The Pastor as Preacher By Murray Capill


It's good to have Murray back on deck this morning. Thank you Murray, I'll hand it over to you now, if you wouldn't mind coming up.
Well yesterday morning I considered with you the preacher as pastor.
The need for the person who preaches and publicly proclaims the word to be engaged with people in a real genuine pastoral relationship.
And I noted that the preaching ministry needs to be undergirded, informed and reinforced by pastoral ministry.
This morning I want to look at the other side of that equation and say okay, now as this man who has been engaged in a network of pastoral relationships
and he's involved in all sorts of pastoral ministries, he's connected to the flock in a very real way as their pastor and shepherd,
now what happens is that man comes into the pulpit and preaches to those people that he's been pastoring.
That's what we want to consider this morning, the pastor now as a preacher.
One of my favourite descriptions of the Christian ministry comes from the writings of James Stalker
and I want to read a little passage to you. It comes from an ordination charge that he gave.
He says I like to think of the minister as only one of the congregations set apart by the rest for a particular purpose.
A congregation is a number of people associated for their moral and spiritual improvement.
And they say to one of their number, look brother, we're busy with our daily toils and confused with domestic and worldly cares.
We live in confusion and darkness, but we eagerly long for peace and light to cheer and illuminate our life.
And we have heard that there is a land where these are to be found, a land of repose and joy,
full of thoughts that breathe and words that burn, but we cannot go further ourselves.
We're too embroiled in daily cares. Come, we will elect you and set you free from our toils and you shall go further for us.
And week by week trade with that land and bring us its treasures and its spoils.
Oh, woe to him who accepts this election and yet failing through idleness to carry on the noble merchandise
appears week by week empty handed or with merely counterfeit treasure in his hands.
Woe to him too if going to that land he forgets those who sent him and spends his time there in selfish enjoyment of the delights of knowledge.
Woe to him if he does not week by week return laden and ever more richly laden and saying,
yes brothers, I've been to that land and it is a land of light and peace and nobleness,
but I've never forgotten you and your needs and the dear bonds of brotherhood.
And look, I've brought back this and this and this. Take them to gladden and purify your life.
Isn't that a delightful picture of Christian ministry?
We're one of the congregation, but they've set us aside and they've freed us from many of the ordinary toils and cares.
We don't have to go out and earn a regular wage.
They say, take time to go and trade with that land and bring back good things to feed us and strengthen us and nourish us and help us.
And so we go away and we invest time in the word and we study great works and we meditate and we pray,
we trade in this noble merchandise and we come back and we say, I've never forgotten you and your needs.
Take this and this and this to gladden and purify your lives.
I think that is the spirit of pastoral preaching, where we come back to people having gone for them,
we come back with that which will feed them and thrill them and help them and encourage them
and spur them on in their pilgrimage toward that heavenly land.
We come back as their pastor.
We've gone there as their pastor and we return as their pastor to now shepherd them from the pulpit.
But what will that mean in practice?
What will make our preaching distinctively pastoral?
What will it mean if the treasure that we've found is treasure that we bring back for them?
How will that color and influence the way in which we preach the gospel message?
How will we suit the treasure to the needs and the capacities of our people?
Well, a whole raft of things could be said in answer to those questions.
And I've singled out this morning three areas that I want to touch on.
And much more could be said about any of these areas,
but I hope to open up some aspects of what it will mean to come back as a shepherd
and share goodies with the people who sent us away to find them.
The first thing that I want to dwell on is this.
We need to speak personally as a pastor and a friend when we come back.
We need to speak personally as a pastor and a friend.
Several things involved there.
The first is that there needs to be warmth as we communicate with them.
There needs to be the same kindness and affection and love and warmth that I spoke of
as being part of our pastoral ministry to them.
I labored yesterday that the preacher needs to have an affection for his people.
He needs to love them.
And we noted the way in which Paul speaks of that loving bond of fellowship
and relationship with the churches that he ministered to.
There needs to be that love and warmth and affection carried with us into the pulpit
as we speak to them.
We speak as their pastor.
We speak as the same person who's been visiting them and meeting with them
and sharing their burdens and problems and difficulties with them
and rejoicing with them and weeping with them.
We're the same person when we go into the pulpit.
So why become a different person in the pulpit?
Some preachers do change as they mount the steps.
And I think the more steps they have to mount, the more they change.
They become much more austere, formal, stiff.
Their voice changes.
They abandon all humor through the rest of the week.
They've got a glint in their eye, but, oh, they'd never have a glint in their eye in the pulpit.
They refuse to speak personally.
They dare not be too contemporary.
If they use an illustration, they almost apologize for it.
They don't want to undermine the solemnity of their message.
And, of course, in a sense, we totally understand that.
In a sense, that's commendable because we realize that when we preach, we preach as a herald.
And we don't just share a few little thoughts of our own.
We preach an authoritative message from a God who has commissioned us to preach His word, not ours.
So there is a seriousness. There is a solemnity.
There is an authority to preaching that demands, in a sense, we do change,
but we're not to be fundamentally a different person as we preach that authoritative, serious message.
Certainly, we're not there to entertain. We don't want to become a stand-up comic.
It's not a casual chat, but it is still pastoral ministry.
It is still ministry to people we know and people we love,
people to whom we feel a bond of affection, people we've met with through the week.
And so we need to commend our message by our manner.
Our manner ought to convey that love and that warmth that's part of the pastoral relationship.
And Paul constantly does that, doesn't he?
He constantly speaks to brothers, constantly speaks with tenderness.
He exhausts them in a very personal way.
He says in 1 Thessalonians that he'd been like a mother, like a father to them.
So don't hide behind a wall of formality when you get into the pulpit.
If you're bringing back treasure from the heavenly land,
then bring it back with all the warmth and love and compassion for the people who sent you there to get it for them.
Another part of the speaking personally as a pastor and friend is not just speaking with warmth,
but I think also sometimes speaking of ourselves.
Sometimes we need to talk about ourselves.
There are times when it's right and proper to talk about our own experience of the truth we're considering.
There's times when we can talk about how we've struggled with that truth
or how that truth has warmed us and thrilled us and helped us,
and we have delighted in it.
It's again something which some Reform preachers are very, very guarded about.
Perhaps as a reaction against those who only speak about themselves in the pulpit.
We object to those who make themselves the centre and focus of attention.
And so in a reaction against that, we're loath to say anything about ourselves.
But again, think about Paul.
His letters are loaded with references to his own spiritual experience.
And very often he brings the truth that he's dealing with to light
as he speaks of his own experience of that truth.
You think of how often he speaks of his conversion experience.
You think of the passage we've just read in Philippians chapter 3
where he speaks of what once was to his credit,
and how he counts it as rubbish, it's dung compared to what now he's laid hold of.
And he thrills to this and he says, I want to know Christ.
And he sits graphically before us as well as before the Philippians,
the sense of excitement and the surpassing excellence of knowing Christ
by speaking of his own experience of that.
And he says, I haven't yet got there.
But I'm striving and I'm forgetting what's behind and I'm pressing on.
A heavenward goal and a heavenward prize.
And he speaks of all those wonderful truths in an extremely personal way.
He hasn't preached himself.
You don't come away from that passage chiefly thinking about Paul,
you come away thinking about Christ.
Because he's shown you what it is, a little bit from his life,
what it is to love Christ and long for Christ and feed on him.
Paul's not invisible in his message.
Baxter wasn't invisible in his messages either.
You learn all sorts of funny things about Baxter from his sermons.
You learn about his ailments.
You learn about his diet.
You learn about his exercise regime.
You learn about some of the things he did as a boy.
And he stole apples like every other boy.
You learn about his spiritual life.
And he used personal recollections to reinforce a point, to illustrate a point,
to drive home a certain direction.
As a preacher, he wasn't invisible.
Now, of course, we don't want to be too visible,
but we don't want to be invisible because we're the shepherd,
we're the pastor, we're one of these people.
And the truth is impacting our lives or it should be.
And it can be an encouragement and an aid and a blessing to our people
as we share something of that with them.
That means we need to be a little bit vulnerable in the pulpit
because I think more often we will share our burdens,
our struggles, our difficulties,
than our great triumphant victories in Christ.
So there needs to be some warmth in the way we communicate.
There needs to be some personal illustration and example.
And then another thing which will help us to preach personally
as a pastor and a friend is that we want to use many homely,
familiar, contemporary analogies and examples and illustrations of the truth.
We want to earth the truth that we're dealing with in the world that people are used to.
This was something the Puritans were absolutely brilliant at,
constant little word pictures and analogies,
little brief snapshots of that truth in the context of life.
But really the Puritans, I think, just learnt it from our Lord Jesus.
Where does the Lord Jesus draw his illustrations from?
He draws them from everyday life.
The farm, the marketplace, the wedding feast,
someone losing a sheep, someone losing a ring,
someone losing a child, a lost son.
As we put truth in terms of everyday things,
people censor that truth as part of their world,
not just another world.
So what are the things which people today interact with?
Well, the internet, lotto, TV,
getting stuck in a traffic jam on the freeway,
driving, I believe, an old beat-up car, broken appliances,
inconvenient phone calls.
All these things which are part of our life become the source of illustration
so that as we're dealing with a grand truth,
we also bring that grand truth into the realm that people are familiar with.
And truth comes a little closer to home.
It's part of their world.
And the preacher is suddenly seen not as a remote and a distant man,
but a man who lives in our world.
And he knows the sort of stuff that we're into.
He bumps into all the frustrations and all the ordinary things of life.
And as people relate to us, they relate to the truth that we're speaking about.
One other thing I think will help to enable us to speak personally
as a pastor and a friend, and that is to speak extemporaneously.
I don't mean by that that we have to be completely note-free,
but surely it's a great help in speaking personally as a pastor and a friend
if we're able to speak fairly freely without being bound to every word on a page.
Imagine that I'm trying to communicate to my wife my love of her.
I told you yesterday I loved her.
I also suppose that I make a little arrangement with her,
that every morning I'd like her to sit down at a set time,
let's say it's quarter to eight,
and I'm going to read her some statements of my love for her.
And I prepare some carefully written manuscripts in which I sit down
and I say, well, my dearly beloved.
And I begin to address her from this page of written notes,
tell her how wonderful she is and how much I care for her.
And I suspect that if I did that for a few days,
well, either she wouldn't be sitting there to listen,
and I'd be reading this to myself,
or she'd rip the silly thing out of my hand and say,
just tell me you love me.
It would be something very artificial if I couldn't just say it and show it.
And there can be something very artificial in the pulpit
if we've really been away through the week
and we've traded with this other land and we've found wonderful treasure
and this stuff's thrilled us and it burns in our heart.
But we can't communicate it freely.
We've got to have every word written down.
Suddenly the presentation of what burns in our hearts can become very stilted.
Now, I know there are some fantastic exceptions to that in church history.
And I wish I could preach like Jonathan Edwards
and some of those who evidently did use a full manuscript.
But for the most part, if we want to communicate personally to people,
then we need to just be able to talk with them intensively, passionately,
authoritatively, but freely.
And so I simply encourage you,
think about whether in the pulpit you are a pastor and a friend to your people,
bringing back truth from this heavenly land in a way which warms their hearts
and which they relate to.
Let me move to a second area that will be necessary
if we are to speak as a pastor when we bring back this treasure.
We need to speak plainly about where our people are at.
We need to speak plainly to them about where they're at.
If our preaching is being informed by a variety of pastoral involvements,
if we know our people, we know something of their condition of soul,
we've spent time with them,
then that will inform the way that we present truth to them from the pulpit.
That means that our application will be of an experimental nature.
Experimental application is particularly concerned with the interface
between biblical truth and life experience.
It's concerned with how that truth is brought to bear on life as people know it
and life as people should know it.
Experimental application is concerned to bring truth to bear on people's minds,
consciences, wills and affections in that order.
It brings truth to bear on their minds by speaking to what people think,
what people tend to think and what people should think.
And it brings truth to bear on people's consciences by pressing them,
concerning what they've been doing and whether that has been right or wrong,
what they feel guilty about, what they should feel guilty about.
It addresses their wills by addressing what people do,
what people ordinarily choose to do, what they might have been choosing to do
and what they ought to be choosing to do.
And it addresses their affections in particular.
Baxter called the affections the bottom of the soul, the bottom of the soul.
Truth enters the soul, it enters the heart through the mind.
We address the mind.
We speak intelligent words to intelligent people
that they might grasp by the spirits enabling, grasp the truth.
But the truth must not only stop at the mind, it must be forced to the bottom of the soul
so that they are moved by it, stirred by it, so that they feel the truth.
And experimental preaching addresses the affections of a person.
It speaks to what they long for and desire and chase after and repine from
and what they should long for and desire and chase after and repine from.
And experimental preaching addresses all those things in a knowing kind of way,
in a knowing kind of way.
The experimental preacher is a person who understands how people tick.
He understands the sorts of things that go on in their minds,
their wills, their consciences, their emotions.
He knows their struggles and their joys and their burdens and he speaks to those realities
and people feel that he was speaking to me.
How did he know me so well?
Well, he knew you so well through two main means.
We speak in this knowing kind of way, firstly because we know our own hearts.
As we know what goes on inside ourselves,
we have a very big insight into what goes on inside most other people.
I mostly just preach to my own sins
and it cuts everyone else to the heart as well
because they're struggling with greed and pride and lust,
discouragement and all those other things which I struggle with.
So we preach in a knowing kind of way because we know our own hearts
and we preach in a knowing kind of way because we've been with these people.
We've pastored them. We have relationships with them. We know them.
They've unburdened themselves to us.
So in experimental preaching, in experimental application,
we don't only speak about the text.
We also speak about the people we're speaking to.
We speak about their lives.
We speak about how they might resist that truth,
how they might object to that truth,
obstacles that they might find in embracing that truth,
difficulties they might have in grasping it.
We speak about them and how they interface with that biblical truth.
That's the truth we're dealing with.
All this needs to be done in a discriminatory way.
Experimental preaching is discriminatory preaching.
By that we mean that we realize from our pastoral work
and from our knowledge of people that not everyone is in the same position.
We certainly don't assume that everyone in front of us is saved.
If they were all saved, we don't assume that every saved person
is in exactly the same condition of soul.
As I said yesterday when we pastor them,
we should think in terms of categories of spiritual condition.
There are the weak. There are the backsliding. There are the tempted.
There are those with some overwhelming indwelling sin.
There are those who are advancing.
Amongst the unregenerate, there are a whole lot of categories.
It's not as simple as the regenerate and the unregenerate.
Amongst the unregenerate, you've got ignorant people.
You've got stubborn people. You've got rebellious people.
You've got broken, sad, grieving people.
You've got proud people.
As we bring truth to bear on people,
as we apply it to their hearts and consciences and wills and affections,
we think of the different types of people that we might be speaking to.
Don't only think of social categories when you divide up the congregation.
We typically think of the older people and the younger people,
the family people and the singles.
Now, there's a place for that, but it's more penetrating
when you think about spiritual categories and social categories,
the different conditions of soul.
As you think about your text,
as you think about the message that you're going to bring to your people,
think about particular kinds of people,
individuals within your congregation,
and how you're going to suit this truth to their needs and capacities.
You don't have to save discriminatory application up to the end of the sermon.
There is a format of preaching that will move towards application,
and in the final stage of the sermon,
now let me say a particular word to a number of different kinds of people here.
You address a word to this group and a word to that and a word to another.
That's one way of doing it.
But you don't have to save it up for the end and then divide your congregation.
You can do that all the way through, just as you're going.
You say, now some of you might think,
or now if you find yourself thinking,
or perhaps you feel,
or this particularly applies to those of you who,
just those little lead in phrases will mean that we constantly,
throughout the message, target our application to different kinds of people.
And it might be useful to sometimes say,
and I've said this to my congregation sometimes,
sometimes I say, now you don't have to listen to this bit
if you're in a certain category.
I find this a very useful technique.
I was dealing with something very difficult recently.
It was a little bit technical, it was a little bit theological, complicated.
So I said to them, now listen,
what I'm going to deal with for about the next three minutes
is technical and it's theological and it's difficult.
And if you're not into things which are technical and theological and difficult,
then you can just switch off and I'll tell you when to tune back in.
So please don't listen.
I just want to talk to those of you who are into this sort of stuff.
And so then I did my little bit and I explained this thing as clearly as I could
with the assumption that the interest of all of them was piqued.
And I listened all the more intensely.
If you say, you mustn't look at that, you mustn't listen to this,
and of course they'll want to.
All of this is what you might call where you're at application.
Where you're at application.
There's a very useful little book on the bookstool by an eminent person in our ranks here
called Ministering Like the Master
and you'll find in there three different kinds of application mentioned.
There's what to do application, calling our people to a certain response.
Beyond that there's how to do it application,
giving them important ideas as to how to implement that thing which we've urged them to do.
Then there's why it's worth doing application,
giving gospel motives and incentives to do that thing.
But I'm suggesting that there's also where you're at application
and in a sense it's preliminary to what to do and how to do it and why it's worth doing.
Part of experimental preaching is helping people to see where they are really at,
how they align to the biblical truth under consideration.
We take the text and we hold it up next to people, different kinds of people
and we want them to sense honestly before God where are you really at.
We want the word of God to be a mirror in which they see their soul.
This kind of experimental application takes time and effort.
That should be obvious.
That means that we're going to have to invest time and effort in it as we prepare our message.
I said before that we don't only speak about our text, we speak about the people in front of us.
That means that in our preparation time we don't only do exegetical work
but we also do a lot of thinking and praying and meditating and processing
about how that should be brought to bear on the people we're preaching to.
Just have a think about your own sermon preparation time, those of you who preach.
What's the proportion between the amount of time you spend studying and analyzing the text and commentaries
and the amount of time you spend pondering how you will bring that truth to bear
on the people you're preaching to.
If we're honest, many of us will say there's a giant proportion of that time spent in the text
and all too little spent thinking about how to bring that to our people.
If we're going to trade with this heavenly land and bring back treasure,
as we come back we've got to be thinking about how we're going to suit it to the needs
and necessities of those we preach to.
There's one more area I want to deal with.
I've said that we need to preach personally as a pastor and as a friend.
And we need to preach pointedly to the people who we're addressing.
But most important of all, we need to speak persuasively of God himself.
Whilst we want to open up a little bit of our lives and speak a little of ourself,
and whilst we certainly want to speak about people and where they're at and speak about their life,
a real calling is to speak about God and life in him.
If we only speak about where they're at, then we'll produce an introspection in our people
and probably a spiritual discouragement and depression.
They need to know a bit about where they're at, but then they need to be lifted above that,
lifted up into the glorious things which can change them and transform them.
We're to give them a glimpse of the land where we've been.
We're to give them a deeper insight into the majesty and the glory of God and the riches that are in Christ.
We're to lead them into a greater sense and understanding of the love and the mercy and the wisdom of God and Christ.
We're to give them a picture of the vastness of Christ's kingdom and expand their horizons.
We're to lift them above the mundane and the petty and the ordinary.
And we know that they're probably going to come to church on a Sunday morning
with their minds chock-a-full of mundane, petty, ordinary things.
They've been in sordid workplaces.
They've been caught up in financial deals and transactions and difficulties and problems and worries
and hard relationships and maybe harsh words even that morning before they came.
Yes, we speak to the realities of where they're at, but then really what we most want to do is lift them above that
and give them something more glorious to look at.
We don't just want to give them how to.
We want to give them who to.
Not just how to live, but who to live for, who to live unto.
A great picture of their God.
So our preaching must be full of God, must exalt Him, must dwell on Him and His works.
Must be full of Christ and the riches in Christ and the absolute all-sufficiency of Christ.
Must be full of the Holy Spirit and the confidence that we have
and a spirit poured out at Pentecost and never withdrawn.
And it must help people to see their heavenly homeland and long for it, yearn for it.
Think how good it is going to be to be there.
One of the overwhelming things in Paul's ministry surely is the doxological note
in all his preaching and teaching.
Think of the grand portion of Romans from chapter 9 through to chapter 11.
He begins that portion of Romans speaking, as I've suggested, very personally.
Speaks of his own anguish. Speaks of the depth of burden in his own soul
over the state of his own people, people of Israel, personally.
And as he first addresses that burden and that concern by speaking of the sovereignty of God and election,
he reasons very closely with people.
He knows where they're at, the kind of objections they'll have,
the kind of difficulties people raise to that doctrine.
He anticipates objections and he answers them and resolves them.
Beginning of chapter 10, he speaks again personally back to his own heart concern
and opens up another dimension of the solution to this problem that he's raised,
the disobedience of Israel.
As you go into chapter 11, it's like things just start to get bigger and bigger and bigger.
The problem he's dealing with is taken account of in terms of God's sovereignty and election,
chapter 9, and it's taken account of in terms of the disobedience of the people in chapter 10.
But then he leads us to grasp that God's not finished yet.
There's more in store. There's something bigger going on here
and as you surge through chapter 11, difficult as it is,
but I can put a little plug for the article of my colleague Steve Vollander
and that free magazine we gave out. I think it's some helpful words on these passages.
As you surge through chapter 11, there's this bigger and bigger picture
of what God's plan and purpose will yet be.
And Paul's own grief and anguish turns to joy and confidence and hope
so that by the end of chapter 11, he bursts out,
oh, the depth of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God.
How unsearchable his judgments and his paths beyond tracing out
who has known the mind of the Lord, who has ever been his counselor,
who has ever given to God that God should repay him.
From him and through him and to him are all things.
To him be the glory forever. Amen.
Paul himself, you sense in these chapters, has traveled a journey from grief to joy.
And if we've traveled with him, we will have traveled the same road.
And it's the kind of road we've got to take our people on week by week.
From realities of life and where they're really at and where we're at,
through to the glorious hope that's ours in the gospel of God.
It was one of the things that first grabbed my heart
about the sermons of Martin Lloyd-Jones when I first read them.
It seems that when Lloyd-Jones deals with something,
it just gets bigger and bigger and bigger.
It starts off small and it just grows into something massive.
And that's a wonderful mark of pastoral preaching.
Start where they're at, speak personally, speak to where they're really at,
interact with the realities of life,
but take them beyond present realities to eternal realities.
Lift them up.
Now let me read what I think is a very interesting, very important statement
from Baxter's autobiography where he reflects on some of these things.
He said, my judgment is much more for frequent and serious meditation
on the heavenly blessedness than it was heretofore in my younger days.
I then thought that a sermon of the attributes of God and the joys of heaven
were not the most excellent and was one to say,
everybody knoweth this, that God is great and good
and that heaven is a blessed place.
I'd rather hear how I may attain it.
And nothing pleased me so well as the doctrine of regeneration
and the marks of sincerity, which was because it was suitable to me in that state.
But now I had rather read, hear, or meditate on God and heaven
than on any other subject.
For I perceive that it is the object that altereth and elevateth the mind
and that it is not only useful to our comfort to be much in heaven
in our believing thoughts, but that it must animate all our other duties
and fortify us against every temptation and sin.
A man is no more a Christian indeed than he is heavenly.
He saw a change in himself in what he most longed for.
And I love that little phrase. It's deeply etched in my mind now.
Those things altereth and elevateth the mind.
Now it's quaint in Old English, of course, but isn't that a lovely thought?
To altereth and elevateth the mind to a noble people
and thrill them and lift them above where they were at
at the beginning of the proclamation.
That's your charge, friends, as you preach a pastoral message.
Lift them up. Exalt them. Thrill them.
Show them something better and more glorious.
Altereth and elevateth their minds if the Spirit enables you.
That's the ultimate in pastoral preaching,
not merely filling their heads with more knowledge,
but filling their hearts with more of heaven.
But you can only do that if you've been there.
So woe to you if you spend all your time there in the selfless pursuit of knowledge
or you've forgotten the people
or you haven't even been there through the course of the week.
Do you really preach God?
Preach the glories of redemption and eternity?
Seek that by God's grace you might alter and elevate people's minds.
I'm convinced that the need for this kind of preaching,
truly pastoral preaching, is very great.
Try to be warm and personal as you speak the truth.
Be as direct as you can to where people are really at.
But above all else, expand their vision.
Speak of God Himself and lift people up.
Thank you.
Thank you, Murray. That was delightful, wasn't it?
Thank you for making us pastors feel that our jobs are heavenly.
Quite often I think we spend our week in hell sometimes.
And it's good to be raised up.
Because quite frankly, Murray, I want to thank you personally.
I came to this convention with an ulterior motive.
I was looking for ways to get out of the ministry.
And when I saw that the topic was how glorious the ministry was,
I didn't want to come here.
I didn't want to be told the ministry was glorious.
But this week has been wonderful, brother.
You have a real ministry of encouragement.
God bless you.
We have some time, maybe 10 minutes, to have some questions perhaps.
If anybody would like to ask some questions about what we've heard this morning,
we certainly have got some time and then time of prayer and our final hymn.
So we've got to move a little bit quickly.
Does anybody want to begin? Yes?
Remember to introduce yourself for the sake of the type and ask your question.
Bruce Murray at Hursul.
With regard to the visiting the other land, just a few words, if you will,
on encouraging your people to take excursions to that land as well.
With regard to, if a sermon is good, quite often the lay people in the congregation,
a number of them will want to read more.
They'll want to look at Baxter, perhaps.
They'll want to look at other references.
And I think sometimes it's not going beyond the pile, is it,
to let them know where some of these things from the sermon came from.
The minister's a little bit guarded with regard, you know,
I've got all this great information, but the congregation aren't going to find out
what commentaries I got them from because they'll steal the thunder.
But I think it just encourages them more.
So could you just give a little bit on that?
Yeah, I think that's a fantastic comment.
I suppose it relates to what I was saying yesterday,
that I think the preaching of ministry then needs to be reinforced by other ministries.
So we bring them to this, hopefully this point of heightened joy and hope in God,
but to simply send them away then and do nothing further for them until next Sunday
and they just fall into a trough in between and their life is just lived from sermon to sermon,
or for other people it's lived from conference to conference or whatever,
that is not helpful for their spiritual maturity.
So I still place considerable weight on what we're doing with our people after Sunday morning,
from the time of fellowship after the service straightaway to home groups or Bible study groups
or prayer groups or different things we have operating in the life of the church
where ideally the themes from the Sunday morning or Sunday evening are picked up
and explored and taken further.
But it is a concern to me that I think we can give our people such good stuff
that we just create spiritual indigestion for them and we never give them time to process
and we actually help them to become hypocrites
because they're hearing more and more stuff which they are not implementing in their lives.
So you've made a good point that perhaps some of our sources could be included in a message,
and I would even more strongly emphasise it.
It's what we do with our people through the rest of the week as we follow that through
and make some direct connections between our preaching ministry and other ministries
so that it's followed through.
Hello, Dale Higgins from Newtown.
Just a question about being pointed and discriminating.
In small churches where everyone knows each other really well
and they tend to know each other's sins,
if you're particularly pointed and particularly discriminating,
everyone will know who you're talking about.
Should you do that?
I mean, I notice that Paul in his letters even names names which is very embarrassing,
not only the heretics who are out but those who are in the church disagreeing with each other and so on.
Just a – could you comment about that?
Yes, I'm glad you've raised that.
My view would be that we're pointed in one sense,
but we'll generally be very loathe to identify individuals,
and if the context is so intimate that it will mean the identification of individuals,
then we're in severe danger of doing from the pulpit what we should be doing in private,
and perhaps we lack the courage to do it in private and we hide behind the pulpit to do it.
And I think we must avoid that.
So there will be a time when the application is a sense more generalized,
but it's a rising out of this particular knowledge of the issues and the struggles and the sins that people grapple with.
There's wisdom needed in drawing that line,
and maybe there are plenty of able preachers here who might also comment on that issue because it's an appropriate one.
Maybe one more question, and that's it. We're running out of time.
Anyone else got any questions?
Well, perhaps we could close in prayer.
There'll be opportunity for a couple maybe to pray.
I will lead, and I've asked Brian Stewart to close off for us at the appropriate time.
We need to be in the morning.