How Should Churches Teach?

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How do you, as a pastor, balance your desire and your calling to preach the full counsel of God's Word and yet also hit these things that come up and they're irrelevant, like, oh, you want to speak against these sorts of things because you don't want anyone in your congregation who, you know, you're charged by God to be over and protect from these heretical teachings.

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How do you balance speaking relevantly to those things when they pop up, but at the same time not completely throwing, you know, your plan of preaching through the whole counsel of God?

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And the great benefit of expositional, through -the -Bible, verse -by -verse preaching is that you get to give your people the whole counsel of God and touch every issue.

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So, for example, we've been in the Gospel according to Matthew for years now. We're just now in chapter 9 and verse -by -verse, and here's what we've been able to do.

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In all that time going through Matthew verse -by -verse, we've been able to touch the Old Testament.

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We've been able to touch the prophecies of the Lord Jesus Christ. We've also been able to touch the law of God pretty extensively.

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We've also been able to touch issues of anxiety and worry and fear. We've also been able to touch the true proclamation of the

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Gospel as Jesus preached it. We get to talk about false prophets and false teachers because that's in Matthew chapter 7.

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And so the benefit of preaching the whole counsel of God in verse -by -verse and expositionally is you get to, as you're preaching through the text, as God is teaching his people through his word, you get to connect that to, in its conversation, maybe modern -day things.

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Like, for example, a couple weeks ago, we were in Matthew chapter 7, and verse 15 is,

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Beware of false prophets who come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly ravenous wolves. So as a minister of the

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Gospel, I get to unpack what that means in its original context with the content before us in Matthew chapter 7.

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I get to do an exegesis of that text and explain what it means in its original context. What did Jesus say?

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What does this word mean? Those sorts of things. But I also get to apply it to the people of God before me today and say,

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Okay, here's our modern context. How does this apply to us today? And so that is the great benefit.

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And I think we are in a bad place today as a church when we have as sort of a primary method of preaching in many churches today, particularly the megachurch context, you become a slave.

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The problem is you become a slave to the whims of the pastor. So the pastor has a bug, a 12 -week series he wants to do on this particular topic.

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Now, by the way, I'm not against topical preaching. Ultimately, I think that that is necessary at times, and you can definitely do that.

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We've had to do that to address particular issues that come up in our congregation. So it's a local church context. Issues might pop up in our own church.

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We have to actually step away from the expositional teaching to address a concern that's happening in our church at that time.

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So topical is fine, but when your primary methodology is topical sermons, you're going to miss the ability to do exactly as you're talking about, to do what you're talking about.

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You're going to miss the ability to give the whole counsel of God. You're going to miss the ability to address all the spiritual concerns that God has already prepared beforehand, that he addresses them in his word.

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So take for an example Matthew 1 -7. You can live off that.

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You can genuinely live off that for your whole entire life. You genuinely can. Matthew actually was the most popular gospel of all the gospels in the second century of the church.

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It was the most quoted from. And Christians lived off this book their whole lives.

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And in Matthew 1 -7, again, you have everything. The book starts off giving you the genealogy of Jesus Christ, which

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I think if many of us are honest, we say, well, I skip that. It's kind of boring. I don't really care. Well, Matthew cares, and we ought to care.

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A lot. Because I preached off of the genealogy of Jesus for weeks. For weeks.

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Because it gave me the opportunity as a minister over the people that God has given to me to actually explain who's

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Abraham and why is he significant to the story? Who's David and why is he significant to the story? How come Matthew gives a different genealogy than Luke?

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And I taught my people to say, praise God for the two different genealogies.

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If there weren't two different genealogies, you wouldn't know that Jesus is the Messiah. Because there was a curse put on one of the lines by God saying that no physical descendant of this line would ever hold the throne of David.

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And that's the line mentioned in Matthew 1. That happens to be Joseph's line, and Jesus received the royal right to the throne through that line, escaping the curse because he was the adopted son of Joseph.

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So, you know, you get to do all these amazing things to show the providence of God in history and how he actually controls the line of the

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Messiah and how he actually puts a wrench in the line of the Messiah so that nobody in history could actually be the

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Messiah unless they were born of a virgin. Now, you get to do all that, explain the history, explain the context, the content.

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You get to actually show how Jesus owns the royal right to the line and the physical line through David and all those things when you do it expositionally.

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Then you move into the first verse quoted from the Old Testament in Isaiah. The virgin birth is there.

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Then you get to show the Gentiles are the first people that come to worship Jesus, looking to worship him as the king.

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You get to explain why that is and how the Old Testament promises where the kingdom of God would come. All the nations would stream up to the mountain of God, and Matthew is showing you that.

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You get to show all the parallels between Moses in Matthew 2 and Jesus and how Moses escaped death as a baby and Jesus escapes death as a baby.

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Israel is tested in the wilderness. Jesus is tested in the wilderness. Adam fails in the garden.

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Jesus succeeds where Adam failed. You get to show the whole entire story of creation, the fall, redemption, the purpose of Jesus.

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And then you get to see Jesus proclaiming the good news of the kingdom and sitting down to teach his people in the

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Sermon on the Mount, giving them the blessings. And what do you hear in the blessings? Blessed are those who mourn, for they should be comforted.

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And the context there is Isaiah has to do with repentance over our sin. And now you get to preach the gospel about repentance and mourning over sin and talk about our depravity and Jesus saying, blessed are the poor.

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That is spiritually bankrupt people. You see what we're doing now? Now we get to preach the whole counsel of God about our condition, our need for Christ and all those things.

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And you get to see Jesus talk about the law of God. You get to see Jesus actually address their misinterpretations of the law of God.

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You get to see Jesus give us the kingdom ethic. You get to see Jesus diss false teachers. You get to see

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Jesus diss false professions of faith. You get to see Jesus talk about his full authority over all things.

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And on and on you go. If you do expositional Bible preaching, you get to do all that. But one of the things we also do as a church is not just address these things in service in the context of what we're reading in the text of the

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Word of God, but we also have an outreach ministry. That's the purpose of Apologia Radio and TV. That's the teaching and proclamation arm of Apologia Church.

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So I actually believe that the New Testament gives us the model for ministry.

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So when you read the book of Acts and you see how they were going about preaching the gospel and engaging their culture, I think that's the model that God gives to us for ministry.

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And one thing you see is that the leaders in the Christian church, the prophets, the apostles, the pastors, those kinds of people, they were actually leading the people of God into the marketplaces and the streets to reach their culture.

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And so I do believe that it's actually important for ministers of the gospel, those who are leading God's people, to lead the way on the proclamation of the

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Word publicly. And so Apologia Radio and Apologia TV serves as our way of the marketplace evangelism.

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So we go on the streets, we go to the Mormon temple, we go to the abortion mills, we go to the streets and Mill Avenue, the college campuses to preach the gospel, we go to the reason rallies, we go to the open air evangelism, but we also recognize that our culture has shifted to where now the marketplace of ideas is on social media.

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And so we've tried to engage that as a means of being obedient to, ultimately, the model and pattern that the

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New Testament gives to us. So the whole reason for our YouTube channel is not to highlight us and how great we are and look at our evangelism, but it's ultimately to bring the

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Word of God into the marketplace of ideas. The Apostle Paul was at the Areopagus, Mars Hill.

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That's the place of intellectual debate and philosophy. It was the place of the love of wisdom, right?

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They love to exchange ideas, and when they bring Paul up to Mars Hill, they're not so much saying, oh, let us know what you have to say.

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They were actually putting him essentially on trial for what he had been saying. And that is

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Paul engaging the toughest place of philosophical debate in his culture, Mars Hill. And I think that Christianity needs to come into collision with the culture in the very same way.

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I do believe that we will see, by God's grace, according to his own determination and power, a transformation of our culture because of the gospel when the church actually faithfully proclaims the gospel and does it consistently and with boldness.

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Until we move away from the idol of comfort and self,

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I think we're going to be in this place of impotence as a church. We need to rise up and proclaim the gospel that George Whitefield proclaimed.

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When you think about it for a moment, George Whitefield, I know I'm going on a tangent here. I hope you guys don't mind.

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George Whitefield is interesting. When he was in England, he was a really popular preacher. He was respected.

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He was well -known. He was very popular. And that was in a day without social media. He comes across to the colonies.

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He starts doing teaching ministry there. The man preached like over 18 ,000 times in his life.

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He literally preached himself to death, literally preached himself to death. As last night, when he was really, really sick, he had preached all day.

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And when he was in someone's house, there were people in the living room, he walked up the stairs, stopped on the staircase and began to preach to them for another two hours.

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And then he walked up the stairs and died. He preached his heart out. But he went over to the colonies.

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In about five years of doing that, he came back to England. And there had been so much corruption that entered the church by that time that when he got back, they didn't like George Whitefield anymore.

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Because the messages they were preaching at that time, after he had left five years, the messages they were preaching in their churches was about how to live a better life.

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They were nice, happy messages about being a better father and a better mother, better mother, all those different things.

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And so it was really the kinds of messages that you hear most often today in our churches in the

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West. Well, they didn't want him in their churches. So people often say, Oh, George Whitefield is amazing.

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First, the Great Awakening, the world, literally the world changed. Towns converted to Christ, the brothels shut down, all those things.

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George Whitefield, he would go out into the fields and he preached to literally 20 ,000 people.

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People would come from hours away on foot just to listen to George Whitefield preach in the fields.

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And people say, That's amazing. You know why he was in the fields? Because the church kicked him out. The church at the time in England didn't like the hard edged, sharp edged, serrated edge of George Whitefield's preaching.

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And so they kicked him out of the church. So he started preaching in the fields and then drawing people. And they heard the gospel and they were transformed.

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And he would preach in England. He'd be on a ship from England back to the States again. And they would tie the ships up together when they got near Whitefield's ship.

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And he would preach to all the ships back and forth and in the colonies back and forth and back and forth and back and forth and back and forth.

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And his preaching was so effective that famous people used to love to come listen to him. One example is

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Benjamin Franklin, not a Christian. Benjamin Franklin was so in love with George Whitefield and his preaching.

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He knew how convincing he was in terms of his orphanages. Whitefield had orphanages.

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He was funding and everything else. That Benjamin Franklin went to go listen to him one day, but he left his wallet at home.

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Because he knew that if he showed up with his wallet, George Whitefield would be so powerful and convincing in his preaching, he'd get all of his money.

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So Benjamin Franklin went to go listen to Whitefield. And when he got there, he ended up borrowing money from somebody because of his preaching.

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But what did Whitefield preach? He preached repentance, faith, and he preached the absolute necessity of regeneration.

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You must be made alive and be made new. Something has to happen when you turn from sin to faith in Christ.

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Your life must be transformed, and that's only through God. But that's the message that he preached. And he did it in such a way that he was thrown out of the churches.

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That's a risky kind of Christianity we have to get back to. And we've got to stop talking about it.

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We've got to stop amening it and saying, yeah, that's what will happen.

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The world will change when we preach the gospel faithfully. We've got to stop saying, yeah, we need to be bold. And we've got to actually start rising up as a church and being bold, taking risks, taking the hits.

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Because, let me say this, there's never been a time in history in missions, never been a time where a mission took place that blew things up and the world changed, where there was not tremendous suffering in the midst of it on the part of the person who was used by God to bring that about.

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So you can name it. Our heroes in history were like, oh, such a hero. Luther, Calvin, Whitefield, Edwards.

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When you look at their lives, if you really study it, it wasn't easy. They received attacks from the world and the church.

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God's greats many times have been actually attacked by the church for being too mean. And so the call is to be risky.