May 11, 2018 Show with William F Hill Jr. on “Experimental Preaching: What it is & Why We Need it”

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May 14, 2018

May 11, 2018: William F Hill Jr., former host of the “Confessing Our Hope” podcast of Greenville Presbyterian Theological Seminary in Taylors, SC, & Pastor of the Fellowship Presbyterian Church (PCA), Newport, TN, who will address: “EXPERIMENTAL PREACHING: What it is & Why We Need it”

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 Arntzen. Good afternoon
01:04: Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, Lake City, Florida and the rest of humanity living on the planet earth who are listening via live streaming at ironsharpensironradio .com.
01:13: This is Chris Arntzen, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, wishing you all a happy Friday on this 11th day of May 2018 and I'm delighted to have as a returning guest my friend
01:25: William F. Hill Jr., former host of the Confessing Our Hope podcast of Greenville Presbyterian Theological Seminary in Taylor, South Carolina and currently the pastor of the
01:36: Fellowship Presbyterian Church in Newport, Tennessee, which is a congregation in the
01:42: Presbyterian Church in America, also known as the PCA. Today we are going to be addressing experimental preaching, what it is and why we need it, and it's my honor and privilege to welcome you back to Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, Pastor William F.
01:55: Hill Jr. Thanks Chris. You know, I've been on enough times now, I think you can call me Bill. Oh, that's nice, all right.
02:03: And I was just talking with, I think we're fellow friends on Facebook and he always calls me
02:11: William and I always tell him you can call me Bill and he always forgets, so please call me Bill, it's fine. Well, I'm glad to be on again.
02:19: I'm not going to divulge names, but I know that there is a pastor out there who was, is no longer, but was the associate to another pastor for well over a decade, perhaps even two decades, and he reached the point where after maybe 15 years he said to the pastor, by the way, can
02:45: I call you by your first name now rather than pastor? And he said no. Yeah, well, that's kind of a, well, that's a subject for another day, but yeah, it's interesting.
03:01: I don't mind if people call me by my first name privately, you know, but in front of the congregation usually
03:07: I prefer different, but that's another subject for another day. That's right.
03:13: And tell our listeners about Fellowship Presbyterian Church in Newport. Sure, well, for those who tune in regularly, you've heard this before, but it's a small
03:22: PCA congregation in Newport, Tennessee. We're about 45 miles from Gatlinburg, so it's a heavily tourist area, especially at this time of the year.
03:31: It's been in existence since 1985. It started in the basement of one of the homes of one of our current members, and it's grown from there, but it's relatively small church.
03:45: I've been here since August of, what year is this, August of 2017. It's my second pastorate, and so we're plodding along in a heavily churched area of the country, the
03:59: Bible Belt, and we're the only Presbyterian church probably within 45 miles in any direction.
04:05: So for those who may be listening who live in this area, we'd love to see you, welcome you to visit, and get to know you in a more personal way other than through Facebook.
04:21: But yeah, that's the extent of it. Small, plodding along, ordinary means of grace, preach the
04:28: Word, administer the sacraments, practice church discipline. But much more important than any of those things, you're world.
04:36: Yeah, absolutely. Definitely. That's a fact, actually.
04:42: We're about, I would say, I can probably drive there in about 35 minutes. So yeah, it's a great area.
04:52: I have a campground right behind my house. People visit all the time from various parts of the country when they visit here on vacation, and so it's great to meet people that come here.
05:05: They find us on the website, usually fellowship -pca .org, and sometimes
05:12: I hear people who come and visit. They say, oh, you went to Greenville Seminary, so we knew we had to go there.
05:19: I don't know what that means, but okay. Well, I know Greenville definitely has a reputation for being one of the few remaining biblically orthodox seminaries in the
05:30: United States, so I don't hear too many complaints, if any at all, from people who
05:37: I highly regard in regard to Greenville. In fact, you've reminded me now
05:44: I've got to get Joey Piper back on the program. Yeah, well, okay. I hope you do.
05:51: He's so busy. He's got to be the busiest man I've ever met in my life, and he's like a machine.
05:58: He just keeps going and going. It's wonderful to see, and he's a great encouragement to me. I'm 52.
06:05: He's older, and he just keeps going. He outworks me easily, and I just don't know how he does all he does, but anyway, that would be wonderful.
06:14: That's really what prompted the topic for today, because one of the things that Greenville prides itself in—and
06:23: I use that word in the right sense—is training pastors to be preachers. As I was thinking about what we're going to talk about today, and you called me and kind of sparked my brain a little bit further,
06:39: I thought the one thing I benefited the most from being at Greenville was I was taught how to preach
06:44: God's Word in a way that's organized and, I hope, helpful and experimental.
06:53: We'll get to that, of course, and a host of other things, but that was one thing I really appreciated about being a student there, taking those raw gifts and having them sharpened and refined in a way that would be usable in God's church.
07:09: I taught at Greenville Seminary, so no one can say, in fact, I'm going to be on their program on Monday, so I won't have to hear it now.
07:16: I mentioned them, I said it, everybody's happy. Well, I also got to get back on the show,
07:24: Ryan McGraw, who's on the faculty there, and I first met Ryan one of the nights
07:31: I was at the Banner of Truth conference last year, and you guys actually helped me find my way back to civilization.
07:38: I got lost on the campus of Elizabethtown College in the middle of the night, well, it wasn't the middle of the night, it was about nine o 'clock at night, and it was pitch black, and I found my way back to civilization by following the trail of cigar and pipe smoke, and I found you and Ryan and about ten other guys hanging out smoking pipes and cigars, and that's how
07:58: I finally found my way back to those. I remember that night. Yeah, that's,
08:04: I remember I was passing out flyers for Iron Trump and Zion Radio, and you, also I hear this voice in the darkness say, why don't you interview me?
08:13: Yeah, I was just thinking, you know, small church pastors, you know, what kind of struggle do they go through, and it's unique in a lot of ways, and we did an interview on that, so people can go back in the archives and look that one up, but I was thinking about that would be an interesting topic, it's not discussed very often.
08:32: Yeah, a lot of people don't, I don't think a lot of people realize that some of the most brilliant and gifted authors and communicators and thinkers in modern -day
08:45: Christendom, in the Reformed faith especially, are very often pastors of very small churches or members of very small churches.
08:54: You people have the wrong connection that if somebody is really worth hearing or reading or whatever, they must be a pastor of some huge enormous church.
09:05: That doesn't go hand in hand. In fact, even R .C. Sproul, the late R .C.
09:11: Sproul, his church where he pastored, which still is there, St.
09:16: Andrew's Chapel, I mean it's larger, a lot larger than the congregation where I am, but it's no mega -church, you know, it's just a fairly large church.
09:25: Right. Well, I was encouraged, I was reading John Owen, so Dr. McGraw, if he ever listens to this, will be thankful that I mentioned
09:33: John Owen. But I was reading John Owen, I think it was actually in one of the books that Dr.
09:39: McGraw had written on John Owen, had wrote, had written on John. Anyway, he mentioned, someone mentioned that towards the end of his life, he pastored a church of 26 people.
09:52: I was just like, what? Wow. John Owen, 26 people? Wow. That actually encouraged me, frankly.
09:58: I thought, well, I'm not even close in the league of John Owen. I mean, we're not in the same vicinity of one another, and he had a church of 26 people, and at that time
10:08: I was in my first pastorate, and we had a handful, 20 people or so, and so that was actually quite encouraging.
10:16: Yeah. By the way, also, I was just wondering, I'm going to be promoting this later, but are you intending to attend the 2018
10:25: Minister's Conference that the Banner of Truth is having in Elizabethtown? I am planning to be there myself, just was wondering if you'd...
10:31: Absolutely. I tried to never miss the Banner Conference. I do everything
10:38: I can to go. For me, it's the highlight of my year, frankly, as far as conferences are concerned.
10:45: To me, it's the best conference there is to go to, not besmirching any other conference.
10:51: I just have found it to be refreshing, edifying, encouraging, challenging.
10:59: I like the idea of we stay in there, we eat together, we pray together, we hear the Word of God open together.
11:06: It's just a wonderful time. The book room is unmatched, of course, but the whole experience has done nothing but benefit me as a
11:19: Christian and a minister of the Gospel in ways that I don't think I could articulate very accurately or very clearly, but it's been wonderful.
11:28: Absolutely, I'll be there. For those of you listening who would like to join Pastor Hill and myself at the 2018
11:35: Minister's Conference that the Banner of Truth is having at Elizabethtown College in Elizabethtown, Pennsylvania, you can go to banneroftruth .org,
11:44: banneroftruth .org, click events, then click on U .S. Minister's Conference. Make sure you click
11:49: U .S. and not U .K. because they've already had a number of U .K. conferences, so make sure it's
11:54: U .S. And it's on the theme, Ministers of Christ, and Alistair Begg, Johnny Gibson, Mark Johnston, Al Mohler, David Strain, and Craig Troxell are the speakers.
12:04: That's one of the reasons why I'm looking forward to this year, actually. I've been listening to Alistair Begg. I know he's not a
12:09: Presbyterian guy, but that's okay. Everybody has their faults. He's on my team.
12:16: He's a Reformed Baptist. He is, but I've been listening to his sermons a lot lately in recent days, and when
12:24: I found out he was going to be there, I was even more excited about going because the nice thing about Banner is that the speakers stay there as well.
12:33: You have a chance to actually interact with them and talk with them and speak with them, and it's just a great conference.
12:40: I would encourage anybody, if you're able, ruling elder, teaching elders, seminary students, by all means, pencil it in.
12:49: Do what you've got to do, but it's a great week. And I'm sure that Pat Daly, who is the director,
12:58: I believe, or executive director of the U .S. headquarters of Banner of Truth, I'm sure he's going to be thrilled to hear your plug for the conference, and also the folks over there in the
13:11: U .K., I'm sure that they are going to be delighted to hear that as well.
13:16: And that's BannerofTruth .org, BannerofTruth .org.
13:22: Click on events, and then you will click on U .S. Ministers Conference. Well, we are talking about an interesting subject today that a lot of people, especially if they're not preachers themselves, and especially even more so if they're not reformed, are not going to know what you're talking about when you say the term experimental preaching.
13:42: Some people might say, yeah, my pastor experiments every Sunday. It seems like he doesn't do any study beforehand, and he's just experimenting up there.
13:51: And of course, I'm not talking at all about the church where I'm a member, but John Miller is quite an excellent preacher, as is everyone who ascends into the pulpit at Grace Baptist Church of Carlisle.
14:03: But if you could define experimental preaching. Yeah, sure. Well, let's start with just the word preaching.
14:11: I think there's a lot of confusion out there as to what preaching is. Preaching is not sharing. It is not getting up there and just throwing your opinions around as to what you think the text says.
14:26: It's different from doing a Bible study or leading a
14:31: Bible study in that you have a little more flexibility as to what you're doing. You can maybe share what your thoughts are as it pertains to the text, but when you're preaching the
14:41: Word of God, you're authoritatively declaring what the Lord has said. And it's different from leading a
14:50: Bible study in the sense that you're not up there as an ordained man proclaiming the
14:57: Word of God. You're not there to give people your opinion. You're up there to tell them what the text actually says.
15:05: And in order to get to that, of course, it takes a great deal of work. And there's a joke in the ministerial world that pastors only work two hours a week.
15:15: Well, it's a joke, I can assure you. It takes hours of arduous labor in a text to understand the mind of the
15:25: Spirit as He has articulated it in that passage. And so preaching is the authoritative declaration of the
15:34: Word of God. It's not my opinion, it's what God has said. Rightly understood, rightly studied, and dealt with.
15:45: Now, with that said, preaching is not preaching if it doesn't seek to work on the heart of the person that's listening.
15:54: That's the experimental or experiential, or maybe put a different way, it's the application of the text into the lives of the people.
16:05: In other words, okay, that's great, Jesus walked on water. What does that have to do with me at 21 centuries removed from that particular event?
16:16: Or, you know, pick any text. But it's the job of the pastor or the preacher of God's Word to authoritatively declare what the
16:26: Word of God says and then apply it into the various crevices and aspects of the listeners' lives.
16:36: And not just any listener, but the listeners that are sitting in front of you that the
16:41: Lord Jesus Christ has entrusted to the minister on that given
16:46: Sunday. And herein lies many difficulties, of course, where ministers who don't know their congregations can't effectively preach to their congregations because they don't know what they're struggling with, they don't know what they're wrestling with.
17:04: But in short, experimental preaching is merely applying, in a clear way, what the text has to say to the people on that Sunday as the
17:18: Word of God is delivered. Now, many of our listeners may have heard the term experimental or experiential
17:26: Calvinism. That is something that I know that was a hallmark of Puritanism and also even modern -day well -known
17:36: Reformed thinkers and writers and preachers like Dr. Joel Beakey and so on. I'm assuming this is also a
17:45: Calvinism which is not to be viewed as some ethereal academic kind of thing alone that is just relegated to the ivory holes of academia where men sit around and drinking snifters of brandy and smoking cigars and behind closed doors and talking about theology.
18:11: We need to apply the doctrines of sovereign grace and the doctrines, of course, that we would also believe are biblical.
18:19: We believe those things are synonymous. We need to apply these things to our lives. Yeah, absolutely.
18:27: Theology is great, and I love theology. To aid in my ministerial work here as a pastor,
18:34: I read Calvin's Institute, I'm reading Sinclair Ferguson's Some Pastors and Teachers, I'm reading
18:40: Bob Vink's Reformed Dogmatics. I mean, I'm reading all these things. That's wonderful. Big whoopie ding. I mean, I don't generally advertise that, but I read that with an eye to the preached word to the people.
18:54: Now, how am I going to take those things and then work them into where these people live on a day -to -day basis?
19:03: I mean, I sat in the pews before seminary. I was a member of a church. I sat in the pew week after week after week after week, and if a man got up and gave me a heavy dose of theology and didn't tell me how that mattered in my
19:16: Christian experience when I go to work every day or I'm interacting with my wife or I'm being a daddy with my kids or how
19:23: I'm supposed to interact with my neighbors or drive my car or pay my bills. I mean, all of these real -life experiences
19:30: I would just mentally have checked out because the man lives in a different world than I live in. Part of experimental preaching or experimental
19:39: Calvinism is taking those things, those theological truths which are vital and important and the bedrock of everything that we say, and seek to find a way to put that in the heart of the person that hears them in a way that they can get their hands around it and they can walk away saying, the
19:59: Lord is challenging me, the Lord is convicting me, the Lord is encouraging me, the Lord is edifying me in these directions based on the authoritative declaration of the
20:07: Word of God proclaimed on the Lord's Day. Now that's the essence of preaching.
20:13: So if you just get up and give a lecture on theological things, that may be helpful for talking heads, and it's not without need.
20:25: But preaching goes way beyond that. The Puritans would often preach in such a way as they would construct the doctrine of the text, and then they would give these uses, and they would, oftentimes they would give these uses of this doctrine from the text in the form of questions, both analytical and probing -type questions, and they would seek to answer those.
20:50: But if you notice with the Puritans, especially in their written sermons, you notice that much of it was derived and aims at the everyday
21:00: Christian who has to go to work on Monday, and has to live in this world, and doesn't sit in a study all day long, read books.
21:09: He's got to live here and do the things that the Lord has called him to do in an everyday experience.
21:18: And so they would take that doctrine, they would apply it right into the hearts of people and press that against their conscience, against their soul.
21:27: That's what preaching is. If preaching ends up merely as information, passing of information, then it's not preaching.
21:40: You've gone someplace else. It's not that that's not helpful. I went to seminary,
21:45: I got lectured at day after day after day, and it was helpful. But that wasn't preaching. Preaching does far more than that, and it's meant to stir the heart of man, and it's done in a way that works through the mind, through the heart, through the emotions, through the will, and ultimately to the heart of the listener that's sitting under that preaching.
22:09: Now do you think, because of what you just said, that although hermeneutics might be a most important aspect of biblically sound preaching, that homiletics is also important, especially because of the reasons that you just listed in what a preacher is supposed to be doing?
22:28: Oh yeah, absolutely. I mean, we've all heard sermons that are homiletically displeasing, in the sense that you just can't follow what he's talking about.
22:45: There's no rhyme or reason to the things that are being said. There's no connectivity to the points.
22:53: There's no purpose in the sermon. What is the minister trying to do here in this text?
23:00: And so it's like a steady stream of unconnected thoughts. Homiletics teaches you, at least it ought to anyway, and where I went to seminary, this was heavily emphasized, that it needs to be organized.
23:15: There needs to be a purpose. There needs to be a purpose. I can't understate that. There needs to be a purpose in the sermon, and that purpose should drive everything that's going on as it comes from the text.
23:28: Obviously the text is the driver. The text is the mover, the shaker of everything that's said in the pulpit.
23:35: But from the text, what's the purpose? What are you trying to accomplish in this sermon? And then organize it in a way that's homiletically pleasing, so that if a person comes back to that passage, let's say five years later, and they're reading that passage, and all of a sudden their brain goes, you know,
23:52: I heard this sermon five years ago. I don't remember who preached it. That's fine.
23:58: I don't remember where. That's fine. But I see the outline in the text.
24:04: I remember the salient points of what this particular passage is communicating, and not merely that, but also how it would apply itself into my various avenues of the
24:18: Christian experience. And so it's extremely important to be clear, organized, simple.
24:27: One of the things I've profited from as a pastor is reading the sermons of McShane, Robert Murray McShane. Died at 29 years of age.
24:34: Probably one of the greatest preachers the world has ever seen. He's brief.
24:41: The brevity of that man blows my mind, but it's clear. It's organized. It's straightforward. You can follow it.
24:48: You're not lost 10 minutes into it. And so, yes, homiletics is an extremely important aspect to taking the raw gifts of a man who's been gifted by the
25:00: Spirit to preach His Word, and sharpen those in such a way that when he preaches
25:05: God's Word, the people don't leave the room more confused than they were when they walked in. That wasn't unique with me, by the way.
25:13: I can't take credit for that. I think Spurgeon actually said that in his lectures to my students, but don't quote me on that.
25:19: I know somebody said it somewhere. But yeah, that's the idea, right?
25:24: We don't want people more confused as to what this text says than they were when they came in the room.
25:30: Now, you said something interesting. You mentioned in connection with Robert Murray McShane, brevity in preaching.
25:36: That is not something that is synonymous, typically, with Reformed preachers. And I know that the former pastor of Grace Baptist Church, where I am a member,
25:48: I believe he was the second pastor to have the oversight of that congregation, if not the second, the third.
25:58: But he was there the longest period of time. He was there for 40 years. Walt Chantry, he was known as a
26:06: Reformed Baptist preacher and still is, because he still does itinerant preaching and conference preaching.
26:13: But he is known for being a man who believes in the brevity of preaching, and that is not very common amongst
26:21: Reformed Baptists nor Reformed pastors in general. No, and it's hard to define, right?
26:27: If members of my church are listening to this program or do listen to it in the future, they would say that I'm not brief.
26:37: I preach roughly 40 minutes. But the question is, that can still be brief in the sense in which
26:47: I'm not repeating myself over and over again. I'm not saying the same thing 18 different ways.
26:53: I've already said that, and I don't need to say it again kind of thing. I think McShane's brevity, if he gets to the point very, very quickly, wraps it up, illustrates it, moves to the next thing.
27:07: Now, that could take 40 minutes, depending on what you're dealing with. But it's a hard thing to define, but you know it when you see it.
27:18: Sadly, in the church, people want, when they hear brevity, they think short sermon.
27:24: They think 20 minutes. A 25 -minute sermon is all I need, and that's good enough.
27:30: Well, that may be okay depending on the passage, but some passages don't necessarily lend themselves to a 25 -minute sermon.
27:37: So much of that pressure of being brief falls to the minister to try to find a way in his preparation to articulate the salient point of the text.
27:49: He's not going to give you everything that he studied, and if he is, you're going to be there for a long time. I had a seminary professor,
27:56: Dr. Shaw, who often would tell us that 80 % of what we study will never see the light of day.
28:03: That is, it will never see the pulpit. It'll never be in the sermon. But it's necessary for me to do that so I can understand the depths of the passage in order to articulate it clearly to the people.
28:15: So brevity simply means getting to the point in a way that the point is clear, it's been made, it's been illustrated, and applied into the hearts of those that hear it.
28:29: Now, that can take, depending on the passage, that can take a long time. That can take longer than some people prefer, and it takes a wise pastor to know his congregation well enough to know what they can eat.
28:42: You know, if you found a starving man in the wilderness who hadn't eaten in a long time, and you brought him home, and you plopped down a seven -course meal in front of him, you would probably make him sick.
28:57: He hasn't eaten. He can't eat that much food all at once. He's got to eat slowly, progressively, and build up his ability to handle more and more food.
29:08: And some congregations are like that. You inherit that situation and you realize they can't handle a 35 -minute sermon.
29:18: There may be many reasons for that, and a wise pastor recognizes that and seeks to figure out a way to help them along and build their stamina to the point where they can handle a 35, 40, 45 -minute sermon.
29:33: That's been a particular challenge for me where I am now. I'm used to preaching 45 to 50 minutes, and now
29:41: I'm down to 35 to 40, and trying to even get it shorter to 30 without sacrificing the main purpose and point of the text.
29:53: That's the key. You don't want to shortchange the text, so you have to figure out how to say the same thing in a shorter way, in a briefer way, and still accomplish the goal, which is obviously to apply that text into the people's lives.
30:10: One author I've read on this subject, he says that for most Reformed preaching, far less attention is given to application, and too much is given to explanation.
30:22: In other words, he would argue that half the sermon should be application. When I read that,
30:31: I thought, well, I agree with that, but then I examined it from the light of my own sermons, and I thought,
30:38: I don't think I'm doing that. I think I'm spending more time explaining the text than I am applying the text. That would help with brevity, obviously, because now you've really got to get to the point really quick.
30:49: What does this mean, and what does it mean for me? And that takes some skill and experience.
30:58: So, brevity, it's a subjective subject. Yeah, we have to go to our first break right now, and by the way,
31:04: I have been corrected. Pat Daly is the manager. He's the general manager.
31:10: Well, I believe John Rowlandson is the general manager in the UK of the
31:15: Banner of Truth we're speaking about. And by the way, John Rowlandson, I still want to interview you on the book,
31:24: I Shall Not Die But Live, Facing Death with Gospel Hope by Douglas Taylor. John preached a sermon at Grace Baptist Church in Carlisle, Pennsylvania when he was visiting there, and he was drawing from the story in that book that involved a colleague of Banner of Truth, a colleague of his at Banner of Truth, facing death, and I believe is with the
31:50: Lord in eternity now. But I would love to get you on, John Rowlandson, so please get in touch with me as soon as you can so we can discuss
31:58: I Shall Not Die But Live. It was a really powerful message and an equally valuable book.
32:05: When you're at Banner, you can corner him. That's right, but he's usually too busy to talk to. No, he's never too busy.
32:16: And if anybody would like to join us on the air right now with a question for our guest, William F. Hill, on experimental preaching, our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com,
32:27: chrisarnson at gmail .com, c -h -r -i -s -a -r -n -z -e -n at gmail .com. Please give us your first name, your city and state, and your country of residence if you live outside the
32:36: USA. Please only remain anonymous if your question involves a personal and private matter, such as you do not want to draw attention to your identity because you are critiquing something that's going on in your own church, or perhaps you're a pastor and you have a problem with the congregation where you are or the denomination that you're in or what have you when it comes to this topic that we are addressing.
33:01: But other than that, if it's not a personal and private matter, please give us your first name at least, city and state, and country of residence.
33:08: We'll be right back, God willing, after these messages, so don't go away. Iron Sharpens Iron welcomes
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34:23: Paul wrote to the church at Galatia, For am I now seeking the approval of man, or of God? Or am
34:29: I trying to please man? If I were still trying to please man, I would not be a servant of Christ. Hi, I'm Mark Lukens, pastor of Providence Baptist Church.
34:38: We are a Reformed Baptist Church, and we hold to the London Baptist Confession of Faith of 1689.
34:43: We are in Norfolk, Massachusetts. We strive to reflect Paul's mindset to be much more concerned with how
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39:52: We are back now with our discussion on experimental preaching. Our guest today, if you just tuned in, is
39:59: Pastor William F. Hill Jr. of Fellowship Presbyterian Church in Newport, Tennessee, and our email address is chrisarnsen at gmail .com.
40:08: If you have a question, c -h -r -i -s -a -r -n -z -e -n at gmail .com.
40:14: Let's see, we have RJ in White Plains, New York, who said, you mentioned that experimental preaching is applying the texts of scripture to our everyday lives.
40:26: Do we not have to be extremely careful with that kind of methodology when some preachers are pulling the headlines out of newspapers and magazines, thinking that we are actually the fulfillment of prophecy, for some reason or another, depending upon what happens to be happening in the news?
40:44: Yeah, that's a great question, and it's a good caution, and there's probably many different ways to answer that.
40:55: Let me start with the news question in the newspaper. One of the things that,
41:01: I subscribe to the Wall Street Journal. I do that for a number of reasons. One, I think it's the most conservative newspaper in the country, so I don't feel like I'm being bombed with leftist agenda, usually, but I do that for a reason.
41:15: I want to know what's going on in the world where the people that I'm ministering to live in.
41:21: I want to know what are they reading, what are they thinking about, what's going on in their own minds. So, with that said, a number of years ago, there was an event that took place in the
41:32: Supreme Court of the United States that functionally legalized homosexual marriage. Obviously, that's in direct contradiction to the
41:40: Word of God, and I knew that my people would be thinking about that subject. I knew that they would be concerned, they would have great worries over the direction of the nation, and how should the church speak into this subject.
41:55: And so, I determined to preach from Psalm 11 that week, interrupting my normal series, because I knew the people in the congregation that I've been called the shepherding guide.
42:06: That would be one of the things that would be foremost in their minds. With that said, we don't want to ever use the text as a platform to press our own agendas.
42:20: The applications that we press into the lives of the people must come from the text you're preaching from.
42:29: You don't just get on your soapbox and start wailing away at people sitting in the pew, the poor sheep, and you're thundering over top of them and misusing your authority, frankly.
42:42: You press into them things that are contrived from the text, but aren't derived from the text.
42:51: I hope you understand the difference between those two terms. And so, it's very important that we do that.
42:56: That's why I'm a big believer in expositional preaching sequentially through a book.
43:03: I can never be rightly accused of getting on a soapbox and going off on tangents
43:11: It's just the next passage in the text. It's the next passage in the book. It just happens to be in God's providence what is next.
43:19: But it's very important to always keep in mind those that are listening, where they are in their lives, and apply from the passage that you're preaching from those issues.
43:31: It's inappropriate, of course, to use the text and then launch into some arcane, tangential application that really has nothing to do with the passage at all, and then use it as an opportunity to beat up the sheep and say things that really are inappropriate to the passage you're preaching from.
43:54: It's a very good question, but it doesn't mean that you shouldn't be sensitive to the things that are going on in the world in which your members are currently living in.
44:06: They live in that world. You're a minister. Chances are really good you're not really dealing with a lot of those struggles because you're not out there in the workforce.
44:15: You're not dealing with a lot of different circumstances that they are dealing with.
44:21: So if you're aware of some of those issues and as opportunity presents itself from the text, you can use it to either encourage and edify or even rebuke and exhort on those matters, or be sensitive.
44:37: After 9 -11, I'm certain that many pulpits across this country were preaching sermons related to that event that happened, and everybody was thinking about it.
44:45: Might as well preach on it because everybody's thinking about it. The holidays, though I'm not, everybody knows well, not everybody, but many know that I don't usually interrupt my series of sermons for the holidays.
45:00: However, I take the advice of Martin Lloyd -Jones, and so I preach as it were
45:06: Christmas sermons at Christmas time, and I preach Easter sermons at Easter time. Why? Because there's going to be people sitting in their room that are probably not there any other time, and I have an opportunity that I would not otherwise have to articulate clearly the passages in front of me into their hearts, into their lives, and press the gospel upon them.
45:27: So you don't want to be inappropriate with your applications, but they have to come from the text.
45:33: That's the guidance, and if they come from the text, you're fine. If they don't, then you're mishandling it.
45:40: You know, it's quite interesting. A lot of people in our audience might find this fascinating, but although our guest today,
45:47: Pastor Bill Hill, is not a fan of dragging holidays into the confines of the church worship setting, they do celebrate
45:56: Mardi Gras for some reason. I'm just kidding. Just kidding. Who celebrates Mardi Gras?
46:01: What's that? Is that that New Orleans thing?
46:08: Yes, that is. That's what it is. Well, anyway. Let's see.
46:16: We have Susan Margaret in Dauphin County, Pennsylvania, who asks the question, why is it that I have heard some
46:25: Reformed pastors say that they are in opposition or in disagreement with experiential or experimental preaching?
46:34: It seems to me like it would go hand in hand historically with Calvinism. Yeah. You know,
46:42: I've heard this argument before. I'm not all that familiar with it, so I'm probably not going to do a very good job of answering.
46:50: I guess I would say it like this. If I were talking with a minister who was averse or was squeamish on the idea of applying the text, then
47:04: I would ask them how they read the letters of Paul, because in almost every occasion in Paul, and I realize he's writing, but he was a preacher as well, but he would articulate a doctrinal truth.
47:23: He would argue a particular point. Take Romans, for instance, and for the first 11 chapters of Romans, you have very tightly argued theological issues.
47:32: Some applications woven in, but you don't really start getting the fallout of all that to get to chapter 12, where he begins to turn it over and say, okay, in light of all of these things that I've just said, here's how you live.
47:45: This is why you should live that way. It shouldn't move you to live this way. And so I would love to hear an answer to that question, because it seems that that's the model we have, not only from the pen of Paul, but even in the
48:00: Lord Jesus Christ in his applications to various miracles that he would perform throughout the
48:06: Gospels. Take, for instance, John 6, where he fed the 5 ,000, and then he moves into the discourse that he is the bread of life.
48:15: Now, what is he doing? I mean, he's applying the very event that he just performed into the hearts of those that hear that he is the bread of life.
48:26: He is the one that this event is supposed to be. Sorry about that.
48:33: He is the one that is mirroring the event.
48:40: He is the one that's the fulfillment of that event. So he's applying his discourse to that event that he just performed in front of this multitude of people.
48:48: So I think you have this model painted all across the corpus of the
48:54: New Testament, and I think it's in the Old Testament as well, but I think it's very pointedly given through the ministry of Christ to the pen of Paul in their argumentation and then their application of those things into the lives of people.
49:08: So take Ephesians, again, as a great illustration. Three chapters of very tightly wound theological argumentation.
49:14: Chapter 4 changes. It's almost like everything shifts, and now how are we supposed to in light of these things?
49:22: So again, it's not enough to just tell them, this verse means this.
49:31: Okay, that's nice, but then what do I do with that? How do
49:36: I incorporate that legitimately, biblically, into my own everyday experience?
49:42: There's that word, experiential Calvinism or experiential preaching. How do
49:48: I incorporate that into my life? Husbands, love your wife. Okay, Paul says that.
49:54: I don't think it needs a whole lot of explanation, but a minister's job in the pulpit would be to flesh that out.
50:01: Okay, in what sense are we to love our wives? Given our 21st century, how does the
50:07: Word of God come to bear on that particular subject, just as an illustration or as an example?
50:13: Well, I'm actually baffled that any Reformed pastor worth his salt would be opposed to experimental or experiential preaching.
50:24: It doesn't seem to make any sense, because he should know that as an undershepherd of a flock of Christ, he is not just there to provide academic information.
50:39: I mean, I don't even understand. What would be an excuse of someone who said, oh, I'm very leery about this experiential preaching?
50:46: What would be the excuse of a Reformed man saying that? I don't even get it.
50:52: Well, I think I've heard someone say, and I don't want to use the name because,
50:59: A, I'm not 100 % sure it's him. B, it doesn't really matter. But I've heard someone say that they just leave that up to the
51:05: Spirit to apply that, as the Spirit's going to apply it. Well, that sounds great, and the
51:13: Spirit's certainly going to do what He's going to do in the preaching. I've had people say to me, you said X, Y, Z in a sermon, and that really struck me, and I really need to think about that, and I'm thinking to myself the whole time,
51:23: I never said that. Now, I don't know where that came from, but I never said that. But that's what they heard.
51:28: Now, I don't know why they heard that. You know, the Spirit's doing what the Spirit is going to do. He's going to oppress the
51:34: Word proclaimed in the way that the Spirit is going to do it, and He knows where to put it, and He knows how to do it.
51:41: And I think that's the argument, that while the Spirit knows where to best apply it, so we'll just leave that up to Him to do that.
51:50: But my encounter with that, when I read Paul, especially in his first and second letter to Timothy, where he talks about exhorting the people, preach the
51:59: Word, be ready in season and out of season, I mean, he goes so far as to move past just merely information into exhortation.
52:11: And what's an exhortation? It's a calling of people to live that which they've heard declared, and to incorporate that into their everyday experience and their everyday life.
52:27: Otherwise, the Bible is relegated to a theological textbook that fills our brains with lots of information, but it doesn't ultimately do anything for my godliness, doesn't do anything for my purity, doesn't do anything for my holiness, doesn't do anything really other than just give me more facts.
52:44: And we've all met people like that, where they know the Bible, they know the facts of the Bible, but they have absolutely no idea how those come to bear upon their everyday life, how they talk, how they drive, how they walk, how they eat, whatever it may be.
53:00: They can't seem to connect those two points. And that's the great problem
53:05: I think we have in our 21st century, where preaching is great in the sense that it's theologically sound, it's got lots of knowledge, lots of information, it's faithful to the text, but it doesn't go to the point that I think it ought to go to, and it doesn't go to the place where I think the
53:27: New Testament screams for it to go, and that is, okay, so what? What do I do with this?
53:32: And we have to go to our midway break right now. It's a longer than normal break because Grace Life Radio 90 .1
53:38: FM in Lake City, Florida requires of us a 12 -minute break between our two major segments, so please be patient with us.
53:44: Please take this time to write down information that our advertisers provide so you can patronize them, and also write down questions for our guest
53:51: William F. Hill Jr. Don't go away, God willing, we'll be right back after these messages from our sponsors.
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01:05:34: And we are going to be returning to our program, or should I say our discussion, with Pastor William F.
01:05:41: Hill Jr. of Fellowship Presbyterian Church in Newport, Tennessee, on experimental preaching, what it is and why we need it, right after a couple more announcements.
01:05:52: The Banner of Truth Conference that we mentioned earlier is right around the corner. It's May 29th through the 31st.
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01:09:14: Pastor Bill Hill. chrisarnson at gmail .com and we are discussing experimental preaching, what it is, and why we need it.
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01:09:32: In fact, we do have an anonymous listener who has a personal and private matter.
01:09:39: He is asking, my pastor preaches way too long and even though the content is excellent from beginning to end, our minds typically begin to fade out.
01:09:51: I have discussed this with other brothers and sisters in Christ. We never try to be cruel or mock him, but it seems that it is counterproductive because the message is although excellent in content as I already said and would be excellent for inclusion in a book, a sermon is not the appropriate place for these lengthy sermons which sometimes are over an hour and the human mind
01:10:16: I do not believe is designed to absorb that information. How would I obey the scriptures in the manner with which
01:10:23: I bring this to his attention? Well, I think somebody in my church might have wrote that question.
01:10:33: I'm just kidding. I don't preach over an hour, so that made me feel better when
01:10:39: I heard that, but that is a very difficult situation and I mentioned earlier,
01:10:47: I think, that a pastor... Well, let me back up.
01:10:54: I live in the Bible Belt and so people frequently call me preacher, which I don't really like.
01:11:00: I gotta be honest. I don't know why they call me pastor because I'm a pastor who happens to preach once or twice a week, right?
01:11:07: So a pastor who knows his people and has done the hard work of visiting with them and has an understanding of where they are spiritually.
01:11:20: I mean, this is the key issue, right? You have to ascertain to the best of your ability where you think the congregation is in general and recognizes that they're just not able to handle a 45 -minute sermon, a 55 -minute...
01:11:39: It's not the length. We need to get rid of that right away. It's not the length of the sermon.
01:11:46: It's what are the people that the Lord has entrusted you able to handle at this particular point in their spiritual development.
01:11:56: Not everybody in the pews are going to be at the same place, but in general, if you have a congregation that begins to check out after 35 minutes, there may be a number of reasons for that.
01:12:09: It could be spiritual malnutrition. It could be just immaturity.
01:12:18: I don't know what the reasons are. I've tried to figure that out for myself. I don't think I preach too long, but I've been told
01:12:24: I do. So I don't know exactly what that looks like, but I do know this.
01:12:31: A pastor needs to be willing to mortify his own zeal, his own personality, his own desires to preach for 60 minutes or an hour and 10 minutes or whatever it may be in order to benefit the people of God.
01:12:47: Now, I realize that there's a breaking point. I'm not suggesting a man call to the office of pastor should get up and give 10 -minute sermons because that'll make everybody feel good.
01:12:57: That's not what I'm suggesting. There's a fine line between too long and too short.
01:13:06: And so I think a pastor who's wise knows his people realizes, look, they can't handle 60 minutes right now, and so I'm going to try to give them 45 and see what happens.
01:13:19: And I know how hard that is to strip back an hour to 45 minutes when you're used to preaching an hour.
01:13:27: I know because I experience it every week. It's hard to cut 15 minutes out of a sermon because so much that you study and so much that you see, you know will profit these people if they'll just hear it.
01:13:38: And you just want to give them everything. And sometimes you just got to realize you can't.
01:13:44: Maybe break the passage up into multiple places. All right, so that's advice to a pastor.
01:13:52: It's advice to me. I'm talking to myself. I might as well be looking in the mirror. What do you do as a member of the church who has a pastor who preaches for an hour, and it doesn't seem that he's going to change that approach?
01:14:06: All right, here's what I would suggest to you. Very simply, don't try to remember everything he says.
01:14:13: You're not going to anyway. Focus on one or two salient points in the sermon that really strike you, and land there, and stay right there in your heart and your mind for the rest of the week.
01:14:30: The Larger Catechism, Question 160, the Westminster Confession of Faith, Larger Catechism, Question 160 says, you know, what is required of those to hear the
01:14:39: Word of God preached? And one of the things they're required to do is to meditate on that which they hear.
01:14:48: Now, you can't remember everything, but certainly there must have been something in that sermon that rang a bell, struck a nerve, made you uncomfortable, frustrated your conscience, encouraged you in some direction.
01:15:02: And so I would suggest you just focus on that, and less on the fact that the man kept you sitting in that pew for 60 minutes.
01:15:13: You're being fed, maybe overly so, but you're still being fed nonetheless, and so zero in on one particular thing.
01:15:23: It reminds me of a conference I went to when I was a seminary student. It's the Greenville Conference that's held every
01:15:29: March, which I would encourage people to go to. Dr.
01:15:35: Joel Beeky was preaching. Now, if you know anything about Dr. Beeky, he doesn't preach short sermons. That's right. Okay?
01:15:41: It's just not in his MO. He's a pastor of a very large church. They're very mature.
01:15:47: They can handle his 55, 65 -minute sermons. And his 55 -minute prayers. And I love them.
01:15:55: I love them. They are sermons in and of themselves. They are, and it's just the context in which he's ministering.
01:16:01: And so he preached a very powerful sermon, and there was many wonderful things said.
01:16:08: It was long. And one of the seminary students, after the sermon was over, he leaned over to me and said,
01:16:14: Bill, how am I supposed to remember all of that? You know,
01:16:19: I told him the same thing I just said. Don't try. Just pick one or two things that he said that really struck you and meditate on those things.
01:16:30: The rest of it, don't worry about right now. Those are the things that the Lord apparently wants you to really focus on.
01:16:37: And so zero in on those. Yes, maybe he went too long. Maybe he didn't bother me.
01:16:43: But some may have been bothered by that. But try not to see the negative issue of he goes too long.
01:16:52: Try to zero in on this one point, this one application. This really, really struck me, and I need to think about this more deeply.
01:17:00: And I think that'll help pare away some of the gripes.
01:17:06: I don't mean that in a bad way. I mean just the complaints that may be legitimate.
01:17:13: Some ministers probably do preach too long. I probably preach too long. I've said that to my elders since I've been in this church.
01:17:19: I've said it at almost every session meeting in the interest of complete transparency, and I probably do for this church right now.
01:17:29: They can't handle 40 -minute sermons. I need to be pastoral. I need to find a way to say the same thing in 35 minutes and hope that they'll grow from that to the point where they can handle more.
01:17:43: But if you have a pastor who won't do that and won't listen to that, then zero in on a couple things and move from there.
01:17:49: Now how do you approach that if you want to go talk to your pastor? I can tell you as a pastor, you can criticize me about a lot of things, and I'm probably okay with most of it.
01:18:00: As soon as someone starts to criticize my preaching, I know my own sin, my own heart, and I know what happens.
01:18:09: Something gets erected inside of me, and I get very defensive, even if it's just internally.
01:18:18: And so if you're going to approach your pastor on this subject, you want to be sure that you've prayed about this, you have considered it, you have thought long and hard about it, and you go with a great deal of humility and meekness, because this is what they do for a living.
01:18:34: This is what they do, and they take it very personally. And even if they shouldn't, they still do.
01:18:42: They're men. At the end of the day, they're just men. And so you want to be as kind as you can and as compassionate and considered as you possibly can, and just set that before them.
01:18:55: I love your preaching. You give me so much information, but I can't digest it all. It's too long, or it's too much, or whatever.
01:19:03: But always be mindful of the reality that we always want to do these things in the spirit of gentleness and kindness.
01:19:11: It's a tough subject. Now, with all that said, I think our modern social media world has done us a great disservice when it comes to preaching.
01:19:24: You know, people can sit and watch a movie for two hours, not move a muscle, but when it comes to the preaching of God's Word, if they go over 45 minutes, people get upset.
01:19:34: I have a hard time understanding that, and I guess it's because I'm a preacher.
01:19:42: I also watch movies, so I know the difference, but I also understand that I can watch a two -hour movie without moving, but I can't listen to a 45 -minute sermon without getting upset.
01:19:59: You know, what's more important? At the end of the day, what is more important for my soul?
01:20:06: We always want to keep things in perspective, keep things where they should be, but if you feel like it's too long, just try to figure out what is it
01:20:14: I can zero in on, stay there, meditate on that, and seek to bring fruit of that from your own life, just on those one or two things that are said in the sermon, even if it was too long.
01:20:26: Yeah, and also, those two things are apples and oranges. When you're entertained by a movie, you're not going to be concerned necessarily, or at least overly concerned, about forgetting certain lines or whatever, whereas in a sermon, if you really care about the
01:20:45: Word of God, you're going to want to retain that information. Yeah, you're right.
01:20:50: I mean, there is a sense in which it's apples and oranges, but I guess my only point is that the time is not always necessarily the problem.
01:21:01: You know, there's something behind that that causes that reaction, and I can only speak from personal experience.
01:21:11: I do it every week, twice. Preaching God's Word is a very hard job.
01:21:17: It's a hard responsibility, because you're being asked by the Lord to bring to bear upon these people that you love,
01:21:26: His Word for their good, and sometimes it doesn't tickle their ears.
01:21:34: Sometimes it needs to be said in a way that is loving and kind and all that stuff, but it still has to be said, and people don't always respond well to it, so what do they do?
01:21:50: They'll retreat into the, it was too long, and they'll find other reasons for that, instead of the reality that what they really didn't like was what they heard.
01:22:04: And so it's difficult. With that said, I think ministers need to be sensitive.
01:22:11: I'm learning to be more sensitive to this. It's not a lesson I've learned easily, and I don't know that I'm there yet, but the
01:22:20: Lord is working on me at this point, to find a way to do the same thing in a shorter time span as it pertains to the people the
01:22:31: Lord's given me today. I can go to another church, Joel Beeky's church, let's just say.
01:22:38: I can preach a 55 -minute sermon there, and they wouldn't bat an eye. Okay, great, that's wonderful, but that doesn't necessarily mean that I can do the same thing at another church.
01:22:49: You know, it's interesting, it's fascinating that if you've ever heard Joel speak from his own pulpit as opposed to his being a...
01:22:59: It's shorter. Well, actually, it's not shorter, it's broken up into two segments.
01:23:05: They have a hymn in the middle of the sermon. Yeah, that's the Dutch Reformed tradition though.
01:23:12: That's not unusual for them. Right. I don't know how he deals...
01:23:17: I mean, I guess he's used to it. That would drive me crazy, but I'm not used to it. Now, I don't know if they do it every
01:23:25: Sunday, but when I... Every Sunday. No, I was going to mention another church. I don't know if this other church does it every
01:23:31: Sunday, but there's an OPC church in Matthews, North Carolina.
01:23:37: They do the same thing. They fell in love with, or at least the leaders, with that methodology or style of breaking up the sermon with a hymn, at least one hymn in the middle, and then concluding the message at the end.
01:23:53: Yeah, yeah. But we... Again, I just think that... Look, the bottom line in the length of the sermon, it's going to fall to the minister, and if he's being faithful...
01:24:07: If he's being faithful to his charge as a pastor, he knows where his flock is, and he wants to try to bring them along, you know, raise the bar a little bit, sure, but don't overwhelm.
01:24:25: If you overwhelm them, they're not going to remember anything you say, and that's counterproductive as well.
01:24:31: So it's a difficult subject, but it's one that ministers.
01:24:39: It really falls to them to think through. So it's a hard subject.
01:24:47: We have a listener with a question that I'm going to ask you before our final break, so this way, during the break, you can have time to think about your answer.
01:24:59: We have John in Bangor, Maine, who says, could you list between three and five of your favorite preachers that are living that exemplify what you would call experimental or experiential preaching?
01:25:13: And we'll have you answer that after we return from our final break. If anybody else wants to join us on the air with a question, do so now or forever hold your peace, because we're rapidly running out of time.
01:25:23: The email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com, chrisarnson at gmail .com. Please give us your first name, your city and state, and your country of residence if you live outside the
01:25:32: USA, and please only remain anonymous if it is a personal and private question or personal private matter that you're asking about.
01:25:40: It's chrisarnson at gmail .com. Don't go away. We'll be right back after these messages from our sponsors with more of Bill Hill and experimental preaching.
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01:30:19: Hi, I'm Pastor Bill Shishko, inviting you to tune in to A Visit to the Pastor's Study every
01:30:25: Saturday from 12 noon to 1 pm Eastern Time on WLIE Radio, www .wlie540am
01:30:35: .com. We bring biblically faithful pastoral ministry to you, and we invite you to visit the
01:30:41: Pastor's Study by calling in with your questions. Our time will be lively, useful, and I assure you, never dull.
01:30:48: Join us this Saturday at 12 noon Eastern Time for a visit to the Pastor's Study, because everyone needs a pastor.
01:30:54: And Pastor Bill Shishko, who is the host of A Visit to the—got tongue -tied there—A
01:31:00: Visit to the Pastor's Study, who is a mutual friend of not only myself, but also our guest today,
01:31:06: William F. Hill, Jr., and I know that you admire him just as much as I do, and could highly recommend him to our listeners.
01:31:14: Absolutely. Yes, he's retired from the pastorate, but he is now involved in Reformation Metro New York, a parachurch organization, under the oversight of the
01:31:24: Orthodox Presbyterian denomination, and he is a phenomenal brother in Christ, who
01:31:31: I believe fits the bill of what we are talking about perfectly—experimental preaching, experiential preaching.
01:31:38: And if you call in tomorrow between 12 noon and 1 pm
01:31:44: Eastern Time on A Visit to the Pastor's Study, please tell him—Pastor
01:31:49: Bill Shishko, that is—that you heard about the program from Chris Arnzen on Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, and that's
01:31:56: WLIE540AM .com, where you can hear the program live -streamed everywhere in the world.
01:32:01: But if you live in the New York Tri -State area, and even parts of Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island, you can hear it on 540 on the
01:32:09: AM dial every Saturday, 12 noon to 1 pm Eastern Time. Well, now we are back to our discussion with Pastor Bill Hill on experimental preaching, and the listener in Bangor, Maine, before the break, wanted you to list between three and five of your favorite living preachers that you believe exemplify experimental preaching.
01:32:31: Yeah, that's a good question. It's also an easy one to answer.
01:32:37: First, I would say, and there's obviously bias here, but Dr.
01:32:44: Joseph Piper, who modeled this for me as a seminary student, every
01:32:51: Wednesday in chapel, he would preach and preach the way he would teach us to preach.
01:32:58: So he would just press God's Word upon our hearts as students, and he would always apply it in that context, you know, as students training for the
01:33:09: Gospel or in some capacity as it was appropriate for the text. So Dr. Joseph Piper, he's on Sermon Audio, he's everywhere, so you can just go to Sermon Audio, search for his name, he's there.
01:33:22: Dr. Beeke has been a big, huge influence on my life as a preacher, but also as a man.
01:33:30: I've met him on a number of occasions and always struck by his great humility. So Dr.
01:33:38: Beeke, also on Sermon Audio, and boy, just three, three to five, wow.
01:33:47: I personally love, as I've said in this program many times, I believe one of my favorite preachers alive,
01:33:55: I believe one of the most powerful preachers alive today is Dr. Conrad M. Bayway, who's the pastor of Kabwata Baptist Church in Lusaka, Zambia, Africa.
01:34:04: Yep, yep, let's see, Dr. Ian Hamilton, banner of truth, board member at Greenville Seminary, he's no longer pastoring after I don't know how many years, many years, but his preaching has always just gripped me tremendously.
01:34:25: Again, he's on Sermon Audio, most of these guys are on Sermon Audio. In fact, you haven't really arrived if you're not on Sermon Audio.
01:34:34: Let's see, well, you know,
01:34:39: I guess I would be remiss if I didn't mention my own pastor, which kind of leads to a point that I really wanted to make on this question.
01:34:47: I had the great privilege in seminary to be under a man who, a godly man who modeled that which he preached, but that would be
01:34:59: Deckard Stephens. Amen, I've heard him preach and he is indeed a gifted brother in Christ, that's for sure.
01:35:04: He is, and he preaches experimentally, you know, application, big influence on my life as a minister and a friend and a pastor.
01:35:15: Right here locally, he is the associate pastor to Pastor Matt Purdy.
01:35:21: Yeah, associate now, finally. Only Presbyterians would understand the difference between assistant and associate, but don't worry about it.
01:35:30: So, but with that said, let me tell you this, something that grieves me a little bit within the
01:35:39: Christian community, the Reformed community, um, it's okay to listen to these guys, and I would encourage you to do so.
01:35:50: Beaky, Ian Hamilton, Dr. Piper, wonderful men, wonderful expositors of God's Word.
01:35:58: But here's the thing, the Lord in his providence did not give you those men to be your pastor.
01:36:06: The man you ought to listen to, and the man you ought to feed from, who you take your diet from on a weekly basis, is the man that's standing in that pulpit every week.
01:36:19: If he's doing his job and he loves you and he's ministering to you, he knows you. He knows your failings, he knows your struggles, he knows your successes, he knows what weighs you down, he knows your hurts, your pains, he knows you.
01:36:34: All right? And that's the man the Lord in his providence has given to you, and he is the one to whom you should listen to the most.
01:36:44: It's not that you can't benefit from Dr. Beaky or Dr. Piper or Ian Hamilton or Deckard Stevens.
01:36:51: You can benefit from them, certainly. But the one that the Lord in his providence has given to you to shepherd your soul is the man that's in front of you every week.
01:37:03: That's the man that you need to listen to, pray for, support, and speak with, and encourage.
01:37:16: And the best way you can encourage your pastor, your preacher, is to hear what he has to say from the
01:37:22: Word of God, insofar as he's faithful to the Word of God, and then do what it says.
01:37:28: You don't even have to say anything to him. I really love that sermon. Great. You know what?
01:37:34: Better do what the sermon said. That will encourage him far more than any words you can offer.
01:37:41: And so while it's fine to listen to these guys, I call them superstars, whatever, you know, it's vitally important that you listen to the man the
01:37:53: Lord in his wisdom and his providence has given to you by his own divine providence to shepherd your soul.
01:38:02: He's the one to whom the Lord would have you here, week in and week out.
01:38:09: So I just wanted to say that because I know we have a propensity to kind of glom onto our superstars, and that's all fine and good, but Dr.
01:38:19: Beaky's not going to busy you in a hospital, but your pastor will, and it's very important.
01:38:27: And yes, I know that Carl Truman has spoken against the dangers of celebrityism, and we have to be very careful not to make idols out of the people that we are blessed by, and not to always compare our own pastors to these men because the men that God has ordained over us are exactly the ones that you just mentioned, the ones that are going to be involved in our personal lives and shepherd us and visit us when we are in the worst of circumstances and so on.
01:39:03: Yeah, I mean Hebrews 13, right? Submit yourself to those who are going to give an account for your souls.
01:39:10: Who are those people? Those are your elders and your pastor in your local church who has been has been tasked with that great responsibility, and so it's okay to, like I said, it's okay to listen to these other guys, but just remember, at the end of the day, the one, if he's preaching faithfully, preaching experimentally, he's applying the
01:39:33: Word of God into your heart, how is he able to do that? Because he knows you.
01:39:39: He knows you, and that goes into the other issues that experimental preaching is not something we just kind of create in a vacuum.
01:39:51: It's born from the reality that a shepherd of the people are walking with the people.
01:39:57: They're visiting the people. They know what their struggles are. They know what's going on in their lives. They understand, and they're wrestling with them as to those issues that press them, and so you're able to, through the preaching, press those particular issues into their hearts, because they're the ones that the
01:40:19: Lord has entrusted to you to do, and when you're sitting in the pew, remember that.
01:40:25: This man is preaching, I trust, out of a motivation of love for you, even if what you just heard didn't feel very loving.
01:40:36: But he loves you enough to say from the pulpit these things. I had an experience years ago with a man who came to my study, and he said to me, you know,
01:40:48: Bill, you were talking about me in that sermon, and I said, well, yes,
01:40:54: I was. You're right. He goes, well, you shouldn't do that. I said, well,
01:41:00: I think you're confused as to what I do for a living. I said, what should I have done? Well, obviously, you didn't mention him by name.
01:41:08: No, no. I mean, the apostle Paul mentioned people by name, right? I mean...
01:41:13: Well, those were obviously enemies of the gospel. Well, yeah, not necessarily. You got Philippians 4, where he mentions two women in the church that are causing kind of an uproar, but they weren't enemies, necessarily.
01:41:23: They were just in the church causing disunity. But okay, but be that as it may, you know, that probably wouldn't be very appropriate in our modern 21st century context, and okay, fine.
01:41:34: I mean, I wouldn't do that. Somebody else might feel more bold to do that. I wouldn't do that. But yes,
01:41:40: I was speaking about this man. I knew what was going on in his life. I knew what was going... the struggles he was experiencing.
01:41:46: Hopefully, I wasn't harsh and nasty, but I wasn't only speaking about him. But certainly, as I was working on that sermon,
01:41:53: I thought of his family. Absolutely. Of course I did. I mean, who am I speaking to on Sunday?
01:42:00: Some blob of humanity that's sitting in front of me? No, I'm speaking to people with real issues, with real concerns, with real struggles, and I want to speak the gospel into their hearts, and I want to speak to them, and I want to bring the
01:42:14: Word of God to bear upon them. The people sitting in the parking lot aren't going to benefit from me. They're not listening.
01:42:20: They're not there. They haven't been given to me to shepherd their souls, and so that's what your pastor does every week.
01:42:28: If he's doing his job, when he works on a sermon, he's thinking about your soul. He's thinking about where you are.
01:42:35: He's trying to ascertain spiritually how you're walking, how your walk is with the
01:42:41: Lord. I read a great book. Time for me to plug this book that I read that I can't help but plug.
01:42:48: It's a great book. Every pastor that listens to this program should buy this book. They should read it. They should devour it.
01:42:54: It's written by Murray Capel. It's The Heart is the Target is the title, and it deals with this whole subject of experimental preaching, application, and sermons, and one of the chapters that benefited me so much was the reality that not every application is going to fit every single person in the room.
01:43:14: One size doesn't fit everybody, and one of the skills of a pastor and a preacher is to find a way to apply this passage into the hearts of those people, all the people in the room, and so you have four different kinds of people.
01:43:31: Usually in a church, you've got people that things are going well, and they know it. They're mature.
01:43:37: They're self -governing. They don't need a lot of prodding, exhortation. They don't need a lot of shepherding, frankly.
01:43:42: They're mature Christians. You've got people that in the church that things are going well, and they don't know it.
01:43:49: They're always down on themselves. They need to be encouraged in the sermon. They need to be uplifted.
01:43:54: They need to be edified. You've got people in the church that things are going well, and things are going badly, and they don't know it.
01:44:02: In other words, they're living in unrepentant sin. They won't deal with their own heart. They need to be pressed hard in exhortation and rebuke, and then you've got people in the church that things are going badly, and they know it.
01:44:15: They know they're immature. They know they're struggling. They know they're having a great deal of problems, and how do you address them in the sermon?
01:44:22: And so you've got these four different groups of people, generally speaking, in every church, and the pastor's job as he preaches the
01:44:29: Word of God is to try to find a way to apply that same application into the hearts of all four groups.
01:44:36: That can take time, and it's hard to do, but you're thinking about those people that are in front of you.
01:44:42: You're not thinking about, you know, Joe Schmoe. My wife always corrects me on that.
01:44:49: You know, that's not there, but I am thinking about the people I know. I'm thinking about the people that the
01:44:55: Lord has entrusted to me, and how can I minister to them through the exposition of His Word, which is the ordinary and primary means of grace into the hearts of the people?
01:45:06: And so application is hard, hard work. Frankly, I think exegeting the passage is easy.
01:45:14: To me, that's not difficult. I mean, I read Greek. I read Hebrew. I can figure out the main point of the text.
01:45:20: It's not complicated, generally speaking. I mean, it takes time sometimes, but it's much harder to craft it in such a way that the applications into the lives of the people sitting in front of me week after week after week will benefit from.
01:45:35: That takes a great deal of thought and prayer and consideration.
01:45:40: It's much harder. So you pastors listening out there, you should spend more time in application than you should in exegesis, and I believe that emphatically.
01:45:49: By the way, could you spell the name of that author that you just mentioned? Sure, C -A -P -I -L -L.
01:45:56: And his first name again? Murray, M -U -R -R -A -Y. Great, well
01:46:01: I hope that... I've given this book away. In fact, Dr. Piper, who
01:46:06: I mentioned earlier, I called him. I read the book twice, marked my copy up so badly, it's crazy.
01:46:15: But I called him one day and I said, you know, you really ought to use this book in your homiletics program.
01:46:23: We learn about exegesis, we learn about homiletics, we learn about organizing a sermon, we learn about outlining a text, we learn about all these things, and those are all important things, but we don't hear enough about how to actually apply that text into the hearts of the people.
01:46:40: This book is gold. And so if you're a pastor and you preach on a regular basis or you preach once in a while, you should get this book, you should read it.
01:46:48: Is he a living... Is he a living author? Oh yeah, he lives in Australia, actually.
01:46:54: He teaches homiletics. Oh, wow. Well, perhaps one day we could get him on the show. We do have listeners and guests from Australia on Iron Sherpa's Iron Radio, so that would be a great idea.
01:47:07: By the way, we have an interesting listener right now has a question. Joe Schmoe from Kokomo has a question.
01:47:14: I was going to say, it's Schmoo. It is? It's Schmoo? How does
01:47:20: Schmoo rhyme with Kokomo? I don't know. We have
01:47:28: Arnie in Perry County, Pennsylvania, who asks a question.
01:47:34: Let's see here. I have heard two different 180 -degree different positions on the same issue from Reform people on the matter of bringing personal experience of the pastor into sermons.
01:47:52: I know that some Reform people despise that. They believe that exegesis of the passage is what we should be doing, not talking about our personal experiences.
01:48:03: The other would say, of course, we should never dominate a message with personal experience, but if we are to apply a passage appropriately, there's nothing wrong.
01:48:14: In fact, there is much to be benefited from if a pastor includes some of his personal experience. What is your guest's opinion on this?
01:48:23: Yeah, you never want your experience to become the centerpiece over against the exposition.
01:48:35: What I learned in seminary, which I think I automatically knew anyway, it was just clearly articulated to me more pointedly while I was in seminary, was that if you use your experience as an illustration and the people walk away remembering the illustration more so than the reason for the illustration, then you've failed.
01:48:59: The illustration should bring light to the passage. It shouldn't dominate the passage. So if I use my own experience in a situation that I'm illustrating, a point from the sermon, that's okay as long as it doesn't become the dominating theme as opposed to the point of the passage.
01:49:16: The other aspect here is I generally never use myself as an illustration in the pulpit.
01:49:28: One, it's just wrought with all the potential for misunderstanding is huge.
01:49:34: So if I do use myself, it's almost always in a negative way, not a positive way. If I were preaching on the sin of gossip or slander, let's say,
01:49:46: I might draw an illustration from my own life to highlight the reality of that point in a negative sense, not in a positive sense.
01:49:56: I didn't do that. You don't ever want to promote self in the pulpit.
01:50:01: It's always promote Christ, promote his word, illustrate it by bringing light to it, but not in such a way that it overwhelms it.
01:50:11: And so I don't think it's wrong to bring experience. I mean, we live in a world, we have experiences.
01:50:17: I mean, there's no way to avoid that fact. We all are operating within a context of experience.
01:50:27: But as long as that illustration that experience, that experienced -based illustration does not dominate the passage, but it brings light to the passage, then we should not be afraid to do that.
01:50:43: Jesus did that quite often, actually, when he spoke in parables.
01:50:48: I mean, he would bring experience of the common person to bear upon a spiritual truth that he was trying to communicate.
01:50:56: The sower and the seed, Mark 4 is a classic example of that, where everybody knew what he was talking about.
01:51:04: This is an experiential circumstance that people were living in day after day after day, and he used that to highlight a greater theological, doctrinal truth into the hearts of the people, but it wasn't overblown.
01:51:21: In other words, it didn't dominate the theme, it illuminated the theme, and that's the big key.
01:51:28: So don't let it dominate. If it becomes a storytelling experience for 15 minutes, and the passage gets lost, and the only thing that people remember at the end of the sermon was your story, then you have not done your job.
01:51:44: Here's an issue that I personally have been in the presence of brothers who disagree over this area.
01:51:54: There are some brethren who say that a sermon is intended primarily for not only, of course, first and foremost, the audience of God in heaven, that's the first primary consideration, it's always
01:52:15: God first, but they will say that the discipling of the flock, the discipling of those who are called out from the world, who are regenerate, is the primary thing, and we should not have in a worship service on a regular basis, the dominance of evangelizing the lost.
01:52:36: There are others who have an opposite view of that, and then there are some who combine both of those and say, yes,
01:52:43: I believe that instruction is the most important thing as far as discipling those in the flock that the
01:52:50: Lord has put under the oversight of that pastor, but there should never be a sermon without some kind of an evangelism, because there may be people in that congregation, even your own elders, that are actually lost and you just don't know it.
01:53:05: Yeah, no, that's a good question, and it's extremely relevant.
01:53:12: I'll tell you what I do. I never assume anything in the pulpit. I don't assume a thing.
01:53:20: My job is to preach the Word of God and bring it to bear upon the people's lives. The Spirit's job is to convict and convert, and that's the means
01:53:28: He uses, right? So I always, well, always is probably too much.
01:53:36: I usually bring to bear the gospel upon the hearts of people.
01:53:43: I don't care what text it is, because I don't know where they are. I mean, ultimately, I don't know where they are.
01:53:48: I mean, I have a sense. My wife, for instance, I have a pretty good idea that she's converted, that she knows the
01:53:56: Lord, she's walking with Him. Okay, but there are people that can give testimony to the fact that they went to a church for 20 years, heard preaching, but were never converted.
01:54:08: I know of Puritans who were converted in the pulpit as ministers of the gospel, and so we always give the free offer of the gospel in every sermon.
01:54:17: In one way or another, we always point people to the only hope there is, and whether we're preaching on gossip and slander, whether we're preaching on immorality, whether we're preaching
01:54:31: Mark 4 and the sower in the seed, which is very easy in that passage to do, it doesn't, it really doesn't matter, because all of Scripture points us to Christ, and so it's to Him that we point the people, and whether they're converted or not, they're pointed to Him, they're pointed to Christ, and it's to Him that they receive and rest upon alone for salvation, and so we always give them
01:54:55: Christ in every sermon, in every text we give them Christ, because all
01:55:00: Scripture speaks of Him, and so I would say it's a combination of both. I mean, it's obviously it's discipling, it's teaching, it's instruction, it's exhortation to the people of God who profess faith in Christ, and then it's also pressing that profession to the point where they realize that this profession is not mere lip service to Him, but it's actually a heart that's been changed by the regenerating work of the
01:55:24: Spirit, and so you do both, always do both, and lead the
01:55:32: Spirit to be the Spirit. You're not the Holy Spirit preaching the sermon, okay? You're the vehicle, you're the instrument, you're the means, but you're not the
01:55:40: Holy Spirit. Let the Spirit press people as He will, and wherever they may be, and you may find you've got an elder in the church who's been in the church, he's a founding member of the church, he's a charter member of the church, he's been there since the very beginning, and some sermons, some point along the way, they realize, you know what?
01:56:02: I've really never bowed the knee to Christ. I put all my hope in the fact that I'm a charter member,
01:56:09: I put all my hope in the fact that I started the church, I've done all these things, but I've never bowed the knee in true submission to Christ.
01:56:17: So you give them Him, you give Christ in every sermon, you point everybody to Him.
01:56:23: If you do that, you're faithful. We don't preach moralism. We don't preach rules and regulations and lists of do's and don'ts and 12 steps to holiness.
01:56:33: I'm not Joel Osteen. I hate to say it, but that's what he does. We preach
01:56:39: Christ and Him crucified every time we preach. If we do that, we're faithful.
01:56:45: I'm actually surprised that Joel Osteen preaches on steps to holiness. Is that really something he preaches?
01:56:52: Well, no, I think I made that up. The point is that his sermons are moralism.
01:57:00: It's not Christ and Him crucified. It's about the happiness of the listener above all else.
01:57:08: Right. So I think it's a combination, and you just exposit the word, point people to Christ. That's what you do.
01:57:14: Give them Christ. Give them Christ every time. And if you do that, you're faithful. If you don't, you're not.
01:57:20: You're just preaching moralism. I mean, that's big whoopee. They need Christ. I mean, even converted people, people who know the
01:57:27: Lord, who love the Lord, who are walking with Him, they need Christ every day of their life.
01:57:34: You've got to show them Christ and His benefits. Do that in every sermon, and you will be faithful.
01:57:41: You may not be liked, but you'll be faithful. Well, it has been a joy having you on the program today, brother, and I want to make sure that our listeners have all of your information.
01:57:54: I know that the Fellowship Presbyterian Church in Newport, Tennessee has a website, which is fellowship -pca .org.
01:58:03: Fellowship -pca, standing for Presbyterian Church in America, dot org. And we might as well plug the
01:58:10: Greenville Presbyterian Theological Seminary in Taylor, South Carolina, that's gpts .edu,
01:58:18: gp for Greenville Presbyterian, ts for Theological Seminary, dot edu. The Banner of Truth website for the minister's conference that both
01:58:27: Pastor Hill and I, God willing, will be attending May 29th through the 31st in Elizabethtown, Pennsylvania, featuring
01:58:36: Alistair Begg, Johnny Gibson, Mark Johnston, Al Mohler, David Strain, and Craig Troxell on the theme
01:58:42: Ministers of Christ. That website is banneroftruth .org. Banneroftruth .org.
01:58:48: Click events, and then click on 2018 U .S. Minister's Conference.
01:58:53: Not U .K., but U .S. for United States Minister's Conference. Do you have any other contact information that you'd care to share?
01:59:02: I don't think so. I mean, the website, if you want to get ahold of me and ask more questions or whatever the case may be, there's a contact form there.
01:59:13: I get those pretty directly, so you can use that. Great. I hope that you all tune in on Monday.
01:59:21: I have a married couple who are co -authors of the book, T .R .M. Howard, doctor, entrepreneur, civil rights pioneer, and he is a forgotten and relatively unknown civil rights leader in our day and age, who has a much more conservative and limited government understanding of politics.
01:59:46: I hope that you all have a blessed weekend and a blessed Lord's Day, and I hope you all always remember for the rest of your lives that Jesus Christ is a far greater