What Happened to Preaching? | Theocast

Hi, this is John and today on Theocast, Justin and I are continuing our series on the means of grace. We're gonna be covering preaching. Specifically, we're gonna be covering three different areas. What is preaching and how that's confused.

The event itself that preaching is the gathered body of Christ. It's not a live stream and why that is so important according to Scripture. And then lastly, what is preached is important that it must be pointing us to Christ.

And so we give an explanation from Scripture of how we should be preaching all of Christ from Scripture. And in the Semper Firmata podcast, we take on some questions where people maybe criticize Christ that are preaching.

Criticisms that have come from the past from people like John Piper.

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Welcome to Theocast. Encouraging weary pilgrims to rest in Christ. Conversations about the Christian life from a reformed, confessional, and pastoral perspective. Your hosts today are Justin Perdue, pastor of Covenant Baptist Church in Asheville, North Carolina.

And I am John Moffitt. I'm the pastor of Grace Reformed Church in Spring Hill, Tennessee. And Justin, it is good to be here with you, my friend, as we continue this series through the means of grace. And just one announcement.

Justin and I are going to actually be spending some time together in Knoxville here in a few weeks. And so we're excited about that. We're going to be creating some more content, working on a book that we're hopefully going to be finalizing.

And most importantly, enjoying fellowship.

Yeah, I look forward to it, man. We got a lot to get done and we're going to enjoy each other while we do.

Yeah. So you'll probably get some content from us on social media when we get there together. And I know every time we announce we're coming to Knoxville, everyone wants to meet up with us. And we would love to do that.

And we are working on putting some events together, potentially in Tennessee and in North Carolina and in Texas. But when Justin and I get together, we have like a very short amount of time.

We have way more to do than time to do.

That's right. It's not that we don't want to be with you, but unfortunately, we don't have time to socialize. Justin, speaking of time, we're running out of it. Let's get into our subject.

Yeah, so we're continuing on today in the series on the means of grace and just public service announcement because of that Knoxville trip that you mentioned, along with some interviews that we've got coming up.

There will be a little bit of a break between today's episode and then the remainder of the episodes that we plan to do on the means of grace. And just go and say this too, when it comes to prayer as a means of grace, we plan to actually do several episodes on prayer in the fall.

So I hope all that's clear enough to the listeners so that you know what to expect. But today, John, we're going to talk about the ministry of the word in particular. All of these things, the means of grace are always related to the word.

I mean, we don't want to pull the word and sacrament apart. We don't want to pull the word and sacrament apart. We wouldn't be able to pull the word away from prayer or song or any of those kinds of things because the word informs it all and undergirds it all.

But we're talking about the ministry of the word in a pointed way today. And certainly the reading of God's word is a piece of this. When God's word is read in the assembled church, that's a thing. But particularly, we're having a conversation today about the word of God preached.

And we're asking the question, what happened to preaching? And what we're saying, of course, is not, in asking that question, what we're asking is not, you know, preaching doesn't occur. Of course it does.

In most every Protestant church gathering in this land on a Sunday, there's going to be some kind of a message, a homily or a sermon of some kind. So we're not saying that it isn't occurring in terms of like a speaking event in the service.

But what we're saying is that a confessional reformed understanding of preaching is not common. And yeah, John, I lament what I see when I survey the landscape. And a lot of the stuff that is called preaching, with all due respect, is nothing of the sort.

It's not the proclamation of the word of Christ. And so I don't think this needs a ton of introduction from us to tee this topic up, because most anybody listening to this podcast is going to care about the preaching of the word of Christ.

And we're going to try today to point out some important distinctions that exist and also try to expose some of the things that are often peddled as preaching that are not preaching. And then hopefully say some good things about what preaching really is.

And I am pretty confident, brother, given what you and I do for a living and the calling that we have in our local congregations, I assume that we'll be pretty fired up at points. And I trust the listener will understand that.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Today's a, I feel like we could do a thousand episodes on this, but we were going to try and get this down in 30 minutes here or so, and then we'll go over to the SR. But when we use the word preaching, what's hard is that over time, we've really lost what that word means and what's expected.

You know, sometimes when people, you know, if someone were to tell me, you know, they love pizza and I'm like, oh, well, describe me what you like on your pizza. And they're like, well, yeah, it's got two buns and you put this meat in between and cheese on top of it with ketchup, mustard.

I'm like, well, there happens to be bread and there happens to be cheese and meat on pizza, but that's not pizza, you know, the red sauce. But and that's an interesting illustration. But the point of it is you hear people describe it and you're like, OK, this makes sense of why Christians are anemic and why they're walking around confused and why they're trapped in sin because they aren't being liberated by the gospel of Jesus Christ.

So, you know, beginning, Justin, I think just even clarifying, I think what is preaching and I'll go and say this, John.

Yeah, I don't mean to interrupt you. Forget congregants for a minute. I think that there are a number, a vast number of pastors who don't know what in the world preaching is. No, and I am not trying to sound condescending or arrogant or prideful in that.

It's just objectively true. I've seen a number of dudes on Twitter say the same thing recently, and I wholeheartedly endorse it. Like a hundred emoji.

I'm there.

Well, you listen to preaching and you're like, what's the difference between this and a TED talk? It sounds like pragmatic advice. Like I don't need pragmatic advice. I need the power of the gospel.

Come on with it, John.

Come on, brother.

So let's talk a little bit about I love when my membership class, I always ask people, what is the difference between preaching and teaching? And it's interesting because both are valuable. And they are and they're very, very different and they have different purposes.

Right. And the means of grace are involved in both. But as an example, preaching in scripture is really means to herald. It means herald or proclaim truth. And the point of it was to proclaim truth for the sake of persuasion and to cause change, really.

Because when you're heralding something, you're proclaiming an announcement that something has passed, whether that means war is over, come home or it's safe or whatever. You're causing change in proclamation.

So we are preaching Christ that hearts might be changed, that minds might be drawn to trust more. Right. So that's preaching. Teaching is different. When you look at the way in which teaching is described in the New Testament, Jesus was a teacher of the disciples.

And so what is he doing? He is building them up in the way of Christ. Right. In the way in which they should think, in the way that they should act. And so it's different in that you're not communicating to persuade, but you're communicating to build and to edify.

In other words, to strengthen. So those two events, I think, do need to be different because it is talked about when Paul tells Timothy, preach the word. I think he means herald for purposes of change.

And then you're talking about teaching, being faithful to teach the word. You have to have both. I know there are churches where that's only a teaching ministry from the pulpit. And I know there are only preaching and there's no teaching that goes on.

And I think there needs to be a healthy dose of both because that's what Scripture gives us.

Sure. I agree with everything you're saying. I want to hammer down, maybe particularly on the preaching part, because that's the bulk of what we're trying to convey today. And preaching is very similar to what John writes toward the end of his gospel.

The purpose for which he wrote that book was so that you might believe in Jesus, the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name. And in one sense, that's what we're trying to accomplish in preaching.

Like you said, we are heralds of news, something that has occurred in time and space that Jesus, God, the Son incarnate, has accomplished in the place of sinners. And we are heralding his person and his work.

We are doing that with the aim to persuade. And we are aiming to persuade in addition by extolling. We're not just saying, hey, he did this. We are extolling what he did. So we are preaching it and heralding it and extolling it so that his power, his love, his grace, his mercy, his sufficiency might be seen, beheld, understood, received, and then trusted.

And that's the kind of change you're talking about. That's what preaching is. And we're going to get to this in a minute. I'm just going to go ahead and throw it out there, that it should become obvious that you are not preaching unless you are heralding and extolling Jesus that way every time you open the book.

Which is like Spurgeon is sort of famous for saying. It's kind of one of those urban legend quotes. I mean, he does write something like this, but know Christ in your sermon, sir. Go home and never preach again until you have something worth preaching.

And that's a big deal.

Pragmatic advice in all it is.

But hey, let's pivot kind of second talking point for us, you know, just kind of giving people the outline here. We want to talk about the preaching event and we're using that language intentionally because you and I were talking a little bit before we jumped on here and hit the record button about how one of the big issues here when it comes to the ministry of the word as a means of grace, and in particular, the preaching of the word as a means of grace, is that we, in a general sense, in the church in our day, have lost an appropriate sense of reverence for the preaching event.

We have lost an appropriate sense of reverence even for the ordaining of men to preach the word in the context of the gathered church. I have a lot of thoughts on this too, John, but I want you to start us off here.

So I love asking this question. Where in Scripture do we have a guarantee of this? Paul says this happens and it's a guarantee by the means of the power of the spirit that you will grow in knowledge and love.

Right. In other words, we are going into the reflection of who Christ is. Do this. And it's a guarantee by means of the power of the spirit. This will happen. And it's interesting what people come up with.

And what's interesting is that they don't quote. And and I love it when someone who says they read their Bible through every year. I'm like, if you've read your Bible through every year, you should be able to answer this question because it is a really powerful moment in the book of Ephesians.

But Paul says that it's the ministry of the word through preaching and teaching. In particular, by spirit empowered and selected elders and teachers of the church. So there's nowhere else in Scripture that Paul guarantees that you will be built up in love and you will not be tossed about by everyone of doctrine.

But you will be into the fullness and the knowledge of Christ building built up in love when the body functions properly. So this is why we are this event. It's not just a nicety. It's not just helpful community time.

It's not how God kind of keeps us all in line. It literally is how he builds us up into the full knowledge and love of Christ. Now, that is a powerful statement. And it's not my words. Those are the words of Ephesians four.

No, it's not like a bunch of preachers got together and said, Hey, how can we make our vocation a big deal? And how can we get people to assemble and listen to us talk? This is not man's idea. Like you said, this is God's idea.

So I'm going to maybe take us in a slightly different direction. I think everything that you just said is really important and helpful. And we need to rightly acknowledge, understand, and reverence the fact that Jesus Christ himself gives gifts to the church in the form of pastors and teachers, and that we need those gifted people, those gifted men.

And that's not a slap in the face to the Holy Spirit because it's the Spirit's design to give such people for the building of the body of Christ.

Amen.

I think something that is an epidemic in our day is not understanding that preaching is an event. I mean, just even in saying the phrase, the preaching event, again, that language is intentional. We sometimes in the serious-minded evangelical church shy away from words like event or shy away from words like experience because of how those things have been co-opted by revivalism.

I mean, so I understand that there can be some, I don't know, allergy to that kind of language, but those words are appropriate because this is true of all the means of grace. They only occur in the context of the assembled church.

And in a particular way, preaching is only when the saints are gathered, when there is a man gifted and ordained by God to do the preaching of the Word who is in their presence bodily, preferably in a regular sense.

Guest preachers are fine, but preferably he's a man who lives amongst the people.

I mean, can I interject?

Yeah.

This is when Paul talks about using wisdom and selecting who, people among you, or men among you.

Yeah.

Correct.

To argue your point.

So in a regular sense, right? This is a man who lives among the congregation, who has been ordained to this office, who has been ordained to an office where he sets aside his life to the study of the Word of God and the ministry of the Word of God in prayer.

Acts, book of Acts, yeah.

Right.

And now he will stand in front of the assembly and open the book, and he is going to proclaim and herald the things that we've been talking about. And we're going to talk more about what it is that we communicate in a minute.

But this is an event and it's an experience that you need to be present bodily for. So with all due respect, if you are in a quote unquote church where you are watching a quote unquote preacher on a screen, you're listening to a message that is not preaching.

That is not the means of grace. If you are the kind of individual who likes to consume sermon content in an audio format, you're listening to your favorite preachers during the week for edification. God be praised that you would be learning and be edified by that.

You are listening to messages, but that is not preaching. Preaching is an event where a man bodily is present with other people bodily, and the spirit is gathered with the people and the man opens the Word and preaches the Word.

And this event is not something that can be replicated. That's why you are legit missing out if you are not present when this happens in the assembly of the saints in your church on the Lord's day. And what we would want to say, John, is that, and I mean, we're two guys, dude, because of this podcast, there are people who listen to our sermons every week.

And I hope that people are encouraged and edified by those things. We thank God for technology and all that stuff. And at the same time, the most important time you ever spend around the Word of God in your life, and the most important thing related to the Word of God that occurs in your life, is when your pastor preaches the Word to your congregation on the Lord's day.

Now, you just said something that I want to emphasize. First of all, well said. You encouraged my heart and I agree. But you said something that's the most important. And that's hard for people to hear because that is not what they have been taught.

Now, we're going to argue this from scripture here. I mean, obviously, this is part of the confessions, which is, you know, where we're arguing from. But you need to understand that these arguments are not just some historical tradition that kind of came about.

No, this is given to us. This is why Hebrew says, do not forsake the assembling of yourselves as such as you were doing, because it is there that our faith is sustained and strengthened and our knowledge of Christ is increased.

And as James says, we become doers of the Word. Well, it's important that there's this emphasis on the receiving of the Word. See, it's been a tradition that God has set up from the beginning. Children of Israel gathered together to hear the law read over them, right?

To hear it. And then you get into the New Testament and it's read and explained because some people say, well, I don't just read it. Well, that's not what Paul says to preach or to herald or explain is not just to read.

And so we do not prioritize this in our lives. And Justin, we're OK with just kind of missing out. It's like, oh, well, you know, I'll get it next week or it's OK, I'll just read my Bible or I'll catch the MP3 on Monday.

And now this is where the things are going to sound legalistic. And you guys are sounding like the Roman Catholic Church. I and Justin just want you to hear the word of God and hear the promises of the word of God.

And if you're going to make a sacrifice, you're going to make a sacrifice that would prevent you from ever feeding and feasting on Christ as he designed it to happen. I am not deemphasizing Bible reading.

I am just putting preaching and teaching back to where Scripture properly emphasizes it.

Make the preaching of the word great again. You know, one sense is what we're trying to do.

Because the priority is the people.

Yeah, I mean, I think Ephesians 4 is an open and shut conversation. You mentioned Hebrews 10. That whole passage leading into Hebrews 10 .25 is so corporate in nature in terms of how this whole thing works.

You mentioned several other passages. Obviously, there's there's 2 Timothy 4.

Can I just say, James, this is why James says with such great gusto, not many of you should be teachers.

100 percent.

Because you could lead people the wrong direction. This is why the office of an elder, they need to rightly divide the word of truth. He has to have right character, needs to be observable, and he needs to dedicate his life to study of the word.

Why? Because he's shepherding. He's not an advisor. He's a shepherd of souls.

Correct.

And I mean, we're thoughtful in how we handle the book of Acts. You know, in terms of not building an ecclesiology entirely on what's going on there as the church is being founded. But people have seen for a long time that in Acts 6, you have proto-deacons and you also see the apostles who are in one sense, proto-pastor, proto-shepherd, teacher type guys being set aside to the ministry of the word and prayer.

And then you notice how the Lord builds his church in the book of Acts. How does he always do it? He always does it through what? The proclamation of Christ. Like when the sermons that are recorded for us in the book of Acts, you know, in chapter two, Peter's Pentecost sermon, like Paul's great sermon in Acts 13, I could go on.

What's the content? The content is always Christ as the fulfillment of everything that has come before him and Christ as the savior of sinners. You know, so that's huge. And then I also think like Romans 10, 17, very famous verse, faith comes by hearing and hearing by the word of Christ.

So faith comes by hearing, huge, hearing by the word of Christ.

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Yeah, I think it's just to add to that, Justin, it's interesting how Paul warns Timothy that as he continues to preach, those who come are going to, their hearts are going to drive them to want something else and don't follow that.

Right.

They're going to want something other than Christ. And I mean, that's been something the church has had to battle for years, de-emphasizing preaching.

Correct.

If the itching ears, you know, who will put around themselves people who will say what they want to hear, that is not simply like, oh, I want the saccharine sweet cotton candy stuff.

Yeah.

I just want the fluff. It could be something else. I mean, it could be an easy listening legalism. You know, it could be an easy listening prosperity gospel. You know, it's all theology of glory stuff about how I can be better now, whether that's my circumstances or whether that's the interior of my life becoming this super refined, like super Christian.

You know, I, all of that is a deviation from what we would understand the right preaching of the word of Christ to be.

That's right.

Which I think, go ahead, before we maybe launch into our last talking point.

Yeah.

And I, this can be part of that.

Right.

So we're, so we're pivoting.

Yeah.

One of the, there are three things I always say human beings need. Um, and this is observing. It's easy to observe. Uh, humans have to drink and eat, uh, and they have to eat. Right. So if you don't have those, I'm sorry, I completely got discombobulated.

If we were the kind of podcast where we edit things out, we would edit that out, but we don't do that.

First of all, a human needs sleep, a human needs water, and a human needs food. If it, if you remove one of those, uh, you will eventually die. That's will, and you'll become very weak and you will die.

So, um, when you think of, does the Bible give this type of understanding when it comes to the Christian life, right? So we're talking about a human life. Now, what about the spiritual life? And our answer to that is yes, it does give us those same types of water and rest and food.

Right.

And those are what we call the means of grace, which is why Justin would say the priority of the Christian life is to eat Christ and to drink Christ. And that is done by means of sacrament and the public preaching and teaching of the word.

Again, these are not our words. This is where Paul emphasizes it. I think so clearly in Ephesians that you can't help, but think this is how I live and grow is by these means, which then means if you are going to a preaching event and you aren't being given Christ, then whatever you're eating and drinking is not going to sustain you.

No, it's not true food.

So that means that our last and final point we'll talk about today on the podcast, uh, and then we're, we've got some stuff we're going to talk about SR that is going to relate it to this for the second podcast that we do after this.

Uh,.

Preaching as a means of grace without grace is not a means of grace. Meaning that if the, if grace is not in your preaching, you cannot call it a means of grace and it is not going to strengthen you and it's not going to protect you.

So we need to explain Justin, what does it mean to have grace in every sermon, which is required? Uh, otherwise it's not preaching.

And we don't mean grace and just some generic ethereal sounds.

That's right.

Because that's a buzzword. I mean, grace, a buzzword. It's thrown around all over the place. We mean grace pointedly in terms of the grace of Christ. And so in one sense, you could say, you know, there needs to be grace and you're preaching for it to be a means of grace.

You could insert Christ for the word grace because Christ is the grace of God.

Without Christ, there is no grace.

Christ is the grace of God to us full stop, you know? And so what do we need in that sense in every message communicated very clearly? And I'm going to, I'm going to riff in a minute on all the stuff that's paraded around as Christ-centered preaching that I don't think is at all, but that's in a minute, I'm going to stop myself.

What we need in every sermon, brother, is the sufficiency of the person and the work of Jesus Christ heralded to the saints who desperately need him. We need his life as our life. You know, the fact that we have never accomplished anything that God has told us we need to accomplish for righteousness.

We've broken all of his commandments. We've never really kept any of them. And we're still, even as regenerated persons, we are still inclined toward all.

Evil.

So what in the world could be our hope? Well, it's that Christ has done everything, that his holiness and his righteousness is counted to us as our holiness and righteousness. It is as though we have been as obedient to God's holy law as Christ was obedient.

For us.

That needs to be preached. Then we need to preach his atoning work, the satisfaction that he made for sins. And so all of the wrong things that we've ever done, all the wrong things we've felt, said, thought, he atoned for all that.

The corruption of our very nature, he made satisfaction for that. And so all is really well, and we have peace with God now and forever on account of Christ, and we receive all of that by faith apart from anything that we could.

Ever do.

That has to be the resting heart rate of the church. That has to be what permeates the service of the church from beginning to end and certainly must be the tone and tenor, the warp and the woof, to use the old phrase, of the preaching of the word.

Or we're not preaching, with all due respect, we're not preaching the word of Christ.

That's right.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's hard. There's been a lot of confusion and conservative evangelicalism, Calvin-gelicalism as we like to call it, Calvinistic preachers. And the criticism is, well, you guys are not taking the word of God serious, and you are implanting application into the text that was never designed to be there.

In other words, you're putting Jesus in a text that was never designed to be there. And I understand.

And we're getting into a question of hermeneutics now.

It is, but I'll swing back to how we interpret the scriptures.

Go ahead. Keep talking.

But I understand the criticism, and even John Piper had a criticism against Christ-centered preaching. I believe we did a podcast on that. I can't remember. We'll put it in the notes if we did. But the point of it is this, is that if you're preaching, if the promise is that we grow in the knowledge of Christ through the means of preaching, it's literally what Paul says in Ephesians, if it's not Christ, then how are you growing into the knowledge of Christ?

So this is a hermeneutic issue. And Justin, this is why those, in my opinion, those who have wandered from the Reformed tradition, the rediscovering of the means of grace, tend to reject the means of grace because they're also rejecting the hermeneutics that it's built upon, which is a Christ-centric human, meaning that Christ is the point of scripture.

I'll just say this now as an introduction. You can go back and listen to our series on covenant theology. And there's another episode we said, Is Your System Any Good? We'll put those two podcasts in the notes below.

But the story begins with Jesus as creator of the world in Genesis 1, and then in Genesis 3, it becomes Jesus as Redeemer, right? Who does God promise? The seed of Eve will come and crush the head of the serpent.

And so from Genesis 3 forward, you go from Jesus creator, Jesus Redeemer, and you're waiting for the fulfillment of that. Well, yeah, I can preach Christ from all the scripture because the gospel begins in Genesis 3 and it's not completed until Revelation.

So don't tell me I can't preach Christ because I can. He is the fulfillment of every Old Testament passage that has ever existed.

Right.

The promise of the Redeemer in Genesis 3 .15. I mean, what the rest of the whole Bible is effectively is the unfolding and the accomplishment of that promise. And so that's huge. So we preach every passage in the scriptures in light of that.

I mean, that's entirely legitimate. We're taking our cue from Christ himself, who said that all of the scripture bears witness to him, that Moses wrote about him, that you search the scriptures thinking in them you find eternal life, but it is they that bear witness about me.

He goes to, in Luke 24, famously on the Emmaus road. He begins with the law and all the prophets and all these things and helps them understand, the disciples understand, all of the things that these books said about him.

Peter's sermon enacts?

Of course.

And we were just talking about all of this. I mean, and this is the tone and the tenor of all of the apostles' writings is that it was all about Christ. And the plan of God to save sinners through him.

So it's entirely legitimate. I want to say a few, I think we'll maybe get into some more of the hermeneutical pieces of this, maybe an SR, you know, where we'll talk about some of the criticisms that are often levied against Christocentric redemptive historical preaching and maybe pick some of those apart.

But for now, let me just say a couple of things here. If we're going to rightly be preaching the word of God, we've got to have some tools in view. You've got to have a redemptive historical framework of the scriptures in terms of how the Bible hangs together.

For us as covenantal theologians, we would understand that covenant theology is that framework. So when we say redemptive historical theology, we mean covenant theology. We'll talk more about that in SR potentially.

We've got to have that, but then we've got to rightly divide law and gospel. We talk about that a lot on this show, that the law and the gospel are very often collapsed in the evangelical church. And even amongst Calvinistic evangelicals, this is common.

And we don't keep the law and the gospel appropriately distinct, and we actually compromise both. We soft-pedal the law in one sense, but then we turn the gospel into this kind of conditional covenant of work sort of thing where there's requirements placed upon us.

That's not helpful if we're going to be preaching the word of God rightly as a means of grace. But then lastly, I'm just going to go ahead and make a few comments about what I think often occurs in pulpits.

It may take me a few minutes. Do you want to say something?

Well, one, if you want to know more, if this is brand new to you, someone just sent you this podcast, Justin and I did a whole three-part series on law, gospel, and distinction. I encourage you to go listen to that because I think it'll give you a bigger platform to this.

And just to add a little bit to what you're saying.

Just the law in general, too. I think we did a series on that.

When we say Christ-centered preaching, we don't mean that we're ignoring parts of Scripture. I think you're going to get into this, but we're ignoring the context and the history and the flow.

And we'll talk about that pointedly in SR.

But the idea of it is, going back to your reference of John, I write these things that you may believe in Christ. The whole point of the Bible, the whole point is that you would believe that Christ is sufficient.