Harmed or Helped pt. 2 (Supporter Appreciation Episode) | Behold Your God Podcast

Well, coming back now to this supporter appreciation episode of the podcast, I want to say thanks to all of you who continue to support what we do and believe in the studies that we make and help make that possible.

This is something that we want to continue to do every week, just to kind of give you some additional content, answer some of your questions as those kinds of things come in, and especially be able to point you to additional resources.

So this week, in this time, we want to talk about some of our favorite sources for sermons when we go looking for other sermons. Where do we look in books? Where do we look online? But first of all, I want to remind you, go back and listen to everything that we just said in our first podcast about the importance of finding your place, plugging yourself into a body of Christ that is manifested locally, as a local church, and to sit under the ministers that God himself has placed you under, to hear those sermons.

Don't fall into the trap of comparing the man that God has sent to you to preach or the men that God has sent to you to preach to your favorite conference speaker or your favorite online preacher or Spurgeon or Lloyd-Jones or any of these other men, but to believe that you could not have picked a better man for yourself if you had, that God has placed these people in your lives.

So we don't want to devalue the sermons that you hear in the local church, but when we do go and we look for good sources for other sermons, where do we go? John, what are some of your favorite printed sermons that you jump to?

Yeah, printed sermons are great.

They lack the immediacy of the dynamic of a man speaking to you on behalf of God as you gather with other people, and that is a unique thing that can't be published on a page. Lloyd-Jones was very clear to emphasize that.

You remember doing the documentary on Lloyd-Jones, how Lloyd-Jones really didn't like taped sermons. It bothered him.

He didn't want his sermons to be recorded.

Right, so somebody's just driving down the road listening to a sermon, so they're looking at road signs, which, did I just miss my turn? And oh, by the way, Lloyd-Jones is talking about God and this passage, and he felt that there were so many disadvantages to that.

He'd just prefer they didn't do it. And of course, we're pretty glad that they ignored him on that one. We get to listen to his sermons, and hopefully, you know, in a way that's helpful. But the printed sermons, we do get to hear the voice of the men from centuries past that would have been lost without that.

And I do have some favorites, and there are some reasons for my favorites. So I have a small stack here, so for the sake of time. And I guess that the first of many people's list would be Spurgeon's sermon series.

Now this is part of the full set and 60-plus volumes, The Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit. And so I think that the thing about Spurgeon is he's always warm, he's always Christocentric. Not just Christocentric, but Crucicentric, it's the cross.

And though he is warm, it's not without doctrine. So there's a careful understanding of doctrine, but it's kind of behind the scenes. It's like all the hard work is done behind the scenes. You don't see all that.

You don't see the mechanics. You just get the benefit from that. It's like he just spreads the table and it's all dessert to the soul. And another thing about Spurgeon, when I was lost, I would read Spurgeon occasionally.

And I remember by the end of the sermon, I felt like he had wrapped a net around me, and I was in agreement with him. My conscience was standing up, standing beside Mr. Spurgeon, pointing its finger at me saying, John Snyder, you know he's right.

And I would think, you're right, you're right. So I think we often, if a church doesn't have an altar call at the end, sometimes people will say, well, where's the altar call? How do people get saved in a church?

And where's the invitation? And Spurgeon's a great example of that. He did not do the altar call. He allowed people to come to him after the service, and he would stay for a long time after Sunday morning service, and people would come to his study and talk with him one-on-one.

But the whole sermon is the altar call. You know, it's just wonderful.

I remember talking with you after having read a particularly good Spurgeon sermon. I can't remember for the life of me right now what it is, but I remember us talking about it, and you said, you know, when you read Spurgeon so often, it's like he places a point here, and then he ties a little rope to it.

And then he goes and he places another point here, and he ties a little rope to it. And then he places a point here, and before you know it, he's just circled you. There's nowhere you can't go anywhere.

He's taken every, you know, escape route out, and then he just tightens the rope, and you're ready to say, okay, you're right, you know. You got me.

Yeah. Another one of my favorites, a very different kind of preacher, is the man that Martin Lloyd Jones considered the greatest American preacher ever. So not the greatest theologian.

So who do you think that would be? The greatest American preacher ever. Who would Lloyd Jones say that that is?

Well, his name is Samuel Davies, and Samuel Davies, kind of a second generation of the Great Awakening men toward the end of the latter half of the 18th century there. But Samuel Davies, we only have three volumes of his sermons, but I would agree that when you read Davies' sermons, they are so balanced.

They're brainy, but you don't, it's not the kind of brainy that makes it hard to read. It's just clear, and they're warm in a way that's mixed with the theology. So I would say that, I would think that Lloyd Jones is, yeah, that's a good statement.

There's a lot of argument that you can make for that statement, that Samuel Davies is a combination of so many strengths that it is hard to find a weakness in his sermons. He's not the greatest at any single category, but when you see them all combined in one man, he does really preach in a way that's stellar.

That's probably not the name that popped into your mind if you are playing along at home, you know. Oh, I'm thinking he's mentioning, unless you knew that Lloyd Jones said that quote, which a lot of people do, you wouldn't think, oh, probably Samuel Davies.

I mean, he's almost unknown in our day. So who publishes that series of sermons right there?

That was published by Soli Deo Gloria.

Okay, so that's now in the hands of Reformation Heritage Books, I believe, so you're able to get those from them. Yeah.

The last one I would mention in this category is another name that's not so well known, but we did include him in the second Behold Your God study, The Weight of Majesty, because his life is such a demonstration of how the character of God changes a man.

His name is Edward Payson, and this is his complete works, only three volumes. This is the third volume, by Sprinkle Publications. So the first volume contains a moderate-length biography, and then some quotes, some choice statements from his sermons, and then follows a couple of volumes of sermons.

What I think is so spectacular about Payson is that because of his situation, he did not have a large library. Now, he was well-read when he was in Harvard. Do you remember when we filmed at Harvard?

Yeah. When he was in Harvard, he was converted at Harvard, and after conversion, he became so studious that the joke among the students was that he had read every book in the Harvard library. But when he became a pastor, he didn't have an enormous library, and so most of the sermons were the fruit of meditating on the Scripture with very little help from other commentaries.

And the product of that is some of the simplest but most penetrating thoughts, so just very uncluttered sermons that I find helpful.

Yeah, we talk about Lloyd-Jones a lot, but it's important, I think, for people to understand that his sermon series, well, basically every book that he ever wrote was a sermon. I ask people that all the time, you know, how many books did Lloyd-Jones write?

And they go, oh, I don't know, dozens and dozens, and no, actually, the answer is zero. He was preeminently a preacher. That's what he gave his life to. That's what he gave his time to, and even though he didn't want those sermons recorded because of some legitimate reasons that we already mentioned, it lacks the immediacy.

You lack the reverence that you should approach a sermon with, sometimes when you just open a book at night and, you know, the kids are climbing all over you. But even with those reasons, those sermons were recorded, and we now have lots of series of books.

So this is his Roman series. This is one of them, Exposition of Chapter 12, which I actually haven't read, but it's the only one that we have the cover on that you can kind of see what it looks like there.

So this is from The Banner of Truth. One that I wanted to talk about specifically as being so helpful to me is his series on Chapter 6, which, of course, you might want to start back in Chapter 5. But Chapter 5 and Chapter 6, where he really starts to talk about the federal headship of Adam over all humanity, and Christ as the second and the last Adam, and how we're pulled out from under Adam's headship, and we're placed into Christ in Chapter 5.

And then when he turns the corner into Chapter 6, it's, man, what is true of you now that you're in Christ? And this was one of the first books that I read post-conversion. And just maybe it was the timing.

Maybe it has to do with just how helpful it is. But it had such a huge impact in the way that I think of what is a Christian, and how do you fight sin, and how do you live the Christian life, and what does it mean to live the Christian life?

It's just absolutely compelling. So I would urge that series of sermons on you.

Now we did that as a small group, didn't we? Yeah. A small group of our men at the church. And that was my favorite small group that we've ever had.

Yeah. So read a chapter on your own during the week, and then come together. And I think it maybe rotated, or different people had different nights. Or maybe there was just one person. But anyway, yeah, just a great way to read as a group of guys together, and then to get together and discuss it once a week was really nice.

John Newton, Handel’s Messiah, and Preaching the Gospel Through Scripture

What about some more unique ones? Yeah. Well, I see you've got one.

Let me, I'll show you. I'll show mine first. Now this is kind of cheating, because this is the second edition, part of the second edition of The Complete Works of John Newton. And I got this for Christmas one time.

And it was, yeah, like I want to put it in my casket at the end of life, because they're so nice. This is a volume, volume four of his works. There's six volumes. And the Banner publishes them now, and so they won't smell bad, but, you know, and they'll hold together.

But in volume four, there's a collection of his sermons. And it's unique. I don't think that Newton's written sermons are the very best. They're good. I think his letters are some of the best letters ever.

But this series is unique because in his day, when Handel released his Messiah, it was all the rage. Everyone wanted to go hear Handel's Messiah. I mean, we think of it as a Christmas only kind of musical, but it was quite popular.

And Newton was really grieved. And that might shock us, you know, because this is a very religious musical. So Newton complained that people were being thrilled with this musical, the Messiah, but they didn't love Jesus Christ necessarily.

So people who wouldn't attend church would go to the theater because, you know, or to the concert because it was a fine event. And so Newton was so critical about it in his day publicly that people said that, well, he just didn't, you know, he was just kind of a grumpy old fellow.

So what he did was he took the passages of the Messiah and he divided them into 52 weeks. And he preached every Sunday morning for a year on the passages of the Messiah as they fell in the Messiah. And it really is just a story of the gospel.

Yeah. So, I mean, I think it's important for us to point out in a day where there are so many hokey things that churches and pastors do, you know, the summer blockbuster series. So all summer long, we're going to do sermon series on the Avengers and sermon series on, you know, the Transformers or whatever, and we're going to pull gospel applications out of things that you're actually interested in, like movies.

That's categorically different from Newton writing a year's worth of sermons on this musical, right?

Why? Yeah, because, well, years ago, probably when I first started preaching, I thought, well, I'll listen to Handel's Messiah around Christmas time. So I, you know, went and bought a CD, and then I thought, well, I can't understand it because it's highfalutin music, you know?

I don't understand rap very well, and I don't understand highfalutin music. I thought, what are they saying, you know? So I went and got an old copy of Handel's Messiah. The music, it was for a choir, a music with the words.

I was shocked. Every single song is just a passage of Scripture. There's nothing added. So what Newton was actually doing was he took the passages that Handel laid out, and Handel laid them out wonderfully.

There's a real progression that really is the progression of the story of the gospel. So Newton just took those Bible verses, and he just preached 52 sermons from them.

You're really just very wise to capitalize on an opportunity. You can imagine, I suppose he would have been ministering in London at this point. So he's in London, the biggest city in their world, you know?

And these Scriptures are in the mouths and in the minds of everybody in London at the time because this is the most popular show, you know, for the socialites to go. So you can imagine if there was something like that in our day where these Scriptures are in the minds and in the hearts of just the general public.

It wouldn't be a bad thing at all for a man to say, well, let me tell you what those Scriptures mean. Let me exegete those for you and show you how they all point to the gospel and to Christ.

Yeah, and that's really a real benefit. You think of it, the Hallelujah Chorus, the most famous section of the whole Messiah, the Hallelujah Chorus that everyone kind of gets excited about, is a chorus that is sung to the glory of God for judging everyone who rejects His Son.

And yet, across the Western world, we find that an entertaining song.

Salvation in Full Color and a Sermonic Doctrine of Salvation

That's sobering. Well, speaking of sobering, my last favorite collection of sermons is edited by Richard Owen Roberts. This is a book called Salvation in Full Color. These are not sermons by Mr. Roberts.

I don't think he has a single one here. This is a work that he edited, he put together. Now I will say, original to Mr. Roberts, the intro, the forward, is worth the price of the book, plus a million.

I mean, it is so, so good. And we could talk about that, but we'd be going off the rails a little bit. The book itself is a soteriology. It's a doctrine of salvation, and it's very, very clearly laid out.

But what makes it different from so many other soteriologies, really any other soteriology that I'm aware of, is that it's sermonic in nature. The way that he put it together, he went and got some of the best sermons on the topics that occur in order, as in the soteriology, and lay those out for you.

So let me give you an example of what I'm talking about. So the subjects are the character of God, the law of God, total depravity, the heinousness of sin, dead works, divine love, the atonement, regeneration, effectual calling, the work of the Holy Spirit, seeking the Lord, repentance, justification by faith, adoption, conversion, love to God, perseverance of the saints, sanctification, divine retribution, and then a final warning.

And so under each of those topics, laid out in a sequential way, as they would be in a soteriology, you have sermons from men like Timothy Dwight and Gilbert Tennant and Solomon Stoddard and George Whitfield and Samuel Davies, John Tennant, William Tennant, Jonathan Edwards, and Ashell Nettleton, and some of these names that we recognize have been some of the greatest preachers from different eras in mostly American history, I think, there.

But just really, really challenging. We've used this as a church. We've read through it corporately.

Yeah, a couple times, yeah. Yeah, I mean, if you took that book in the coming year, just starting in January, and I know everyone gets busy, but if you just, you know, maybe two of those, there's 20 sermons, so about two a month.

If you carefully read through those, it's like being able to have the greatest preachers. They are all preachers in the American scene, the Great Awakening, Whitfield being the fellow that traveled over.

So you are hearing the greatest of the Great Awakening ministers talk to you one by one on one aspect of the greatest theme ever. It's a real privilege.

Well, there's so many other sources that we could talk about, you know, printed sources, but in the interest of time, you know, these are the ones that sort of rise to the top in our minds. Let's talk about online sources for hearing sermons, some of our favorites there.

Online Sermon Archives: Vernon Hyam, the MLJ Trust, and The Approaching Storm

What do you go to first? Well, I know that we both want to talk about Martin Lloyd-Jones, so I'll save him for you. One of the doctor's close friends in the last 20 years of his life was a man that was actually my pastor when my family and I were in Wales.

His name was Vernon Hyam, and they have put together an online collection of his sermons, and it's called, it's under wvhyam .org, and we'll put that on our site because you might get that wrong. So wvhyam .org, and Mr. Hyam's sermons were always the same.

They were always a beeline to the cross, regeneration, and the theme of revival. I mean, those were, you couldn't hear a sermon that wasn't really on one of those. I remember listening to him on the Ten Commandments, and I was preaching through the Ten Commandments, and I was actually a little disappointed because I wanted, like, okay, so, you know, I have some questions on this commandment, like what did you come up with when you studied it?

He would mention the commandment. He would talk about how that exposed our heart, how we fall short, and then he would preach the rest of the sermon on regeneration, the need of a new heart, and, but I mean, every preacher has those kinds of things that he's naturally drawn toward, and we did attend that church, and we did see the fruit of 40 years of his preaching and guiding under the blessing of the Lord along with the other elders at the church, and it was a real oasis for us.

So I always like to go back and hear Mr. Hyam.

Yeah, so the MLJ Trust, Martin Lloyd Jones, there are, that's such an incredible resource. Just if you take a look at mljtrust .org, I remember these sermons used to cost money back when they were, because, you know, the trust was an organization that was founded to try to preserve these recorded sermons, and so in order to do that, they would sell them, you know, so it was three bucks a sermon or something like that.

Then when the trust came over to America, it used to be called the MLJ Recordings Trust, I think, and then it sort of shifted several years back, maybe four years back, it shifted to the MLJ Trust in the States, and they made a huge step in faith, and out of a desire to make these sermons available for free, they just opened up the library.

So there's now 1 ,600 plus sermons that you can go on to mljtrust .org and hear. Now the Roman series that's printed there, that's there, Spiritual Depression, his book that's been so helpful to me and so many other people are there, his preaching through the book of Acts, his preaching through the book of Ephesians, all that's really good, but I would tell you when it comes to those series, that when you read them, they have been edited just enough that it's almost more helpful to me to read those.

If I want to go into it and think, okay, so what did he have to say about this chapter in this book of the Bible, I actually like reading those a little better than I do listening to his original ones.

But there are some excellent series that I would point you to. One of them comes to mind, and there's kind of a neat story that goes along with it. Let me see if I can find that here. It's called The Approaching Storm.

It's a series of sermons that he preached in Pensacola, Florida in 1969. And so a little kind of lesser known story about this, he came over to preach, he gave these what they called lectures, but they're sermons, at the Pensacola Theological Institute of McElwain Memorial Presbyterian Church.

And he preaches on what is the church. Now I don't know enough about the story, and I'm sure I'll get some feedback on this. He may have been giving lectures during the day and preaching at night, but there's a series of sermons that he preaches, again called The Approaching Storm.

And I can tell you the names of the sermons. There were nine of them. There's a sermon on prayer, a sermon called The Acid Test of Christian Profession, The Deep Things of God, The Doctrine of the Church, A Picture of the Church, then How Shall We Escape, The Problem of Evangelism, Revival of a Backslidden Church, and The Narrow Way.

Those are the sermon titles if you want to take a look at those. But there's a little article here that tells the story of how when Lloyd-Jones came over to preach in this Presbyterian church, the men who invited him over, as they walked on the beach, several of the men who went on to found the PCA, the Presbyterian Church of America, told the doctor that they knew that they needed to leave the old mainline denomination and to start a new one, but that they feared that they wouldn't have the resources to be able to do so.

And as the story goes, Lloyd-Jones told these men that they not only could leave and start a new denomination of churches that would be faithful to the scriptures, true to the Reformed faith, and obedient to the Great Commission, but that they must do so.

And so this sermon series called The Approaching Storm because there was literally a hurricane approaching, and as they're evacuating, people are coming there to hear Lloyd-Jones preach, and Lloyd-Jones doesn't care, you know, so he's preaching anyway.

But through this sermon series on what the church is, who is God, what's a Christian, what's a church, these fundamental things, and then these conversations with these men, one of the healthiest denominations and expressions of Presbyterianism in our day, the PCA, was founded.

And so if you know much about Lloyd-Jones' own life and the 66 Controversy between him and Stott back in the... And then it's kind of an interesting addendum to that whole story.

One of my favorite Lloyd-Jones series was in 1958 -59 celebration, 100-year celebration of the 1858 -59 Revival in the UK, and so he preached a long series on the nature of revival. And my family and I, we had just returned from the UK after the three years of residency for research there, and my in-laws graciously let us live for free in a little rental property they had.

And so one of the things they asked is that I would paint the house, and so I was glad to do that, even though I was not a painter. So they gave me the exterior. I couldn't mess that up. So lots of paint, you know, 97 degrees weather in South Mississippi, and all through the summer.

So I'd go to work and I'd come home and I'd paint a little bit more on the house. But I'd listen to Lloyd-Jones sermons, you know, and back then this was probably on tape. You had a Walkman, little fuzzy things sticking out of your head.

So it was a real benefit to my own soul, you know. It just reminded me of things that I'd been researching and things I didn't need to forget, and that was one of my favorite series for him. One of my, another one of my kind of one-off favorite sermons is Paris Reedhead.

The sermon, 10 Shekels and a Shirt, where he discusses the difference between serving God for humanity and serving God for God.

That one is absolutely fundamental, like you need to go and listen to that one and re-listen to it often.

Sermon Resources, Propitiation, and Closing Thanks

Yeah, that's a real kind of life shaker, like have you ever thought of this, you know? And so I always return to that occasionally.

Do you remember, this is kind of pre-internet days, but do you remember how it used to be back in the olden days? There would be almost like a tape trading. I mean, if you wanted to hear preaching, somebody had to give you a cassette.

So I mean, how did you ever know, how do you know that there is a person called Richard Ellen Roberts in the world?

Yeah, I think I heard about Roberts from someone who'd been at a conference where he had, just leveled the place, you know? It was actually a group of preachers, and he was so straightforward with them that many of them were offended and left.

So I thought, well, I was a baby Christian, and I thought, I wonder what this guy said that would make preachers mad. So I listened to it, and I thought it was a wonderful series. You know, it was very pointed, so I could see that if they didn't humble themselves, that was the only other option.

But I started getting tapes from him, from anybody I could find that could get me a tape from him, you know, whether you bought them. And back then, you know, like you said, with the Lloyd-Jones Trust back then, it was, you know, $3 or $4 a tape.

To cover the cost. Yeah. And so I remember having some of them on The Nature of Revival again. He did a short series, and I wore the tape out. It just broke in my car, because I probably listened to it 30 times.

It's such a neat thing to remember, you know, that, I mean, back then, you could want to know something, and you would have to actually go seek it out physically, you know? Go and hear a sermon. You couldn't just say, like, hey, Siri, play me a sermon from so-and-so.

Oh, hey, Siri, my iPad just opened itself up here. But that you actually had to go and look, and it was a real legitimate ministry for people to provide those tapes. I remember a place called Mount Olive Tape Library down in Mississippi.

And if you're listening to this, you may be going, yes, you know, I used to get shoeboxes of tapes from them, and I've heard that story over and over again. So we're not limited to, you know, having to exchange cassettes anymore.

There are some really good repositories for sermons online. One of those is Sermon Audio. I mean, Sermon Audio is a service. Your church, if you want to host your sermons in a place that is going to do a good job of getting those to people who maybe can't attend and who can't hear, or if you want to be able to go back and re-listen, then they're a service.

We use them here at Christ Church, you know, to host our sermons. But what I really appreciate about them is that they do have doctrinal standards. So anybody can't just go and, I mean, they'll say no thank you if somebody tries to open up an account with them, and they don't hold to some degree of orthodoxy.

Now, that's not to say that you can just, you know, throw a dart and hit a Sermon Audio sermon and it's going to be orthodox down the line. But there's so many good guys that you can hear there. So SermonAudio .com is a great resource.

Yeah, I think with Sermon Audio, as you said, there's somewhat of a mixed bag. But it's a good resource, and one of my favorites on there is Paul Washer, especially Series on the Gospel. Of course, there are some of his more famous ones that some people like because they're more shocking.

But I think that the more lasting benefit, you know, are those that just take you right to the cross, to propitiation. Paul's been preaching about propitiation for a while now, you know, seeing a lack of clarity of that in the average evangelical church, and I think those are really worth our time.

Well, just a few resources to commend to you. Certainly not an exhaustive list, but maybe something that could get you started in the right direction. If you have sermons that you really love, if you have collections of sermons that you've been benefited by, send us a message.

We'd love to hear about those. Maybe even discuss those in a future episode of the podcast. Thanks again so much for your support. Again, if there are people that you know who would like to have these, but finances are an impediment for them, let them get in touch with us.

We want to make these things available to everybody, but we especially want to say thank you to those of you who come alongside us and help us do these things. So thanks again, God bless, and we'll talk to you next week.