Persuasive Preaching - Part 1 — Alistair Begg

I invite you to turn with me to 2 Corinthians chapter 5, 2 Corinthians 5, and as you're turning there, may I just make one slight change, not to the program, but to location. You can tell that this incidentally was printed by one of the junior members of our pastoral team.

Next year when they do this, we will have a magnifying glass that comes with this. But if you can see down to seminars at 1pm, the only thing you need to know is that I think, in fact, not I think, but I have planned that John Lennox will be here in the auditorium and that I will go to room 227.

So that gives the maximum number of you the opportunity for interaction with John, which I think is the right way to do this, and so just if you'll make note of that, in the auditorium will be John Lennox in room 227, myself, and then the rest will be as is written.

Paul's Heavenly Hope and the Ministry of Reconciliation

2 Corinthians and chapter 5, I'm going to read the whole chapter, although we will only deal with part of it. The chapter divisions in our Bibles, of course, are not always particularly helpful, and this chapter break between 4 and 5 breaks up the thought of what Paul has been saying.

We don't lose heart, we're actually wasting away, but he says, in fact, the reality is that what we see is transient, it's ephemeral, what is unseen is lasting and is eternal. And then it's as though his mind moves on from there and he has a discursus on the whole hope of ours in terms of our heavenly dwelling, and he writes,.

Now we know that if the earthly tent we live in is destroyed, we have a building from God, an eternal house in heaven, not built by human hands. Meanwhile we groan, longing to be clothed with our heavenly dwelling, because when we are clothed we will not be found naked.

For while we are in this tent we groan and are burdened, because we do not wish to be unclothed, but to be clothed with our heavenly dwelling, so that what is mortal may be swallowed up by life. Now it is God who has made us for this very purpose and has given us the spirit as a deposit guaranteeing what is to come.

Therefore, we are always confident and know that as long as we are at home in the body we are away from the Lord. We live by faith, not by sight. We're confident, I say, and would prefer to be away from the body and at home with the Lord.

So we make it our goal to please him, whether we're at home in the body or away from it. For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, that each one may receive what is due to him for the things done while in the body, whether good or bad.

Since then, we know what it is to fear the Lord, we try to persuade men. What we are is plain to God, and I hope it is also plain to your conscience. We are not trying to commend ourselves to you again, but are giving you an opportunity to take pride in us so that you can answer those who take pride in what is seen rather than what is in the heart.

If we're out of our mind, it is for the sake of God. If we are in our right mind, it is for you. For Christ's love compels us because we are convinced that one died for all, and therefore all died. And he died for all that those who live should no longer live for themselves, but for him who died for them and was raised again.

So from now on, we regard no one from a worldly point of view. Though we once regarded Christ in this way, we do so no longer. Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has gone, the new has come.

All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation, that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting men's sins against them.

And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation. We are therefore Christ's ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us. We implore you on Christ's behalf, be reconciled to God.

God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God. Amen. Well, I've taken as our text for this study, verse 20. We are therefore Christ's ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us.

We implore you on Christ's behalf, be reconciled to God. We've set ourselves the task in this session to consider the matter of preaching that confronts people's stubborn wills. Or if you like, we have taken to ourselves the responsibility of thinking about persuasive preaching, preaching that persuades.

Paul's Pattern of Persuasion in Acts

For us to do so is to immediately place ourselves in good company, for the apostolic pattern and indeed the apostolic precept pushes us, urges us in this direction. And Luke, throughout his record of the Acts, particularly in relationship to the teaching of Paul, makes this perfectly clear.

I'm not going to give you a whole host of cross-references, but for example, in Acts 18 and in verse 4, Luke describes how Paul, every Sabbath, he reasoned in the synagogue seeking to persuade Jews and Greeks.

He was in there seeking to persuade them. He was not like the individual who goes fishing, comes back with nothing, and when his wife says, did you catch any? He says, no, but I did influence a few. It is an insufficient exercise.

And the passionate longing of Paul was that he might be used under God so to convince and see the Holy Spirit convicting, so to persuade that both Jews and Greeks might come to bow before Christ. He ends, that is Luke ends, Acts 28, right around verse 23, telling us the same thing.

From morning until evening, in the location in which Paul found himself, people came to him and he explained and he declared to them the kingdom of God, trying to convince, it's the same word in Greek, trying to convince or persuade them about Jesus from the law of Moses and the prophets.

In other words, he was doing biblical exposition. He was turning to the Bible and he was doing what had become his routine pattern. First of all, arguing with these people, seeking to convince them that the Christ had to suffer and die and rise from the dead.

And once he had labored to that end, he would then say to them, and this Jesus that I am telling you about is that Christ, so that men and women might be brought to an understanding of Jesus. Now what Paul did by way of his own pattern and by example, he also urged upon others by way of precept.

Timothy's Commission to Preach the Word

And classically, of course, in his swan song, in his final letter, when he writes to Timothy as his young lieutenant in the faith, he gives to him very clear exhortations concerning the performance of the pastor's primary duty, namely the preaching and teaching of the Bible.

And you'll remember he says to him in the fourth chapter, the time will come, seasons will appear, and indeed you're in one now, Timothy, where people won't put up with sound doctrine, they will gather around them.

A great number of teachers, the same with their itching ears, want to hear, but what I want you to make sure you do is that you continue in what you have been taught, what you have become convinced of, and then that you preach the word and do it in such a way that others might come to faith in Christ.

Now for Paul to do this, to say this to Timothy, was not a call to some easy existence. It was not an exhortation to some soft option. And when you read 2 Timothy from its very beginning and all the way through, you realize that the exhortation to be this preacher and this teacher is set firmly within the context of suffering.

Indeed, he hasn't gone many words into 2 Timothy before he says to Timothy, now I invite you to join me in suffering for the gospel. Why does he say that? He says it because he knows that that will be the eventuality.

He says it because, as he goes on later to say, this is what I am also doing, this is my gospel for which I am suffering. And the nature of his suffering was directly related to the clarity with which he was communicating this news concerning Jesus.

Apostolic Suffering and Divine Compulsion

Now what we find there in that, thank you, in that swan song of his, we find also here in 2 Corinthians. And you don't go very far in Corinthians, that is in this second letter, without being introduced to this same theme.

I'll leave it to you to look and see if it's actually there, but I can guarantee you that it is. And he launches into his letter and here are the words that come jumping out of the first chapter. Trouble, distress, suffering, great pressure, far beyond our ability to endure, and the despair even of life itself.

So it's not as if he says, dear Corinthians, I know you're all having a wonderful time and I am having a wonderful time too, and let's all go out for ice cream. No, it is something far graver than that.

It is something far more significant than that. And it is not an invention. It is not a contrivance. It is a reality. And it is within that context, as he unfolds his personal experience, that he turns then to confront others with this great responsibility of persuasive preaching.

Incidentally, it is quite wonderful the way in which he understands the doctrine of providence, isn't it? Where in chapter one, now I'm in it, you may as well look at it, but he says in verse nine of chapter one, our hearts, in our hearts we felt the sentence of death.

And then here's this theology coming through. But this happened, that we might not rely on ourselves, but on God. It is from page one to the last page of the Bible manifestly clear that God kicks the legs out from underneath the stools upon which his servants seek to sit comfortably, and almost always to ensure that we are brought to an end of ourselves.

By the time you get to chapter 12, he's saying the same thing, isn't he? In fact, he uses the very terminology, to keep me from becoming conceited, to keep me from getting a fat head, to keep me, he says, from believing my own press reports, to keep me from succumbing to my natural affinity to think it may be about me, and what I say, there was given me a thorn in my flesh, a messenger from Satan.

And it is in that context that he now finds himself writing to the Corinthians, and he is on the receiving end of criticism and of false accusations that abound. He doesn't actually identify them in a straightforward fashion, but as you read the letter, you realize that he is responding to some of these accusations.

They said he's really a bit of a coward. He writes very well, but if you see him up close, he doesn't amount to much. He's frankly incompetent, although he's a blusterer. He's really, really not much of a man of spirituality at all.

Indeed, we're not sure that he should even be part of the church. And quite honestly, we've heard some of his sermons, and we think that he's actually lost it. He is out of his mind. In other words, clearly there was nothing particularly safe about what he was doing.

There's nothing particularly orderly about what he was conveying. There was that which called for the reaction of people that said, you know what? We have no truck with this man. We have no time for this man.

So his exhortation here in 2nd Corinthians 5, and we don't want to stray too far from our verse, his exhortation to those who would be on the receiving end of his instruction is set within the context of one, human opposition, and two, divine compulsion.

Human opposition and divine compulsion. And let me just say to you that if we do not share with him the latter, then we will crumble in the face of the former. In other words, if our biblical, expository, teaching, preaching ministry does not emerge from a sense of divine oughtness, then I suggest to you that as soon as the battle rages before us, the temptation will be simply to fold up our tents and head home as quickly as we can.

The Unpopularity of Persuasive Preaching

For let us be clear. Preaching is unpopular. Preaching is unpopular. Sangster at the end of the last century in Britain said, preaching is in the shadows. The world does not believe in it. I think if he was around now at the end of the last century into this, he would have said preaching is in the shadows.

The church does not believe in it. The church does not believe in it. Let's get it over with as quickly as we can. Put something up on the screen. Show me videos. You're boring. Try and do something to keep my attention.

I was golfing some years ago in the south of Ireland, and we were a mixed bag. On the Sunday morning, some of us went to church, some didn't. Our Catholic friends went dutifully to the church. I went to a little Methodist church that I found with a friend.

And when we came out and down the street of somewhere in County Wicklow, I think it was, we met one of our good friends who'd come out of the Catholic church. And I said to him, how was your service this morning?

He said, fantastic. He said he did it in 17 minutes. He did it in 17 minutes. Did what? Well, there was a time when we would have just been able to laugh at that without it actually, the laugh becoming slightly hollow in our ears.

Now, when I talk about preaching, I'm not talking about anybody that stood up behind a box, a sort of well-intentioned fellow speaking with enthusiasm. We're talking about spirit-filled, Bible-based, Christ-exalting delivery of the scriptures in such a way that it becomes apparent that God chooses to deign to consecrate the lips of individuals to his service, so that as he says in here, the ambassador actually is the one through whom God himself makes his appeal.

So it's not about Mr. Jenkins. It's not about Mr. X. It's not about who do you think you are or where do you think you've been? It is about God making his appeal through unlikely folks. Now here's the thing, incidentally, to quote Dick Lucas, I freely confess that I am waggling on the T quite a bit at the moment.

You understand his metaphor, those of you who are golfers? You can fiddle about with a golf club for about 20 minutes and nobody knows whether you can hit the ball or not. You just stand there and waggle it.

So I am waggling a little bit, but I am purposefully waggling. This is not like some of my English essays at school. This is not filler. It might be fuller, but it's not filler. So if preaching is unpopular, if preaching is unpopular, and I put it to you that it is, no preaching is more unpopular than the preaching which addresses the stubborn will of men and women and calls them to repentance and faith in Jesus.

If preaching in itself is unpopular, whatever way we might define it, anybody giving a monologue from behind a box, if that in itself is unpopular, then none is more unpopular than the persuasive preaching which we find in the apostolic pattern and in their precepts.

Now the very unpopularity of it confronts us with challenges, and I want to just suggest to you three, and then we'll go to the positive side of things. So here are the challenges, and then we'll think in terms of the antidote.

The Personal Challenge of Fear and Familiarity

The challenges that confront us, first of all, may well be personal. In a sense, they always will be personal. For when we think in terms of the peculiar responsibility of standing between a holy God and those whom God has made and fashioned for himself, then any sense of natural inhibition and fearfulness will almost necessarily present itself.

And depending on our personalities, whether we are extroverted or introverted, whatever it might be, it may take absolutely everything out of us and from us and demand everything in us simply to fulfill that to which we've been called.

And that's why I think it is so encouraging to recognize that, as Paul says back in the previous chapter, we have this treasure in jars of clay, in old clay pots, so that the transcendent power might be seen to belong to God and not to us.

And just this morning I was thinking again about one of my favorite passages in Numbers, that of Balaam's donkey. And I just love the encouragement that is there, and also the inherent warning, I think, where it just says, and then the Lord opened the mouth of the donkey.

And sometimes when I feel myself at the very lowest of all, I go to that verse and find it a great encouragement. And also I find in it a great warning, that God says, shut up, beg, I could replace you with a donkey any day I choose.

And some days a donkey might be a lot more articulate. The personal challenge of natural inhibition and fearfulness, but also we face a challenge when we're tempted to self-preservation. Self-preservation.

And what I mean by that is an unwillingness to bring the demands of both the law and the gospel to bear upon our listeners. A fearfulness, an unwillingness to bring the demands of both the law and the gospel to bear upon our listeners.

We recognize, don't we, that those listeners, as Paul has said in the previous chapter, cannot see the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God. And how are they to see? Well, as a result of us opening up the scriptures.

How are we to do this? Well, not only in dependence upon God's Spirit, but as articulately and as imaginatively and creatively and effectively as all of our might and ability might muster. And it's hard.

Every Sunday comes around as if there were only 48 hours in between them. And time passes, and we might think that we would be more at ease, that we would find it much more accessible. We find ourselves battling again our own tendencies, our own fearfulness, our own sin, our own incapacities, and so on.

And we recognize, too, that the minds of men and women are blinded to the glory of the gospel in Jesus. Satan is not blinding people's minds to religion. Satan is not blinding people's minds to family values.

Satan is not blinding people's minds to tall stories and emotional exhortations and all kinds of things that pass for preaching in our day. He blinds the minds of the eyes of men and women to the glory of the gospel in the Lord Jesus as he is in the image of God.

And it is important for us to remember that lest we fall foul. Also under personal challenges, I think we face the challenge, some of us at least, of familiarity with our material. And yes, let us be honest, a familiarity which unless we go frequently on our knees to God, on our knees before our Bibles, in the secret place in our room, in the private place in our car, in the hours of the night about which no one knows, unless we are there, we may very quickly become the purveyors of that which does not pass with any sense of conviction through us at all.

Because familiarity has bred in us something that has cut, if you like, the nerve endings that are marked by vitality and effectiveness. In other words, the very understanding of that which we convey, unless we come to it in reverence and in awe and in wonder, we may find ourselves like the gravediggers in Hamlet laughing and joking and singing at our task.

You remember that great scene, don't you, the gravedigger scene? If I could be in a Shakespeare play, I would just like to be one scene, I want to be one of the gravediggers. It's one of my favorite scenes.

And you remember Hamlet and Horatio come on the scene and Hamlet says to his friend Horatio, as he hears this fellow singing and joking, and he looks at him and he says, has this fellow no feeling of his business that he sings at grave making?

Has he no feeling of his business? You remember Horatio's reply? Custom, routine, familiarity, custom have made it in him a property of easiness. Custom has made it easy. It is not easy. If it is, come and tell me afterwards, because I want to know the secret.

It may become easy because we have become so familiar that we have trivialized the very truth to ourselves. If I go one more place to preach and go in what they call the green room and have some fellow slap me on the back and say, go get him, I'm not sure what I'm going to do to that fellow.

What do they think is happening in the delivery of God's word? Who do they think is involved? Spurgeon can teach us, can't he? Goodness, Spurgeon was brighter at 24 than most of us are on the brink of our graves.

Listen to Spurgeon. The gospel is preached in the ears of all. It only comes with power to some. The power that is in the gospel does not lie in the eloquence of the preacher. Otherwise men would be converters of souls.

Nor does it lie in the preacher's learning. Otherwise it would consist in the wisdom of men. We might preach till our tongues rotted, till we should exhaust our lungs and die. But never a soul would be converted unless there were mysterious power going with it.

The Holy Ghost changing the will of man. Oh sirs, we might as well preach to stone walls as to preach to humanity, unless the Holy Ghost be with the word to give it power to convert the soul. The challenge that is personal, secondly, the challenge that comes to us that is cultural.

The Cultural Challenge of Entertainment

For we live in a world, we read newspapers, magazines, our companions, our colleagues in ministry do the same, our congregations are there, and so on. And it is ridiculous for us to think that somehow or another we are able to fashion a citadel which removes us from those influences and from that realm.

Last week on business, kingdom business in New York, my wife and I had the opportunity to go and see Beckett's play Waiting for Godot, although I think you call it Waiting for Godot, but it is actually Waiting for Godot.

I don't know whether it is or not, but anyway, if you say it with authority, people go, oh, yes, I guess it is. But you know the two characters, Vladimir and Estragon, I must confess I slept through a significant part of the first half.

I did manage after a coffee to come through good, I breasted the tape just before 10 o 'clock, but it's no surprise that you sleep through it. I mean, you do have to be awake. I mean, what is the opening line?

Nothing happens. There's no plot. There's no play. There's no movement. Nothing happens. No one goes. No one goes anywhere. No conclusions are reached, and nothing is resolved. And it costs you a hundred bucks to go and see it.

I've got to be insane. I can't believe I went there. I wish I had the money back right now. But what Beckett is conveying is the fact that all purpose has collapsed. The thing is pervaded by an air of sort of unrelieved emptiness.

And I sat there once I'd wakened up, and I wondered whether the people laughed for the same reason when it opened in 1953 in Paris, as they laughed 2009 in New York City. I have a sneaking suspicion that there were at least some in 1953 who watched this play and laughed, realizing that it was a spoof.

That the reason it was funny was because there was a dissonance between what Beckett put in the mouths of his characters and what people were experiencing in their lives. I don't know. But I felt that the laughter on Broadway was somewhat strangulated, because I'm not sure that the dwellers in the 21st century regard it as a spoof.

I think they probably think that it's an accurate representation, a tumble-down existence in a world without meaning. Life, just a dirty trick, as Hemingway put it. A short journey from nothingness to nothingness.

Now, the cultural challenge that comes to us in being ambassadors of the gospel has to be faced. Do you realize how long has elapsed since the book Amusing Ourselves to Death? Was that Berger or Berger wrote that book?

Who was it? Postman, Neil Postman. That's right. Berger was Rumor of Angels, Neil Postman. And you remember the chapter on Sesame Street and how the implications of Sesame Street were that when you took the puppet away from the children, then they didn't want education anymore.

I want the puppet. I want the puppet. And then he talked about the nature of television itself and education via television. And he said, if you're going to attempt to educate via television, there are three things that you have to make sure that you do not violate.

One, thou shalt have no prerequisites. Two, thou shalt induce no perplexity. Three, thou shalt avoid exposition like the 10 plagues visited upon Egypt. Sounds a lot like the average pastor's conference, encouraging us all to go back to our congregations and make sure that we avoid those things as well.

And then this is what Postman says. The name we may properly give to an education without prerequisites, perplexity and entertainment and exposition is entertainment. No prerequisites, no perplexity, no exposition.

That's entertainment, he says. Oh, I hope it niggles just a little, and I hope it niggles some quite a lot. Come into church as represented by the gathering of God's people. I think time has long since passed in most places, apart from just the stuffy and moribund, where there's any sense of, now I want you to sit up, pay attention and think.

Now, some well-meaning soul who gets up and says a few pleasantries essentially says, I want you to sit back, relax and enjoy yourselves. I hope there's nothing here today that will be a prerequisite for you to do anything at all.

I certainly hope none of you will be perplexed. And you'll be glad to know that our pastor has had hardly any time to study this week, and he's got a very long video clip, which I'm sure you're going to enjoy.

The Theological Challenge of Sovereignty and Evangelism

Thirdly, the challenge that is theological. The challenge that comes to us that is personal, that is cultural, and that is theological. This may surprise you, but I think it's fair to say, and I'm noticing this as I move around the country just a little bit, I keep meeting these individuals who have tripped over a systematic theology and decided that they both believe it, understand it, and feel that they ought to convey it.

I don't know where they were before ever they started to read their Bible or to read the systematic theology, but that's not for me to be concerned with. Suffice it to say that this particular brand of discovering a biblical theology has had a radical impact on these individuals.

They often seem to talk about it far more than they talk about Jesus. They seem to talk about it far more than they talk about just about anything else at all. And something has happened to them. This may be you.

They've come to convictions about election, about the depravity of man, about the particularism of the atonement. All biblical truths, all vitally important. But what has happened to them is this, that they find themselves now in relationship to the prospect of preaching persuasively, virtually tongue-tied.

Despite the fact that Paul, as he preaches in Athens on Acts 17, says, and Luke records it for us, that God commands all people everywhere to repent. He commands all people everywhere to repent. But what has happened to some souls is this, that they have begun to set in juxtaposition or in opposition, not apposition, to one another the truths of God's sovereign purposes in election and the truths of man's responsibility in preaching the free offer of the gospel.

And because they have now determined that the one cancels out the other, in the worst of cases, they have virtually ceased from evangelism totally. In less extreme cases, their diffidence is seen in a sort of conspicuous awkwardness and spontaneity in the preaching of the free offer of the gospel.

Somehow or another, we find ourselves, they find themselves, at the point of pressing upon people the claims of Christ, the sneaking suspicion that maybe I'm not supposed to do this, because after all, God has done what is necessary.

And so we find that there is a theological challenge where men are laboring under the inhibitions that arise from the fear that in freely offering Christ to the sinner, we might be impinging upon God's sovereign purposes in salvation.

In short, men are frightened that they might be involved in seeing the non-elect get saved. Now of all the things you want to worry about during the week, take that one off your list. But I may be completely wrong in this, but I don't think I am.

And the necessary and wonderful benefit of the restoration of Reformation principles, not least of all in relationship to soteriology, for which we can be absolutely thankful in our day, carries with it the correlative possibility that people who are unable or unwilling to wrestle with the great antinomies of the Bible may find that they have actually become silenced in relationship to these things.

And as we return to 2 Corinthians 5, let me just take you to Matthew chapter 11, because I want to show you, I want to show you that this point, the way I always deal with theological things like this, I always say, how does it work with Jesus?

How does it work with Jesus? Because that's not the same as getting a bracelet that says, what would Jesus do? Because we don't know what Jesus would do, so get rid of the bracelet. The real question is, what has God said?

And that'll do us fine, so you can get a new bracelet. But anyway, you come to this question and say, okay, so God's particularism in the atonement, God's sovereignty and salvation, God's elective purposes from all of eternity, how does this work in the ministry of Jesus?

Matthew chapter 11 and verse 25, at that time Jesus said, I praise you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you've hidden these things from the wise and learned and revealed them to little children.

Yes, Father, for this was your good pleasure. All things have been committed to me by my Father. No one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son, and those to whom the Son chooses to reveal him come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.

We dare not hide behind our inability or unwillingness to bow beneath the immensity of Scripture and thus fail to be persuasive in our preaching. So if the challenges, at least as I've represented them, or the enemies to persuasive preaching are confusion, fear, and complacency, then the necessary prerequisites for preaching to the stubborn will are, number one, clarity instead of confusion, and clarity about the nature of the gospel itself.

Clarity About the Gospel and Substitution

If we are not clear about this, if we are confused in our own minds, we will never be clear from the pulpit. And really, here we find ourselves exactly where we were set up last evening, where John was taking us, aren't we?

Because here in 2 Corinthians 5, verse 21, following verse 20, gets to the very heart of the matter, making it clear that it is not the mere possibility of salvation, nor simply the provision for salvation that is offered in the gospel, but it is salvation full and free.

And that that is what Paul is making clear in verse 19. That's why he says what he says, that God was not counting their sins against them. All this is from God who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation, that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting men's sins against them.

Why? Didn't they deserve to have their sins counted against them? Yes, didn't we? Haven't we broken God's law? Yes. Haven't we spurned his offers of mercy and of love? Yes. And more besides. But here is the wonder.

You see, and loved ones, this is so important because some of us want to move far too quickly to this notion, biblical notion, that God does not count our sins against us. And we're hardly two minutes into the service before we want everybody to know that God does not count our sins against us.

So the people who have been making a royal mess of their lives for the last seven or eight days, they breathe a great sigh of relief and go, well, I'm glad I got in here for that. That is absolutely terrific.

But we have to tell them why and how it is that God has done this. God was not counting their sins against them because he was counting their sins against him, that he was not overlooking sin, that he was not saying it was a matter of indifference, that it didn't make a bit of difference at all, but no, that what he was doing was charging, as we heard last night, all of our sins to the account of Christ.

And it is this, you see, which is wonderful, which is awe-inspiring, and which is majestic. There probably are a couple of books by Goldsworthy through there in the bookstore. I commend them to you. I know some of you will know them.

And here's a quote from Goldsworthy. He says, only the message that another true and obedient human being has come on our behalf, that he has lived for us the kind of life we should live but can't, that he has paid fully the penalty we deserve for the life we do live but shouldn't, only this message can give assurance that we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.

So that the gospel is not good advice, the gospel is good news. And that, you see, that clarity is what gives to Paul his boldness, what gives to Paul the sense of absolute drivenness, if you like, in order that in 1 Corinthians 9, I think it is, he says, and I want to win as many as possible.