“For those who love God all things work together for good.” So wrote the apostle Paul, and so we believe. Of course, as with other frequently quoted verses of scripture, a variety of interpretations and applications exist and are commonly (and sometimes unreflectively) held by fellow believers.
Supposing your elders tasked you with expositing that familiar quotation from Romans on a Sunday morning, you might find you have to clear away a few cobwebs first.
In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.
David B. was kind enough to forward us this link to a recent survey by Ligonier Ministries and LifeWay Research about what Americans believe about God, Jesus Christ, sin and eternity.
Tom: Apparently they are doing this every couple of years now. Having regular new data sets to browse can be useful in noting trends of one sort or another. We discussed the LifeWay 2016 survey in this space, if I recall correctly … yes, I do. That was the one where, based on the frequency of their heretical answers, my fellow writer Immanuel Can was inspired to refer to some of the respondents as not so much Christian as “ ‘Christian-flavored’, like a really, really bad kind of tofu.”
How’s the tofu this year, IC?
“Words, words, words,” says Hamlet.
He’s not enthused. And rightly so. Sometimes there are just too many words.
The Bible says, “God is in heaven, and you are on earth. Therefore, let your words be few.” It’s talking about prayer, of course, but the point carries more generally: even the smartest of us is pretty limited in knowledge. The Lord can use as many words as he wants, and every one of them will be right; but when we human beings talk too much, we make mistakes. Sometimes, we even roll right into sin.
So we’re encouraged to be careful, talk only about what we know, use our words precisely, and not to multiply them without due attention to what we’re really doing. After all, teachers receive a more serious condemnation if they do a bad job.
According to Wikipedia, homiletics is “the application of the general principles of rhetoric to the specific art of public preaching”. For those who have not studied rhetoric, its general principles are usually broken down as follows: ethos (the establishment of trust and credibility), pathos (appealing to the emotions) and logos (appealing to reason and logic). So then, homiletics has to do not so much with the content of the message, but rather with its composition and delivery. It is about taking a proposition and making it persuasive.
For Christian preachers, the starting point is the truth of God. Homiletics is about adorning it rather than veiling it, undermining it or otherwise sabotaging the attempt to communicate it.
“… whoever speaks, as one who speaks oracles of God.”
Assuming we take the word “speaks” to mean “addresses the congregation when believers gather”, it should be evident Peter wrote these instructions to Christians exercising the spiritual gift of teaching rather than the spiritual gift of prophecy, though we know both were present among members of the first century church.
The reasons for this are twofold.
Mature Christians in every denomination recognize that the ability to teach the Bible is a gift that comes from the Holy Spirit of God, as is plainly stated in Romans and 1 Corinthians. Fewer are able to reel off a list of criteria by which gifted teachers may be easily identified, especially when that gift is in early stages of development.
In practice, some believers instinctively associate gift with charisma, others with seminary training, still others for some intangible quality in a teacher’s ministry that reminds them of Bible teachers who influenced them early in their own Christian lives.
Recently, I came across an online discussion concerning the relationship between prophets, preachers and teachers, as biblically defined. By some verbal sleight of hand, one of the participants had accepted as valid the proposition that preaching is the functional heir to the prophetic gift.
The question naturally followed: since there were female prophets (prophetesses) in both Old and New Testaments, why can’t women be preachers today?
In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.
Continuing a discussion arising out of Immanuel Can’s recent and well-received post “Who’s Minding the Store?”
Elders have the job of feeding the flock. IC’s post suggested that not only the Holy Spirit’s leading but a certain amount of human organization, ingenuity and especially careful observation are necessary in effectively carrying out that task. I pointed out some of the things that make that tougher than it looks, and we considered three of them last week. And here we are.
Tom: Since you mention individual gifts, IC, I pointed out in our discussion last Friday that our gifts tend to predispose us to see the world a certain way.
In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.
In his recent post “Who’s Minding the Store?” Immanuel Can considered the responsibility of elders in deciding what should be taught in the local church they care for. His point was that elders need to really know their congregations in order to provide them with the spiritual food they need. Somebody needs to “mind the store”, so to speak.
Tom: I wanted to get into this a bit further with you, IC, and it seems to me this is a better place to do it than a back-and-forth in the comments to the original post.
In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.
Mike Leake has a few words to say here about stewardship of the word of God. Leake says that preachers and teachers tend to approach their responsibilities one of two ways. In Scenario 1, like the servant in the parable of the talents. In Scenario 2, like Paul instructed Timothy, guarding “the good deposit”.
Tom: One approach attempts to improve on what has been given while the other simply attempts to retain what has been given.
What do you think of his analysis, and how do you approach the word of God when you’re responsible to share it with others, IC?
Hans Schantz has a Ph.D. in physics and dozens of conference papers and patents to his credit. He works in the field of electromagnetism — quantum mechanics, dipoles, fields, energy and other aspects of science about which I know literally nothing. Despite having a vastly superior grasp of these concepts than I do, Hans said exactly the same thing about himself in a recent blog post as I feel about my own comprehension of them: “I Know That I Know Nothing”.
How can that be?
David de Bruyn’s blog series giving pastoral advice to various types of stagnant Christians continues this week with a post on the importance of church attendance. I have not agreed with every position he takes throughout these letters, but major kudos to David for bringing these issues to our attention and provoking thought and conversation with his posts.
Of course attending church is very important indeed. No difficulties with that.
I won’t soon forget his face.
He was perhaps thirty or forty years of age, well-dressed and smart looking, a typical man of his era. He was just one among the thousands who had come to this week-long Christian conference.
Every morning, the speakers had been dealing with the reasons for faith, their goal being to show people how firm and rational the foundation for our beliefs really is. Naturally, in this day and age, they had found it necessary to refer often to the recent screeds of people like Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett or Sam Harris, the self-appointed “brights” of the atheist world, the so-called “Four Horsemen” of the secular apocalypse; though, really, all four are theological lightweights, since contempt for one’s subject matter tends to make one rather imprecise. Anyway, they make their way by preaching to the atheistic converted, reciting to them the same old canards that have been circulating since Darwin, Freud, Marx and Nietzsche. (Truly there is no new thing under the sun.)
 |
I’m seeing more and more of those “self-checkout” units at the local stores. They always creep me out a bit. There just seems to be something really weird about the idea of walking up to a mechanical box, shuffling around my own transaction, and then leaving, going out of a store without passing by a person.
I feel as if I owe somebody some kind of explanation, like “Here’s my purchase, and here’s my money, and they match up; so don’t call the cops.” And then this person is supposed to give me the nod, like, “Okay, you’re alright this time; but when you come back, we’ll need to see each other again.”
In response to Tom’s post Five Lessons We Can Learn from Jordan Peterson, Russell writes:
“In the local church context, based on 40+ years of listening to sermons/messages, I would say there are a rare few who can hold people’s attention for more than 15 minutes. They present material in a boring and unorganized fashion. They are unaware of the learning and comprehension level of their audience. They are very very detached in their application to where people live their daily lives. Shame on them for being such poor communicators of God’s truth. Shame on us for propping up a system which perpetuates bad messages.”
Now, we might bridle at that — especially those of us who have a favorite speaker. We might say, “That’s not fair, Russell; I know Mr. X, and he’s really profitable and interesting: I could listen to him forever.”
Maybe. But how many Mr. X’s are there? Be honest now.
If you tell me, I forget.
If you show me, I remember.
If you involve me, I understand.
— Old Teaching Axiom
In his recent post on the subject of platform preaching, Tom writes, “For the purposes of this post, I’m going to assume that one-man platform ministry is the way to go, not because I believe it to be the most scriptural model, but because it’s what we’re all doing and I see little hope for wholesale change.”
He just doesn’t see any reasonable prospect that we can be induced to reevaluate our conventional church behaviors to the extent of questioning the value of platform ministry.
Well, Tom and I usually agree. But not on everything. Not on this.
In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.
When the Lord Jesus restored Peter, he gave him a job: “Feed my sheep.” He repeated his instructions twice, each time with a slightly different verb, and in one instance with a slightly different object.
Assuming we think there is an example in this anecdote for Christians to follow, the net effect is to make the men who shepherd the people of God in our present age responsible for the entire flock — young and old, of whatever type — and to charge them with the care of their spiritual diet, as well as their guidance and direction.
In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.
David B. was kind enough to forward us this link to a recent survey by Ligonier Ministries and LifeWay Research about what Americans believe about God, Jesus Christ, sin and eternity.
Tom: Apparently they are doing this every couple of years now. Having regular new data sets to browse can be useful in noting trends of one sort or another. We discussed the LifeWay 2016 survey in this space, if I recall correctly … yes, I do. That was the one where, based on the frequency of their heretical answers, my fellow writer Immanuel Can was inspired to refer to some of the respondents as not so much Christian as “ ‘Christian-flavored’, like a really, really bad kind of tofu.”
How’s the tofu this year, IC?
In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.
Tom: I have a confession for you, IC. I was a terrible kid in Sunday School. I made everybody’s lives miserable, from the guy tasked with leading the singing to my individual Sunday School teachers. I really didn’t like it much.
The odd thing is that I had nothing against church particularly, or the Bible. I even
believed it was true. But I was a total
How about you?
Immanuel Can: Yep. Dead with boredom, and ready to make trouble.