Legal Preaching

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Hi, this is John, and today on Theocast, we are going to be discussing legal preaching.

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Preaching that tends to remove hope, or maybe establish fear, and going after the lazy

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Christian. We have a long discussion about the distinction between the law and the gospel, where legal preaching emphasizes law in almost every passage, and gospel seems to be a byproduct, or the way in which we enter into the

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Christian life. And then in the membership podcast, we talk a little bit more about our personal lives, our journey through legal preaching, how it is that we discovered

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Reformed theology or Calvinism, how I personally began to struggle with legal preaching, and how

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I began to set free from that. And really, at the end of it, we talk about what is the purpose of the pulpit ministry.

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What should preachers be establishing, fear or hope? We hope you enjoy the conversation. A simple way for you to help support

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Theocast and join the Reformation is by shopping at Amazon. That's right. Everything that you purchase there, they will take a percentage of it and donate it to our ministry.

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All you have to do is go to smile .amazon .com and then search for Theocast, Inc., and choose us as the supporting donation.

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To learn more about this and other ways of supporting us, you can go to theocast .org Welcome to Theocast, encouraging weary pilgrims to rest in Christ.

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Conversations about the Christian life from a Reformed perspective. Your hosts today are

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Justin Perdue, pastor of Covenant Baptist Church in Asheville, North Carolina, and I'm John Moffitt, pastor of Grace Reformed Church in Spring Hill, Tennessee.

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Justin, it is good to be with you here this morning, my friend. Two days in a row, getting caught back up from having to take a break for a while.

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Yep, because one day this week would not do, and we might be back doing a double dip next week as well just to get caught back up.

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It's good to be behind the mic with you again today, bro. I know we've been having some conversations in our pre -recording time the last couple of days just about current events and things going on in life.

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We find ourselves all, I think, trying to get our feet under us and get our minds wrapped around what's going on in our society with the

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COVID -19 coronavirus stuff. We realize that by the time this podcast comes out, many more things will develop.

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Things will have changed probably a number of times by then, but many of our listeners and many of the members of our churches will be experiencing hardships like many of us maybe haven't seen in our lives.

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One of the things that I know you and I are mindful of as pastors is to continue to hold out to people the hope of Christ, the eternal faithfulness of God, and the fact that we may lose certain things in this world and in this life, but the hope of Christ cannot be taken from us.

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The promises that God has made to us in Christ are rock solid. I know

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I've been looking at text messages and correspondence this morning from members of my church, and I know that you've been doing the same thing.

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Just know that we're praying for the world, we're praying for our nation, we're praying for our people, we're praying for our listeners, for God's mercy in various ways.

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These are exceptional times that we find ourselves in for sure, but it's still good for us.

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I even told you this morning, admittedly, I'm distracted and I'm burdened by things, but I'm really glad to get on here and have a conversation like we're going to have today to remind all of us of the gospel, of the grace of God, of the hope we have, of the assurance that we have in Christ.

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What better thing for us to talk about than these things in the midst of times like these?

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Tim Leach I think it's important to use technology to our advantage. Of course, we're doing that right now where we've been able to help thousands with the gospel and bringing rest.

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I had my first Cyber Elder meeting last night. That was an experience for me to not have to drive home and have a meeting.

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We started it later because we didn't need to worry about driving. I think that just going forward as believers, we need to be sensitive to the thoughts and fears of others, that to call someone dumb or irresponsible or uneducated or any other word that you want to use because they don't agree with you on this particular situation is just not showing kindness and brotherly love.

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My encouragement to all Theocast listeners is that we demonstrate love. John 17 is very clear.

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It says that the world will know that I have come by the love we have shown for one another. I just really think we need to take to heart and believe that to be true.

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We demonstrate love with people we disagree with, and we demonstrate kindness.

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That being said, that can lead us over to our topic today about being kind in people that we disagree with, so Justin, lead us into our disagreement today.

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Not with us. We don't disagree. Justin Perdue We are in agreement. We are in agreement. We are disagreeing with others, and we hope to do so charitably in a way that's helpful.

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The ministry of Theocast is built upon the biblical principle of giving people rest and hope and peace and assurance in Christ.

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That's our tagline, encouraging weary pilgrims to rest in Christ. We understand that Jesus has accomplished everything in the place of the believer that we need to be reconciled to God and have peace with God forever, to be assured of our existence in the new heavens and the new earth with each other and with the

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Lord. We take this very seriously, being able to hold out that rock -solid hope and confidence to the believer in Christ, because that's the message of Scripture, the promises of God through Messiah, through Jesus Christ.

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We get a number of emails and phone calls and correspondence from our listeners talking about their experiences throughout their lives or maybe even in their current context where they feel like they are repeatedly being robbed of hope and they're being robbed of assurance and peace.

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The underlying feelings and the underlying tenor of their experience in the church is one of doubt and of being unsettled and of questioning their assurance and their peace before God and their standing before Him.

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You and I have experienced these realities too, where we've been a part of church context or we observe things that we see going on in the evangelical world, in particular with respect to preaching and how preaching is done and how, sadly, the purpose of the pulpit is off from our perspective.

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The purpose of the pulpit certainly is to preach the law rightly, but ultimately the purpose of the pulpit is to herald the grace of God in Christ, to extol the power and the mercy of Jesus Christ to sinners so that we might find our rest and our hope and our confidence in Christ alone.

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Sadly, from our perspective, that's not happening in many pulpits and in many contexts, and so we want to have a conversation today about what we're calling legal preaching.

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I know we're going to do this in just a moment. Shout out to R. Scott Clark for a wonderful article that he has written, and he has used this term legal preacher.

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Many others have used this term legal preaching or legal preacher. It's not original to Theocast, but we want to make our own observations about legal preaching today, so we're going to talk a little bit about what we mean by that term, and then we're going to talk about the fallout of legal preaching and some of the observations that we have made.

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We hope that this is clarifying for people and maybe puts words to their thoughts and their wrestlings.

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We also hope to do this charitably, but ultimately to give people the hope of Christ, even in this podcast as we talk about legal preaching.

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Yeah, this is hopefully an encouragement to pastors out there, potential pastors, those who want to be preachers, and even those who are trying to identify why it is they walk away from a sermon and don't feel encouraged.

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They feel as if hope was removed and not established. Theocast, our ministry, is designed to establish hope and rest.

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As Christ says, come to me and I will give you rest, and legal preaching seems to do the exact opposite of that.

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In the article, I'll just read this to you, and we'll have this in our show notes, so you can go to the show notes section of our episode and you can get the link here.

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He says the symptoms of a legal preacher are this. A legal preacher is a preacher who majors in the law to the neglect of the gospel.

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In practice, he preaches nothing but law. He thinks that mentioning Jesus periodically or even regularly means that he is not a legal preacher, and he cannot imagine that people are concerned about the tenor of his preaching because he doesn't see anything wrong with it.

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It's the sort of preaching he heard as a young man, and it's the sort of preaching he heard in seminary, and it's the sort of preaching he admires in other preachers.

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And I will say that he is describing me in my very early age as I graduated from college.

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I was a legal preacher. I remember telling specifically to one of the pastors I served with that I felt like people will not appropriately understand

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God and love him and respect him if they don't fear him. And I didn't mean fear in the sense of the way in which the psalmist believes to be fear, not fear as in dread, but fear as in respect.

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I wanted people to dread God, and because if they dread and feared him, then they would obey.

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They would live holy lives and sanctified lives.

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So something he says here, it says, legal preachers is a preacher who majors on the law to the neglect of the gospel.

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And I would even go on saying that they turn every passage of Scripture into law, even when it might even be a gospel passage.

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An example of this was sent to me recently by a Theocast listener, and the question was, what do you think of this?

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I can't tell you how many of these we get. What do you think about this? And it was 10 ways to abide in God's love.

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And they were basically 10 laws. If you do these 10 things, you will abide in God's law. And how do you turn such a wonderful passage of abiding in the love of God into law?

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And unfortunately, this article did that, or this sermon did that. But that would be an example,

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JP, of, I think, a legal preaching where something is meant to establish hope,

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God loves you, remain in that, to this is how you earn. And they didn't say earn, but another way, if you do these 10 things, you abide in God's law or love.

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Justin Perdue We've talked about John 15, abiding in Christ. And the message there is one of hope in me, trust in me, rest in me, apart from me, you can do nothing.

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And it's about union with Christ by faith. And we turn that into something identical to what you just said.

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Here are the seven ways that you can keep yourself in Christ, or here are the seven steps to abiding in Christ.

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And it ends up becoming more of an emphasis on our actions and our discipline and our diligence versus the grace of God, the mercy of God, the efficacy of the work of Christ and the sufficiency of the work of Christ in the place of the

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Christian. I want to pick up on the turning every passage into law thing that you just said.

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I think you're exactly right. And again, we're not the first to make these observations, but we agree with observations that others have made and have made similar observations ourselves.

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So, you just said it, you turn every passage of Scripture into law, even the passages that are gospel.

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And this is because there is a collapsing of the categories of law and gospel in the mind and in the understanding of the legal preacher.

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So, this is not a podcast about law -gospel distinction, but we can't escape that reality when we're talking about legal preaching.

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So, the legal preacher does not understand the distinction between the law and the gospel. And quite simply, for some of those who might be newer with us, when we talk about law, anything in Scripture that is imperative, that tells us, do this and you will live, that's law.

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Do this and you will have favor with God, that's law. Anything that tells us about what has been done for us by Christ to be received simply by trusting him is gospel.

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So, do is law, done is gospel. And the legal preacher does not understand that distinction.

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And what he ends up doing is taking every passage and turning it into an imperative to the

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Christian of what the Christian must be doing, or the Christian must be applying, or how diligent the

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Christian must be. There's always this kind of exacting, threatening tone to it that you need to do this or else dot, dot, dot.

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And what that ends up doing, obviously, is robbing the believer of any hope of assurance and peace and rest.

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Because, my goodness, if I'm not doing my part or I'm not taking this seriously enough,

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I should be afraid and I should be concerned. And so, this collapsing of law and gospel ends up stealing assurance and it ends up robbing people of hope and peace because we never can just allow people to bask and rest in the grace of God, it doesn't seem.

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Because the fear, and I don't mean to take us in a different direction here, but I know this is where we're going to go eventually.

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The fear for the legal preacher is that if he lingers too long on what

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Christ has done for the Christian and does not give the Christian imperatives, exhortations, things to do, then the listener, the

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Christian in the pew, might misunderstand him and think that there is no obligation or no duty associated with the

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Christian life. And that's a big thing. This notion that we must uphold obligation and we must uphold duty all the time, lest people misunderstand it.

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You and I would agree that there are duties, there are obligations in the Christian life, but what

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Christ has done is always primary and our identity in Christ is always primary and our duty is derived from our identity, not the other way around.

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And that's where those things are kind of blended together or flipped, where it seems in the mind of the legal preacher that our identity is determined by what we do, not what we do being determined by our identity.

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I could say more, but I want to throw it over to you before we maybe take it in a completely different direction. I think that being able to identify this is important.

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Just to add a thought to the obligation, we could even call this obligation preaching or legal preaching, is they have a fear that if they don't keep this in front of the believer's life, they will become lazy.

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And the laziness of the believer is what they're going after. And we at Theocast have been accused of not being concerned over sanctification, not being concerned over obedience and the term antinomians thrown out there.

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And this is what I would say is an overcorrection. Can someone preach in such a way that people don't see the obligation to obey?

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Sure, absolutely. But you can't overcorrect to the side where you are so afraid of grace, you only preach law.

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You have to trust grace. So in his article, he says something towards the end, which I think is a fair observation that many people have when it deals with law gospel preaching.

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He says they don't seem to be nearly as interested. This is the accusation against the law gospel preachers. They don't seem to be nearly interested in sanctification and obedience as they should be.

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Certainly, those fellows aren't as interested in it as he is. He suspects those fellows of just being lazy.

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And that would be, I would say, many, many preachers. And I'm not going to name names.

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I'm going to let you identify these as you will. But a man who gets up in the pulpit and he's angry at Christians because they aren't living as dedicated, as separate, as passionate about obedience and holiness as he is, and they will really hone in on holiness.

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Man, do they are going to just preach the holiness of God, which I agree, the greater the view of the holiness of God, the greater the grace of God becomes.

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I couldn't agree more, right? The greater the law, the harder the law.

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The other day I preached about the wrath of God, the cup that Jesus drank.

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And one of my deacons came up to me and said, I couldn't wait for you to get to the gospel. What he was saying is

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I was stepping down so hard on his throat with the law. He was so suffocated.

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By the time I poured the gospel out, he couldn't gobble it up fast enough. Well, that is law gospel preaching, where you need to feel the weight of the law so bad that no one can obey it.

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And who is going to relieve me from this body of death, as Paul says in Romans chapter seven.

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So there's a difference between preaching the law.

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I think Justin and I preach the law every week. You have to, otherwise you can't have a prayer of confession.

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Prayer of confession is not necessary if you don't preach law. Justin Perdue That's exactly right. I have a lot of thoughts.

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I'm going to try to do this in a way that's clear and systematic. I want to sort of touch on some things that you're talking about and also circle back around to some other stuff that we maybe have already talked about.

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With respect to the law in general, I completely agree that if you're going to be biblical or reformed in your preaching, you must preach the law rightly.

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So that would mean preaching the law in its uses, in particular the first and the third use, depending on who's numbering them and what categories you have there.

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We'll talk about that more maybe as this show goes on. The thing with respect to the legal preacher, you'll often hear this phrase.

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I know I have heard it a number of times in my life where somebody will make the statement with respect to the

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Bible, well, it's all gospel. The whole thing is gospel, and it's like, no, it's not.

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You'll hear people say, even in the Mosaic Covenant, it's all of grace.

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I'm like, well, yes, in that the Mosaic law is given underneath the banner of the covenant of grace high level, but the

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Mosaic law, as we've said a number of times on this show, is a reissuing of the covenant of works with respect to its requirements.

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We can't call the law gospel in that respect, but you hear guys trying to do that and say that.

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These are guys who even would claim to be reformed in their theology, and that's just an inaccurate, imprecise representation of Scripture.

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It's not all gospel. There are a number of passages that are not, in fact, gospel at all.

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The law, as it stands on its own, is a damning, condemning reality. It's important, like you just said,

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John, that we preach the law in its first use every week, that God is holy and righteous and requires perfect fulfillment and obedience to his holy and perfect law.

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If we do not render that unto God, we stand condemned. Then we give people the gospel and we point them to Christ Jesus, their

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Savior. A lot of times, this has been my experience too, the third use of the law is the law as the perfect guide for the life of the

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Christian. A lot of times, the legal preacher does not ever really preach the first use of the law.

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He doesn't ever preach the holiness of the law. You cannot do this, and Jesus has fulfilled it for you.

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Trust Christ and have peace with God. He does not do that as he should.

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But then he preaches the third use, which is not threatening. Calvin would even say that the law is our kind advisor in Christ Jesus, but instead, the legal preacher preaches that third use as though it's the first one.

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You better conform your life—that's my observation. I've said this a number of times to people.

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You preach the third use as though it's the first use. You preach it in this threatening tone, like you better do this or you'll be condemned or you're not really a

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Christian. It's like, brother, I don't think you've understood the law in its uses appropriately.

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Paul in 1 Timothy 1 .8 says we uphold the law as long as it's used lawfully. I don't think the legal preacher does that.

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It creates a lot of confusion, but it is so damaging.

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It does rob people of assurance and peace because they end up thinking if they don't do an appropriate job of conforming themselves to the word of God, if they don't have an appropriate level of desire or affection or discipline or whatever, then they need to be afraid.

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Anybody with a brain and a conscience is going to say, I don't know where my hope stands then.

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I have a few other thoughts. John, if you're not mad at me, I'll offer them. The issue with laziness is a thing.

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In the talk about holiness, you brought this up. The legal preacher seems to have in his crosshairs all the time the lazy

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Christian or the way that I would even put it is. It seems to me that so many sermons from legal preachers about holiness are preached with the assumption that everybody listening to the sermon does not want to be holy.

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It's the assumption that everybody listening does not want to be godly. Let me interject there that they don't have the intensity that they should.

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Their intensity level is to be higher.

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Maybe it's not that people don't want to be holy or godly at all, but they don't want it badly enough.

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They're compromising. There's this sinking suspicion in the mind of the legal preacher that the audience really loves ungodliness and really just wants to be comfortable in their sin rather than really wanting to love

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God with all their hearts and to obey the Lord and really wanting to be holy. When I listen to that,

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I honestly am asking the question, brother, who are you talking to, and who do you understand your audience to be?

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I know in my own local church context, for example, I don't know anybody in my church that if asked wouldn't sincerely say, yes,

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I want to be holy, and yes, I want to be godly, and yes, I want to love God with all my heart, and yes, I want my heart to be thrilled in worship.

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The problem for all of us is that we want that in our inner man, and at the same time we battle against sin and our own corruption.

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That even sparks a thought in my mind too, John, that I think in the mind of the legal preacher, there's not an appropriate understanding of the sinner -saint reality either.

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Romans 7 is in the Bible, and Galatians 5 .17 is in the Bible, where we're told that the spirit and the flesh wage war against each other, and we don't do what we want to do.

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That seems to escape the mind of the legal preacher as well. I know it's our observation that laziness and the lazy

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Christian is always in the crosshairs, and what you end up then doing is scolding people, berating people, and unsettling people in order to motivate them toward holiness.

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It's like if these people are going to be sufficiently motivated toward holiness and godliness,

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I need to get up here and unsettle them and light a fire under them so that they'll be motivated to pursue it.

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If I don't do that, and if I just continue to preach Christ, they will be content and apathetic in their current state.

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We're excited to announce that we have a new free e -book available at our website called Faith vs.

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Faithfulness, a Primer on Rest. We the hosts put this together to explain the difference between emphasizing one's faith in Christ versus emphasizing one's faithfulness to Christ.

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How one leads to rest and how the other often to a lack of assurance. You can get this at theocast .org

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slash Primer. If you've been encouraged by what you've been hearing at Theocast, we'd ask you to help partner with us.

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You can do that by joining our Total Access membership. That's our monthly membership that gives you access to all of our material that we've produced over the last four years, or simply by donating to our ministry.

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You can do that by going to our website, theocast .org. We hope that you enjoy the rest of the conversation.

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I would say that they are removing hope in the same way we would remove hope.

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So I don't have a problem with removing hope when it comes to a false hope. Meaning, if you're trusting in your profession, like you came forward at the end of a service and you accepted, you asked

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Jesus into your heart, the sinner's prayer. If you're trusting in your baptism or whatever, if you're putting yourself, you're putting your trust in any kind of action that you performed, most of the time it's the

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Southern Baptist world, they said the sinner's prayer. That's what they're going after. And if you're trusting in, you're a good person, or you said the prayer and you're, because I can't tell you,

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I'm a church member, I've said that they've been saved like 700 times because every time they were,

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I really mean it this time. Listen, if they're going to go after those people and removing their hope,

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I don't have a problem with that because that is not really hope, right? That's not a very solid foundation.

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And I don't have a problem walking over with a hammer and popping that glass and shattering it and saying, listen, you don't want to stand on that.

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That's not where you want to stand. But what you do is you put your hand on their shoulder and you lead them over to the corner foundation of Christ and say, this is where you want to be.

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You don't lead them over to legalism. You don't lead them over to law.

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You don't lead them over to obligation because that too is not the foundation that we stand on.

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And here's the thing, I'm not calling these guys heretics, and I'm definitely not saying they don't understand the gospel, but when it comes to the everyday

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Christian life and how it is that I am to respond in holiness to the Father, you can either motivate people through fear or you can motivate them through hope and love.

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And I just want to use this as an example. The Apostle Paul, who was a preacher and would write letters that would be read on his behalf, it's because he couldn't be there to preach.

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He would have them read on his behalf. And if you go and you read these passages, you know, Ephesians is a great example of this.

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He begins by identifying him, writing to the church of Ephesus, chapter one, verse two, grace to you and peace from our

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Father and Lord Jesus Christ. He begins this way. As a matter of fact, that same phrase he begins with in Philippians, he begins in Colossians, and then he ends the same way.

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He ends the letter, grace and peace to you. He is not establishing fear.

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He is not establishing dread. And he does give law in there because the gospel is not sweet unless there's law.

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And he does give obligation. He says, listen, you need to consider how to build one another up in love.

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You need to protect the unity. But all of that is centered from the position of grace.

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So he establishes hope and then he presents obligation because he says literally in chapter four, verse one, you need to walk worthy in the manner of which you have been called.

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And what is that? That response to that is love. So we are not saying there's not obligation for the believer.

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There is obligation. But that obligation is not what determines whether your hope is established or not.

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It's a byproduct of hope. It is not the establishment of hope. There's a difference, byproduct versus establishment.

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Thinking about the pattern of the apostles, the letter of the Philippians pops into my mind where there are certainly exhortations throughout that letter.

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I mean, we all are familiar with Philippians chapter two where we're exhorted toward humility and we're pointed to the model of Christ who humbled himself to the point of death, even death on a cross.

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And then at the beginning of chapter three, Paul in Philippians 3, verse one says, for me to write the same things to you again is no trouble for me and it's safe for you.

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And he goes on at that point to remind the Philippians that a righteousness according to the law is nothing.

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I mean, Paul talks about it in his own experience that I had a righteousness according to the would surpass practically anybody's, but I consider that as trash when

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I then consider the righteousness that is according to faith in Jesus Christ that God gives us.

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And so throughout the epistles, these kinds of things are just peppered in. It's like, yeah, we're talking about humility and we're talking about how we live together as a body.

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And oh, by the way, let me remind you of where your righteousness comes from. Or the

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Romans example that we use all the time is when Paul is encouraging the Roman saints, he talks constantly about their identity and their union with Christ.

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So I agree with you, John, that if we're going to exhort believers in the church and we're going to give imperatives, which we absolutely need to do, we need to do it in the way that the apostles do it.

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We need to do it by establishing first identity and status as justified, united to Christ, and then talk about how the redeemed live.

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I know when I was preaching through First John, it's been a number of months ago now that we finished that series.

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That letter, we could do a Dazed and Confused on First John sometime just about how misunderstood that letter is, because it's often upheld as the great litmus test of salvation.

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Well, measure yourself up against these standards to determine whether or not you're saved. And I don't think that's

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John's aim in that letter. He's writing to a church that's been bombarded by false teaching and apostasy, and he's comforting the redeemed.

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And so what he says, when I was preaching through that letter constantly,

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John's posture here is not to smoke out the lazy Christians or to smoke out the nominal

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Christians. His posture is to comfort the saints. And so what he's saying, for example, when he'll talk about the confessions that believers make that Jesus came in the flesh and that Jesus is the

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Christ and the Son of God, he'll talk about practicing righteousness. He'll talk about loving the brothers. His tone and his posture is not so much, you better love the brothers, and if you don't love the brothers sufficiently, you're not in Christ.

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He'll say, hey guys, we're the redeemed, and the redeemed love each other.

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It's just a very different posture. Let's do what the redeemed do. And that's what you and I are saying is, herald to the saints, trust

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Christ, you are righteous, you've been reconciled with God, you have peace with God in Christ through your union with Christ by faith, and now let's live like the redeemed live.

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And here's how we're to live together. It's very different. Rather than, you better live this way, or you're going to just prove yourself to be an unbeliever.

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One establishes hope, and one robs people of any possibility of hope.

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One is a good motivator for life in the church. The other is a very poor motivator for life in the church and the

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Christian life in general. There's a world of difference in those two perspectives for sure. And last thought really quick before I throw it back over to you, man.

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If the legal preacher in his mind really thinks that the people he's preaching to are at best lazy or are at worst unconverted, which it seems that that's the case.

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You listen to many of these certain friends and these guys preach. It's like, brother, you seem to be thinking that you're preaching to an unbelieving audience.

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If that's the case, then why in the world are you just lambasting people with law and never giving them

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Christ? If you really think that these people might not be

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Christians, then preach the first use of the law in all of its holiness, in all of its righteousness, and all of its terror outside of Christ, and then give people

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Jesus. Let me tell you about the Savior. Let me tell you about the one who has fulfilled the law for you.

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Let me tell you about the one who took upon himself all of your lawbreaking and all of your corruption and all of your guilt and all of your shame and drank the cup of God's wrath and drained that thing and has atoned for your sin.

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Let me tell you about absolution and forgiveness and mercy and grace and peace that's found in Christ by faith alone.

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Let me tell you about that. But that's not how it ever goes. You just end up getting a guy up there yelling at people about how they're supposed to live, and that is gospel -less so often.

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The gospel might be a tip of the cap to the gospel or some sort of acknowledgement of the gospel or maybe an assumption of it, but they're not preaching law and gospel in its fullness to people that they seem to think might not even be

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Christians, and that blows my mind a little bit. Yeah, if you even understand

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Calvinism or if you consider yourself to be a Calvinist, you have to wonder if they are preaching to the unbeliever, they do know that the only way in which they will be converted is through gospel.

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So to tell somebody to fear holiness, right, to examine their life, and you know, it's hard to know.

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I don't know. We don't know the attention of every preacher, but sometimes you feel like they do feel like they're preaching to the unbelieving crowd, and if you're preaching to a crowd that is openly denying

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Jesus, they know the gospel and they're just like, I don't care, I don't want to believe, then yeah, you can preach some pretty heavy condemnation upon them because it's like, listen, you know the truth and you're denying the truth.

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Paul and Jesus bring some pretty heavy condemnation on them, but if you're dealing with people who are trapped in sin or confused, or I would say uneducated, they're weak in their faith and you bring law to them and you don't bring gospel, gospel is what bolsters our faith.

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Gospel is what grounds us. This is why Paul says, I want to come to you and preach Christ and him crucified, and Christ and him crucified is not the gospel unless it comes to you by grace.

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If you didn't listen to last week's episode, which I'm assuming these are coming out one after the other on, oh shoot, what did we title that?

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I can't think of the title of it now. Preaching about the gospel. Preaching about the gospel, that's right.

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So if you are giving all the facts of Christ's life and you disassociate it from grace, or you never conclude that these are yours by grace, then you're not really preaching the gospel.

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So I would say if you're hearing preaching and it feels like the preacher's angry, he is constantly warning you about your attitude and your actions towards God.

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And you walk away concluding, I'm not sure he offered me hope.

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I think he offered me fear that if I don't get myself in line that I should, and they'll use verses like examine yourself to see if you're of the faith, right?

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And what they mean by examining is that they immediately point to your actions. You should examine, which in context, we need to do a

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Days and Confused on that. That is not what Paul means. As a matter of fact, just the

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Corinthian church in 1 Corinthians was, let's just say if they could do something wrong, they were.

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They got the gifts wrong. They got love wrong. They got sexuality wrong. They got idol worship wrong.

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They got it all wrong. And what does Paul do? He comes in and he reestablishes their assurance in love and reestablishes the gospel and says, listen, you've misunderstood the gospel.

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You've misunderstood grace. You're, you're, you're boasting in it. And he corrects really some antinomianism.

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He corrects it with the gospel. I mean, he opens it with one, I'm not ashamed of the gospel. Number two, I want to come and preach the gospel to you.

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And that's because I believe, here we go, bump, bump, bump, because Paul is a Calvinist. Or we could just say

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Calvin was Pauline. I just did that to make all my Arminian friends mad at me.

38:27

You're a shock dog, John. Watch out. Like an observation along these same lines that of what you were just saying is that a lot of times the legal preacher seems to be very dissatisfied with where his people are.

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And he, he seems to be frustrated with them constantly. And I think

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Scott Clarke in his, his article that we'll link to in the show notes references this as well, sort of paints a hypothetical picture of the congregant coming up to the pastor and saying, pastor, are you, are you frustrated with us?

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Because it seems like you always are dissatisfied and frustrated with us. And that does seem to be the tone and the posture of so many guys where the people are not doing as they should be.

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They don't take things as seriously as they should. They're not diligent enough. They're not disciplined enough. Their affections aren't good enough.

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And so I'm going to, again, light that, that proverbial fire under you to motivate you through intensity and an exacting tone and demands and even, even kind of this threatening sort of vibe,

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I'm going to unsettle you. And it's interesting as we, as we think about, like you were just talking about the, the posture of Paul in the letters to the

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Corinthians. I'm also mindful of like first Thessalonians four, one, where Paul says to the Thessalonian Christians, essentially this, what you're doing, do so all the more as he's exhorting them, you know, to, to continue on in the, in the faith and in the

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Christian life. He doesn't just lambast them for all the ways they fall short. He says, you're already doing this and this and this and this.

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Just so as you're doing, just do it all the more. That I think is a much better representation of what our pastoral posture should be.

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Establish people in their identity in Christ. Their status as justified, adopted children of God. You've been given a spirit of adoption, not fear.

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And you are, you are safe and look at what God is doing in you. Look at how your life is changing and what you're doing.

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Do so all the more. Rather than, yeah, you've got a long way to go, you know, like, yeah, it's just, yeah, it's just totally different posture and tone.

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Yeah. I would also say that legal preachers, you will not hear them admit to their own frailness and need of grace.

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Paul constantly would say, I'm the greatest sinner that I know. Yeah. And when, and meant that we trust.

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Right. And he didn't say it once. He talked about how if he stacked up his righteousness, he considered it as worthless.

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Oh, wretched man that I am who will save me from this body of death. I think he was referring to his post experience, his post conversion experience, not his prior.

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Paul did not see himself as a wretched man on his road to Damascus. That's when he, when he, when he was confronted and converted, that's when he was like, oh my, this is who

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I am now. A legal preacher will, will be looking down upon the congregant, trying to pull them up to his standard.

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And I would say a gospel preacher is one who is down with his people, trying to lift them up into hope.

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He is, he is not trying to pull them to his own standard. He is trying to push them to Christ and to uphold them.

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And so it's the difference between the removal of hope because they're trying to create an action versus the establishment of hope as well as trying to create action.

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I want my people to love each other. And the best way they will do that is when they feel as if all hope is secure, that they don't need to love each other because they're establishing

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God's love. They don't need to love and obey and fight sin because if they don't, there's the fear of God.

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They have it already. This is Ephesians one, I'm sorry,

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Ephesians four one. This is how you respond worthy to the call, what you have called or calling, right?

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It's, it's, it's a response from, we always say identity forward, right? We rest, therefore we obey.

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And the legal preacher is, if you want to rest, you better obey, which is completely opposite to me.

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You cannot, you cannot obey enough to have rest. You just will never obey enough.

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You're always going to fight against sin, but you can rest if you're resting in something that is outside of yourself.

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And the good news of the gospel is rest is found outside of yourself. The law should keep you from ever resting in your own self -righteousness.

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And I think from the experience that I've had through the years of hearing legal preaching is that they are trying to get you, they wouldn't say it this way, but unfortunately it's the conclusion that they're trying to get you to rest in your own self -righteousness.

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And you and I both know that's very dangerous because you don't have enough self -righteousness to have enough hope when it comes to the end of your life.

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It just won't be enough ever. Nobody. Paul's model of upholding himself as the utmost or the foremost or the chief of sinners is helpful for any of us who would ever get in the pulpit and preach.

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Again, I'm like you, I don't think that Paul is using that language, like 1 Timothy 1, 15 and 16, when he calls himself the foremost of sinners.

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I don't think that that's just a rhetorical tool and tactic to try to create a reaction.

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I don't think that's smoke and mirrors. I think that's legitimate. And I'm convinced,

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John, I think I've said this on the air before, that the guys who are the most effective in the pulpit, biblically speaking, are the preachers who are most in touch with the depth of their own corruption.

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Because if we are appropriately mindful of how wretched we are as the man standing in the front to herald the good news and to preach the word of God, then we would never assume that we have any kind of merit or righteousness to stand on.

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We would never downplay the severity of our own sin or the depth of our own wickedness.

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And that's going to help us in preaching and counseling and teaching other people because we would never encourage them to look to their own merit or their own righteousness.

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We would never downplay the depth of their corruption. If anything, we're going to just continue to beat the drum of, you are far worse off than you ever imagined.

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Even for those of us who have been in the faith for a season of time and are being sanctified, we still are much worse off than we ever could see.

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There's more sin in us than we realize, but here's the good news. There is even more mercy in Christ.

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This is why you must continually look to him for your hope and your confidence and the ground of your assurance and not look to anything in you.

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And again, I'm not saying that this is what guys think, but it seems that a lot of the legal preachers have lost at least some touch and some sense of the depth of their own corruption because it's almost like in their own minds, they're doing pretty well.

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For them, like you said, to be able to almost look down upon others and preach with a kind of condescending tone or the notion that you would want to pull people up to your level is craziness biblically.

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Justin Perdue If anything, what we want to do as preachers is have our people, if they're going to imitate us, it's like, well, there may be some things in my life that are worthy of imitation by God's grace, but ultimately imitate me as we all look to Christ for our hope.

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Join me in looking to Jesus Christ for our righteousness. Join me in looking to Christ for everything.

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If I'm demonstrating love, grace, peace, and patience, sure, imitate that.

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But often when people think of that, they think of the spiritual disciplines. They think of the standard, like I've established these standards and you need to look at my standards and establish your life according to my standards.

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If you think I'm demonstrating grace and you can see that, then sure, imitate that.

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But there's not much about my life that you're going to want to imitate.

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Justin Perdue But those are things that you're describing. Those are fruits of God's Spirit, which are held out for all of us.

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God will produce these things in us. Of course, we would look to those things and say, yeah, that's really good.

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I'm seeing love in his life, or I'm seeing patience in her life, and God gets the credit for that.

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That is something that I want to see more of in my own life, absolutely. But what you're saying is often what's upheld are these things that actually aren't explicitly in Scripture.

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They're like life habits and practices that may be wise, maybe not.

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It's like, I need to do everything like he's doing it if I'm going to be godly like that, and that's really not so helpful.

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Well, we are out of time. We need to move over to the members podcast. We have more to say on this.

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There might even be some advice to preachers. If you find yourself to be a legal preacher, how do you make the change?

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I'll give the description of that moment where I made that transition. I know that Justin himself—we both grew up in legal preaching, and so how do you transition out of it?

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And I think we're going to spend a little bit more time on what is the purpose of the pulpit in the membership podcast.

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If you don't know what that is, that is an extra podcast that we do for those that support our ministry.

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It's just a simple way for us to say thank you for taking your money and supporting our ministry. You can get a 14 -day free trial.

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Go over and listen to several of those to hear about them. But it also has a backlog of all of our episodes, 200 plus episodes of our regular podcast, 100 plus of our membership, all of our articles.

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There's an education series on there. There's a lot of information, but it's a simple way to help support

48:45

Theocast to keep the message of rest going around the world. Thank you for listening, and we'll see you next week.