our introductions than our brethren from three and four hundred years ago did. We don't have to be apologetic for the truth of the Bible at all, but we may need to arrange it in a way that they're going to hear and better understand why we're going to tell them what we're going to tell them. This is sort of giving the "so what" before you give the "what."

If any of you have read Jonathan Leeman's book One Assembly, raise your hand. A lot of you? Okay. It's a good book. It's a tough read, and I don't know how well you remember it. I use it with my internship program every semester, so I'm going over it again and again. It's basically three chapters with a really good appendix. The first two chapters are rough going, but the third chapter is all the sweet stuff about how churches work so much better together when they realize that they're essentially an assembly. They become much less competitive with each other and start helping each other more—all this amazing stuff.

Jonathan and I really went back and forth about whether to put that third chapter first. That's the kind of "so what" that gets people bought into it before you ask them to do the hard work of climbing through the ravine of exegesis and theological reflection in those initial two chapters. Do you put it in the order he finally did, or do you change it? I think we have to think that through with our sermons. You know what the point of your sermon is tomorrow; how distant is it from the people you're going to be giving it to? That might help you understand what you should be trying to do in your introduction.

Sermon Structure: Prioritizing the Text and Truths

Well, enough on introductions. Let's go on now to number two: sermon structure. The Puritans said that the structure of the sermon should be text first, then truths. Text, then truths. Make sure they get the text. God's Spirit might do stuff with the text that you didn't even think of for your sermon, so make sure they get the text, and then the truths. The text should be first summarized, and then the doctrines drawn from it.

Every Puritan sermon I can ever remember seeing is structured like this. You'll see it if you look at William Bridge's sermons on Psalm 42:11, published as A Lifting Up for the Downcast, or in Thomas Brooks' sermons on Lamentations 3:24, An Ark for All of God's Noahs, or John Bunyan's sermon on Luke 24:47, published as The Jerusalem Sinner Saved. All of them are structured like this: text, then truths.

The Directory for Public Worship says:

If the text be long (as in histories or parables it sometimes must be), let him give a brief sum of it; if short, a paraphrase thereof, if need be; in both, looking diligently to the scope of the text, and pointing at the chief heads and grounds of doctrine which he is to raise from it.

The typical structure of a Puritan sermon is going to be: a very brief introduction, the text, a summary of the text, and then the doctrines to be raised from the text. That will be about thirty percent of the sermon. It will feel much more nearly applied to your heart, probably, than almost any sermon you've ever heard. Then they get to about sixty percent of the sermon—the last part of the sermon—which contains the "uses" or the applications. Use number one, use number two, and then they really start going after the hearers' hearts. So if you've never looked at a Puritan sermon, I encourage you to find one and examine it.

I think if you look in Scripture, you can see where we get this basic idea. In Deuteronomy 31, Moses charged Joshua with reading the law before the people every seven years. Do people in your community need to go to a Roman Catholic church if they want to hear the Bible read aloud? It would be great if Evangelical churches would start reading the Bible out loud again. What a good way to spend our time together: to hear the text of God's Word read.

In Joshua 8:34-35, this is what Joshua was doing on Mount Ebal: he was having the law read back and forth. In 2 Kings 23, when the law is rediscovered, what does King Josiah do? He finds the law many years later, and he has it read aloud. This is also what Ezra the priest does at the time of the return from exile in Nehemiah 8, reading before those who returned.

Of course, what does Jesus do in the first sermon of His we have recorded in the synagogue at Nazareth? He takes the Isaiah scroll, He reads the Word, and then He explains what He has read. That's the basic biblical justification for what you and I are doing tomorrow morning if we're preaching. We are reading God's Word, and then we are explaining it. We're explaining the truth of it as we comment upon it. That's what we want to do in our preaching.

It's important that what we say comes from the Bible—that it really does come from the Bible—and that we labor to make it clear to our hearers that this is in fact coming from the Bible. I remember when our friend Claudia was baptized, she was giving her testimony. She was an agnostic before I met her, and she ended up coming to Christ. When she was giving her testimony before her baptism, she said she had read something while she was considering Christianity that had been published by our church, and it used the phrase "born again." She thought, "What a wonderful image: born again." Her conclusion was: "What great writers they have at this church!" She had been brought up in a completely non-religious home and had no idea that those words came from Jesus.

Friends, we've got riches in God's Word to share with the world around us, helping them understand their own lives better than they do with their poor, broken ways of understanding themselves. Help your people by teaching them the truth about themselves from the Scriptures. The structure of expositional preaching makes it clear that the agenda is fundamentally God's agenda, and not our own. That's number two: sermon structure.

Sermon Content: Faithfulness to the Biblical Context

Let me make a few comments about sermon content, our third thing. We will see how much time I've got to make various points here. First, I'll just say the Puritans believed that sermons should be faithful to the text. Sermons should deal not just with individual words, but with whole sentences. Sermons should not be mere lexical exercises—you know, going over the etymology and use of logizomai to reckon or account—but should cover the whole sentence that the word is used in and deal with the point of the text. What we're trying to make clear in the content of our sermons is that the Bible is primary, and it must be primary in our preaching as well.

Matthew Henry was very clear on this when he commented on Ezekiel 1 and 3. He says: "Those who preach must first hear." Those who preach must first hear. That's us, friends. If we want to preach in the way the Lord wants us to, we ourselves must first hear.

Again, there are many good examples of this from the Puritans. They were not ones who would spend forever talking about the etymological root of the word hamartia. They're not going to do that; rather, they would follow the point of the biblical passage.

For instance, one of my favorite shorter Puritan works is by John Bunyan. If you want one of the more readable Puritans, John Bunyan has to be one of the most readable of all the Puritan writers. In his comments on Ephesians 3:18-19, published as The Saints' Knowledge of Christ's Love, Bunyan follows those famous four adjectives that describe the love of Christ: breadth, length, depth, and height. That's the order that he goes through: breadth, length, depth, and height. But he never loses himself in an illustration that is ten miles from the point of Paul's words there.

For example, in the section where he is talking about the breadth of the love of Christ, Bunyan writes this—and this will give you a little taste of him:

Sometimes a man, yea, a man of God, is, as he apprehends, so far off from God, that he can neither help him, nor hear him, and this is a dismal state. They think themselves beyond the reach of his mercy. Wherefore, in answer to this conceit, it is that the Lord asketh:

Why was no one there when I came? Why was there no one to answer when I called? Is my arm too weak to redeem? Or do I have no power to rescue? Look, I dry up the sea by my rebuke; I turn the rivers into a wilderness; their fish rot because of lack of water and die of thirst.

— Isaiah 50:2 (CSB)

And again:

Indeed, the Lord’s arm is not too weak to save, and his ear is not too deaf to hear.

— Isaiah 59:1 (CSB)

Wherefore he saith again:

Even if your exiles are at the farthest horizon, he will gather you and bring you back from there.

— Deuteronomy 30:4 (CSB)

God has a long arm, and he can reach a great way farther than we can conceive. He can, when we think his mercy is clean gone, and that ourselves are free among the dead, and of the number that he remembereth no more, reach us, and cause that again we stand before him. He could reach Jonah, though in the belly of hell, and reach thee, even then when thou thinkest thy way is hid from the Lord, and thy judgment passed over from thy God. There is a length to admiration, beyond apprehension or belief, in the arm of the strength of the Lord; and this is that which the Apostle intended by his word "length"; namely, to insinuate what a reach there is in the mercy of God, how far it can extend itself:

If I fly on the wings of the dawn and settle down on the western horizon, even there your hand will lead me; your right hand will hold on to me.

— Psalm 139:9-10 (CSB)

"I will gather them from the east, and from the west, from the north, and from the south," saith he, that is, from the utmost corners. This, therefore, should encourage them that for the present cannot stand, but that do fly before their guilt: them that feel no help nor stay, but that go, as to their thinking, every day by the power of temptation driven yet farther off from God, and from the hope of obtaining of his mercy to their salvation.

Poor creature! I will not now ask thee how thou camest into this condition, or how long this has been thy state; but I will say before thee, and I pray thee hear me: Oh, the length of the saving arm of God! As yet thou art within the reach thereof. Do not thou go about to measure arms with God, as some good men are apt to do: I mean, do not thou conclude that because thou canst not reach God by thy short stump, therefore he cannot reach thee with his long arm. Look again: "Hast thou an arm like God?" An arm like his for length and strength! It becomes thee, when thou canst not perceive that God is within the reach of thy arm, then to believe that thou art within the reach of his; for it is long, and none knows how long.

Amen! Oh, it's all so good. I'm serious, go get Bunyan's The Saints' Knowledge of Christ's Love.

Now, in all of that, notice that Bunyan gave attention to individual words, but in the way he was doing that, he never lost the fox that he was chasing. He had the main point through it all; he kept his eye on the ball and kept the main thing the main thing. This is exactly what the Westminster Directory had encouraged preachers to do:

In analyzing and dividing his text, he is to regard more the order of matter than the words; and neither to burden the memory of the hearers in the beginning with too many members or divisions, nor to trouble their minds with obscure terms of art.

I think this is consistent with the way we see God giving His Word in the Bible. You see somewhat free citations of Old Testament passages in the New Testament where they are capturing the main point that the author is making. It's faithful to the meaning of the text, even though they've translated it from Hebrew into Greek, and there are a number of ways it could be translated. You can see how carefully Paul argues, say, in Galatians 2 and 3, from the fact that "seed" is in the singular, and in so doing, he's not losing the point of the passage in Genesis. He is following it to say that there is one person in whom this promise is summed up and ultimately fulfilled.

For us, we have to be aware of the danger of doing our systematic theology through each individual word and thereby losing the forest for the trees. This came home to me very clearly when I was doing overview sermons of the Bible. A good friend of mine, Isaac Adams—who is pastoring in Birmingham, Alabama—has just begun a series of overview sermons through different books of the Bible. He said he has never worked harder on sermons, but it has never been more fruitful for his own soul.

That would be my testimony. I did a bunch of overview sermons in the late '90s and early 2000s. They are published as Promises Made and Promises Kept: The Message of the Old Testament and The Message of the New Testament. Book by book, you guys can find those sermons and listen to them for free online at Capitol Hill Baptist Church's website. If you do something like that, I think you'll see that the work you do in the text causes you to understand what the basic argument is and to follow that.

This first came to me very clearly when I was living in England and a Muslim friend became a Christian—not through my witness fundamentally, but through some other people. They asked me to disciple him. I knew I was returning to America to pastor a church, and I had a limited amount of time. So I said to this brother from Pakistan, "Listen, let's meet three times, and I want you to teach me the book of Hebrews." I knew that he needed to understand forgiveness and atonement.

Coming from a Muslim background, he had understood God as fundamentally requiring submission. And God does require submission, certainly. But what a partial and therefore inaccurate way to fully summarize our relationship with God! Submission, yes, certainly. But what if all your kids knew about their relationship to you was that you required submission? Or your wife? What a wretched relationship that would be! Yet that's what our Muslim friends grow up believing in their hearts. Oh, it's heartbreaking.

So I thought Hebrews was the perfect thing for this guy. We met three times, and I had him teach me through the book of Hebrews, a third of it each time, just to teach me what the message is. That showed me the helpfulness and the instructiveness to people of getting a whole, large section of Scripture and trying to summarize it clearly. Anyway, that's about content, and that is me just making the point here, following the Puritans, that the sermon should be faithful to the text. You want to get the whole sense of the sentence or the passage.

Let me give a second thing about the content. The Puritans said that sermons should be true, biblical, and helpful. "Now, Mark, aren't you just saying the same thing in a number of different ways?" Yes, in fact, I am, and I'm doing so deliberately. But let me do it again, and let me ask you to write down these three words. They are three good words for you to ask about your sermon for tomorrow morning: Is it true? Is it biblical? And is it helpful?

I don't mean the exact same thing by "biblical" as "true." You might think of something that is true—like, "it's sunny outside"—but that is not particularly biblical in terms of expositing a text. So I'm trying to make a second, distinct point: Is it biblical? That is, do you see what you're teaching in Scripture, and does your sermon show that to the people who are listening to you preach? Is it true? Is it biblical? And third, is it helpful?

Paul says in 1 Corinthians 14:26, "Let all things be done for building up." Don't take up your people's time on the first day of the week if you don't think it's going to help them. You want to help the people; you want to build them up. True, biblical, helpful.

The doctrine drawn from the text should be true, it should be evident, and it should be edifying. The sermon should make sense, it should flow from the text, and it should be helpful. This is the way the Puritans actually preached. If you've read much of Jeremiah Burroughs, you've seen him do this. He was a noted preacher, a Congregationalist, and a member of the Westminster Assembly. In late 1643 and early 1644, he was preaching from Isaiah 66:2 on "him who trembles at my word." Each of these sermons expresses great truths about the nature of a trembling heart and its importance.

At the beginning of the series, Burroughs well set his text in the context of Isaiah's history and argument, and it was certainly a topic that was important to be addressed at the time. England was in a civil war; it was at a real crossroads regarding what it would do with its own government. Which way would Burroughs urge them to go? Well, he doesn't give any straightforward political advice, but he tells them to go in the way in which they can tremble at the word of the Lord. The truth, the clearly biblical nature, and the helpfulness of Burroughs' remarks were simply typical of Puritan preaching. If you read preaching from these Puritan brothers, you'll find this.

The Directory encourages this, saying:

In raising doctrines from the text, his care ought to be: first, that the matter be the truth of God; secondly, that it be a truth contained in or grounded on that text, that the hearers may discern how God teacheth it from thence; and thirdly, that he chiefly insists upon those doctrines which are principally intended, and make most for the edification of the hearers.

Make most for the edification of the hearers.

I'm looking back at my last two series I preached this year. I was in Romans 4, and before that, I preached Genesis 5-11. Have they been helpful for the congregation? Have I addressed things that this assembly of Christians needs to think through and understand? That's a question to evaluate our own preaching. I think we see this kind of concern for God's Word throughout Scripture.

You go back to Deuteronomy 5 and 6, where God, the Truth Himself, speaks and gives His people His Word, which they need for their daily instruction. Then, in chapter 6, He instructs parents to teach their children these same things. He cares about the method; He cares about the content. The Lord is very careful about teaching in that sense.

Clearly, today too, our preaching should not be the opposite of these things. Our preaching should be true, not false. Our teaching should clearly be from the text of Scripture; it should not be obscurely related to Scripture or just our own thoughts. And it should not be to no point, as if you've just "always wanted to preach one on this," as opposed to what would be helpful for the hearers.

I know that sometimes, particularly in summer months, pastors have resorted to some weird things. They will say right after Easter, "Now, for the next three weeks, we're going to be piling up votes for what people want to hear this summer." I've heard strange things preached, and they do that in order to raise interest in the congregation. I would discourage you from doing that.

Plainness and Clarity in Preaching

There is a third thing on the content of our sermons that we can see in the Puritans: sermons should be clear. Sermons should be clear. The doctrine should be clearly expressed. That is, not only does the doctrine clearly flow from the text (which is what I was saying in the previous point), but the doctrine itself should be clearly expressed.

If someone says your sermon is "very plain," that's a compliment. You don't want someone leaving just amazed at your brilliance as a communicator: "My goodness, how did he ever get that from the text?" No, you want them to say, "How did I never see that before? It's so clear! I will never be able to unsee that now. It's not that I have to memorize your very clever outline, but now when I am reading through the story of the flood, I will never not see that. I will always have that in mind." Brothers, that's what we desire for our sermons to be.

Richard Capel was supposed to have been very plain in his preaching, and he felt he was complimented in that by being compared to Richard Sibbes, another Puritan who was famously plain in his preaching. In his day, it was written:

This curious age is too much given to the affectations of words, phrases, and cadences; and holy Dr. Sibbes was wont to say, that "great affectation and good affections seldom go together."

I'm always suspicious when I'm at some pastors' conference and I hear a lot about the "how" and very little about the "why" and the "what." I like the "why" and the "what." Now, in this message I'm giving you, there is a lot on the "how," but I would say this is an exception. This is a "how" which is stressing the coherence between the "what," the "why," and the "how." It's trying to look at that and raise that issue.

Contrary to the way their old language may hide it from us sometimes, in their own day, the Puritans were masters of clarity. Masters of clarity. I am again and again challenged when I read the sermons of Jonathan Edwards. I was talking to two young pastoral assistants at our church yesterday morning, and I wanted to try to help them in their preaching. I said, "Listen, let me tell you three more recent preachers. I want you to read one sermon of each, and then we'll get together and talk about them." The three more recent ones were Martyn Lloyd-Jones, John Stott, and James Montgomery Boice. Read one of each of theirs, and we'll talk about them.

"But then," I said, "I want to tell you three old preachers. I want you to read one of their sermons: John Calvin—particularly one of his sermons on the Ten Commandments, which have been translated so well; Jonathan Edwards; and Charles Spurgeon. And we'll get together and talk about the virtues of their different kinds of sermons."

On Edwards, I don't know of anybody that I read where pretty much every paragraph has things pop in my brain like, "Oh my goodness," as he's drawing these connections so clearly. One of the most extraordinary examples of this is his series of sermons preached on 1 Corinthians 13, called Charity and Its Fruits. Austin, I'm holding up another Banner publication. You may want to get a picture of this for your employers just to show them how faithfully I'm out here promoting Banner work, even on the West Coast. Austin works for the Banner of Truth. Brothers, what can I say? The print is large!

What Edwards does in these sermons—which, interestingly, were not published during his lifetime—is go through the text very carefully. You can tell from the titles:

1. All True Grace in the Heart Summed Up in Charity, or Love
2. Charity, or Love, More Excellent Than the Extraordinary Gifts of the Spirit
3. All That Can Be Done or Suffered in Vain Without Charity, or Love
4. Charity is Meek in Bearing Evil and Injuries
5. Charity Cheerful and Free in Doing Good
6. The Spirit of Charity the Opposite of an Envious Spirit
7. The Spirit of Charity a Humble Spirit
8. The Spirit of Charity the Opposite of a Selfish Spirit

Let me just go to that eighth sermon to show you what the clarity of his thinking and expression is like.

He says—this is from 1 Corinthians 13:5—"Charity seeketh not her own." This is how he begins:

Having shown the nature of charity in respect to the good of others, in the two particulars, that it is kind to them, and envies not their enjoyments and blessings, and also in respect to our own good, that it is not proud either in spirit or behavior, I pass to the next point presented by the apostle, that is, that charity "seeketh not her own."

So, other translations, how do you have that? Let me hear an ESV, a Legacy, a CSB. 1 Corinthians 13:5, that phrase "seeketh not her own."

Audience Member: "Does not insist on its own way."

Mark Dever: That's ESV. Someone else?

Audience Member: "Is not self-seeking."

Mark Dever: That's CSB. Someone else?

Audience Member: "Does not seek its own."

Mark Dever: That sounds like the Legacy. Good. So here he says that the spirit of charity, or Christian love, is the opposite of a selfish spirit. That's his doctrine that he raises: "that the spirit of charity, or Christian love, is the opposite of a selfish spirit."

Here is just the first paragraph of his explication of that, and listen to how clear his language is. The clarity of language reflects the clarity of thought:

The ruin that the fall brought upon the soul of man consists very much in his losing the nobler and more benevolent principles of his nature, and falling wholly under the power and government of self-love. Before, and as God created him, he was exalted, and noble, and generous; but now he is debased, and ignoble, and selfish. Immediately upon the fall, the mind of man shrank from its primitive greatness and expanded to an exceeding smallness and contractedness; and as in other respects, so especially in this. Before, his soul was under the government of that noble principle of divine love, whereby it was enlarged to the comprehension of all his fellow creatures and their welfare; and not only so, but it was not confined within such narrow limits as the bounds of the creation, but went forth in the exercise of holy love to the Creator, and abroad upon the infinite ocean of good, and was, as it were, swallowed up by it and became one with it. But so soon as he had transgressed against God, these noble principles were immediately lost, and all this excellent largeness of man's soul was gone; and thenceforward he himself shrank, as it were, into a little space, circumscribed and closely shut up within itself, to the exclusion of all things else. Sin, like some powerful astringent, contracted his soul to the very small dimensions of selfishness; and God was forsaken, and fellow creatures forsaken, and man retired within himself, and became totally governed by narrow and selfish principles and feelings. Self-love became absolute master of his soul, and the more noble and spiritual principles of his being took wings and flew away.

Brothers, that's literally just the first paragraph of the sermon! I mean, I could keep going. It might be more edifying if I just read this the rest of the day to us! If you have never read Jonathan Edwards... well, some say, "Edwards believed in slavery." Yes, unfortunately, he did. But so did Augustine. Slavery is not a uniquely Christian thing; it's a thing in the fallen world that is abusive of people and not right. But the end of slavery came from Christianity; its origin was not in Christianity, friends. So Edwards should be recovered and used to edify your own thinking, and Charity and Its Fruits is a great place to start.

Well, this is exactly what the Directory encouraged preachers to do:

The doctrine is to be expressed in plain terms; or, if anything in it need explication, it is to be opened, and the consequence also from the text cleared. The parallel places of Scripture confirming the doctrine are rather to be plain and pertinent, than many, and, if need be, somewhat insisted upon, and applied to the purpose in hand.

This is the kind of plainness we see in the Scriptures. John the Baptist was famously plain in his speech. In the Gospels, we see that the crowds of people welcomed Jesus gladly. He didn't just perform for the academic elite or for the history aficionados. In Mark 12:37, we see that the large crowd listens to Him with delight. Peter's early sermons in Acts 2 and 4, or Stephen's when he's about to be stoned there in Acts 7, were not only bold almost past imagining, but they were crystal clear. This is part of what gives them their brave force.

Of course, friends, our trouble began with Satan taking the Word with its inherent authority and garbling it up, confusing it. And our troubles will end when God speaks His verdict clearly—His true Word of power and judgment.

So, brothers, sometimes we think that spontaneity is the essence of clarity, and that to be studied is necessarily to be tortured, obscure, hair-splitting, and overly academic. But it's not so. Your sermon might become clearer if you took more time working on it, and particularly on how you are going to express it. Friends, there is much more I could say here, but this is just a few matters for you to consider to help you be faithful to preach God's Word—regarding your sermons, their introductions, their structure, and their content. Let me pray for us.

Lord God, we thank you for elder brothers that you've given us in this task. We pray that you'd give us both curiosity and humility, that we would read and learn. Lord, we desire to know you better. Use your Word to that end. Father, we pray that you would anoint the preaching of each man here this coming Lord's Day, that we would be able to open your Word and explain it clearly and compellingly in a way that edifies those gathered. Do this, we pray, for your glory and our good, in Jesus' name, amen.

Panel Discussion: The Heart of the Preacher and the Grind of Ministry

Host: Even though it may not initially seem like much when you look at the essence of Puritan sermons, I would like to think that my own sermons are faithfully following the same way they approached the text. That talk was really helpful. Bobby, any thoughts?

Bobby Jamieson: Mark, I thought it was so helpful, really encouraging. It wasn't a sermon, but it was a fantastic talk on just what we are doing. One of the things that I think we're always trying to recover... we talk about expositional preaching a lot, right, especially in our circles. But we're trying to recover the idea of expressing, in our sermon content and structure, things that come straight from the Scriptures. Particularly, Mark, what you said about... I forget the exact way you said it, but that you want them not to be impressed by anything we've said, but to look at the Scriptures and go, "Why didn't I see that? I can't unsee that now." That would make the greatest impression on the hearer of our sermons.

Mark Dever: A little parable of that is me having you all read that text in the beginning. Some of you are quite prejudiced in favor of your translation, and I just wanted to let you know that I think you're being silly and you're not helping your people! I don't care if it's the NIV 2011 or the King James; all of these are excellent translations into a major modern language done by committees of scholars. They're excellent, and we should praise God that we have these excellent translations. So I was hoping to drive that point home, to the honor of the Word of God, in a brief, memorable way.

Host: That's very helpful. It's extremely helpful. I just enjoyed every point. When we're faithfully preaching, what we ought to be doing is giving ourselves over to just being a means by which God speaks to His people from His Word. So the text has to stay king. It has to stay king over the structure, and we're just laboring to hear well what the text is saying, and then say it clearly. It takes a lot of work to do that.

I'm curious: we've got three different kind of seminary traditions represented here on this panel. We've got Southern Seminary, we've got Masters, and we've got like evangelicalism of the 1970s and '80s—Stott, Gordon-Conwell back then. All three of these traditions are big on expositional preaching; they would all say this is the center. Is there anything you're hearing in this that is distinct or supplementary to what you've been taught?

Mark Dever: I would say, although my guys back in the '80s at Gordon-Conwell never referred to the Puritans (except Richard Lovelace would refer to Jonathan Edwards, and he misunderstood him badly), they actually ended up getting it pretty right in the sense that, say, John Stott or Jim Boice that I mentioned, and certainly Lloyd-Jones... all of these modern preachers, I think, are capturing the best of the essence of that kind of Puritan commitment to the clarity of the Word and trying to reproduce it in their preaching.

Host: I'm just curious, did you reflect on Masters or Southern? Any thoughts on what you guys were taught, and how your training in preaching has held up?

Bobby Jamieson: My Masters experience might be a little unique. I was really, really influenced through my Bible study at UCLA. Our Bible study pastor was getting his PhD in Semitic languages, so he would have us read a chapter, and I had to write out each word and say what part of speech it was. So I had a really deep exegetical kind of background that he influenced me in—line diagramming, block diagramming, doing all this exegetical stuff. Consequently, it took me quite a while—in fact, maybe I'm still not fully there—to not just make my preaching a historical description. That last part of what you said, Mark, about getting to the truth and application... I almost stopped at just explaining the text. That is still a weakness I hear in my own preaching.

Panelist: I was going to say the same thing. Our seminary—God bless them, we're talking about The Master's Seminary—has a strong emphasis on exposition, on explaining the text, and I think they do a great job in that. But for a lot of us who come through that tradition, yes, you can emphasize the explanation to the point where, like Bobby said so well, that's kind of all you've given them—a kind of exciting commentary.

Again, that's not wickedness; we haven't denounced the gospel or the reputation of Christ. It's a good thing that you're explaining the Scriptures. But I think preaching has a little bit more to it. Particularly when we're looking at the Puritans, their ability to draw out these simple statements of, "This is how we apply this," makes you go, "Man, their thinking is so good, and my thinking is so shallow." I mean, that Bunyan passage that I read, or the Edwards passage—they're both super faithful to what the Scripture is talking about, but they climb right into it and they think it out in a way that anybody should be able to relate to.

That is so difficult for us because if your tradition is very steeped in exegetical research, then what you might find challenging is trying to say, "Okay, so that's what the text says; I'm clear on that. Now, how would that be helpful to my particular congregation or to these men in the room?" I find that to be so much more challenging and difficult than simply working through a lexicon for a word or looking up a grammatical structure. That's kind of unearthing stuff scientifically and objectively. The subjective work of, "What does this mean for me, for my household, for our church, for every member?"—that is so much more work. I don't know if I do it exceptionally well, but I'm thankful for the men who have shown us the way.

Bobby Jamieson: One thing I try to do—and this may be a limitation of my tradition—is I try to do my exegesis really early in the week. I try to make sure by Tuesday I know what the text is saying, so I can meditate the rest of the week on, "Now, how can we feast on this? What are the implications of this for our people?"

I think my criticism of Southern would be, like most seminaries, just the lack of practice in preaching. You're getting a master's degree, and you're preaching maybe three to six sermons total that are ten to fifteen minutes long, and you're only preaching to your own peers. I think the type of things that we paid attention to were kind of like the blind leading the blind. It wasn't until I actually started preaching more regularly that I realized, "Oh, my priorities need to be completely different in the things I pay attention to."

Mark Dever: One more comment on this. I think that if you're in a tradition that has not been that careful about the text, then Masters or Southern or my old Gordon-Conwell days are really helpful. If we've been in a tradition where we all believe it's the inerrant Word of God and we really want to know it, then what all these brothers in our seminaries are telling us is equipping us better to mine it. But there's a lot more that goes on in preaching besides that.

You look at Simeon Trust workshops, which I love. But what they do, again, is just this same thing—it's what I was taught to do, what you were taught to do, and what you guys were very well equipped to do. That's about it. It's like, "maybe don't make the wrong applications" is implied in it, but wouldn't it be good if there was something like a Simeon Trust workshop to help us do better application, more nearly associated with the thrust of the text? Of course, you'd have to know everybody's congregation in order to do it perfectly, but there are some things that are basic to human nature, and other things that are particular to our context.

I want to say this to the younger guys who just came out of seminary: I loved my seminary professors. They were my heroes, and because they influenced me so much, I really thought, "That's how I should be; that's what I should be doing in a pulpit." But seminary professors aren't always pastoral preachers. So I'd encourage you to find some good, local church preachers and listen to them.

Host: Well, brothers, you guys have been helming your pulpits for multiple decades now. What are some ways that your preaching has changed over the years?

Bobby Jamieson: I think, hopefully, I've moved away from just limiting my sermon to being a commentary or just a historical description. I've tried to step into what Mark said and really think through how to flesh out the truth for our congregation better.

Panelist: I think one area that I would encourage you guys to walk through is... at some point, because I've been pastoring so long and preaching so long to the same congregation, I stopped trying to impress people. I'm telling you, for my own soul and for the help of those who are listening to me preach, that's probably one of the most singular character issues that I've had to overcome. Especially as a young guy... we church-planted when I was, I think, twenty-seven. Sorry to make fun of all the twenty-somethings in the room, but if I was able to take a time machine and meet up with my younger self, I'd say, "Dude, don't church plant yet. You don't know anything about life yet! You don't know what you're doing."

But especially when you're young, you feel like you need to be impressive. Like Bobby's saying, you've seen some guys preach and you're like, "Okay, I'm going to be like that," and you're trying to mimic someone. But at some point, you realize that preaching, in terms of the style of it and the delivery part of it, is just a slight amplification of your own personality. I've had conversations with Mark—we've had dinner together—and Mark is pretty much that, but maybe toned down a little bit in private!

I think once we get over trying to impress people, and we're just convinced, "Hey, I think this is what God's Word says; let me try to explain this to you well, in a way that you might be able to apply it," then you just do your best. I think one of the worst sermons I've ever preached was at a Christian college chapel. I wanted to be impressive to a bunch of young collegians; I wanted to be funny. I told some good jokes, and it was the worst. I felt so embarrassed before the Lord. Maybe the collegians liked it, maybe they didn't, and I trust that the Word of God was still there. But that was one of those moments where I realized, "Man, what in the world are you doing?" For you young guys, if you're nervous about how you appear, that is something you've got to work out—that fear of man—because in the end, you're not going to impress anyone. You're just trying to convey what the Lord has taught you. That's one nugget I try to give to young men who are preparing for ministry.

Mark Dever: I would give a three-part answer: Justin (a country preacher), young Mark, and old Mark.

First, Justin, the country preacher: Connie and I, when we are on vacation, will always go to a church on the Lord's Day. That's what Christians do. Often we are not entirely pleased by what we experience on that day, but it gives me fresh resolve for Nine Marks and putting time into that ministry! But I want to help pastors a little bit, too. I was at this one place, and this time, the guy preaching was much better. He was young, a Southeastern grad, and he was orthodox in everything he said. He had good, earnest vigor, but he must have quoted people like five or six times—like Bavinck and other scholars. Here we are in some valley in Virginia, and the dude is quoting long, excellent quotes of Bavinck! I thought, "Okay, this is a young guy; he likes good stuff, but he doesn't realize he's supposed to swallow and digest it, and then just give the good results out of it, not cite the bibliography." He'll learn that.

Which brings me to the second one: young me. My sermons, if you listen to them in the '90s or the early 2000s especially, were more complicated than my sermons now. My sermons over time have simplified somewhat—not as much as they should. I still have that sort of scholar's brain or historian's brain of wanting to do too much of a lecture. That's why I think—were it not irreverent—I would say the Lord made a mistake in making me a pastor; I should be a professor. But I trust His sovereignty; He knows what He's doing. If it were up to me, I would put me in the classroom, not in a pulpit. But I think even I have learned to be a little simpler.

You see this in Spurgeon's sermons. If you compare a Spurgeon sermon from the 1850s to one from the 1880s, there's a huge difference. In the 1850s, he has a lot of complex points. By the 1880s, he's saying, "People are sinners, they need a Savior, and Christ is that Savior." He's just so clear. By the 1880s, it is smoothed down. You've got all the same deep content, but it's just not as much of the "how he got there" as in his early sermons.

Host: Many of us have been trying to preach faithfully week-to-week for multiple years now. I've only been at it for ten months, and I'm already feeling some of the compounding exhaustion that happens from knowing that you have to do this every seven days, over and over again. Any encouragement for the exhausted, discouraged pastor who is preaching week-to-week?

Bobby Jamieson: I hope when you are preparing sermons, you're not just preparing a meal for your congregation that you yourself are not feasting on. You've just got to pour yourself into the text and plead, "God, show me your glory, help me experience your love, sanctify me." You want to allow this privilege that God has given you to shape you. What a job! You're spending all this time in the Word, and you should be praying that the transformation of 2 Corinthians 3:18—those incremental steps of glory—is happening to you while you're in the Word. Your congregation then gets blessed by that, as you're being blessed to be in the Word like that. Don't make it just, "I'm doing this for them." It has got to be for your own soul.

Panelist: I think that's phenomenal advice because whatever the fatigue and discouragement are rooted in, it is probably in some ways connected to that—feeling like we're trying to serve others without taking the time to really imbibe what the Scriptures have to say.

Prayer is a significant part of that. There are crazy weeks in pastoral ministry: someone passes away and you have to do a sudden funeral; a longtime member couple is having a really difficult time and they need to meet with you; things happen, you get sick, and you may not have the time you think is adequate to prepare as well as you'd like to prepare. You need to lean more in on the Lord at that moment, and less on, "Okay, how do I get this in my mind, and how do I not make a fool of myself?" It is all about: Do you believe in God's sovereignty, and do you have enough that you can explain what Scripture says for the benefit of the congregation? That's all you're after.

People tell me, "Hey, I went back and listened to your sermon series on this book," and I just cringe! I'm thinking, "I'm sorry I did such a bad job." I don't say that out loud, but I'm thinking it. I don't know that I am a fantastic preacher every single Sunday. I'm just decently good, but I trust the Lord uses "decently good" because that's all I've got sometimes. I would encourage you guys in that moment, if there's discouragement, just go to the Lord. It is really in His service and for your soul, and when you recover that kind of worshipful attitude, you'd be surprised what the Lord will do.

Mark Dever: I want to make three very distinct parts: there is the discovery (studying and discovering), there is the crafting of the sermon, and there is the preaching. These three, in my mind, could not be more distinct. What Bobby is saying, I only agree with on the first part. I don't think there's anything necessarily virtuous in liking the second or third parts. They can be related, but the first part is where I am one hundred percent amening Bobby. If you don't like studying God's Word, and you're not refreshed by what you're finding there for yourself, you should get out of the ministry—like, pronto. Just get out of the way; don't do that.

Like you, Bobby, I find the study of God's Word hugely refreshing to my soul. In fact, it is the best thing about being a pastor: the fact that I am paid to study God's Word. I am scared that if I were not a pastor, I would not study God's Word so carefully. I don't know if I'm a good enough Christian to not be a pastor! So in that sense, I agree with you. On the study of God's Word, it refreshes my soul and gives me happy feet.

The second thing is what will drive me out of the ministry: working to create and write the sermon. I hate that. Now, a lot of people like that, and I don't think there's anything morally good or bad about liking it or disliking it. People are just different. John Piper gets his thinking done by coming up with the words that will express the glory he's experienced in the text. I love that John is like that. I am not like that. I am a more selfish creature, perhaps. I've gotten my joy in looking at the text; I've understood it myself, and I'm happy now. It's the difficult work of making a good meal for everybody else that my soul just grinds at. It is my least favorite part of being a pastor.

Then there is the preaching—the third part, very distinct from the other two. Again, unlike that first part (which I think is virtuous to like and bad to not like), the crafting of the sermon is just a matter of personality. I think the same thing about preaching. While, yes, we all want to be a witness for the Lord, God has given us all different personalities. For some people, they get super nervous before they speak. For me, even before I was converted, you could put me in front of three thousand people and I could just talk to them like it was just my mom in the living room. It was just the way He made me; my temperature just does not go up when I'm standing in front of people. That has good points and bad points. I say more stupid things than most people in public—that's part of it! But I love proclaiming God's truth and feeding God's people. I'm not intimidated by the mechanics of the task. Proclaiming His Word is an amazing privilege, and though it makes me physically tired, it doesn't emotionally exhaust me. So, what you're talking about, John... I would say I'm revved up by the study, and I love the privilege of the preaching, but I am exhausted by the writing of sermons every week. I have no hope for you in that whatsoever!

Bobby Jamieson: I just want to add, you have to be okay not being okay at everything. It's Acts 6. Because you're the pastor, everybody thinks you're supposed to be the expert in finance, administration, youth ministry, and everything else. You don't want to say no because you don't want to let them down, and so you find yourself not wanting to neglect all those things, and you end up drained.

It takes so much time to get from step two to step three. Writing the sermon—gosh, it takes time. I spent literally seven hours writing, and I got about a third of the way through my sermon. I thought, "Okay, I'm going to be here Saturday; I normally write my sermons on Saturday, but I wanted to get done early, so I started on Thursday at seven o'clock." I wrote for seven hours, and I was only one-third of the way through, and I thought I knew the text already! You really need a lot of time.

You have to be okay with people saying, "Oh, he neglects children's ministry," or "He neglects this." You feel bad having this reputation of being flaky in these other areas, but you need to be okay with that so that you can stand in the pulpit and not be drained because you ended up doing too many other things.

My former pastor—I won't mention his name, but I do know this accurately—if he wasn't where he needed to be on his sermon by Thursday, he would tell his administrative assistant, "Cancel everything else in my schedule the rest of the week." That's hard to do, but pastors, you have to do that sometimes. You just have to say no. If you don't have leadership for these ministries, and you're the clown in the circus spinning all the plates, you can't do those ministries well. You have to be okay with not having a great children's ministry or a great program here or there. Your primary job is to pray, preach, and shepherd folks.

Host: Two rapid-fire questions before we go to lunch. First: What is the hardest book of the Bible you've preached?

Bobby Jamieson: For me, I think it was the book of Hebrews. The Greek in that is very difficult, and there was stuff in there that I found challenging. I was a young pastor, so that was a grind, but I loved it. There are some phenomenal things in there.

Panelist: The Book of Revelation.

Host: Any reasons why?

Panelist: I just think you've got to have great clarity in so many other parts of the Bible because it's the end of the story. If you're not clear in Ezekiel, or you're not clear in Daniel, you're going to struggle. You just have to be clear on a lot of things to preach it clearly.

Mark Dever: I would say, in the way he is talking, the second half of Daniel or Zechariah. But pastorally for me, I'd say probably actually 1 John. 1 John seems like it's pretty straightforward, but then pastorally, you begin to say things in a sermon and realize how challenging it is to preach it in a way that's not going to hurt the weak or make the false convert comfortable. I find it spiritually and surgically challenging.

Host: Real quick, let's go down the line: What is your schedule for the week as you prepare your sermon, if you're preaching that Sunday?

Mark Dever: Friday is what Bobby talked about regarding the discovery, and Saturday is the writing.

Bobby Jamieson: Tuesday, I do most of my exegetical work, trying to figure out what the text is saying. Then, Wednesday or Thursday, I'm doing a lot of the structural work of how I'm going to approach explaining it. Then I finish it up on Saturday night.

Panelist: Really similar.

Host: I tried doing the Friday-Saturday thing and I almost died! So I appreciate your little disclaimer in the beginning. I switch most of my mining time to Monday, and then I'll let the text kind of stew in the back of my brain and make random notes throughout the week. Then, Friday morning, I'll usually sit down and write my sermon. Jonathan Edwards would write down little scraps of paper with thoughts he had and pin them to his clothes. I just email myself on my phone!

Four announcements for us, brothers, before we go to lunch. First of all, our meal is provided by the Los Angeles Southern Baptist Association. Steve Darus is the director of that association. So if you're Southern Baptist and interested in learning more, you can talk to Steve. Steve, can you stand? Steve is also the retiring pastor of this church, and he has faithfully shepherded the flock here for twelve years, so we're really grateful for you, brother.

Second, in order to have lunch, you are going to line up at the door to the right of the stage and go through that room. The hallway will loop back to that door, and you're going to eat inside this room.

Number three: this is a church building, so think about how clean you want your auditorium to be. I ask you to have mercy on us! We will have volunteers go up and down the aisles with trash bags as you guys eat your food. I encourage you to get to know one another.

And lastly, let me pray for the food.

Lord, we thank you for this consistent reminder of our daily dependence on you. We thank you for this food. We pray that it will nourish our bodies, and that you would make the most of this time. We pray this in Jesus' name, amen.