Stott on Having a God-Directed View of Prayer

"It will be seen that the fundamental difference between various kinds of prayer is in the fundamentally different images of God which lie behind them. The tragic mistake of Pharisees and pagans, of hypocrites and heathen, is to be found in their false image of God. Indeed, neither is really thinking of God at all, for the hypocrite thinks only of himself while the heathen thinks of other things. What sort of God is it who might be interested in such selfish and mindless prayers? Is God a commodity that we can use to boost our own status, or a computer that we can feed words into him mechanically."

John Stott
The Message of the Sermon on the Mount

A Word for Preachers...Stott on the Pastor's Personal Walk

"We pastors have God-given responsibilities both to the congregation we serve and to the doctrine we teach, for both have been committed to us. Yet our prior responsibility is to ourselves, to guard our personal walk with God and our loyalty to him. Nobody can be a good pastor or teacher of others who is not first a good servant of Jesus Christ. Disciplined habits, of pastoral visitation and counselling on the one hand, and of theological study and sermon preparation on the other, become barren exercises unless they are supported by disciplined habits of personal devotion, especially biblical meditation and prayer. Every pastor knows how exacting his ministry is. We may encounter misunderstanding and even opposition; we shall certainly grow weary in mind and body; we may also have to endure loneliness and discouragement. Even the strongest personalities collapse under the weight of these pressures, unless the power of God is being revealed in our weakness, and the life of Jesus in our mortal bodies, so that 'inwardly we are being renewed day by day. (2 Cor. 4:7-11 and 16)"

John Stott
Between Two Worlds: The Challenge of Preaching Today

A Word for Preachers...Stott on Studying the Word of God

"The systematic preaching of the Word is impossible without the systematic study of it. It will not be enough to skim through a few verses in daily Bible reading, nor to study a passage only when we have to preach from it. No. We must daily soak ourselves in the Scriptures. We must not just study, as through a microscope, the linguistic minutiae of a few verses, but take our telescope and scan the wide expanses of God's Word, assimilating its grand theme of divine sovereignty in the redemption of mankind. 'It is blessed,' wrote C. H. Spurgeon, 'to eat into the very soul of the Bible until, at last, you come to talk in Scriptural language, and your spirit is flavoured with the words of the Lord, so that your blood is Bibline and the very essence of the Bible flows from you.'"

John Stott
The Preacher's Portrait

A Word for Preachers...Stott on How We Handle Scripture

"It is certain that we cannot handle Scripture adequately in the pulpit if our doctrine of Scripture is inadequate. Conversely, evangelical Christians, who have the highest doctrine of Scripture in the Church, should be conspicuously the most conscientious preachers. The fact that we are not should cause our heads to hang in shame. If Scripture were largely a symposium of human ideas, though reflecting the faith of the earliest Christian communities, and lit up by an occasional flash of divine inspiration, then a fairly casual attitude to it would be pardonable. But if in Scripture we are handling the very words of the living God, 'words not taught by human wisdom but taught by the Spirit' (1 Cor. 2:13), God's words through men's, his own witness to his own Son, then no trouble should be too great in the study and expression of them."

John Stott

Between Two Worlds: The Challenge of Preaching Today

A Word for Preachers...Stott on Humility and Preaching

“The main objective of preaching is to expound Scripture so faithfully and relevantly that Jesus Christ is perceived in all his adequacy to meet human need. The true preacher is a witness; he is incessantly testifying to Christ. But without humility he neither can nor wants to do so. James Denney knew this, and had these words framed in the vestry of his Scottish church, ‘No man can bear witness to Christ and to himself at the same time. No man can give the impression that he himself is clever and that Christ is mighty to save.’”

John Stott
Between Two Worlds: The Challenge of Preaching Today

A Word for Preachers...Stott on Expository Preaching

"Properly speaking, ‘exposition’ has a much broader meaning. It refers to the content of the sermon (biblical truth) rather than its style (a running commentary). To expound Scripture is to bring out of the text what is there and expose it to view. The expositor prizes open what appears to be closed, makes plain what is obscure, unravels what is knotted and unfolds what is tightly packed. the opposite of exposition is 'imposition', which is to impose on the text what was not there. But the 'text' in question could be a verse, or a sentence, or even a single word. It could equally be a paragraph, or a chapter, or a whole book. The size of the text is immaterial, so long as it is biblical. What matters is what we do with it. Whether it is long or short, our responsibility as expositors is to open it up in such a way that it speaks its message clearly, plainly, accurately, relevantly, without addition, subtraction or falsification. In expository preaching the biblical text is neither a conventional introduction to a sermon on a largely different theme, nor a convenient peg on which to hang a ragbag of miscellaneous thoughts, but a master which dictates and controls what is said."

John Stott
Between Two Worlds: The Challenge of Preaching Today

A Word for Preachers...Stott on Cultural Relevance

"I recognize that there are perils in the clamant demand for relevance. If we become exclusively preoccupied with answering the questions people are asking, we may overlook the fact that they often ask the wrong questions and need to be helped to ask the right ones. If we acquiesce uncritically in the world's own self-understanding, we may find ourselves the servants rather of fashion than of God. So, in order to avoid the snare of being a 'populist' or a modern false prophet, the type of bridge to be built must be determined more by the biblical revelation than by the zeitgeist or spirit of the age. The Church's calling is to challenge secularism, not to surrender to it. Nevertheless, there is a great need for more understanding of, and sensitivity to, the modern world around us."

John Stott
Between Two Worlds: The Challenge of Preaching Today

A Word for Preachers...Stott on the Relationship Between Prayer and Study

"All the time we shall be praying, crying humbly to God for illumination by the Spirit of truth. We shall repeat Mose's petition, 'I pray you, show me your glory' (Exod. 33:18) and Samuel's 'Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening'. (1 Sam 3:9, 10) Christian meditation differs from other kinds in being a combination of study and prayer. Some preachers are very diligent students. Their desk is piled high with theological works, and they give their mind to the elucidation of the text. But they hardly if ever pray for light. Others are very diligent in prayer, but hardly ever engage in serious study. We must not separate what God has joined."

John Stott
Between Two Worlds

A Word for Preachers...John Stott on Letting the Text Be Your Guide

"In our sermon preparation, we must not try to by-pass the discipline of waiting patiently for the dominant thought to disclose itself.  We have to be ready to pray and think ourselves deep into the text, even under it, until we give up all pretensions of being its master or manipulator, and become instead its humble and obedient servant.  Then there will be no danger of unscrupulous text-twisting.  On the contrary, the Word of God will dominate our mind, set fire to our hearts, control the development of our exposition and later leave a lasting impression on the congregation."

John Stott

A Word for Preachers...John Stott on the Power of the Word

"(One) conviction which preachers need about Scripture is that God's Word is powerful. For not only has God spoken; not only does God continue to speak through what he has spoken; but when God speaks he acts. His Word does more than explain his action; it is active in itself. God accomplishes his purpose by his Word; it 'prospers' in whatever he sends it forth to do. (Is. 55:11)"


John Stott

A Word for Preachers from John Stott

"A man 'does not qualify to be a preacher of the Word,' John Huxtable has written, 'by making weekly sallies into the good book to discover some peg upon which to hang some scattered observations about men and affairs.' Sporadic and haphazard dipping into the Scriptures is not enough. Nor must we limit ourselves to our favourite passages, or concentrate on the microscopic examination of a few key texts. Such selective knowledge and use of Scripture plays into the devil's hands. Every heresy is due to an overemphasis upon some truth without allowing other truths to qualify it and balance it."

John Stott

You Are the Salt of the Earth

In 2011 I've had the pleasure of teaching an adult Sunday School class on The Sermon on the Mount.  One of my favorite parts of teaching is all the learning that I get to do.  In my preparations for class, I try to glean insights from a number of scholars who are far more learned than I am (there's no shortage!).  To this end I have loved studying a number of fine commentaries on The Sermon on the Mount (Carson, Doriani, Ferguson, Stott) in addition to commentaries on Matthew from my two favorite sets by Calvin and Hendriksen.

Another commentary on Matthew that was recently introduced to me by a friend is Frederick Dale Bruner's Matthew: A Commentary. Volume 1: The Christbook, Matthew 1-12.  I've only had the commentary for a couple weeks and I can't speak to all of Bruner's theology.  What I can say though, is I have already been richly blessed by the devotional nature of his writing and some of the insights he offers on Matthew 5.  Included in this would be the following words I came across today preparing for this week's lesson on being "the salt of the earth":

"Blessing is given to believers so that they will be blessings -- to the world (cf. especially the seminal promise of Gen 12:1-3: "I will bless you and make you a blessing; and in you all the families of the earth will be blessed"); salt is made salt in order to be salty in food.  We are put on notice that while it is from nothing (gratis) that we have been made salt, it is not for nothing (frustra).  We are to live for other people.  Christians, we learn here for the first time explicitly, are in danger if they do not live as Christians.  This is what is meant by the warning's sad conclusion, "It is absolutely useless except to be thrown out and trampled underfoot."  Here is deserved persecution.  In the world this "persecution" often takes the form of simple contempt or of complete disinterest."

May we always remember how very blessed we are to have found favor in the eyes of God in spite of our sin. And may we also remember that we, like Abraham, are blessed that we might be a blessing.

A Word for Preachers

"But suppose in our preaching we are careful to demonstrate that the authority with which we preach inheres neither in us as individuals, nor primarily in our office as clergy or preachers, nor even in the church whose members and accredited pastors we may be, but supremely in the Word of God which we expound?  Then the people should be willing to hear, particularly if we put the matter beyond doubt by showing that we desire to live under this authority ourselves.  As Donald Coggan has put it, in order 'to preach, a man must know the authority of being under Authority.'"

John Stott