Exposure or taxes?

Transcript of the video:

Let’s pray together. Father, the desire of my heart now is that Your Word be honest, that Your name will be magnified, and that Christ be exalted, preaching your Word, not only at that time, but in the way I speak of preaching, which You preach. . more faithful to your Word, more glorifying Jesus, more purifying for your church and more powerful in the world. Sir, these are days of great need in the midst of coronavirus, and preaching is crucial, and it has always been crucial. I hope to do what I can to be part of preaching in our pulpits now and as long as you allow it, however powerful, for the glory of Jesus. I ask in your name, amen.

• Therefore.
• The title given to me for this message was: “Preach the gospel by exposing the whole Bible.
• “It wasn’t my title.
• They gave it to me.
• I was happy to have it.
• So let me explain to you what I think He assumes.
• I think.
• That we should.
• In our preaching as shepherds.
• Explain the whole Bible.
• This is a good assumption.
• Because Paul says that all the scriptures are useful.
• Everything that contains.
• Anywhere in the Bible.
• Everything you say.
• Authentic remembering is beneficial to God’s people (2 Timothy 3:16).
• Then.
• Four verses later.
• In 2 Timothy 4.
• 2.
• “Preach the Word”.
• And I am the current of thought to refer to the word that has been discussed.
• That is.
• All Scripture inspired by God.
• Preach the word!.

So the first part of my homework is in the title. Show the entire Bible. Great homework. It doesn’t mean, I suppose, preaching every verse of the Bible. Open all the texts of the Bible. You can’t do that in a lifetime. Not if you take exposure seriously. In fact, I’m going to show what this verse says. It can not be done. So what does this mean? What does it mean to preach the whole Bible? I think that means that in his 40 or 50 years in the pulpit, he goes through the whole Bible, taking texts from everywhere, as the Spirit commands, as time demands and people have. need. Because everything is inspired, everything is useful. Exposing the entire Bible for the benefit of your listeners is 100 times more important than any idea with which you just made your particular comments on religion, politics, or culture. Then go through the entire Bible and preach God’s word from anywhere in the Bible. This is the first half of my title. Or the second half. And the other half?

The first half of the title, which says “Preach the Gospel. ” And the two halves are connected by “A”. Preach the Gospel by exposing the entire Bible. I guess that means that when you expose all the texts of the Bible, from anywhere, you have to preach the gospel. I think that’s what they want me to talk about. How would you preach the gospel by displaying each text? I have a problem with this task. And this message is based on trying to solve the problem. I don’t think about preaching like that! Week after week when I’m in this chair, and that’s what I’ve been up to for 22 years, because this building was built in 1991 and I came here in 1980. So for 22 years in this chair and 11 years in the other, It’s not the way I prepare my sermons, it’s not the way I think about preaching. My way of thinking, when I go to text or go up to the pulpit, right? How can I preach the gospel in this text? Now I don’t think that way about preaching. My dominant thought was: what do the words, sentences, phrases, connectors, the logic of the text, the flow of thought mean, what do they mean in this text? Or to be more precise, my dominant thought was: what reality did this inspired writer want to communicate to his readers through words, phrases, expressions, the logical flow of thoughts, what reality did he want? I see? What did you want me to think? How did you want me to feel? Or what would I do in response to the reality that he revealed through the words he chose to write?

So my first thought, that controls me when I go to a text in this book, or when I go to the pulpit, right? How can I preach the gospel from this text? Instead, the question prompts me: how can I see what this author sees? What perception of divine and human realities do you have for me? I must continue, looking, looking and looking at the text, with a sincere prayer that God help me to see what is really there, and with a sincere renunciation of any sin that is in me that may distort what is in the text. , change it or misuse it. And then I turn to people. And week after week when I preach, I try to show you the great things I’ve seen by looking at the words, phrases, phrases, logical flow, and connectors; what realities and what glorious things I saw in the text. I want to show you this, and I want to show how I saw it all! Because I think the authority of Scripture is that people see how you saw what you saw. Otherwise, you are the authority and not the Bible. I think it is very important to honor the Word of God. Show the reality you saw and how you saw it in the words of the scriptures. Pastor, where do you get your ideas? I’m listening to your ideas, show me how you got those ideas from those words. I look up and down and they don’t match. I like your ideas, I just don’t see them. Where do you get them from?

There is a kind of preaching that floats over the text. Right above the text, it never gets to the words of the text so people can see where the preacher’s ideas are coming from. So, I don’t believe in the overriding question: How can I preach the gospel from this text? It has produced, for the past 40 years or more, the kind of preaching that fills stable, countercultural, mature, doctrinal, and Bible-filled churches with a passion for radical obedience to God’s Word. I don’t think it served us well. So I will offer an alternative to those who think that preaching Christ or preaching the Gospel from anywhere in the text means distributing general comments on what the text says, covering only the surface of the text, rarely explaining the words and words. and then move on to the main concern of making the pompous entrance of the Gospel, with Christ and his reconciliation in the forgiveness of sins. So that everyone can leave relieved. I think this kind of preaching makes people frustrate their expectations of being able to see new, beautiful, difficult, profound, terrifying, or wonderful things in the text. I think this tends to treat the sentences, words, and logic of the inspired text as having less meaning when it is given the impression that they do not need to be treated with special care or rigor. ; these are just preparations for the most part to come. I think this tends to accustom people with bad habits to reading their Bibles, which reduces the thoroughness and seriousness of meditating on God’s word day and night. I think this tends to undermine the seriousness of the practical and biblical imperatives on how to live the Christian life in all holiness, purity, and love, inserting the substitutionary atonement at critical moments when the focus should be on the urgency to obey, because that it is the urgency of the text!

So, I want to recommend an alternative so that you do not always make each text a path to the Gospel, or do not have the motivating question in your preparation for the sermon: How can I preach the Gospel from this text? I want to wave the yellow flag in front of a phrase that is often attributed to Spurgeon: “Take the text and draw a straight line for the cross. ” Nobody knows if Spurgeon said that. At least I can’t find any expert Spurgeon who can prove he spoke, but whatever the point is: instead of taking your text and drawing a line for the cross, I think you should take the cross and draw a line for the text. . Instead of building your sermon on the cross, build your sermon on the cross. Rather than preaching biblical imperatives as indicators of the perfection of Christ and imputed righteousness, I believe we should preach imputed righteousness as the power to obey biblical commandments. Or, to put it another way, stay in the power and the promises bought for God’s elect by the blood of Jesus, wrestle with words, with phrases and expressions, and with the flow of thought in the text, do -his face, until you see the reality in those words, then show them to people! And show how you saw them, then gift them to him! Give them as a gift bought with blood. Encourage them with all you can, so that they can see, understand, hug, rejoice, and obey. And share. Let the reality of the text be the main element of the sermon.

Well, how did I come to this conclusion? Let me show you from the scriptures how I got here. We will start from here. When I fully dedicated myself to this a few years ago, the Lord gave me incredible teachers to pull my nose into the text. Thank God! When I put all my attention and effort into trying to see the reality that the author of the Bible would like me to see, through the words he wrote and the way he wrote them, I realized that I could not see reality. . The way he wanted her to see and share it, he could only see this reality if he knew more what he was thinking than what was in the text. For example, Paul says in Romans 12:13, a list of short requests. ? Practice hospitality. Well, I have an idea what the word hospitality means, I may have an idea what the word practical means, but there are a dozen ways I could practice hospitality, but they are flawed and Paul would disapprove. ! Right? I could practice out of fear of what others will think if I don’t. Or you could practice hospitality in hopes of being paid back! It could be hospitable because I’m so legalistic that I have to try to be right with God by being hospitable because the Bible says I should. And Paul would shake his head and say, “I didn’t say that. ” I would consider each of these elements defective. But you can’t know what he wanted and would like to see happen in those two words if you know something external about Paul, about what he thinks when he says “practice hospitality. ” . You came to know something about the cross, about grace, about the Holy Spirit and about faith, about sin and about the glory of God. The reality that Paul has in mind that he wants us to know, embrace and obey is this 😕 Do you practice hospitality? it is more than can be expressed with these two words.

Now what? I asked: what aspects of Paul’s mental world, what aspects of Paul’s mental world and his global reality, what aspects should he see so as not to distort what he says in these particular sentences and expressions?Suppose the question: are there truths or realities in an author’s global perspective, and here Paul in particular, is there any particular reality that is so ubiquitous, so complete and relevant to everything he says?Is there any truth in your worldview that, if we ignore them, will always cause a misunderstanding about what these expressions mean?Are there such broad realities in an author’s mind that, if we ignore them, we will not be able to respond to a certain text as he wants us to respond?And my answer is yes. Let me say three, I think it is the three most important, who must guide any preaching, I will only take care of one of them, but I will mention the others.

When Paul says in 1 Corinthians 10:31, “whether you eat, drink, or do something else, do everything for the glory of God,” supported by dozens of passages that clarify that God does everything for his own glory. , then you realize that every text Paul wrote, and in fact, I would say that all the biblical authors wrote it, was written with the ultimate goal of seeing and experiencing God as glorious, tested as glorious. This is one of the universal truths you eat, drink, write a biblical text, or preach a sermon, do everything for the glory of God!If you are not careful and each text does not connect with this truth, the biblical authors will say, “Haven’t you seen my intention here?” But to defend this, another message would be needed.

Here is the second broad and global truth that I think we should know so as not to be confused with Paul’s texts and other texts. Romans 14:23 says: “All that does not come from faith is sin. “Hebrews 11. 6 says: “Without faith, it is impossible to please God. ” Then I infiseer that this truth is one of those universals, a global reality for Paul, for the author of Hebrews, and we could say that for all biblical writers. This means that if you are going to treat a biblical text in a way that is consistent with the general intention of the author, which is certainly that God is always happy and that we do not sin, then you must ensure that each text, in a way, is linked to faith. Without faith, everything is sin. Without faith, God is not happy. Every sermon would be ruined if I didn’t mention faith. That would require another sermon to defend.

But this is what I want to talk about because everything is focused and relevant to my task. Is Paul telling us that there is something about the cross and something about the crucified Christ that is so extensive, so complete, that all the benefits of every sermon offered to God’s people have to be tied to it? Should we want to preach the gospel from each text? This is one way of asking the question. I don’t think this is the most useful. So I want to ask: is Paul saying something about the death of Christ, about the atonement for sins, in relation to everything he preaches? The answer is: yes, in at least two places, he says. 1 Corinthians 2. 1 😕 I, brothers, when I came to announce the testimony of God to you, I did not do it with ostentatious language or with wisdom. “Because I have decided not to know anything about you except Jesus Christ and he is crucified. ” Nothing between you. Because I have not decided to know anything between you, except Jesus Christ and him crucified. Or Galatians 6:14, “But far from me to boast, except the cross of our Lord Jesus. ” I will not boast of anything except the cross of the Lord Jesus. So, taking their intrinsic value, these two words say that Paul does not preach anything, he himself said, I do not want to know anything more than Jesus Christ and him crucified. And Paul does not boast of anything except the cross of the Lord Jesus. What does that mean? What does this mean for our preaching? Someone may say, well, don’t apply it too much, because maybe it’s referring to a particular situation in the Corinthians and a particular situation in the Galatians, so you can’t generalize anything about this expression. . I don’t think this is correct. For two reasons. Number one: Even in the Corinth situation, the problem persists, right? He says: “I don’t want to know anything between you except Jesus Christ and him crucified,” then he goes on to talk about the divisions of the Church, discipline, sexual immorality, divorces, marriage, food dedicated to idols, veils , spiritual gifts and more. You don’t have to say, sure, but today we have to talk about marriage. Paul spoke about marriage shortly after saying that he was only talking about Christ crucified. Or, if you go to the Galatians and say “this is a special situation, it won’t work,” because it is not a special situation. The way he expresses it is not. It says in chapter 6, verse 14: “But far from me to boast, if not the cross of our Lord Jesus. ” He talks about a fundamental belief he has of reality, and you can see it by the way he bases verse 14 on verse 15! And that is why it is absolutely essential to pay attention to the text! He said: “For neither is circumcision anything, nor is uncircumcision, but being a new creation. This is the basis for saying: “I do not glorify myself but in Jesus. ” It is not a basis limited by the situation. However, Paul uses the same word for “Glorify”. when he says this: “And we glorify ourselves in the hope of the glory of God. ” (Romans 5. 2) Do we glory in our own tribulations? (Romans 5. 3) So I will gladly boast of more weaknesses? (2 Corinthians 12. 9) Who is our glory except you, dear Christians? And then he said, “I only boast on the cross. ” And then he boasts in the church, in tribulations, in hope? and in God.

Well, this is what we have. 1 Corinthians 2,2: Paul says that he decided not to know anything between them, except Jesus Christ and him crucified. And then he goes into detail on eight other topics. And in Galatians 6:14, it says, “Far be it from me to boast, but from the cross of our Lord Jesus. ” And then in another place, does he boast of the glory of God, of tribulations, of believers? So what do you mean? Paulo is not confused. What do you mean when you say: I only know Christ crucified? “I’m just showing off the cross. ” I think it means that: in everything I know and preach, I know and preach on the basis of the one who was crucified, on the basis of the one who was crucified. Everything else in which I boast, I do on the basis of the cross. At the base of the cross. And the application of our preaching would be: Every biblical theme, every text that we choose and, worshiping God, we expose it and offer it to our people for their benefit, must be based on the cross, on which it has been crucified. . It has to be down, holding on; that could never be true without him. What is the basis for affirming this? Romans 8:32 is the basis. “He who did not spare his own Son, but abandoned him for us all, will he not give us everything with him?” I think that’s almost the most important prayer in the Bible. Very important for life, very important for preaching! It is the glorious link between the sacrifice of Jesus made by the Father and all that comes to God’s people, now and forever! It’s the connection! The logic goes something like this: if God made the most difficult, did not forgive his own Son, but gave it for us, then he will not stop doing the easy thing! I mean, give us everything, forever! This is the logic. So what, all the things? understand? Christ dies, the Father does not forgive his own Son, and the result? On this basis, everything comes to us. What does this include? This is not prosperity preaching! And we know that because, four verses later, it was verse 32 of Romans 8, and four verses later, Paul will list everything. And they include this: “They’re running us all day. ” But no, we are not separated from his love of death! We are more than winners! So all things? redeemed by the blood of Jesus and by the Father not to forgive his Son is: death and triumph over death! With Christ, forever more than conquerors of death! So the meaning of Romans 8:32 is as follows. For the elect of God, the predestined, the called, the justified (Romans 8:30), for the elect of God, everything good and everything bad that God does good has been assured to us through the cross of Christ. Every breath for heaven that a believer breathes has been bought by the blood of Christ.

Did John Flavel, the British Puritan, call it 300 years ago? The sweet dropper? commenting on Romans 8:32 with his beautiful words, and they are very correct! He said: “Surely, if God did not forgive his only begotten Son with one blow, cry, groan, sigh and misery, it could never be supposed that, even after that, he should deny or deny his people, those for Whom Has he suffered all this, some mercy, or consolation, or privilege, spiritual or temporal, that would be good for us? Does anyone still wonder why we love the Puritans? He is absolutely right. Here is the implication of the preaching. We simply cannot afford any benefits as beloved children of God away from the cross of Christ. There are none. But all sermons offer benefits to the children of God, do they not? Every sermon. All Scripture is inspired, helpful and beneficial! It is a gift, a benefit. It is a gain for the people of God! The only way that any advantage or gain reaches the fallen sinners who deserve hell, but chosen, is Christ crucified! It is the only hope that something good and useful can l bequeath to sinners like us. Therefore, every gain, every benefit, every blessing, every gift, every promise of the Bible, every warning of grace, every precious teaching, every sound doctrine, every transformative glimpse of God’s glory in every sermon, is bought with blood. . Without exceptions.

Therefore, the cross, the crucified Christ, is the foundation, the basis of every biblical sermon. Jesus died to buy the miracle of obedience to the texts. He paid with his blood to buy the faithful display of the texts. cross to transform the texts into a beautiful holiness that exalts Christ. Anything that minimizes obedience, ex display, and holiness in the name of “preaching the gospel of every text” is contrary to God’s will. Let’s take an example.

1 Peter 4: 7-9 😕 The end of all things is near. So be prudent and sober; dedicate yourself to prayer. Above all, love yourself sincerely, because love covers a multitude of sins. Be mutually hospitable, without complaining. Now what should be the motivating question when going to this text? Are you going to make some general comments about being smart by being sober, loving others, and being hospitable without complaining? Are you going to hover over the text? To never get to the bottom of the question: what does it mean to be judicious? “I thought it had to be controlled by the Spirit! What is this story about? “Help me, pastor! I thought sobriety had to do with something, but now it has to do with prayer! “What does my endless entertainment at home have to do with not being sober in my prayers?” Help me, pastor !? “Come here and help me with these intriguing questions !? “How exactly does my love cover your sin?” And if that covers up her sin, should she be reprimanded? And if it fails, what to do with the sin discovered? “Help me pastor, those things that are said there are very complicated!” How about: how do I get rid of my whispering mind? And then after going around all these questions, and not bothering to help people with all these questions and the details of the text that are intriguing, difficult, practical, beautiful and long. Are you going next? Do you make it to the grand finale? “Here is Christ, the perfect embodiment of self-control on the road to Calvary !? “Here is Christ, sober in prayer in Gethsemane, sweating blood !? “Here is Christ in his love, through whom he covered a multitude of sins !? “Here is Christ with open arms with cosmic hospitality there on the cross !? “There are no words of repentance on the road to Golgotha ​​!? It is not an exhibition. It is imposed! It is not a statement of the Word of God. It is to diminish, and perhaps even silence, the Word of God. It is not faithful conduct with the beautiful holiness of this text. It is a distraction from the enormous beauty that Jesus died for. Yes, it is possible to inadvertently use Jesus to obscure what He died for. Christ died so we can draw a line of the cross to the text. So that we can spend hours and hours struggling with the questions, the perplexities, the sacrifices and the charms of being judicious, sober in prayer and love that covers sins, and the gentle encouragement of hospitality and miracle of a life free of whispers. He died so that He and His cross could come like a great wave, bringing with them all the charms of this obedience to the world, for the glory of His name! He died for it! so that this text can be seen, known, loved, obeyed and brought to the world ld! You draw a line from the cross to the text and the grand finale is the charm of holiness!

What did Peter say? In chapter 2, verse 24, he says, “He himself carried our sins in the wood of his body, that we may die for sins and live for righteousness!”He died by self-control, by sobriety, by prayer. For our love to cover the sins of our friends and family!He died for hospitality and for the freedom to whisper!Peter says that GOD draws a line between the cross and the text. From the cross to prayer; from the cross to love; the cross to cover sins; from the cross to hospitality, from the cross to being remorseless. God draw that line! He begins from the cross by the beauty of holiness, not the other way around. Don’t tell your people that the beauty of the flower of justice comes from the root that settles the blood; Flowers aren’t made for this.

So finally, how do we look at the title of this post? ? Preach the Gospel by exposing the entire Bible. Or the implicit question, “How do I preach the gospel of any text?” Or the attractive shape? How to draw a line of any text with the cross? And my answer is: don’t think of it that way. Don’t make this your motivating question when you go to the text and prepare the post. Instead, immobilize your soul’s intention regarding the words, phrases, phrases, quotes, and connectors found in the text. Fight against them. Fight with them. Tighten them! Luther said, “If necessary, bang your head with them, until you get rid of all the beauty in them. ” And then show people what you saw. Show them how you saw it! And how precious it must be, after Christ’s death, to make people beautiful in that way. Let us pray. Father, we want to honor Your Word; everything is breathed out by you, do not allow us to abuse the Word for homiletical obligations that do not find in the text what you put there. I pray that Jesus Christ, crucified and risen, will be exalted. Not as the grand finale of every sermon, but as the foundation of every sermon, producing a type of church in the world that beautifies Jesus. I ask this in his name, amen.