The Responsibilities of the Church: Preaching, Pt. 2
Selected Scriptures
Well, we started this morning to discuss a very important part of the anatomy of the church. One of the functions of the church is essential to its life and ministry and that is preaching. For those of you who are visitors tonight, you haven't been with us, let me just say for a number of months now, in fact I think this is message number 34 in this series, we've been talking about the church and what a church is and what a church does. We started out talking about the church as a body. The Bible talks about the church in the metaphor of a body. And as a body has a skeleton, the church has a skeleton, or basic foundational structure of certain doctrines and certain commitments. And then we moved to talk about internal systems which are spiritual attitudes that characterize the church. And now we're talking about the muscles that make the body function. We're talking about what the church does. And last study had to do with fellowship, the church is engaged in the sharing of common life and consequently the sharing of common ministry and we call that, in the Bible, fellowship.
But there's another very important element of life in the church and something the church cannot do without, something designed by God to play a primary role in the life of the church and that is preaching and teaching. And as I said this morning, preaching and teaching is a crucial function in the church. I went so far as to say, and I think it needs to be emphasized far and wide, that the primary reason for choosing a church is the preaching, biblical preaching, because that is what makes a church strong and the absence of that is what makes a church weak. And since man shall not live by bread alone, says God, but by every word that proceeds out of his mouth, it is essential that His truth be proclaimed. And God has designed that it be proclaimed through preaching and teaching. That is God's method. We remember 1 Peter 4:11 that says, "If anyone speaks, let him speak the oracles of God." God has placed in the church those who preach, those who teach and they are to speak the oracles of God. That's what we do when we come together on the Lord's day, that's what you do when you go to a fellowship group, or Sunday School class or some kind of a Logos class, our weekly Bible institute classes, or a Bible study. There are those there who will teach you the Word of God. God has ordained the means for delivering His truth to be through gifted folks who can preach and teach His Word. God has designed by the foolishness of preaching, not foolish in His eyes, but very often foolish in the eyes of the world, He has designed by the foolishness of preaching to save those who believe.
And as I said this morning, you cannot honor God, you cannot worship God any more than by reverently listening to God's Word being preached with a heart eager to obey. That is the highest expression of worship, hearing God's Word with an eagerness to obey it. So we trusting that you grasp the message this morning, and plant it in your heart, the centrality of preaching and teaching in the life of the church.
Now that by way of introduction brings me to the text that I want to draw you to. If you'll open your Bible to 1, 2 Timothy and Titus, just kind of hovering in those three pastoral epistles, I want to sort of lead up to the main passage, but I want to emphasize to you that these epistles written to Timothy and Titus, who were two young pastors, give instruction for life in the church. And they point out clearly the priority of preaching and teaching. In 1 Timothy chapter 4 and verse 6, Paul writes, "In pointing out these things to the brethren, you will be a good servant of Christ Jesus, constantly nourished on the words of the faith and of the sound doctrine which you've been following." He says to young Timothy who is a preacher, a pastor, he says to him, "You must be constantly nourished on the words of the faith and the sound doctrine which you have been following." Then in verse 11 he says, "Command...is the verb there...Command and teach these things." And then he adds in verse 13, "Until I come, give attention to the public reading of Scripture, to exhortation and to teaching." Read the Scripture, explain the Scripture and apply the Scripture. And then in verse 16 he adds, "Pay close attention to yourself and to your teaching, persevere in these things." This is the heart and soul of ministry is to learn the Word of God and then to proclaim it to others.
In the next chapter of 1 Timothy, chapter 5 and verse 17, we are reminded that elders, or pastors, who rule well should be considered worthy of double honor, especially those who work hard at preaching and teaching. I could launch off on a rather lengthy and impassioned sermon on how leaders in the church are to be honored when they work hard at preaching and teaching. In contrast, we have today pastors working hard at lots of other things and not that. But that is what God honors and that is what the church is to honor, hard work at preaching and teaching, that's God's design for disseminating His truth.
Then I want you to turn, if you will, to 2 Timothy chapter 1. In verse 13 and verse 14, Paul reminds Timothy again in this second letter, "Retain the standard of sound words which you have heard from me in the faith and love which are in Christ Jesus." Again he's saying hold on to sound doctrine, hold on to the truth, verse 14, "Guard through the Holy Spirit who dwells in us the treasure which has been entrusted to you." And the treasure was the treasure of truth, divine revelation, the Scripture. Then back up in verse 6 he says to him, "I remind you to kindle afresh the gift of God which is in you through the laying on of my hands." He had been given the gift of preaching and teaching, he was to retain the sound doctrine, guard the treasure of revealed truth and kindle afresh or stir up to a fire the ministry of preaching for which he was gifted and to which he was called.
In preparation for that, 2 Timothy chapter 2 and verse 15 says, "Be diligent to present yourself approved to God as a workman who does not need to be ashamed, handling accurately the Word of truth." And again here is a call to careful study, to the learning of the Word of God so that it might be passed on. Now all of that leads us up to 2 Timothy chapter 3, and this chapter I want to begin to have us look at along with chapter 4 because here is a direct commission. And this is the Word of God to every pastor, the Word of God to every elder, the Word of God to every leader in the church. Chapter 3 and chapter 4, at least chapter 4 down through verse 4, we'll not have time to go beyond that, are all built around one command and the one command in this entire section is in chapter 4 verse 2. Chapter 4 verse 2 says this, "Preach the Word, be ready in season and out of season. Reprove, rebuke, exhort with great patience and instruction." Now there is the dominating command of this entire section from chapter 3 verse 1 on through chapter 4 verse 4. Preach the Word. And he adds, "Be ready in season and out of season." That means stay at your post. That means seize every opportunity. Preach on every occasion that is presented to you. And when you preach, there is a negative side, reprove, rebuke. There is a positive side, exhort with great patience, and instruct.
Preaching then is to be strongly confrontational in that it reproves and rebukes, and it is to be gently encouraging in that it exhorts with great patience and instruction. So whether you are strongly confronting sin, or whether you are gently encouraging believers, you do it all the time remaining at your post, seizing every opportunity, you preach the Word. That's the command. That's what Timothy, a young leader in the church, was told to do. That was to be the heart and soul of his ministry.
Now the remainder of the passage surrounding that command gives us reasons why that is so critical. Reasons why that is so critical, and I want to share those reasons with you. And I know in the past you have studied this section and I have preached through this section in years past, but I want to approach it a little bit differently and not quite so detailed, but to give you the sweep and the flow of this particularly important passage.
There are five reasons why the Lord has designed that the center and heart of the ministry of the church is preaching and preaching the Word, the Word of God, the revealed Scripture.
Reason number one is because of dangerous times...dangerous times. Look at chapter 3 verse 1, "But realize this...he says...that in the last days difficult times will come." Now the phrase "difficult times" is dangerous times, really, dangerous times not in a chronological sense, but kairos in the Greek which means seasons, or epochs. It's not talking about clock time, it's talking about movements, eras. And he says, "You must preach the Word because of the dangerous seasons that will come." He says they'll come in the last days and I don't need to remind you that the last days began when Jesus Christ arrived. The last days arrived when the Messiah came to earth. The last days were initiated by Jesus Christ when He came preaching His Kingdom. We're still in those last days and these are a prolonged period of time, but nonetheless the last days awaiting Christ's return and the establishment of His Kingdom.
In these last days dangerous epochs, dangerous seasons will come. And the intent of the verb there, "will come," sort of carries the emphasis of accumulation. It's not as if they come and go, that would make things easier. It is as if they come and stay. And so the longer we go after the coming of Jesus Christ, the further we move toward His return, the more of these dangerous epochs we collect. In fact, look down at verse 13 where he addresses this same issue. He says, "Evil men and imposters," that's false preachers, false teachers, religious fakes and charlatans, "will proceed from bad to worse, deceiving and being deceived." They are both deceived in their own minds, and deceivers of others. And they will get worse and worse and worse as time goes on in the last days.
When Paul was writing to Timothy, the dangerous seasons had just begun. And here we are 2,000 years later and we have the accumulated impact of from bad to worse for 2,000 years. We live in very dangerous times. These epochs have accumulated through these years and they threaten the very life of the church, they threaten the integrity of preaching, they threaten the proclaiming of God's truth all around us.
Now let me just suggest what they might be for you briefly. As you look back over the history of the church, as you look back over the epochs that have thrown themselves, as it were, against the church, a number of things come to mind immediately. First of all, let's start way back. After the early church had begun to develop and grow and gain a little strength and spread the Word of God around, it wasn't long until persecution came...a frightening, fearful, angry, hostile persecution against believers. And believers were being killed for their faith in Jesus Christ. And we're aware of that because we have documentation that goes way back up to the times when persecution was unleashed against believers. And I suppose that...that kind of hostility was an epoch of its own. That kind of hatred, that kind of animosity toward the truth that comes out in the fury of actual persecution and produces martyrdom and imprisonment and all of that was a epoch of danger to the church.
But I don't want to include it because in all honesty as you look at that, the truth of the matter is typically in the life of the church, persecution has a purging effect. Persecution tends less to be a threat to the church than to be a boon to the church because it has a way of purifying and it has a way of ridding the church of those that are shallow and uncommitted. So let's start with the dangerous epochs at the time when Christianity became the religion of the Holy Roman Empire. And so you have not long after that what is commonly known as the Dark Ages that runs from the time of the establishment of the Holy Roman Empire clear through to 1500, over a thousand years of Dark Ages they're called and the dominating danger to the church at that time was sacramentalism...sacramentalism. And that's the word that you will identify in your mind with this first epoch.
Sacramentalism means that the church was dominated by sacraments, by mechanisms, by external mechanical means, dominating by attempting to know God through some kind of automatic action whether it was lighting a candle, whether it was genuflecting, whether it was bowing down, whether it was going through beads, whether it was inflicting some pain upon yourself physically, whatever it might have been, these were mechanical means supposedly to give people salvation. Certain prayers, certain rituals, certain confessions under the authority of the Church. The Church became a surrogate Christ and people were called to attach themselves to the Church who had no personal knowledge of God whatsoever. This era was dominated by the rituals developed by the Roman Catholic Church. The Church became the only interpreter of Scripture, the Church became really the source of spiritual life, at least in its own mind and the minds of its people. Sacramentalism was a severe danger to the church. In fact, it dominated the church, it took the Word of God out of the hands of the people and the litany and the liturgy that was done during all of those years was done in the Latin language which was obscurantus and people didn't even know what was being said or what was going on. And that was part of the idea. The Church was the only justifiable interpreter of God's truth and nobody was allowed to interpret it on his own or her own and you attached yourself to the Church externally. A terrible, terrible era in which the Word of God was terribly suppressed and people thought they were Christians because they had an attachment to a system but no knowledge of God. By the way, sacramentalism came and stayed and it's still with us.
It was then the Reformation came. As you remember, the Reformation in the sixteenth century when all of a sudden the Word of God broke loose from this terrible incarceration in the Dark Ages. And as the Word of God broke loose in the Reformation, people turned to the Bible and they found out you're not saved by attaching to the Church, you're saved by attaching to the living God through faith in His Son. And as Martin Luther discovered it and articulated it, the just shall live by his faith. The Reformation was born. It was a great dawning of a new day. Always through the era of sacramentalism there had been pockets of believers. God always had His remnant, whether it was the French Huguenots, or whether it was the Anabaptists, or whatever, Waldensians, there was always a group of people who were true to the faith marching through those terrible, terrible years. Then came the Reformation and the light dawned and it was a great turning point in the history of the life of the church.
But it wasn't long after the Reformation, in fact before the Reformers could really sweep through all of theology and all of the church and do all of the corrective work that might have been done, a new dangerous epoch came called Rationalism. In the eighteenth century, you remember what happened, the enlightenment, the French Revolution, the Industrial Revolution followed and man coming out of the Dark Ages began to realize his intelligence. He began to realize what could happen when he could read for himself and when he could discover things and it was an explosion of inventions and discoveries. And man began to worship the human mind. And the byword of that era was the book by Thomas Paine called The Age of Reason, written around the eighteenth century. Thomas Paine, of course, basically denied the existence of God, debunked the Bible and called people to bow down to the shrine of human reason. That swept into the church, that swept into the colleges, universities, and seminaries. And they came up with this commonly known liberalism, or theological rationalism which denies the Bible. It is that which is taught today in most seminaries in America and around the world. It had a dominating effect. They denied that the Bible was inspired by God. They denied the deity of Jesus Christ, the deity of the Holy Spirit, and on and on and on it went. That had a tragic effect on the church as it destroyed the church across Europe and destroyed the church across America to the degree that today most of the major denominations are dead as dead can be because of the liberalism that entered them, the supremacy of reason, the discrediting of the Bible, and so it went.
It wasn't long after that, that there came a kind of a movement back to grip the scriptures and the Bible was published and disseminated in a breadth that it never had been before because even during the Reformation it was impossible to print Bibles and spread them around since they were printed one page at a time. And so there was not yet mass produced Bibles until you get in to the late eighteenth century, the nineteenth century, all of a sudden the Bible starts to spread, people get a hold of the Scripture but there was a sad reality in the nineteenth century, the end of the 1800's, and that was shallow spirituality, dead orthodoxy. There was an orthodoxism, it was sort of denominational and wasn't personal and that dangerous reality entered the church. And it's still around. We still have dead orthodoxy. We still have sort of angry fundamentalism even today where it's cold and dead and indifferent. They have the Bible but their spirituality is shallow at best.
This was followed, you come into the early twentieth century and the influences in Europe by what you could call, I suppose, another great danger, politicism. The church became politicized. The church became the state church. The state began to own the church. And the church was politicized. And it began to take on agendas that were social agendas and political agendas. One of the most remarkable of those was what happened with Adolph Hitler. When Adolph Hitler developed the Third Reich and when he developed his Aryan supremacy theories and wanted to obliterate the Jews from the face of the earth and that was simply a man carrying out a satanic plan, it wasn't new. You remember that Satan has tried to obliterate the Jews a number of times. Just go back and read the book of Esther if you want to see an attempt at genocide that failed there. And here came Hitler and he wanted to obliterate the Jews. And in the process he wanted to capture all of the thinking of the people of his time who were involved in the Christian religion which was the state religion, of course. Lutheranism of Germany, and so he developed what was called German Christian Movement...The German Christian Faith Movement, declared himself the true Christian preacher...in fact, declared himself the Apostle of Christ and may have even said things like he was the Messiah. And he managed to wrap his arms around the whole of the church, politicized the church, get them to believe that they should eliminate the entire Old Testament and all positive references to the Jews in the New and take the rest as being from God and follow him as the voice of God. And believe it or not, the church moved right in and acknowledged that.
Well, you know, the church is still dealing with politicism. We still have that with us today, social gospel, reconstructionism, liberation theology, and all of that trying to win the culture war at the expense of sound doctrine, setting aside the preaching of the gospel in favor of some social moral agenda. We fight that battle as well.
Then after politicism in the fifties, the 1950's came...well I guess we could call ecumenism. And the big wave in the church was, "let's all get together and love everybody. Jesus is all about love and God's all about love." I remember because I was starting to study the Word of God at that time, something came down the pipe from the liberal seminaries called "The Jesus Epoch," or "The Jesus Hermeneutic." And since Jesus was all love and hearts and flowers and gentleness and kindness and tenderness and meekness, and all of that, only the things in the Bible which reflected that attitude were true and everything else wasn't true. And the only way you could ever interpret the Bible was by the Jesus Hermeneutic and that is to say you looked at every passage and says...and said, "Does it express the loving, tender-hearted, kind and meekness and kindness and meekness of Jesus? If it does, we accept it. If it doesn't, we don't. And let's all get together on the basis of love and let's forget what divides." And that was the raging issue when I was a seminary student. Sentimentalism, unity without dogma, tolerance of error, it's still around. It has all kinds of different forms but there is a new sentimentalism even in evangelicalism that wants to make sure doctrine is not an issue.
Then in the 1960's in no less a place than Van Nuys, California, a movement was born that has swept evangelical from pillar to post...evangelicalism from pillar to post. I like to call it experientialism. It was called the Charismatic Movement, 1960 and the Episcopalian Church right down here in Van Nuys, California under a rector by the name of Dennis Bennett. There was an explosion of interest in the revival of the expressions of quote/unquote "Christianity" that were characteristic of the early twentieth century in what was called the Azusa Street Meeting, when people broke into tongues and claimed healings and visions and all of that.
Experientialism basically said, "Truth comes through experience....Truth comes through feeling God...Through getting visions...Getting touched...Hearing prophecies.. Signs.. Wonders.
The Charismata and the church faced the dangerous, dangerous season of experientialism where all of our spiritual experience becomes authoritative. As one lady said to me one time after I had spoken, she said, "I really don't care what the Bible says, I know what Jesus told me." And I've looked back at that as kind of a byword for where that movement has taken the church. Experientialism is a dangerous, dangerous epoch. It came along with all the rest and it never went away. And here we are up to our ears in sacramentalism, and exploding in burgeoning sacramentalism in the growth of the orthodox church and Roman Catholicism. We continue to face rational liberalism in the seminaries and universities of our land. We still have a cold, dead, sort of shallow orthodoxy, we have the politicizing of the church not only in our country but all over the place, certainly South Africa endured some of the horrors of a politicized church. We face ecumenism, the idea of let's all get together and not make doctrine an issue. And experientialism dominates in so many ways.
We came into the seventies and there was a New Wave. And in the seventies we could...we met the terrible danger of subjectivism. And in the seventies the psychologists began to rise and tell us all to contemplate our navel if we wanted to get in touch with spiritual reality, that spiritual reality started within us, not outside of us. We needed to be concerned about our own needs and the meeting of our own needs and coping with our own anxieties and developing self-esteem. And so we became Narcissistic Navel Watchers. And we turned inward and we got very preoccupied with psychology and psychologists became the reigning gurus in the church and they were the ones who knew all the mysteries of being and all the secrets of the human heart and all the reasons why people did what they did. The church became very subjective and very enamored with that. And it engulfed the church. Here the church, on the one hand, had just been exposed to experientialism and was getting engulfed in that and then came another wave of subjectivism, both of them turning the church away from the Word of God.
We came into the 1990's and we added another danger, mysticism...mysticism. That's sort of believing in everything. Believing in intuition, coming to truth by intuition. Mysticism began to accumulate power energized both by sacramentalism which is mysticism as well, and by experientialism which is mysticism and by rationalism which is mysticism and by subjectivism, the psychology which is a form of mysticism. And so we had all of this stuff accumulating. And here we are, it's all around us. And then in the 90's, and you notice as we go they come faster. Once they took a thousand years to develop, and now they develop in a few years because of the intense exposure of media. Into the nineties we came and another ism came, pragmatism. And pragmatism basically says that the appropriate means for ministry are those that are most popular with the people. I mean, that's basically what it said. That's a purely MacArthur definition but as I tried to boil down what pragmatism is, it simply says this, the appropriate means for ministry are those that are most popular with people. So find out what people want and do it. Preaching is seen as a sort of a Pony Express function in a high-tech computer world. They say that preaching is like Pony Express in a time when we ought to be using e-mail.
And then number ten on my little list, just in the last couple of years is Syncritism says, "Oh well, we all worship the same God whether we're Buddhists, Muslims, Catholics or even Atheists who are searching for truth. As I expressed to you in that interesting book called Ecumenical Jihad, we all are worshiping the one true God anyway, so let's all get together and forget about our differences and realize we're all going to wind up in heaven in the end anyway and it will all get sorted out up there. '
These are deadly dangerous seasons. Here we have accumulated all of this and I've over-simplified it. There are nuances that overlap in these issues and they come in all different forms. It's one of the reasons why young men today need seminary training. You can't send a babe in the woods out to deal with this kind of stuff. They need to be trained. These are deadly, dangerous seasons and at stake are the souls of men, and at stake is the truth of God and the honor and the glory of God.
Now, the characteristic of people who are engaged in developing these dangerous epochs are given to us starting in verse 2. People who develop false systems he describes in this way. "Men who are self-lovers, who are money lovers, who are boastful, arrogant, revilers, disobedient to parents, ungrateful, unholy, unloving, irreconcilable, malicious gossips without self-control, brutal, haters of good, treacherous, reckless, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God." Not a very nice group, really. They are characterized as those who are self-lovers, money lovers. They develop these things out of their own pride, their own desire to be wealthy. They are boastful, arrogant, proud. They have little regard for their forefathers, their parents. They're ungrateful, unholy. They have no love. They don't want to make peace or reconcile. They're malicious, haters of good, and so forth and so on.
The people who develop these things are then not well intentioned but they are ill intentioned and they seek to destroy the truth. Verse 5 defines them not only as self-lovers but, "As religious frauds. They hold a form of godliness although they have denied its power and avoid such men as these," he says. Now not everybody in every one of these isms that I've talked about is a non-Christian and a false teacher. But the basic error of these is produced, I believe, by those who have malicious intent toward the truth. Many well-meaning people get caught up in them. Many believers get caught in them. Therein lies the responsibility that faces us.
Down in verses 6 and 7 he says, "These people are typically out to capture people. They are those who enter into households and captivate weak women weighed down with sins, led on by various impulses, always learning, never able to come to the knowledge of the truth." I don't want to be accused of being chauvinistic here, I just want to tell you that what the Scripture says here is most movements go, first of all, for the women. That's where Satan went in the Garden, right? He wanted to get a woman out from under her authority, the one who had been given by God to be her covering and her protector, get her on her own and come after here in her weakness and lead her astray. As Satan went after Eve, so does Satan with all of his evil systems seem to target women.
Verses 8 and 9 further defines the people who are behind these kind of movements as those who are the opposers of truth, like Jannes and Jambres. Those two names, by the way, are names of the magicians of Pharaoh. And if you go back to read the account in Exodus about Pharaoh's magicians, you won't find those names. But they opposed Moses and these men also opposed the truth. They have depraved minds, they reject the faith. And then in verse 9 he says that there are going to be some limits to their progress. So when we're talking about these dangerous seasons, we're talking about dangerous epochs developing and being accumulated, going from bad to worse, and at the core of them is the love of self, the love of money, religious frauds who intend to capture people's souls and they are in opposition to the truth.
Now therein lies the initial compelling reason to preach the Word. He says, "Preach the Word because of the dangerous times, the dangerous seasons." It is a time of all times to preach the Word. Here we are, getting further down the line, accumulating more and more danger and at the same time a diminishing of the proclamation of the truth to meet that danger rather than an escalation of it. We ought to be doing exactly the opposite of what we are doing. Instead of setting preaching aside, we ought to be increasing the preaching of the preachers because of the increase and the dangers. Serious dangers exist today in the church. And everything I've mentioned to you is in the church, threatening the church. And that's why we have to preach the Word because the Word answers all of these things. The Word sorts it all out whether it's sacramentalism, or rationalism, whether it's some form of liberalism, or experientialism, or mysticism, or subjectivism or pragmatism, or whatever it is, the Word of God gives the truth that comes to bear against all of that.
There's a second reason why Paul tells us we have to preach. Not only because we live in dangerous times, which can only be addressed by divine truth proclaimed but we are to preach because of godly examples,