300 years ago today, Robert Murray M'Cheyne was born in Edinburgh, Scotland. M'Cheyne is most famous for the Bible-reading program he developed and for his applicatory preaching. Eric J. Alexander writes of him in What is Biblical Preaching?, 'He seemed, as his preaching progressed, to advance upon you until he was standing inside your heart, applying the Word of God to all your life.'
You remember what was said of the saintly Robert Murray McCheyne of
Scotland in the last century. It is said that when he appeared in the
pulpit, even before he had uttered a single word, people would begin to
weep silently. Why? Because of this very element of seriousness. The
very sight of the man gave the impression that he had come from the
presence of God and that he was to deliver a message from God to them.
That is what had such an effect upon the people even before he had
opened his mouth. We forget this at our peril, and at great cost to our
listener.
Below is a talk that John Piper gave on M'Cheyne at the 2011 Desiring God Pastor's Conference. Check it out if you get the chance, and thank God for the presence and example of such ministers as Robert Murray M'Cheyne.
"Indeed it seems to be the case that the greater the preacher the more hesitant he has been generally to preach. Oftentimes such men have had to be persuaded by ministers and elders and others to do this; they so shrank from the dread responsibility. This was true of George Whitefield, one of the greatest and most eloquent preachers ever to adorn a pulpit. And it has been true of many others. My argument is, therefore, that a man who feels that he is competent, and that he can do this easily, and so rushes to preach without any sense of fear or trembling, or any hesitation whatsoever, is a man who is proclaiming that he has never been ‘called’ to be a preacher. The man who is called by God is a man who realises what he is called to do, and he so realises the awefulness of the task that he shrinks from it. Nothing but this overwhelming sense of being called, and of compulsion, should ever lead anyone to preach."
"What then are we to do about this? There is only one obvious conclusion. Seek Him! Seek Him! What can we do without Him? Seek Him! Seek Him always. But go beyond seeking Him; expect Him.
Do you expect anything to happen when you get up to preach in a pulpit?
Or do you just say to yourself, 'Well, I have prepared my address, I
am going to give them this address; some of them will appreciate it and
some will not?' Are you expecting it to be the turning point in
someone's life? Are you expecting anyone to have a climactic experience? That is what preaching is meant to do. That is what you find in the Bible and in the subsequent history of the Church. Seek this
power, expect this power, yearn for this power; and when the power
comes, yield to Him. Do not resist. Forget all about your sermon if necessary. Let Him loose you, let Him manifest His power in you and through you. I am certain, as I have said several times before, that nothing but a return of this power of the Spirit in our preaching is going to avail us anything. This makes true preaching, and it is the greatest need of all today -- never more so. Nothing can substitute for this. But, given this, you will have a people who will be anxious and ready to be taught and instructed, and led ever further and more deeply into 'the Truth as it is in Christ Jesus'. This 'unction', this 'anointing', is the supreme thing. Seek it until you have it; be content with nothing less. Go on until you can say, 'And my speech and my preaching was not with enticing words of man's wisdom, but in the demonstration of the Spirit and of power.' He is still able to do 'exceeding abundantly above all that we can ask or think.'"
"We must ever remember that Truth of God while meant primarily for the mind is also meant to grip and to influence the entire personality. Truth must always be applied, and to handle a portion of Scripture as one might handle a play of Shakespeare in a purely intellectual and analytical manner is to abuse it. People have often complained that commentaries are "as dry as dust." There is surely something seriously wrong if that is the case. Any kind of exposition of "the glorious gospel of the blessed God" should ever produce such an impression. It is my opinion that we have had far too many brief commentaries on and studies in Scriptures. The greatest need today is a return to expository preaching. That is what happened in the time of the Reformation and the Puritan Revival and the Evangelical Awakening of the 18th Century. It is only as we return to this that we shall be able to show people the grandeur, glory and majesty of the Scriptures and their message."
“I am disturbed therefore when I am often told by members of churches that many of the younger Reformed men are very good men, who have no doubt read a great deal, and are very learned men, but they are very dull and boring preachers; and I am told this by people who themselves hold the Reformed position. This is to me a very serious matter; there is something radically wrong with dull and boring preachers. How can a man be dull when he is handling such themes? I would say that a ‘dull preacher’ is a contradiction in terms; if he is dull he is not a preacher. He may stand in a pulpit and talk, but he is certainly not a preacher. With the grand theme and message of the Bible dullness is impossible.”
"While men believed in the Scriptures as the authoritative Word of God and spoke on the basis of that authority you had great preaching. But once that went, and men began to speculate, and to theorise, and to put up hypotheses and so on, the eloquence and the greatness of the spoken word inevitably declined and began to wane. You cannot really deal with speculations and conjectures in the same way as preaching had formerly dealt with the great themes of the Scriptures. But as belief in the great doctrines of the Bible began to go out, and sermons were replaced by ethical addresses and homilies, and moral uplift and socio-political talk, it is not surprising that preaching declined."
If you like great preaching and are not currently at Together 4 the Gospel (I assume there are at least three or four of us), then I have some big news for you. Apparently Jonathan Catherwood, the grandson of Dr. Martyn Llloyd-Jones, announced this morning at T4G that the MLJ Trust will be making audio of ALL of his grandfather's sermons available for free at www.mljtrust.org.
This is great news as over 1600 sermons from one of the greatest preachers of the 20th century will be available to us all beginning tomorrow. I understand the announcement was met with rousing applause at T4G (no surprise). Click here to read the particulars of the announcement.
"Is there any need of preaching? Is there any place for preaching in the modern Church and in the modern world, or has preaching become quite outmoded? The very fact that one has to pose such a question, and to consider it, is, it seems to me, the most illuminating commentary on the state of the Church at the present time. I feel that that is the chief explanation of the present more or less parlous condition and ineffectiveness of the Christian Church in the world today."
The other day my friend Marc Swan posted the following quote from D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones:
"What God did when he sent his Son into the world is an absolute guarantee that he will do everything he has ever promised to do. Whatever your state or condition may be, whatever may happen to you, he has said, 'I will never leave thee, nor forsake thee' (Hebrews 13:5) -- and he will not."
May you have a merry Christmas. And may you dwell securely in the promises of God which find their guarantee in the incarnation of Christ!
Yesterday I posted an excerpt from The Jesus Storybook Bible by Sally Lloyd-Jones. Please take five minutes and watch the video below, which is a presentation of the chapter that deals with the Christmas story.
I hope that you have a wonderful Christmas celebrating the birth of our Lord!
From the introduction of my favorite children's Bible, The Jesus Storybook Bible by Sally Lloyd-Jones:
Now some people think the Bible is a book of rules, telling you what you should and shouldn’t do. The Bible certainly does have some rules in it. They show you how life works best. But the Bible isn’t mainly about you and what you should be doing. It’s about God and what he has done.
Other people think the Bible is a book of heroes, showing you people you should copy. The Bible does have some heroes in it, but (as you’ll soon find out) most of the people in the Bible aren’t heroes at all. They make some big mistakes (sometimes on purpose). They get afraid and run away. At times they are downright mean.
No, the Bible isn’t a book of rules, or a book of heroes. The Bible is most of all a Story. It’s an adventure story about a young Hero who comes from a far country to win back his lost treasure. It’s a love story about a brave Prince who leaves his palace, his throne – everything – to rescue the one he loves. It’s like the most wonderful of fairy tales that has come true in real life!
You see, the best thing about this Story is – it’s true.
There are lots of stories in the Bible to tell this Story. And at the center of the Story, there is a baby. Every Story in the Bible whispers his name. He is like the missing piece in a puzzle – the piece that makes all the other pieces fit together, and suddenly you can see a beautiful picture.
And this is no ordinary baby. This is the Child upon whom everything would depend...
As we celebrate the birth of this child, may he reign in our hearts and in our minds, and may all glory be his now and forevermore! MERRY CHRISTMAS!
"What is preaching?...Logic on fire! Eloquent reason! Are these contradictions? Of course they are not. Reason concerning this truth ought to be mightily eloquent, as you see it in the case of the Apostle Paul and others. It is theology on fire. And a theology which does not take fire, I maintain, is a defective theology, or at least the man's understanding of it is defective. Preaching is theology coming through a man who is on fire."
30 years ago toay, Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, one of my preaching "heroes" (for lack of a better word), went to be with the Lord. Today I saw a neat video (included below) of a television interview with him from 1970.
I love it at the 2:40 mark when the interviewer, discussing Lloyd-Jones' call to ministry, asks the question, "Did you feel in yourself that you had the qualities that would make a successful preacher?" Lloyd-Jones responds, "I really was never concerned about that. My concern was with what needed to be preached, and it was this burning conviction as to the message needed that drove me on."
May all of us who are preachers have a similar aloofness toward "success," and a similar conviction that the gospel needs to be preached.
"Seek (the Holy Spirit) always. But go beyond seeking Him; expect Him. Do you expect anything to happen when you get up to preach in a pulpit? Or do you just say to yourself, 'Well, I have prepared my address, I am going to give them this address; some of them will appreciate it and some will not'? Are you expecting it to be the turning point in someone's life...? That is what preaching is meant to do...Seek this power, expect this power, yearn for this power; and when the power comes, yield to Him."
"The man who has faith is the man who is no longer looking at himself, and no longer looking to himself. He no longer looks at anything he once was. He does not look at what he is now. He does not look at what he hopes to be as the result of his own efforts. He looks entirely to the Lord Jesus Christ and His finished work, and he rests on that alone.
"He has ceased to say, 'Yes, I have committed terrible sins but I have done this and that.' He stops saying that. If he goes on saying that, he has not got faith.
"Faith speaks in an entirely different manner and makes a man say, 'Yes, I have sinned grievously, I have lived a life of sin, yet I know that I am a child of God because I am not resting on any righteousness of my own; my righteousness is in Jesus Christ, and God has put that to my account.'"
Yesterday I passed on a blog post by Dane Ortlund in which he asked a number of theologians to attempt to share the message of the Bible in a single sentence. It got me to thinking of how many people (Christians and non-Christians alike) have a faulty conception of the Bible, considering it merely a book of rules we must follow. At the same time, others see it as a book of heroes we should emulate. In her introduction to The Jesus Storybook Bible, Sally Lloyd-Jones offers what is, in my opinion, a quite helpful corrective:
No, the Bible isn't a book of rules, or a book of heroes. The Bible is most of all a Story. It's an adventure story about a young Hero who came from a far country to win back his lost treasure. It’s a love story about a brave Prince who leaves his palace, his throne — everything — to rescue the one he loves. It’s like the most wonderful of fairy tales that have come true in real life!
You see, the best thing about this story is — it’s true.
There are lots of stories in the Bible, but all the stories are telling one Big Story. The Story of how God loves his children and comes to rescue them.
It takes the whole Bible to tell this Story. And at the center of the Story, there is a baby. Every
story in the Bible whispers his name. He is like the missing piece in a puzzle — the piece that makes all the other pieces fit together and suddenly you can see a beautiful picture.
I highly recommend The Jesus Storybook Bible, not only for children, but for adults as well. I have personally found reading it to be quite devotional in nature. As I pointed out in Part 1 of last year's Disney series, I greatly appreciate this idea that the Bible tells the one true Story. And I especially enjoy the way Lloyd-Jones tells the Old Testament stories in a way that is simple and Christ-exalting, realizing that all of them ultimately point to him.
The preacher must be a serious man; he must never give the impression that preaching is something light or superficial or trivial…What is happening is that he is speaking to them from God, he is speaking to them about God, he is speaking about their condition, the state of their souls. He is telling them that they are, by nature, under the wrath of God – 'the children of wrath even as others' – that the character of the life they’re living is offensive to God and under the judgment of God, and warning them of the dread eternal possibility that lies ahead of them. In any case the preacher, of all men, should realize the fleeting nature of life in this world. The men of the world are so immersed in its business and affairs, its pleasures and all is vain show, that the one thing they never stop to consider is the fleeting character of life. All this means that the preacher should create and convey the impression of the seriousness of what is happening the moment he even appears in the pulpit. You remember the famous lines of Richard Baxter: "I preached as never sure to preach again, and as a dying man to dying men."
I saw this video today and thought it was pretty funny:
I found it humorous, but at the same time I was reminded of the words of the Apostle Paul who wrote to his young protegé Timothy, "...the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions," (2 Timothy 4:3). I assume that this was the case in the first century and I know that this is the case today.
Many churches forsake the preaching of the Gospel of Christ's life, death and resurrection on behalf of sinners, instead opting for sermons that are little more than self-help seminars wrapped up in Christian trappings. Another thing we often see is what I would term a trivialization of worship, as it often seems to be more about entertainment than about worship.
Now I'm not saying that "traditional" worship is necessarily better than "contemporary" worship. I've been to "contemporary" churches where the worship was indeed very worshipful, and I've been to "traditional" churches where quite frankly it was not. Neither am I saying that a preacher needs to wear a robe and ascend into a massive pulpit in order to truly preach. In fact, I applaud what I hope (and honestly believe) is an effort to reach people "where they are" and "in a way they can understand." But there is a caution that must be noted. We must not forget that the way in which we say something says almost as much about what we are trying to communicate as the actual words we use. As Marshall McLuhan put it, "The medium is the message."
The following words from D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones (Preachers and Preaching, pp. 85-86) do well to underline these thoughts:
The preacher must be a serious man; he must never give the impression that preaching is something light or superficial or trivial…What is happening is that he is speaking to them from God, he is speaking to them about God, he is speaking about their condition, the state of their souls. He is telling them that they are, by nature, under the wrath of God – 'the children of wrath even as others' – that the character of the life they’re living is offensive to God and under the judgment of God, and warning them of the dread eternal possibility that lies ahead of them. In any case the preacher, of all men, should realize the fleeting nature of life in this world. The men of the world are so immersed in its business and affairs, its pleasures and all is vain show, that the one thing they never stop to consider is the fleeting character of life. All this means that the preacher should create and convey the impression of the seriousness of what is happening the moment he even appears in the pulpit. You remember the famous lines of Richard Baxter:
I preached as never sure to preach again,
And as a dying man to dying men.
I do not think that can be bettered. You remember what was said of the saintly Robert Murray McCheyne of Scotland in the last century. It is said that when he appeared in the pulpit, even before he had uttered a single word, people would begin to weep silently. Why? Because of this very element of seriousness. The very sight of the man gave the impression that he had come from the presence of God and that he was to deliver a message from God to them. That is what had such an effect upon the people even before he had opened his mouth. We forget this at our peril, and at great cost to our listener.
, pp. 85-86)
