April 19, 2017 Show with C. Matthew McMahon on “The Calling of the Ministry”

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April 20, 2017

DR. C. MATTHEW McMAHON, founder of A Puritan’s Mind, who will address: “The CALLING of the MINISTRY”

00:01: Live from the historic parsonage of 19th century gospel minister George Norcross in downtown
00:08: Carlisle, Pennsylvania, it's Iron Sharpens Iron, a radio platform on which pastors,
00:16: Christian scholars, and theologians address the burning issues facing the church and the world today.
00:23: Proverbs 27 verse 17 tells us, Iron sharpens iron so one man sharpens another.
00:32: Matthew Henry said that in this passage, quote, we are cautioned to take heed whom we converse with and directed to have in view in conversation to make one another wiser and better.
00:46: It is our hope that this goal will be accomplished over the next hour and we hope to hear from you, the listener, with your own questions.
00:57: Now here's our host, Chris Arnzen. Good afternoon
01:04: Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, Lake City, Florida, and the rest of humanity living on the planet
01:11: Earth who are listening via live streaming. This is Chris Arnzen, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, wishing you all happy Wednesday on this 19th day of April 2017.
01:23: Before I go to our interview today or to before I introduce my guest today,
01:30: I have a prayer request for the family of a dear friend of mine, a dear friend of mine who went home to be with the
01:38: Lord last week. In fact, it was April 12th of this year, last week, that my friend
01:46: William Norman Grigg went home to be with the Lord at 54 years of age after a heart attack.
01:53: William Norman Grigg will be a name recognizable for those of my listeners who happen to be
02:01: Christian libertarians, especially who are politically libertarian or constitutionalists.
02:08: William Norman Grigg was the former senior editor of the New American magazine and quite a brilliant man, quite a genius, a former
02:18: Mormon who converted to biblical Christianity when he discovered the true
02:24: Christ and true gospel of the scriptures. And I had quite a number of occasions where I was blessed to have
02:33: William Norman Grigg on this program on the old Iron Sherp and Zion radio that was broadcasting out of New York on WNYG and WGBB radio.
02:45: And Norman leaves behind a wife and six children. Please pray for them.
02:51: This is obviously quite devastating since Norman was such a young man, as I said, 54 years of age. He went home to be with the
02:58: Lord, but thankfully, obviously, he, as I mentioned, he was a
03:03: Christian before leaving this planet. He loved his Lord dearly and put his full trust in the finished work of Christ alone for his redemption and salvation.
03:16: And pray for his Mormon parents. I believe his parents may still be alive and I believe they were alive when
03:22: I was interviewing him a number of years ago. And I know that he has siblings. He was an adopted child and so he does still obviously have
03:34: Mormons in his family. Pray for their salvation. Pray that as they hear about more and more about William Norman Grigg's testimony of conversion that the
03:44: Lord uses the rehearing of that testimony as it echoes in their ears to finally drive them to their knees in repentance and cry out to the true
03:54: God and the true Christ of Scripture. I plan on at some point airing some reruns of William Norman Grigg interviews in memory of him and I hopefully will soon have at least a couple of those posted on Facebook and other places so you can hear those interviews.
04:14: One in particular, which he is giving the account of his salvation and his coming to the true
04:21: Christ and true gospel scripture, where he actually breaks down in tears during the interview. It's quite a moving interview and so God willing
04:29: I will be able to share those with you the public very soon. So keep that family, the immediate family, and also the larger family of the
04:39: Grigg family in your prayers and especially those
04:45: Mormon relatives and perhaps even more especially his wife and six children who are mourning very severely, very deeply after this loss.
04:57: Well today we have on the program again someone who's becoming quickly one of my favorite guests on Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, Dr.
05:07: C. Matthew McMahon, founder of A Puritan's Mind and we are going to be addressing the calling of the ministry and this is actually also the title of a book by William Perkins who is a 16th century figure from church history and his book
05:28: The Calling of the Ministry has been brought back into print by Puritan Publications which is also an organization founded by my guest
05:37: C. Matthew McMahon. That's my honor and privilege to welcome you back to Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, Dr.
05:43: C. Matthew McMahon. Happy to be here Chris, glad to be here.
05:48: Great topic, great Puritan, great discussions we always have so I look forward to it.
05:54: And in studio with me is my co -host the Reverend Buzz Taylor. And good morning. Good morning.
05:59: Afternoon. That's right, you're the one that's supposed to mess up the times, not me. I'm sorry about that. And let me announce right now our email address it's
06:08: ChrisArnzen at gmail .com ChrisArnzen at gmail .com.
06:14: And before we even go into the subject at hand, Dr. McMahon, I'd like to know something about William Perkins who wrote the content of what we will be discussing today.
06:26: Well, Perkins is considered one of the early Puritans.
06:32: He was an outstanding, capable preacher and theologian.
06:38: He made a number of great contributions, wrote a number of fantastic works.
06:45: Almost everything that you read by him is extremely deep, biblical, pastoral.
06:53: When I say that I mean that he has a pastorally tender heart in the way that he deals with the subject matter while at the same time being an eminent scholar.
07:05: He went to college at an early age. Keep in mind that his years are a bit earlier than most of the
07:13: Puritans that one would study. Generally Puritanism is going to reach from about the mid -1550s all the way to the early 1660s.
07:27: Perkins, he was born in 1558. He died at 1602. He was one of what we would consider one of the early
07:35: Puritans along with others like Nicholas Byfield and Arthur Hildersham. These early
07:42: Puritans are amazing because they were deep, right, they were the ones who were gaining a quick foothold on top of the doctrine of the
07:54: Protestant Reformation, and they were taking all that doctrine that was coming to light out of things like Luther's writings and Calvin's Institutes and such, and they were applying it to every practical area of the
08:11: Christian walk, and Perkins was fantastic in being able to do that.
08:16: He wrote a number of works on various subjects that, as a matter of fact, he was one of those
08:26: Puritans that enjoyed also doing charts, or things that you could visibly see.
08:32: This demonstrates to you, in part, his pastoral heart to the people, because there was a lot of illiterate people in his day.
08:40: So what he did is he created a chart called the Order of the Causes of Salvation and Damnation.
08:46: It was part of a work that he wrote where he created sort of like chutes and ladders, where you would take your finger and you would place it at the bottom of the chart, and depending upon the path that you would go down, you would see various theological doctrines contained inside of circles that were then connected on both sides of, this is how you were saved, and this is what happens if you are lost.
09:14: And so even the illiterate who couldn't read would be able to, through his teaching them, take their fingers and follow along these circles and see patterns to be able to memorize at least what he was teaching them and telling them.
09:30: So he wrote all sorts of great expositions on Galatians, on Matthew, on the book of Hebrews.
09:39: He has a great work called the Cases of Conscience. A lot of times we look today, we talk about maybe psychological issues or different things of that nature that people may fall into.
09:52: In Cases of Conscience, he'll deal with specific emotions, the states of men, you know, melancholy, depression, happiness, sadness, all of those kinds of ideas.
10:03: And in the early days, they put together all of his works inside of a three -volume set called
10:11: The Works of William Perkins, and we've actually published a number of his individual works, taking those works and kind of making them individual books.
10:21: We've done The Order of the Causes of Salvation and Damnation, we've done The Largeness of God's Grace Seen in Predestination, The Foundation of the
10:31: Christian Religion Gathered in Six Principles, The Art of Faithful Preaching.
10:36: That's another one we should talk about on the show at some point. Glorifying God in Our Jobs, A Treatise of Man's Imagination, A Solve for a
10:48: Sick Man. You can really tell when you think about how the
10:53: Puritan pastor, who is both the pastor and the theologian at the same time, will deal with all of these different aspects and write on a number of different topics to cover everything that needs to be covered in the
11:10: Christian ministry. So I mean, like A Solve for a Sick Man or A Treatise on Godliness and Sickness and Dying, that is a fabulous work.
11:17: Helping people leave, just as you were just talking about, leave this planet and enter heaven in an amiable way, and how that should be done.
11:26: You can see that Perkins was one of those pietistic, godly theologians and pastors that the
11:36: Puritans were very much known for, and he had a plaque above his desk that said, thou art a minister of the gospel, be about thy business.
11:48: Always to remind him what it was that he was supposed to be doing, and what was his emphasis.
11:56: He was a great brain, so to speak. Sometimes you read, you know, a particular theologian or Puritan, and you're just thinking, man, this particular person the
12:07: Lord had just gifted in their mind to such a great extent. And Perkins was one of those people.
12:13: He had, it is said, that he had a surprising talent for reading books, where he read them so speedily that it was as if he read nothing, and yet did it so accurately that he seemed to read everything.
12:28: And so you can see in reading through his works, where he quotes not only the
12:34: Reformers extensively, but also all of the early Church, all of the
12:42: Middle Ages. He was very versed in knowing just about everything that was written that would have been of some substance to those in that particular day.
12:56: But he was known as a very powerful pastor, theologian, and a celebrated divine, a thorough
13:07: Puritan, both in principle and in practice. And he was also very pious in his life, exemplary in that way.
13:19: He had no reproach to his character that we know of, and in his preaching, it's just as powerful as what you read in many of his treatises and sermons and works.
13:33: So he's one of those people who you want to get to know in Puritan theology and literature.
13:43: Oftentimes people are turned off of the Puritans in certain ways, because they have to deal with all of the old
13:49: English and so forth, because these texts are old. But that's one of the things that we enjoy doing at Puritan Publications, is that whenever we put out a book, we update it into modern
14:00: English so it's much easier to read. So, a little bit of a background on Perkins. So you don't really think very highly of this
14:07: Perkins. I'm just kidding. That's the interesting thing about Perkins himself, is he's in the top ten of, if you would say, what are your top ten favorites,
14:23: Perkins would definitely be there. And the reason is because of the simplicity of his writing, yet the depth and the godliness that he is doing what every minister of the gospel is supposed to do for the people who are engaging with those that God has placed over them in their church.
14:47: He is taking them off the earth and placing them in the midst of heaven with all of his writings and all of his sermons.
14:56: You know, taking and connecting the mind of my mind and connecting it with the intention of the
15:03: Holy Spirit and whatever it is that he's teaching. That's why I said, I mean, you just read just about everything that he writes on, and you're not going to disagree with it.
15:12: And when you read some of the things that he writes. I had one minister email me after reading this particular work,
15:21: The Calling of the Ministry, and he said to me, I would never have saw what
15:28: Perkins saw in Job, and that's the first half of the treatise.
15:33: I said, I would never have seen that, reading that on my own. And it's amazing, not that just they don't pull things out of the air, they thoughtfully deal with the text.
15:45: And when they do that, that's where they mine out apples of gold. And his parents, or at the very least his grandparents, certainly would have been around during the
15:57: Reformation. What kind of a family life, in regard to religion and faith, did he grow up in?
16:04: He grew up in a pious house. Sometimes when you deal with having information about the
16:13: Puritan, even some of the really, really great works, like one of the last conversations and interviews that we did a month ago or so, was on Thomas Hodges, but you know, there's just not a lot of information on Thomas Hodges.
16:27: We just don't have all that we would like. We know just a little bit.
16:34: He grew up in a godly household, and we don't really start having a lot of information until after his conversion, because he was actually very devoted to the sin of drunkenness before he was converted.
16:51: And while he was walking through the town, he heard a young woman say to her child, hold your tongue, or I'll give you to drunken
16:58: Perkins. Wow. And so they used that as something that was, and he heard that.
17:05: And as a result of hearing that, and seeing that he was a byword in that way among the people, his conscience began to grip him, and he became so deeply impressed by it, that that was his first step to conversion.
17:17: So it wasn't long after he became a very strong exponent of Calvinism, and became a fellow at the college that he attended at the age of 24.
17:30: So, you know, early on he grew up in a godly household, but it didn't take until some time later, and then it wasn't until the age of 24, that he was ordained to the ministry, began his ministry and preaching.
17:44: He actually began preaching in prison, and in the Cambridge jailhouse, and he would collect all the prisoners in one room, and he'd preach to them every
17:53: Lord's Day. And so for a great while, the prison was his church.
17:59: And his love to souls, and the way that he dealt with them, and the work of preaching itself, basically that was, that was his wages at the time.
18:08: He was, you know, going to school and at the same time preaching, and once those labors started to exponentially grow, people started hearing him, and multitudes started to flock to hear him from all over the area, and he wound up being an instrument used by God to bring salvation to a number of people in that particular manner.
18:32: And his fame started to grow. Afterwards he was known in churches around in the area, it spread throughout the
18:37: University, and then he was chosen to be the preacher at St. Andrew's Church, where he basically labored until his death, and where we get all of these great treatises from.
18:48: Amen. Let me announce our email address again, chrisarnsen at gmail .com.
18:54: If you have a question for Dr.
19:00: C. Matthew McMahon about the calling of the ministry, or about specifically William Perkins, and there is already a kinship,
19:11: I feel, with Brother Perkins, because I was delivered from the same addiction myself, by the grace of Christ.
19:17: I was, I too, was an alcoholic who reached, unfortunately, scandalous levels of drunkenness that were known to the public, and so on.
19:27: So I am very thankful to God that he has delivered me, and I'm also thankful to discover other brethren in Christ, both from the present and the past, who were delivered from that same sin.
19:44: We have a question that I normally wouldn't, perhaps, go to questions this quickly, but this,
19:52: I think, will help set the tone of our discussion, since it is related to the subject.
20:00: Jerry in Charlestown, New Hampshire, says, I have often heard the call to ministry distinguished between an internal call, having a
20:09: God -given burden for ministry, and an external call, having the necessary character and gifting, and having this affirmed by leaders of the church.
20:18: Could you speak on the importance of aspiring pastors to pay close attention to an external call to ministry?
20:26: This seems vitally important, especially since I have seen many Lone Ranger men enter ministry without the affirmation of elders, without having their gifts evaluated, and sadly, without the proper character, but they proceed to ministry because of their own subjective feelings.
20:43: That's an excellent question, actually. Yes, that's a great question. That is the heart of this work by Perkins, and that is what he's showing and what he's explaining, based on both the
20:58: Job passage and the Isaiah 6 passage. We desire itself is something that is a noble desire.
21:13: First Timothy 3 .1, if a man desires the office of a bishop, he desires a good work. So the desire, in and of itself, is a good thing.
21:21: Now, whether or not that person is necessarily first fit for the office, and what his inclinations are as to why he wants to go into the ministry, those things have to be hashed out.
21:37: John Newton said, no one but God can make a minister of the gospel, and that's an important note.
21:44: Perkins is going to agree with him 250 years before Newton was around. And so what the idea is, it's not repugnant in any way to desire the office, but that means that there's a pious desire there, which a man voluntarily devotes himself to the
22:08: Church, but then he is going to commit the judgment concerning himself to others, and he'll wait for a lawful call.
22:17: So there's two parts to being called to the ministry.
22:23: There's the internal call, and there's the external call. And when you deal with both of those, you can't escape dealing with both of those in a lawful way.
22:38: Perkins, when he talks about the ministry, begins by dealing with the text first.
22:47: He deals with Job, and he deals with chapter 33 more in particular, verses 23 and 24, and just so everybody has that, let me read that to you,
23:02: Job chapter 33, 23, and 24. If there is a messenger for him, a mediator, one among a thousand, to show a man his uprightness, then he is gracious to him and says, deliver him from going down to the pit,
23:21: I have found a ransom. So that's the first text that Perkins is dealing with. But also consider the second text, because he deals with first how
23:33: Job 33 speaks directly to the one that God places as a mediator between him and the people, and then he also talks about the confirmation of Isaiah in Isaiah 6.
23:50: And let me just read that just so that's out there as well. In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the
23:56: Lord sitting on a throne high and lifted up, and the train of his robe filled the temple. Above it stood Seraphim, each one having six wings, with two he covered his face, with two he covered his feet, with two he flew.
24:07: And one cried to another and said, holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts, the whole earth is full of his glory.
24:13: And the posts of the door were shaken by the voice of him who cried out, and the house was filled with smoke. So I said, woe is me, now this is
24:20: Isaiah, woe is me, for I am undone, because I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips, for my eyes have seen the
24:28: King, the Lord of hosts. Then one of the Seraphim flew to me, having in his hand a live coal which he had taken with tongs from the altar, and he touched my mouth with it, and said, behold, this has touched your lips, your iniquity is taken away, and your sin is purged.
24:41: Also I heard the voice of the Lord saying, whom shall I send, and who will go for us?
24:48: Then I said, here am I, send me. And he said, go and tell his people, keep on hearing, but do not understand, keep on seeing, but do not perceive."
24:57: So Perkins uses both of these two texts to explain what it means to actually be inward and outwardly called to the ministry.
25:09: And he begins it by showing that the point of the passage of Job is that in his mercy,
25:20: God uses means to preserve sinners from falling into sin. That's the mediator.
25:27: And so he's concerned with the means and the remedies that God uses in rescuing his people, demonstrating how they can be righteous and how they can be delivered from the pit.
25:40: And so he says that these words in Job contain a valuable description of a true minister.
25:48: They describe him in five ways. By his title, he's a messenger and an interpreter.
25:54: By his rarity, or he'll say scarcity, he is one of a thousand.
26:01: Now that in and of itself, from the question that Jerry posed, eliminates a number of people who immediately think, well
26:12: I desire the office, so I should be in the office. There's more to it than the desire.
26:18: Okay, let me give you a pause there on number two and just give you an instance of what I mean. Let's say you are going to college, and this is actually a true thing,
26:31: I went to college, I had a friend, he loved sports, he specifically loved football, and his name was
26:38: Paul. And Paul loved football. And he knew everything about his alma mater.
26:45: Everything. He knew the stats, he knew all the players' names, he knew the good players, the bad players, he knew the patterns, he knew the runs, he knew everything.
26:53: If anyone desired that particular position to be on the football team, in any capacity,
27:04: Paul was the guy. The problem that he had was that he was a hundred and ten pounds soaking wet.
27:11: And so for him, even though he desired to be on the team and he did, his heart was there, it didn't mean that he had all the necessary skills to fulfill any part on the team that would cause them to be a winning team or even allow him on the team.
27:29: He actually never played football because of that particular limitation. So even though someone desires that particular task, there are certain aspects to being called to that office apart from just the desire itself.
27:45: And so as much as there must be an internal call, there also must be an external call.
27:54: And so again, Perkins says five reasons, five ways that the minister is described here.
28:03: He's described as a messenger and interpreter, number one. He's rare. Ministers are rare.
28:08: He's one in a thousand. His office, he is to declare his righteousness, the man or a man's righteousness.
28:17: Number four is, by the blessing that God gives to his labors, then he will have mercy upon him.
28:23: So God will bless that work. And number five, by his commission and authority, in the last words,
28:29: God will say, deliver him that he does not go down into the pit for I have received a reconciliation. So what he does first, out of the gate, is he shows that the title of the minister, that he's a messenger and that he's an interpreter, are first gifts that that person who's desiring the office has to have.
28:52: And let me give you another illustration. A friend of mine said to me when
28:57: I was going to college, this is my friend talking, he said when I was going to college, or right before I was sent to college,
29:07: I was in my church and one of the elders in the church had a conversation with him and said they got into reading the
29:15: Bible and he said, yeah, I've read the Bible. And the elder was like, you've read the Bible? He says, yes,
29:21: I've read the Bible. The whole Bible from cover to cover? Yes, I've read the whole Bible from cover to cover.
29:26: But you should be in the ministry. You should be in the... that's a... you're in some way to that elder in the midst of the church that he was attending, he was doing more religiously speaking, or in some pious way, than others who had not done that.
29:49: And so that seemed to be the qualification to send him off to Bible college.
29:55: And that's what they intended, and that's what they initially began to do with him.
30:01: But it's not... I mean, reading your Bible from cover to cover is something that every
30:07: Christian should be yearly doing. One of the things that I think people lose in thinking about a minister is that everything that the
30:17: Christian ought to be doing, the minister should be doing already. Not that just because he's read the
30:25: Bible, that suddenly makes him fit to be in the ministry. Because then you have the exact opposite of that, of another friend.
30:32: And he has been in the ministry for ten years now, or so, from the time that he was called, the time that he went to college, and then he went to seminary, got his
30:49: MDiv, his Master's of Divinity, sent by his church to be able to do that.
30:55: I kid you not, this was the conversation not but a month ago that I had with him, and I was like, well why don't you, we were just talking about something, so why don't you preach from, you know, the
31:07: Minor Prophets? Well, I haven't read the Minor Prophets. What? Well, I haven't read the Minor Prophets yet.
31:13: Let me ask you a question. Have you read your Bible all the way through? No, I have not read my Bible all the way through. I'm like, okay, let's back the truck up for a second.
31:21: So you've gone through college, Christian college, you've gone through seminary, you have an
31:28: MDiv, and you've not read the Bible all the way through. What books haven't you read all the way through? I haven't read the
31:34: Minor Prophets, I've not read Chronicles or Kings, I haven't read through parts of Hebrews, I haven't read
31:39: Revelation. It's like, thinking about this, it's the opposite way.
31:45: It's like, if somebody has some kind of inclination that they want that particular position, we're like pushing people into that particular position without having them be qualified for the actual office itself.
32:02: So Perkins says, first thing, we need to understand that the minister himself is a messenger and an interpreter.
32:12: He's a messenger. He's a messenger of the Lord of Hosts. And in thinking through that, just that thought alone should cause every minister to shudder.
32:24: You're going on behalf of God to the people to be the mouthpiece for God to those people.
32:34: You are to be, in that particular manner, the physician, so to speak, the surgeon, so to speak, of their never -dying souls.
32:44: Those souls are in your hand. So you're God's messenger to do that, you know?
32:51: And so if anyone, like Peter says, if anyone speaks, let him speak not the
32:56: Word of God, but as the oracles of God. Not only the Word of God, but as the actual oracles of God themselves, 1
33:04: Peter 4 11. So they have to speak God's Word. They don't get to get up there and give illustrations and happiness about their family and what happened last
33:13: Christmas, and then tie it up with, you know, a prayer, which a lot of times ministers, even in our area, will do.
33:22: It's the substance of the sermon is to be nice, you know? But instead, the minister ought to be showing their faithfulness to the message which
33:31: God has, as Perkins says, honored us to carry. God's Word is pure, and it therefore must be purely studied and delivered.
33:43: And so he says, let all those who are God's messengers desire to be honored as ambassadors of God to fulfill the responsibility of God's messengers.
33:55: Because if they don't do that, they take away the power and majesty of God's Word in the way that they deliver it.
34:02: So the first thing is that they're messengers. They have to be good messengers. They have to take the
34:10: Word of God and expound it. They need to know how to do that. They need to be familiar with the
34:16: Word. Before they can even expound it, they need to be familiar with it. Because what if you preach in one particular area out of the
34:23: Gospel of John, but you don't know that, for some reason, you don't know that Isaiah said something contrary to the particular message that you think should come out of John chapter 12, and you have a contradiction.
34:36: But you don't know that because you haven't read Isaiah. You've got to be familiar with the
34:43: Word to be a messenger of the Word. You have to have the skill. And we have to go to a break right now, and by the way,
34:51: Jerry in Charlestown, New Hampshire, you have won a free copy of the book that we are addressing,
34:57: The Calling of the Ministry by William Perkins, Compliments of Puritan Publications and Compliments of Cumberland Valley Bible Book Service will be shipping that out to you.
35:07: So look for a package from CV for Cumberland Valley, BBS for BibleBookService .com.
35:13: CV, BBS .com. And I'm going to read a question for you and allow you to answer it after the break.
35:21: Ronald in Eastern Suffolk County, Long Island wants to know, I know that all
35:26: Christians in the ministry worth their salt would have a high level of importance on hermeneutics, but did
35:35: William Perkins also have a high level of importance placed on homiletics, the manner in which the
35:42: Word of God is preached? And you could answer that when we return from the break. And anybody else who'd like to join us on the air, our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com.
35:52: chrisarnson at gmail .com. Don't go away, we'll be right back with Dr. C. Matthew McMahon and more of our discussion.
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41:15: This is Chris Arnzen. If you just tuned us in, our guest today for the full two hours is Dr. C. Matthew McMahon, founder of A Puritan's Mind.
41:23: Today we are addressing the calling of the ministry. If you'd like to join us on the air, our email address is chrisarnzen at gmail .com,
41:31: chrisarnzen at gmail .com, and before I repeat the question that was asked by Ronald in Eastern Suffolk County, Long Island, it's interesting,
41:40: Dr. McMahon, that my first pastor, founder of Solid Grand Christian Books actually, he years ago,
41:50: I would say probably over 20 years ago, perhaps even 30 years ago, he was on a review board of a man who was seeking ordination into the ministry, and he was really soundly rebuked by the other men on the review panel merely because he was questioning the candidate on the minor prophets and was disturbed that the the man had little knowledge of them.
42:24: So it was kind of, it's kind of interesting that you brought up that analogy there. But anyway, that's a pretty sad commentary.
42:32: I mean obviously he was just doing what was expected of him. He was interviewing a man that was entering the one of the most important callings that a human being can enter into on this earth, and they were lambasting him for being too harsh.
42:48: But anyway, before we went to the break, Ronald in Eastern Suffolk County said did
42:54: Perkins put as high a view of importance on homiletics as he did on hermeneutics?
43:04: The answer to that question is yes, and that's why you have his work,
43:10: The Art of Faithfully Preaching the Gospel, or The Art of Faithful Preaching. He says,
43:15: I'm going to quote him, the preparation of sermons is an everyday task in the church, but it is still a tremendous responsibility and by no means easy.
43:27: In fact, it is doubtful if there is a more difficult challenge in the theological disciplines than that of homiletics or the science of sermon preparation.
43:40: Why? Because its subject matter is prophecy, which is a higher gift indeed, whether we think about its dignity or its usefulness.
43:51: So without getting too sidetracked, yeah, Perkins a hundred percent believed that homiletics was exceedingly important, and at the end of that particular work, what he does is he puts a little summation at the end where he shows faithful gospel preaching involves this.
44:17: If you want to boil it down to just four points, this is what it is, and this is where homiletics comes into play as the sister of hermeneutics.
44:26: Number one, the preacher is going to read the text clearly from the canonical scriptures. I can't tell you how many times
44:31: I've sat in sermons and the preacher has not read the scripture that they're preaching on. It's odd that they would even think that way.
44:38: Number two, explain the meaning of it once it has been read in light of the scriptures themselves.
44:44: Number three, gathering a few profitable points of doctrine from the natural sense of the passage.
44:50: And number four, applying the doctrine explained to the life and practice of the congregation in straightforward, plain speech.
44:57: So he combines both. He talks about interpretation, and he talks about homiletics and the structure of the sermon.
45:05: And all the puritans did this. All this is this exact same thing. Read the text, you open it and explain it, give me the doctrine from the text or some aspects or arguments, depending upon the kind of sermon it is.
45:19: It might be a auditory sermon, some kind of encouraging sermon, it might be a doctrinal sermon, it might be something that comes out of an historical narrative, but they're still going to do that, and that they're going to apply it.
45:29: They all did the same thing. This is not, like, so difficult to grasp, but for some reason what people are learning today in seminary are the application sermons, as if there is no compartmentalizing in taking this information and structuring it in such a way as to precisely deliver it.
45:50: That was one of the reasons why all of these guys, that we have the works of all of these guys, because they wrote everything out.
45:58: Every sermon that they preached, they wrote them out. Robert Leighton said, for the first seven years, all of our students, all of our young wannabe ministers, as they are under our care, they are going to write out their sermons word -for -word for seven years.
46:15: And the reason that they want them to do that is because when you write it out and then go over that sermon and all of its sections and all of its transitions and all of its explanation, you're choosing the best words and the best ideas and the best way to communicate as a messenger what
46:34: God intends in that passage. So not only do you have to get the passage right, which is hermeneutics, but you also have to communicate it in a way in which you screw truth into men's mind, as Richard Baxter would have said.
46:49: So you can be really good at hermeneutics and be terrible at homiletics, and that's not going to help the people.
46:57: I think I mentioned a time or two ago about Samuel Willard. He was a preacher in Boston, as a colonial preacher, and his nephew came in one week and he preached in a day that Samuel Willard could not be at the church.
47:14: And the nephew then, on that Monday, said to him, it didn't go over very well, I don't think they received it very well.
47:20: And so Samuel Willard took his sermon, and it says in his bio that he preached that same sermon word for word, and it went over very well.
47:30: So it's all, in that particular instance, it was all how he was saying it, how he was emphasizing it, where his transitions were emphasized, how he was loud, how he was soft.
47:41: All of those things fall under the rubric of homiletics. And so you could be a great interpreter, but if you don't wind up being able to communicate what it is that you've just interpreted, you're not going to be a very good messenger.
47:56: And so answering that briefly in that way, yes, Perkins definitely put a great stock in being able to preach well.
48:05: And that's why he says, it's two things. First, in terms of title, out of this
48:10: Job passage, he has to be an interpreter, and he has to be a messenger. He's going on behalf of God to be the spokesperson of the
48:20: Lord. God says, people should seek the law from his mouth, that is the minister, that's
48:25: Malachi 2 .7. So if they're doing that, then he has to be able to rightly communicate that information.
48:35: So not only does he have to interpret what it is that the Lord has said in his word, but he has to take that word and be able to deliver it to the people as a messenger.
48:46: So homiletics is just as important as hermeneutics in a number of ways, and Perkins was very hardy on that.
48:55: Ronald in Eastern Suffolk County, thank you for the question, and you are also getting a free copy of The Calling of the
49:02: Ministry by William Perkins, complements of Puritan Publications, and complements of our friends at Cumberland Valley Bible Book Service, cvbbs .com.
49:11: So keep your eye open in the mail for a package from CV for Cumberland Valley, BBS for BibleBookService .com.
49:19: We have RJ in White Plains, New York, who has a similar question.
49:26: He says, I know fundamentalists who don't think that a sermon is real preaching unless the pastor is shouting as loud as can be and shaking the rafters, and others from the
49:39: Presbyterian and other Reformed backgrounds barely go above the level of a whisper and sometimes preach with all the enthusiasm and passion as if they are a trigonometry teacher.
49:51: Is the tone of voice and the volume of voice at all important according to Perkins and according to your guest?
50:00: Yes and yes used wisely. I believe our last interview we talked about John Brinsley and the preacher's charge in people's duty, and he summed up his book in saying that the preacher should be preaching boldly, he should be preaching faithfully, and he should be preaching plainly.
50:22: Now this is where, in homiletics, you don't shout for the sake of shouting, or speak loudly just because you think that that should be occurring in a particular sermon.
50:37: Those things are tools, and the preacher's voice is extremely useful if used in the proper way, which means some things should be made plain, but he shouldn't be monotone.
50:54: Yet at the same time, he shouldn't be screaming from the top of his lungs at the same time. That's just as distracting.
51:01: He wants to be able to communicate most effectively, which means in writing out his sermon, in knowing what it is that he's going to say.
51:09: He's going to place, and this is what, for me personally, this is what I would do, is I will bold certain aspects of it, or I will put asterisks where I need certain pauses.
51:22: There are useful tools with the voice, and there are whole sections of works.
51:29: Dabney talks about it, Vinay talks about it, in dealing with your voice in the right way.
51:36: Perkins doesn't specifically talk about how to raise your voice or lower your voice.
51:42: He's utilizing homiletics in the way of how to rightly communicate these things with structure, and be able to send it out in a way that it's understood.
51:55: But it doesn't necessarily mean that you have to yell your sermon. That would, in many ways, be distracting, and you'll lose many people by just shouting your sermon.
52:05: That doesn't mean that many of the preachers didn't shout or didn't raise their voice. George Whitefield had to shout his sermon because he was in the field.
52:15: You see, that's a practical application. When you have 10 ,000 people surrounding you, and you need all of them to hear you, and you have no microphone, and you're in the middle of a field up on a small hill, you have to shout so everybody could hear you.
52:27: Spurgeon did the same thing. Yeah, he had to shout. Whitefield, it says in his bio that many times he came in and he would be spitting up blood because he was shouting so greatly, trying to reach all of the hearer.
52:40: But I know that Benjamin Franklin was absolutely astonished by the loudness of his voice. Yes, he attended a number of Whitefield sermons.
52:51: One fellow saw Benjamin Franklin there and said to him, why are you here? You don't believe any of this.
52:59: But he said back to me, he said, but yes, he does. And that's one of the reasons why, because he was good friends with George during that time.
53:08: Excellent answer. Yeah, excellent answer, but at the same time a rebuke to him.
53:13: Yes, of course. So in any case, you want to use your voice in the right way.
53:20: You don't want to be so low that no one can hear you. You want to be able to speak boldly and plainly, but at the same time you're not screaming your sermons.
53:28: You're going to be wise in the way that you use that. Yeah, if you want to highlight an important fact by raising your voice, if everything is yelled, nothing is going to be highlighted, because everything is going to be lost in the same volume.
53:41: But anyway, we have to go to a break right now. If you'd like to join us on the air, our email address is chrisarnsen at gmail .com.
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01:04:03: Iron Sharpens Iron Radio. Welcome back, this is Chris Arnzen. If you just tuned us in, our guest today for the full two hours, with a little less than an hour to go, is
01:04:12: Dr. C. Matthew McMahon, founder of A Puritan's Mind. We are addressing the calling of the ministry.
01:04:18: If you'd like to join us on the air, our email address is chrisarnzen at gmail .com, chrisarnzen at gmail .com.
01:04:25: Before I return to our discussion, I have a couple of important announcements. The Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals wants me to remind you that this is the last week for registration for the
01:04:38: Philadelphia Conference on Reform Theology, which is going to be held April 28th through the 30th at Proclamation Presbyterian Church in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania.
01:04:49: The featured speakers include Richard Phillips, Carl Truman, and Daniel Doriani. If you would like to register, go to alliancenet .org,
01:04:59: alliancenet .org, click on Events, and then click on the Philadelphia Conference on Reform Theology 2017.
01:05:06: The theme is Reformation, Recovering the Essence of the Gospel. Once again, that is
01:05:11: April 28th through the 30th at Proclamation Presbyterian Church in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania.
01:05:16: Go to alliancenet .org, alliancenet .org. Also, the
01:05:23: Banner of Truth, which is well known as being one of the finest publishers of Christian literature from the past and present around today, as well as being a ministry that sends out speakers to preach at conferences and so on, they are having their 2017
01:05:44: Ministers' Conference Tuesday, May 30th through Thursday, June 1st in Elizabethtown, Pennsylvania at Elizabethtown College.
01:05:55: The theme is The Living and Enduring Word, and the speakers include Dr. Joel Beeky, Jeff Thomas, William Vandewoord, Mark Johnston, Jonathan Master, Carlton Winn, and Ian Hamilton.
01:06:09: If you are a minister or leader in your church and you'd like to register for that, go to banneroftruth .org,
01:06:16: banneroftruth .org, and click on Events, then click on U .S. Ministers' Conference.
01:06:22: Of course, if you live in the United Kingdom, and I know that many of our listeners do live in the U .K., click on any of the several
01:06:30: U .K. Ministers' Conferences that they list under the Events section if you'd like to attend one of those events.
01:06:36: But once again, go to banneroftruth .org, banneroftruth .org. And I believe
01:06:43: I forgot to give our last questioner the good news that he has also won a free copy of the book
01:06:51: The Calling of the Ministry by William Perkins, Compliments of Puritan Publications. If you'd like to join us as well, our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com,
01:07:01: chrisarnson at gmail .com. And we have Pastor Sterling Vanderwerker of Shepherds Fellowship in Greensboro, North Carolina.
01:07:13: He says, Perkins is my favorite Puritan. He says, ooh, is the chart for double predestination in the book?
01:07:26: It is my favorite resource on the sovereignty of God and salvation. Does the guest know of other Perkins works that relate to the same subject?
01:07:34: I'm assuming he's talking about double predestination. Great Puritan, exciting, he also adds.
01:07:42: Yes, all around I'll agree with him. And yes and no, we reproduced the chart, and the chart is in downloadable fashion when you get the e -book from Puritan Publications.
01:07:59: If you get the print book, then it is in there, but you have to keep in mind that because of the size of a six by nine book, what we did is we broke up the chart on various pages as he dealt with that particular topic.
01:08:18: So the e -book side, we actually included the PDF chart. It's like an 11 by 17 size chart.
01:08:25: You'd be able to use it, print it out, what have you. But in the printed book, it's in pieces, so it's sort of six half dozen depending upon which way you want to go.
01:08:36: But yes, Perkins is great, and I would agree with him, one of my favorites. Great.
01:08:42: We have Daniel in Bakersfield, California. My question for Matthew McMahon is, how does a minister know for certain they are called to the ministry?
01:08:53: Feelings can be very subjective and fluctuate over time. You hear stories about pastors burning out, and one wonders if they were called to the ministry in the first place.
01:09:07: Yes, great question. In dealing with that particular point,
01:09:13: Perkins is going to explain the idea of calling.
01:09:19: You have to have an outward and internal call, so both of those are there. But how do you then not make it subjective?
01:09:27: It's an impossibility on the internal aspect to not be subjectively affected by the internal call in some way because it is you that's experiencing it.
01:09:43: So you don't want to be thrown off from the idea that, oh, it's a subjective experience.
01:09:50: Now, that doesn't speak to what happens to someone later in their ministry when they burn out or such.
01:09:56: But in thinking about what it means to be called, I think we often think, well,
01:10:04: I'm called to be an engineer, or I'm called to be an artist, or I'm called to be a policeman.
01:10:12: You know, when we apply the word call to some kind of profession of what we would consider a temporal order, we only understand it as equivalent to, like, talents we have or aptitude that we have in that particular thing or taste to it.
01:10:31: But when we talk about it in lieu of the ministry, to exercise legitimately the ministry as a minister, as a messenger and interpreter, we have to be called to it.
01:10:48: And then so someone says, well, how do you know if you're called? Well, there's a difference between taking somebody in a church and saying, hey, would you like to be a minister?
01:11:01: Well, sure, I would like to be a minister. Well, let's place you in that position and see how you do in comparison to the one who has voluntarily consecrated themselves over to that ministry and is demonstrating that ministry naturally in their inclinations with those in the church.
01:11:21: Now, that doesn't mean that they push the pastor over and get up and they start preaching, but in the very aspects of what
01:11:27: Paul sets down in 1 Timothy 3 and Titus and the qualifications and various other scriptures that talk about how they're to act, how they're to think, how they're to interact.
01:11:40: There are certain things that they are going to naturally see come out of them, and the
01:11:45: Holy Spirit will confirm that to them, because the idea of calling is really the idea of consecration, that you are consecrating yourself to that which
01:11:57: God is pressing your heart to acknowledge. And in dealing with that, it's different than a secular vocation that you might like.
01:12:09: It's instead having that aspect which demonstrates the giftedness that God has given that particular person in the life of the church in a limited fashion until the elders or pastor are able to convene with that person and cultivate the gifts that they seek, which that also means that the pastor and the elders and the deacons of a church, they need to be having an eye towards people that have those abilities.
01:12:43: Their eyes should be thinking, well, how are these people gifted in various ways in the church?
01:12:48: That's a whole other topic, but they should be looking at the one who desires those things and is exemplifying those things.
01:12:57: You know, God is one that has to send that person both subjectively and objectively by those in the church, so that when a minister officiates in any way or when he does anything that is a duty tied to that office, he has to be sent.
01:13:19: So when we talk about this in terms of Isaiah with Perkins, you know, the prophet
01:13:24: Isaiah does not say, I will go. Instead, he says, Here am
01:13:29: I, Lord, send me. So spontaneity in that particular matter doesn't exclude the mission or the call.
01:13:38: The charge of a pastor is a charge. It is a ministry, but it implies ascending.
01:13:43: So one can no more be a minister without a call than anyone else that has a specific call to a special office, like a judge.
01:13:52: You know, you can't just get on the Supreme Court. You have to be called to it. You have to be examined. All of those things, they have to have an eye to making sure that it's the right person and such.
01:14:01: In this case, it's even elevated higher because it is God who does the sending subjectively, and yet at the same time, it is something that outwardly both those things have to work together in order to see that.
01:14:15: So it's going to still remain in the subjective realm personally, but it's also going to be something in which you cannot do anything else other than that.
01:14:30: Right? Jeremiah, when he says, But his word was in my heart like a burning fire shut up in my bones.
01:14:38: I was wearying of holding it back, and I could not. If someone who desires the task or the office of a minister can do and has the ability to do anything else and is okay to do something else as well as do this, then subjectively they should see this has not yet been applied to them in that convicting manner.
01:15:04: They should be thinking, This is what God has called me to do. This is what I'm going to do. And now
01:15:09: I'm going to wait for, in all of my exercising of these particular gifts, I'm going to wait for a lawful call from those people outside of me in my church to call me then to a specific ministry or idea.
01:15:24: And having that in a subjective way really starts with the way that Perkins sets up the first couple of chapters of this work when he says,
01:15:35: Listen, you need to think through what it is that you're getting yourself into. Because, one, you've got to be a messenger on behalf of God.
01:15:45: Two, you have to have the skills to be an interpreter. And then in the next chapter he talks about the scarcity of ministers.
01:15:54: So, three, you have to be thinking about, Hey, am I that guy?
01:16:00: And when we say that guy, I mean, I think every single church on the planet should devour
01:16:07: Job 33 and really think about this when, in lieu of needing a pastor that they want to see visibly before them as they interview people, what that person's reaction is when they ask him a simple question like,
01:16:26: Are you one in a thousand? Are you that guy? And how that person handles that question.
01:16:33: Because someone might say, Well, you know, it's really hard to answer that question because if you answer it boldly then you're really not being humble and that could be a point against you, so to speak.
01:16:45: But then if you go into the humble zone and you kind of go, Well, I hope I am, and that's also not going to be a good way to deal with that question.
01:16:55: But the minister who is one in a thousand is going to be able to handle that question in a way that answers it in the affirmative while at the same time putting aside the difficulty of the way the question is posed.
01:17:10: Because Perkins is the one who's asking the question throughout that entire second chapter because the subjective experience of a person going into the ministry, they have to consider whether or not they are that guy.
01:17:21: A lot of people don't, but they should. And they should be taking the idea that how few ministers there are, how few that really
01:17:35: God is sending into the ministry. Back in William Plumer's day, he was given, he was either
01:17:44: William Plumer or William Taylor, I can't remember which. They both wrote books on pastoral ministry and pastoral theology.
01:17:50: And one of them was asked, I think it was Taylor who quoted somebody in the book. He said, you know, if we were to get so nitpicky, like your friend,
01:18:01: Chris, that you were talking about who was on the search committee asking about the minor prophets and such, if we get so nitpicky about everything that, you know, would be really needed for a minister to be a minister with every single candidate, well, we would hardly have enough people to, you know, be pastors in our churches.
01:18:20: Where the minister replied, and he said, well, I think, though, that it would be better to have fewer actual ministers than to have a whole fleet of just teachers.
01:18:35: Because with the minister, he has a particular, he has a particular calling that's tied directly to God's sending.
01:18:46: And so in doing that, there has to be a particular perspective that he has.
01:18:53: He has to be the guy who thinks to himself, I'm the one that God is giving authority to rescue such and such people, such and such a person from damnation.
01:19:05: That's what Job 33 is talking about. I'm the one that has to be the herald, be the messenger, and communicate the message in such a way as to demonstrate how this person can be righteous in the sight of God, how
01:19:17: God will then pity them, deliver them from the pit. I'm that guy. And so I think every search committee should be asking that question.
01:19:25: Are you one in a thousand? And I think every minister who is one in a thousand should be able to say, listen, you know,
01:19:35: I'm not trying to be prideful here, but I want to answer your question in a way that coincides with what
01:19:42: God's word specifically says. And I believe that I am one in a thousand, and here's the reasons why.
01:19:49: For that to come out of the minister's mouth and deal with that in a biblical manner, because it's such an unusual phrase and an unusual thought, we just want to make sure that the minister can shake people's hands in the right way and has a smile on his face.
01:20:07: No, no, no. We want him to be one in a thousand. Are you that guy? And so Perkins takes a whole chapter in dealing with that idea.
01:20:17: You know, Paul said, who is sufficient for these things? In 2 Corinthians 2 .16.
01:20:23: Now, who's sufficient? You know, it's not a surprise then, Perkins will say, it's not a surprise then when someone says,
01:20:31: I'm not sufficient. That's an okay thing. Then God is calling you to do something else.
01:20:38: You don't want to force yourself into some position, as the question was posed, that you're not qualified for, that you're not sent to, because no one should want to get into that particular position whom
01:20:50: God is not sending. God is not with them then in that particular position, in that particular way.
01:20:56: They're not stamped with that approval or called and confirmed as Isaiah was in Isaiah 6.
01:21:05: I'll go, Isaiah says. No, no, no. Here am I, send me. And the
01:21:10: Lord then sends him and confirms his calling. But in the great scheme of gather up all of these ministers, being one in a thousand, being able to,
01:21:22: I mean, you've got to be one in a thousand in so many different ways. And that doesn't mean that a minister doesn't have strengths and weaknesses, but he should be overabundant on the strength side in dealing with those qualifications that are non -negotiable for every minister of the gospel.
01:21:40: There are whole denominations, I'm probably getting in trouble for saying this, there are whole denominations of ministers who have elders that are not required to be apt to teach, in which they can go online and pull down a sermon that somebody else has written and read that in their church, because they don't have the skills to be able to put together their own.
01:22:02: So I don't even understand the logic behind that, much less the scriptural. Yeah, some people or some churches might just think that it'd be great to have an elder who has vast experience in the corporate world making money, so they think he can be qualified for an elder or something like that.
01:22:20: A lot of times, I think, in churches, they think they define the term elder as the person who's involved with the church that's been there for a long time, who's been a faithful member, or maybe even an older person who's been in the church for a long time, and so they define elder in that particular manner.
01:22:44: Well, I mean, if that's the case, then you're going to exclude a number of fabulous ministers throughout the history of the church that were not very old at all.
01:22:56: Andrew Gray died when he was in his 20s, and to read any of Andrew Gray's sermons, they're some of the best sermons you'll ever read in your entire life.
01:23:04: Robert Murray McShane. Robert Murray McShane died at 29. Exactly. McShane, Gillespie, Rutherford.
01:23:12: Right? Who are we going to exclude? Because, what, they're young? No, elder doesn't mean old.
01:23:18: Elder means that they're wise in the Word. They have the abilities in the Word.
01:23:23: They've been sent by God and confirmed by God as a minister to deal rightly with the
01:23:28: Word, to be able to preach, to be able to pray, and be qualified in those two offices.
01:23:34: That doesn't necessarily mean they need to be old. Now, it may mean that some who maybe takes a little longer to be able to get those skills or cultivate those skills because everybody's different, that might be the case.
01:23:47: But an elder is not an elder simply because they're old. We don't just pick people. We just don't get people in the church to be elders or ministers because they've read through their
01:23:56: Bible. No. Ministers are scarce. Perkins says that good ministers are one in a thousand.
01:24:08: If, therefore, he says, their number is to be increased, we have to be able to train them.
01:24:16: And so he places a lot of weight on the ministers in a church being able to train up the
01:24:25: Paul to the Timothy, having those diligently being able to take those that they're spying out, seeing their giftedness, and be able to train them up in the faith.
01:24:38: I mean, I remember spending, personally, spent five years in a church and asked them, you know, do you have something that trains up young ministers?
01:24:49: And after a year of asking, the elders finally said, no, we just don't have that.
01:24:56: But that should be, that is a commanded prayer that Christ says, pray the
01:25:04: Lord of the harvest to send out workers into the field. The harvest is plentiful. The workers are few.
01:25:11: We should be cultivating solid ministers, and yet, at the same time, we should be thinking that they're one in a thousand.
01:25:20: It wouldn't be awesome if we had pastors and elders and universities and schools that were cranking out one in a thousand all the time, and they were gathering up those people and sending those people out instead of, here you go, you can have an
01:25:39: MDiv, here you go, you can have an MDiv. They don't even know if the person's read their Bible yet. It's amazing what we will allow to slide in that way in such an important aspect to how
01:25:55: God communicates his word to his people on the planet.
01:26:01: That's why when we look at history, we look at the Puritan era, and we look at our era now, or we look at the time of the
01:26:08: Reformation, people would die. They would be burned at the stake for their conviction.
01:26:14: I mean, do we have those convictions today about being able to send out ministers, good ministers?
01:26:20: Do we have the convictions to hold steadfastly and not compromise? Those questions are, for some reason, slipping away from us today instead of holding to, listen, we need to have people who are qualified in the church to be able to be the cure of souls for the people that are listening.
01:26:40: We have to go to a break right now. By the way, Daniel in Bakersfield, California, you have won our last copy of The Calling of the
01:26:48: Ministry by William Perkins, and we thank you for your question, and keep your eye open in the mail for a package from cvbbs .com.
01:26:58: That's cv for Cumberland Valley, bb for Bible book, s for service .com, cvbbs .com.
01:27:05: We also thank Puritan Publications for giving us these books to give away. If you'd like to join us on the air, you better send in your email now because we already have quite a number of listeners who are waiting to have their questions asked and answered.
01:27:20: Our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com, chrisarnson at gmail .com.
01:27:26: Before I go to the break, I'm going to read a question for you, Dr.
01:27:32: McMahon. B .B. in Cumberland County, Pennsylvania wants to know,
01:27:38: I know that sometimes a pastor's qualifications or lack thereof to be in the ministry may be the root cause of a church not growing or even shrinking, but don't you think that sometimes it is the very reason that he is a faithful proclaimer of biblical truth that the church is not growing and perhaps even shrinking because of the unpopular level of truth, the unpopularity that truth has in the 21st century?
01:28:12: And we're going to go to the break and we'll have you answer that when we return. Our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com,
01:28:18: chrisarnson at gmail .com. Don't go away, we're going to be right back after these messages with Dr.
01:28:24: C. Matthew McMahon. So don't go away. One sure way all
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01:34:40: This is Chris Arnzen. If you just tuned us in, our guest today for the full two hours with about 25 minutes to go is
01:34:47: Dr. C. Matthew McMahon, founder of A Puritan's Mind, and we have been addressing the calling of the ministry.
01:34:53: Our email address, if you have a question, is chrisarnzen at gmail .com, chrisarnzen at gmail .com.
01:34:58: And before the break, we had a question from B .B.
01:35:03: in Cumberland County, Pennsylvania as to the issue of whether or not a pastor should automatically be judged as unworthy of his calling just because there is a lack of church growth or because the church is shrinking.
01:35:21: The answer to that is no, not immediately that way. You have to think of it biblically in the sense that ministerial success is set on divine sovereignty.
01:35:39: And so on that particular note, knowing that God's will is going to be accomplished no matter what, there is a certain idea that the minister should have that they should earnestly desire and expect success in their work.
01:36:02: Now, success doesn't mean 10 ,000 in attendance, a large auditorium, millions of dollars.
01:36:11: Think through that the outlook itself, the fulfilling of the commission itself and doing as God requires is first and foremost success.
01:36:25: So if the person is called, if the minister is called, and he is doing what God requires him to do, it may be because God never says, and this is an important point,
01:36:33: God never says that a particular church in a particular local geographical area is ordained to be established for all time.
01:36:42: He never says that. Think about two examples. Example number one, Jonah is sent to Nineveh.
01:36:50: He does not want to go. God coerces him, to say it lightly, to go.
01:36:58: He spends three days in the belly of the fish, and he's spewed out of the fish's mouth onto the beach at a city where they worship fish gods.
01:37:10: He starts walking through the midst of the city and says, repent, and in the course of his preaching, according to the scripture, the city repents from the king down to the lowest.
01:37:24: Now, it was a particular person in a particular situation that needed to be done in a particular way in order for success in that particular city to occur.
01:37:36: It may not have been that if the Apostle Paul, if he had lived at that time, just to use the illustration, walked along the sandy shore, happened to come upon Nineveh, and started walking through the street and said the same thing,
01:37:50: God may not have blessed that particular preacher in that particular manner.
01:37:56: The extraordinary circumstances of Jonah being puked onto the beach in front of them, probably looking quite terrible, being in the belly and acids of the fish's stomach for three days, and not only that it wasn't a turtle, it wasn't an octopus, it was a fish.
01:38:20: And all of those things and all of those circumstances, Jonah was successful in doing at that particular point, once he repented from his rebellion, to go do what
01:38:30: God wanted him to do and preach to the city, and God blessed that. Now, turn the corner, go back a few hundred years, and we have
01:38:38: Joshua going into the city of Jericho. God must not have been very missionary -minded for the people of God to go into the city of Jericho and only get one convert out of it, which was
01:38:50: Rahab. So how did those things work themselves out?
01:38:56: The size of a congregation is immaterial to the overall idea of biblical success.
01:39:06: Now, that doesn't mean that we don't want to see certain things occur under our ministry. It does mean, though, that the minister should be faithful to do what
01:39:14: God has instructed him to do, knowing that divine sovereignty is that which attests to ministerial success.
01:39:21: So it may be a whole various different ideas, different circumstances, where the town is located.
01:39:30: Maybe a minister goes in. This was the case with a number of ministers during the
01:39:36: Puritan era, where they went into a town, and the town was flooded with Jesuits, and it took many years, many, many laborious years to get a few converts.
01:39:48: So we don't suddenly say, well, just because the church doesn't have 200 people, 300 people, and it didn't grow to 500 people, that doesn't mean that that minister is not being successful.
01:40:01: Yet at the same time, we discern what's going on in those particular places. What if the minister says, listen,
01:40:09: I've been a minister of the church for 10 years, and the church has not grown at all, but he's canceled the evening service, he doesn't want to teach anything during the week because he has too much on his plate to preach one time a week, he wants to do some evangelism, but that's been far and few between, going out in the inner city to preach here or there, yet he wants a raise because he's only making $90 ,000 a year and he'd like $100 ,000.
01:40:43: In that particular situation, interestingly, in situations like that, you know, we have to look at what is actually going on.
01:40:55: Why is his mind in that particular vein, and why are they losing people instead of gaining people?
01:41:02: Are the people being abused? Are the people being fed? Are they being catechized?
01:41:08: Is he visiting them? Is he taking care, is he their cure of souls? So we can't simply say that because a congregation is small, that person is not having ministerial success, because he could be doing everything right, and yet we have to sit in that particular area where we say
01:41:27: God is the one, the Holy Spirit is the one that gives us our success.
01:41:33: And we can't just assume that because, one, a church is big, that it is being blessed by God, or that a church is small, and it's not being blessed by God.
01:41:44: You don't know, you know, what minister is raising up the next
01:41:49: Timothy. Even if it's in a small church, you don't know what God is doing. That person might be the next
01:41:55: Whitfield, or might be the next Jonathan Edwards coming out of a small congregation of, you know, 10 or 15 people, but that faithful minister who knew what his job was, who's called, sent by God, and is working in that particular congregation for the good of those people, maybe he's the one that God wants to use to raise up that next person who might enact the next
01:42:14: Great Awakening. You don't know that. And we have a word of encouragement from Linda in Hilltop Lake, Texas.
01:42:22: Today with Dr. McMahon has confirmed so much of what we believe about being in the ministry. I'll be sharing the recording with others in my family who need this confirmation.
01:42:32: Prayers for continued blessings for my beloved Iron Trap and Zion radio broadcast. Thank you so much, Linda. That means the world to me, and I'm sure it means a lot to Dr.
01:42:40: McMahon as well. Yes, very much so. And let's see, we have a bunch of other people here, and I don't know if we're going to be able to get to all of them, but we have, let's see, we have
01:42:57: Joe in Slovenia, and Joe in Slovenia, I have to quickly enlarge his question because his typeface, his font is microscopic, and Joe in Slovenia says,
01:43:16: Please ask Dr. McMahon to disclose to us what, in his assessment, is the most prevalent common denominator shared by William Perkins and the other great
01:43:26: Puritans that he speaks so passionately about. As he describes Perkins and those like him in terms that are at such distressing odds with those in our pulpits all over the planet who gain a paycheck but give little else,
01:43:40: I'm wondering what did they have that is absent in many preachers today? What is the essence of the thing that we need, that they had, that is largely missing today?
01:43:52: How can Perkins live again in our pulpits today? Thanks for serving us today in a sharpening fashion.
01:44:00: That's a great question. The answer to that is multifaceted, but if you ask me what we should at least start with,
01:44:08: I would say eminent piety. That's one of the things that you will see with every biography of every one of the
01:44:18: Puritans. You'll see that with the Reformers. Eminent piety. The basics of what a
01:44:25: Christian should be doing as a Christian, and then heightened in the sense that the minister ought to be doing those things eminently.
01:44:35: If the minister doesn't have a good devotional life, there is no possible way that he's going to be effective in his church.
01:44:44: I mean, he may shake people's hands and have a great smile, and lots of people might like him, but in terms of the sanctifying effect of the spirit through that person, that's what the spirit is using.
01:44:57: He's using human beings. He's using these men to bring his word and all of its ways to the people to bring them up, to dislodge them from earthly -mindedness into heavenly -mindedness.
01:45:14: So I would say, first and foremost, when you look at all of these guys, you're looking at eminently pious, godly zeal for Christ, for Christ's kingdom, for Christ's word.
01:45:31: See, if you have eminent piety, if you have a high level of fire in your bones and that zeal, then all of the other things are going to start to fall into place because you're going to be extremely concerned about the way that you study.
01:45:50: You're going to be extremely concerned about the way, as a minister, that you pray in the public meeting.
01:45:56: You're going to be very concerned about the way that you structure your sermons and how you deliver your sermons and how you catechize the children and how you visit the sick.
01:46:09: All of those things are going to overflow from the minister's closeness to the throne of grace in which, if he is not close to the throne of grace, how is he going to bring other people close to the throne of grace?
01:46:22: Even if he has the right mental ideas of what ought to happen, if he's not doing those things and if he's not engaging in those things, he's not going to be effective in helping others to engage in those things.
01:46:37: It's not, do what I say, not as I do. It doesn't work that way for the minister.
01:46:42: It's like what Perkins said concerning Isaiah. He was in the midst dwelling with the people, and he understood, he surveyed the landscape of the kind of people he was with.
01:46:58: He was an unclean man, and he dwelt among unclean people. And he said, woe is me, for I am undone.
01:47:03: In and of himself, he would not be able to give success to that situation, but at least he had that mental capacity to survey what was going on.
01:47:14: He was dwelling with them, which means he had to be among them in order to minister to them.
01:47:20: He knew his state, he knew the people's state, and the Lord is the one who then gave him success.
01:47:28: But that in and of itself demonstrates an eminent piety among Isaiah. And if you read
01:47:33: Isaiah, in and of itself you see that in his person. You know, the fear of the
01:47:39: Lord coming out of that eminent piety will fuel so many things. But that doesn't mean that Christians ought not to have eminent piety, or they ought not to fear the
01:47:49: Lord or think in some of those ways. That's the idea that the minister has certain functions that he has to do, being called of God and sent by him, that are elevated in the same things that the
01:48:05: Christians do. God's not calling the minister to do something other than being a Christian. He wants him to take that particular aspect of his
01:48:14: Christianity and then apply it in these other ways that then cause him to be successful. So I think, first and foremost, it's going to be eminent piety.
01:48:23: The second thing would be learning. We probably don't have enough time to talk about that. But these gentlemen were schooled, learned, taught from an early age, and every single one of them, you just hit it.
01:48:38: You know, they went to school, they went to college at an early age, and they graduated early, and they were all smart, and they were all studious, and they all loved
01:48:46: God's Word, and they were all, like, wholly and completely devoted to understanding what the
01:48:53: Word says so that they would be able to utilize it effectively. So one hand, eminent piety.
01:49:00: The other hand, the skill to be able to officiate that office. We have another listener in Greensboro, North Carolina.
01:49:09: This is Seth from Greensboro, North Carolina. Excellent topic today, Mr. Arnzen. Would Dr.
01:49:15: McMahon please advise us at what point in a new convert's life would he recommend him accepting the call into ministry?
01:49:22: How long or how many years? It seems to me a negligent epidemic among many
01:49:32: Baptist churches to allow anyone to step into the ministry of preaching God's Word regardless of how long they've been saved.
01:49:40: Last year I saw a young man make a profession of faith, and within two weeks he was preaching at churches across the state.
01:49:49: This is Seth in Greensboro, North Carolina. Great question.
01:49:56: It saddens my heart in many ways to see the inability of the novice trying to fulfill that role when they don't have basics down.
01:50:09: Well, one of the non -negotiable qualifications that Paul lays out in 1
01:50:15: Timothy is that he is not a novice. In Titus, it also says that he has to have the ability to silence the gamesayer, which means the minister has to know a lot of stuff.
01:50:29: Now, that doesn't mean that he can't learn or know or be committed, like we were saying,
01:50:37: McShane, Rutherford, Gillespie, Andrew Gray, Christopher Love, right? They're young men, but they were not novices.
01:50:45: What makes you not a novice in firearms? You're going to be a marksman.
01:50:51: What makes you not a novice? Lots of practice, lots of training daily, all of the time, giving yourself over to it.
01:51:01: So it's not necessarily time. It is, though, the skills and qualifications that ultimately come out of that.
01:51:09: Now, the whole two -week thing, that's ridiculous. It's going to take a certain amount of time for someone not to be a novice because there's a lot of things to learn.
01:51:17: Even if you were to say you don't want to be a novice in the Word of God, there's a lot to learn in that particular way because the minister is the surgeon for the people.
01:51:29: You walk into – this is a practical example because it relates to everybody. You walk into a doctor's office and you need to have surgery, and the doctor says, oh, yeah, you know,
01:51:39: I just started medical school. I've been in medical school for two weeks, and so are you okay with me providing some kind of surgery for you?
01:51:49: Well, no, you would laugh. You would laugh. What would you say?
01:51:56: You would be like, no, why are you even sitting here? You're a janitor here. Why are you eating a peanut butter and jelly sandwich in the surgery room here?
01:52:07: Exactly. It's like, no, why would you then put yourself in the same position as a
01:52:13: Christian in a church with a minister who's unqualified as well? They're supposed to be taking care of your soul, making sure that they're snatching you from the fire.
01:52:24: You're not going to do that. A novice is not going to have the ability to do that. And so in thinking about that, no, it's not going to be a short period of time.
01:52:35: I mean, even Paul, he spent years having known the law inside out and backwards, spent a number of years before he even went out on his missionary journey, and no doubt acquainting his mind with the way that he should be thinking about the gospel as a result of what
01:52:52: Christ had done for him in consideration of what he understood the law to be.
01:52:58: And of course, in Paul's letter to Timothy, 1
01:53:03: Timothy 5 .22, Paul says, Do not lay hands upon anyone too hastily, and thereby share responsibility for the sins of others.
01:53:12: Keep yourself free from sin. And, you know, I have been,
01:53:18: I think, misunderstanding Paul's words to Timothy to not let anyone despise him because of his youth.
01:53:27: I was thinking for a long time he was saying to Timothy, Hey, you know, don't let anybody mock you because you're young and you're preaching.
01:53:34: I've been hearing lately from men I respect that Paul was actually saying, Don't let your youthfulness bring reproach upon you because you're acting like a child or something.
01:53:46: Which way do you exegete that? I lean to the youngness of Timothy, and it speaks exactly to what we're talking about.
01:53:55: The idea of despises is to think little or nothing of, to disdain him because he's a young man.
01:54:05: Not because Timothy was acting like a child, but that he was young.
01:54:12: Paul was the elder, he was the younger. Now, the exact age, not sure. However, Paul does say that from his youth he was taught the scriptures.
01:54:22: So he was mighty, no doubt, at the particular point that he had hands laid on him and he was ordained into the ministry, and yet he has to deal with people who are older.
01:54:37: And so, what were they thinking? Oh, you haven't been in the church for a long time.
01:54:43: You haven't been part of us for 25, 30 years, so you don't really count.
01:54:48: No, I think Paul is saying the exact opposite of that, that Timothy, being a younger man, should not be despised simply because he is young.
01:54:58: Otherwise, if that's the case, then we need to despise George Gillespie and we need to despise
01:55:03: Rutherford and despise Andrew Gray and those younger men who were used mightily of God in their respective stations.
01:55:12: So I would see that in that particular manner. Aaron in Indianapolis, Indiana, says, Would you have support to share that one who is called to ministry should also have experience sitting faithfully under a faithful pastor, hearing faithful preaching, and putting himself under a faithful church's authority for an amount of time in addition to college and or seminary?
01:55:37: Schooling is not enough for pastoral ministry, correct? In other words, should this person also have been a member of a faithful church for a reasonable period of time before they are rushed into a pastoral position?
01:55:50: They should be Christians first, which requires all of those things. So you don't suddenly get converted, again, this is that short period of time, you don't suddenly get converted and then say, well,
01:56:02: I want to be in the ministry. Oh, you seem to have a few gifts because we've watched you over the period of the last two months.
01:56:08: And so, yeah, let's send you to school and get you a seminary degree and you should be good to go.
01:56:13: No, they need to be faithful as a Christian for a period of time.
01:56:18: That's why I think it's really a dangerous thing where we can just go to seminary.
01:56:25: I don't need to check with anybody, so to speak, for right now, if I had decided, or maybe
01:56:32: I've got a couple of friends that they just decide, I want to get up and I want to go to seminary and I want to get a degree. They don't need to check with anybody, so to speak, to go do that.
01:56:39: I remember being in work study at the seminary that I went to, and I had to collect all of the applicants and their surveys.
01:56:51: We did surveys with them. Why do you want to come to the school? Why do you want to come and get a degree?
01:56:58: Not one of them said, I want to come to seminary because I want to know the
01:57:03: Lord Jesus Christ better and I want to sit under these people and have a closer relationship with Christ as a result of learning more about him.
01:57:10: And then if God calls me to go be a minister, well, we'll deal with that at that particular time.
01:57:16: But this is going to be my first step to draw closer to Christ. Not one person said that. Every single one of them said the same thing.
01:57:22: Why, I want to be a minister. I want to go to school to get my MDiv. I want to be a minister. And so in thinking about that, in the question that was asked,
01:57:31: I think it is an indispensable requirement.
01:57:37: I'm going to say requirement based on inference from Scripture of the Paul and Timothy relationship that you really need to have that practical oversight in a church by godly pastors who have already been proven faithful so that you can learn those things that you are never going to learn in seminary.
01:57:58: Because it's not a chance that you're going to learn everything that you need in any seminary position.
01:58:04: You may go to a really good seminary and a really good school and there may be really great theological minds there and there may be even great pastors there guiding each of them, yet you still need that.
01:58:19: You need to go into the hospital room with the wife who just lost her baby.
01:58:24: The husband and the wife are there with the pastor and see how to deal with that. That was one of the things that Perkins did, cases of conscience.
01:58:31: How do we deal with all of these different kinds of people? Where do we get that practical experience? We get that from the
01:58:36: Paul and the Timothy relationship. I think that's indispensable. Okay, well, I want to thank you so much,
01:58:43: Dr. McMahon, for being on the program, and I know that we already have some other future interviews lined up with you, and I'm looking forward to those interviews.
01:58:51: And I want to make sure that our listeners have your website URLs. We have
01:58:57: PuritanPublications .com, PuritanPublications .com,
01:59:02: and we also have a PuritansMind .com, a PuritansMind .com, obviously no apostrophe in that.
01:59:09: Thank you so much for being on the broadcast, and I look forward to your return and to your frequent return to this program.
01:59:16: Well, I appreciate it very much. I want to thank Reverend Buzz Taylor for being in studio. I want to thank everybody who listened, especially those who took the time to write in.
01:59:25: And I want you all to always remember for the rest of your lives that Jesus Christ is a far greater