It’s a great privilege to be here. I’ve been looking forward to this for some time and I’ve been praying about it. Actually, I have been turning over in my sleep thinking about speaking to a bunch of pastors about such an important topic. I bring you greetings for the Windy City. You perhaps didn’t know this, and I had to confirm the other night when I was watching a television special on Mayor Daley of Chicago, but they pointed out that Chicago got its name, the Windy City, not because it’s on Lake Michigan. But because of the politicians. And believe me, living there, that is true. It is windy, it does get cold in Chicago. In fact, this year the storms have passed us on the south. They’ve passed us on the north. We just sort of have ground and ice, but it’s been cold. In fact, it’s been so cold that we’ve actually seen politicians with their hands in their own pockets. So, this is a very good Chicago winter.

A Personal Narrative of Sorrow

As I’m standing here, I am thinking about two and a half years ago when our life reached a very low spot. I had been speaking in Switzerland and then went to see some friends in Paris and then was going to the holy Land for the first time ever and I was in the Moriah Hotel and I could just look out at the Dome of the Rock. I was going to go out the next day and begin to tour the city when I got a call from my youngest son and he said, “Dad”, he said, “I hate to tell you this, but Kent (my oldest son) is in intensive care.” And then he explained that he tried to take his life. What a night that was and what a trip back through New York to Chicago. And that was two and a half years ago and we’ve had some hard times in these past years.

Kent is doing well now, but just about a year ago, my wife went into the hospital for a routine hysterectomy and they nicked an artery and she almost bled to death and all her organs went into shock and she’s been for about the last 10 months a semi invalid. The reason I say that is she’s on the mend right now and there’s a couple sitting down in the front row here who are part of that because we went up to Mayo Clinic just before Christmas and we didn’t know Dennis and Margie. Their pastor, an elder in the church there, said, “We have a couple you can stay with.” And Dennis and Margie were like the hands and mouth of Jesus to us for a week. We got an answer to her problem. Last week my wife said to me, “I feel great.” And so I have much to praise God for and praise God for good friends that are here, new friends.

The Study and the Sermon

Well, I’m going to be talking about the study and the sermon that was announced and it is going to fall into three categories before the study, in the study and around the study. And so as we talk about before the study, you noticed in the conference brochure that I have the title, “The Study and the Sermon.” I’d like to say more specifically that it is the study and biblical exposition because that’s what I do. I have looked over my sermons, tried to sort out how many sermons are expositions and how many are say topical exposition. Well I would say that 95 to 97 percent of my preaching is biblical exposition. Once in a while I’ll do some topical exposition. Disciplines of a Godly Man was topical exposition, but I am committed to expositing the word of God.

Let me also say that from my limited experience around Chicago and then times that I get out in different places, I would say that expositional preaching has fallen on hard times. It has declined. It’s not in the forefront of much of what is going on. I wouldn’t say it was true about this group because of why you’re here and what your commitments are, but biblical exposition is in trouble. And let me talk about some of my experiences. You can probably relate to these.

A Lack of Biblical Exegesis

You have probably been somewhere say on vacation you slipped into the back of a church. You understand from the outside of the church it is a Bible-believing evangelical church. The Scripture has been read. You sit down ready for a feast out of God’s word and the pastor departs from the scripture never to return. You’ve had that experience. That is a common experience. Every one of you has had that experience. Probably many of you have also had the experience of listening to a series of sermons by a pastor maybe in a week at a camp somewhere. And after about the third sermon, they all begin to sound the same. And you wonder why.

Well, I’ve reflected on that and that is because just what John was talking about out of Luke 11 where they have taken away the word of God. Let’s put it this way: There are evangelical, rabbinical, accretions. That is, there is a series of Scripture texts that a pastor will get in the back of his mind and every text is annotated with those same texts so that the scripture sounds the same and you hear a time after time after time, and frankly that is taking away the word of God. That’s hedging the law and insulating the people from the truth of God’s word.

There are also sermons that pose as exposition. It is a sermon which remains within the parameters of the text, even nods towards the text a few times. But there is no rigor and there is no real interaction with the text. God’s word is not taken seriously. The people that sit out there think that they’re hearing exposition, but they are hearing exposition which is not exposition. And today this is very common.

There is also a type of exposition which sees Scripture through a particular lens, a patriotic lens, a therapeutic lens, a feminist lens, a social lens, etc. So that one sermon, regardless of what the text is, is characterized either by political chauvinism or an emphasis on wellness. Every sermon is about being well and being whole and being together, or it’s on a one string social issue that is very, very common to date. Now we all bring our frameworks, we know that, but that’s typical.

True Exposition

I’m going to say this. When biblical exposition occurs is when the biblical text is prayerfully interpreted in its literary context by the classical canons of hermeneutics — lexical, syntactical, historical, sociological, and theological. And through all of those things, its main theme is discerned. And that theme is then first understood and applied in its historical setting before it was applied today. In other words, and this is what Dick Lucas likes to say, “You can’t go straight from the biblical text to Minneapolis, you have to go through Jerusalem.” So you go from the biblical text through Jerusalem to Wheaton to understand what it really means. And then that theme or idea, as it’s discerned, is preached, utilizing the structure of the passage as a guide for the structure of the sermon. And that exposition is preached as the Holy Spirit applies it to the soul and ethical conduct of the preacher and fills him to preach the word of God. That’s kind of a long definition, but that’s how I see it.

Now let me say — I was talking about before the study — that you have to believe in preaching. I believe in preaching, I believe in preaching with all of my heart. I believe what the Bible has to say about preaching. I believe what Paul said in Colossians 1:25, “I have become the church’s servant by the commission God gave to me to present to you the word of God in all of its fullness, in all of its completeness.” That’s what I believe my call and my commission is. And so you have from Paul a mandate for biblical exposition, that is, to preach the word of God in all of its fullness, in all of its completeness. And I hold close to my heart what Paul said to Timothy in 1 Timothy 4:13, which says:

Until I come, devote yourself to the public reading of Scripture, to exhortation, to teaching.

And then what he again said in 2 Timothy 2:15, which says:

Do your best to present yourself to God as one approved, a worker who has no need to be ashamed, rightly handling the word of truth.

And then 2 Timothy 3:16-17 says:

All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work.

And then again in 2 Timothy 4:1–2, he says:

I charge you in the presence of God and of Christ Jesus, who is to judge the living and the dead, and by his appearing and his kingdom: preach the word; be ready in season and out of season; reprove, rebuke, and exhort, with complete patience and teaching.

Difficulties in Present Time

Now I say all of that in preparation for talking about the study because preaching I believe is harder today than it’s ever been in American culture. Why? Well, 90 years ago preaching was easily, across small town America, the most stimulating thing in town every week. And the pastor was generally the most educated and intellectually alive person in town across America. That’s before the advent of the wireless and the radio and television and media and tapes and CDs. Also, people today are not as skilled at listening as they used to be. Many church attendants listen to God’s word the way many of you yesterday listened to the flight attendant announce what was going on as you took off the safety features. How many really listened yesterday? Not very many.

I think that that job is a job that you have to have a strong ego to do. It has to be one of the worst jobs in the world. You’re daily suffering from frequent fire flier rejection. One flight attendant, this is said to be true, was so exasperated by the inattention that she altered her little talk. She said, “When the mask drops down, place it over your navel and continue to breathe normally.” And she said, no one listened. And some of your congregations look like the 6:00 a.m. flight to Chicago, don’t they? Because hearing the word of God involves listening and that’s been impaired by our modern society. Glut of words. There are billions of words everywhere, words on our TV and radio and VCRs, and sometimes it seems with everything around all those words are saltiness at once and we as a culture are a distracted people.

It is an established scientific fact that the visual media has reduced the capacity of the normal person to follow reasoned discourse without visual aids. Those are the people that you preach to today. And there is a postmodern mind which responds so readily to self-directed, subjective, feeling oriented messages, I know how to get a congregation quiet, start talking about my inner feelings. It’ll be as quiet as can be. But those same people find it terribly difficult to follow the reasoned exposition of Scripture. And then there’s the fact that many people today just don’t want to hear the word of God, even though they are evangelicals and say they would die for the Bible.

For the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions, and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander off into myths (2 Timothy 4:3–4).

That’s the context. But I am committed to the biblical exposition of God’s word. I’m committed to thinking. I’m committed to preaching what God’s word says and it is difficult. I don’t think there’s any more challenging task in all of the world than preaching God’s word.

The Task of Preaching

I also believe that it is exalted. I was talking to a friend of mine who is the head of a theological institution and I’d had an offer to take over a practical theology department. Since he was in a different institution, I called him and I asked for his advice. I said, “What do you think? Do you think that I can influence men towards preaching the gospel by staying in my pulpit or do you think I could do it more by going to a seminary?” And the head of this seminary said to me, “You ought to stay where you are. You will not influence men to teach the word of God unless the rest of the faculty members are believers and convinced that it is the highest of intellectual endeavors.”

And I believe that it is. It may sound self-serving for a preacher to say that preaching God’s word is the highest of intellectual endeavors, but it is the revelation of God and to take it and understand it and apply it to life and to communicate it so that IT gives life is as demanding of the mind and the soul of anything I can think of. It’s more demanding than being a lawyer and more demanding than being a surgeon.

To preach God’s word. And here we are, we’re called to preach. We’re called to be heralds of the gospel. We’re commissioned to preach the gospel, the glorious thing. So I say all of that about what you have to have is an attitude before you come to the study and that’s my heart. Now what do I do?

The Pastor in the Study

The first thing I do in the study as I’m preparing for a sermon is I lay the text out before me. I’m preaching through the Gospel of Luke now, so I would be in Luke 12. I lay it out before me and I humble myself before God and the text. I pray, I think about the end product and oftentimes I go through a little chain of Scriptures like Exodus 4:10–11 where Moses says that he’s inadequate to the task and then I read God’s words that say, “I will be with your mouth.” I open to Jeremiah 1:6–10 where he says, “I’m only a child.” And he tries to demur and God says, “Say not ‘I’m a child.’” I look at 1 Peter 4:11, which says, “If anyone speaks, anyone preaches, let him speak or preach as it were, the oracles of God.” And I pray. I would say that preaching God’s word is 20 hours of prayer for me because I pray through the whole process whatever I am doing. Preparation is 20 hours of prayer. That’s the first thing. And so that is the thing that coats everything that’s done is praying, being prayerful, working through the holy word of God.

Cracking the Text

Then the other thing, the next thing that’s involved is what I would call cracking the text. And let me say that is the hardest thing that I do. That’s the hardest work that I do all week long. I had a farmer friend that told me that his congregation could not understand when he was in the study that he was working. Maybe you have some people that think that about you. They work with their hands, they see it as action moving around, and to think of a pastor sitting motionless before a desk — that’s not work. That’s a luxury to them. But it is the hardest thing I do bar none. It’s harder than balancing my checkbook.

What I do is I clear my desk of everything and I put my English Bible out before me, a legal pad, and my Greek New Testament. There is nothing else open on my desk and I begin to read it. I read the text. I read it over and over again. Oftentimes I read it out loud because if I read it out loud, I begin to get the sense and feel of the text. I check out the Greek and check some of the nuances to get a feel for it. I read the context before even though I’m doing exposition week after week. I’ll go back to the context beyond that. I’ll think about the theme of the book. I’ll read what comes after and I will think about what it says. That’s hard.

Why do I do this? Why don’t I crack a commentary? Well, if you crack a commentary first thing, and you do that a couple of times, you’ll become captive to what that commentary says. Your thoughts will be molded by it and your originality will be taken away. And I say this from experience because when I first began to preach, I was so unsure of myself I’d read five or six critical commentaries before I’d begin to think. I was so unsure of myself. But we’ll talk about commentaries in a little bit. I believe in commentaries, but I have some things to say about that.

You think. And one way of defining preaching, if I take it from one angle that preaching is thinking. Do you remember Martin Lloyd Jones’s definition of preaching? Preaching is what? It’s logic on fire. It’s thinking through the word of God. I think through it. And because I don’t have those tools, I have to think and I listen to God. I would encourage you wherever you are in this whole matter of preaching to start this discipline. Maybe it’s just spending an hour and you’ll get it figured out. It may be two hours. But if you’ll spend two hours with nothing else but your English Bible, your Greek Testament, and reason things through God will speak to you. Listen to the voice of God of God. And we shouldn’t imagine that just breaking down words is really listening to the voice of God. Now, I don’t recommend the theology of Carl Barh, but I do recommend this quotation:

The Bible is like a love letter and should be read in the same way. If the letter is written in a foreign language, the lover will need to decipher it with the aid of a dictionary, but he will regard the toil of translation as an irritating delay to reading the letter, a necessary evil. And he will certainly not imagine that he is reading the letter while he is still translating it. Therefore, if thou art a learned man, then take care less with all thy erudite reading, which is not reading God’s word, thou forgetest perchance to read the word of God.

So we need to read it. It’s that procedure, thanking it through, figuring out what it is, what it’s about, considering it.

Themes and Illustrations

And then secondly it’s about getting its theme or its big idea or whatever you want to call it, and being able to state that in a succinct sentence. I do that and then I try to break it down into divisions according to the literature that’s before me to think it through. Now when I’ve done that, I still don’t go to a commentary. After I’ve done that, gotten the structure, hopefully gotten an outline and the theme, then I consider biblical parallels. I think about those things. I think about cross references. The Bible I like to use has a number of cross references down the center of the page. I’ll just go through those oftentimes if I can’t think of cross references. But I’ll try to get my own. I’ll think about insights.

For instance, this last Lord’s day, I was preaching on Jesus’s great call to his disciples not to worry. And as I thought about it, I realized that that worry is a proleptic sin, that it’s out there, it’s in the future. And then I thought about the fact that when you’ve got all the burdens of the days that you carry, the great damning thing about worry is it takes the burdens of tomorrow and places them on top of the burdens of today and it makes them impossible. Do you see? So you think. I think about applications and then I think about illustrations, and we’ll say something about illustrations after a bit. I’ll try to get illustrations without opening illustration sources.

A couple of weeks ago I was preaching on the parable of the rich fool, and there’s that great phrase in the last part of Luke 12:15, which says, “A man’s life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions.” I tried to think about that. I tried to relate it to my own life and experience, and all of a sudden it came to me, and this is how it came out to the congregation. I was raised in the 1950s, kind of grew up in the 1960s, but I was raised in the 1950s. I graduated from high school in 1959 and because of that I was present for one of the great days in American history. That’s the birth of the 1957 Chevrolet.

I remember Richard Smith’s Chevrolet. Richard Smith lived three doors down the street from me, Richard Smith was four years older than me. I was 15, he was 19. I couldn’t believe that car. Now if you know what a 57 Chevy is, it was Campbell Soup red. It had that beautiful silver swath on the side, dual pipes, the biggest Chevy engine in it, and it had angora dice hanging from the rear view mirror. And Richard Smith, he was so cool in his flat top, his t-shirt, and when he came home from work every day and when the guys were out in the street playing ball, it was like an epiphany when that beautiful car gleamed at the top of the street and we stood back reverently as Richard Smith cruised by. I knew that a man’s life may not consist in the abundance of his possessions, but I knew that it consisted in the possession of a 57 Chevy.

Well, Richard Smith learned that it didn’t. I learned that it didn’t. But the tragic thing is that there are gray headed old men that think life consists of a European coupe. You see, a man’s life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions. So what I’m saying about this whole process is having yourself into it, your mind into it, your life into it before you go to the commentaries.

The Use of Commentaries

Then I put together a typed outline and I go to my commentaries. Now let me say the commentaries need to be respected and disrespected at the same time. On the one hand, what arrogance to say, “I don’t use commentaries.” What foolishness to say, “I can find all of this by myself to think that all the wisdom of past years is something I can dispense with.” On the other hand, it is a mistake to over revere them. Eta Linnemann was a prominent German New Testament critical theologian. She’d done her doctoral work, then she’d done her second doctorate, she’d gotten an honorary doctorate, and was teaching with great esteem. She came to realize that her scientific approach to Scripture was really not opening people to the truth. She became depressed. In fact, she says the way she met her depression was through alcohol and television. This great German critical scholar.

She came to Christ and was marvelously delivered and she wrote this in her historical criticism of the Bible methodology or ideology:

Historical critical theology is hindered by ignorance since the theologian generally is only aware of those small parts of the Bible which he regularly studies in keeping with the widespread tendency to specialize. As a rule, he knows numerous books that deal with his area of interest, but he does not know his Bible.

And that’s true. I had a sabbatical and I studied at Tyndale House Cambridge, and there were some people working on PhDs that were ignorant about their Bibles. They did not know their Bibles. So you need to have a healthy disrespect at the same time and a healthy respect. Now when I go to my commentaries, for instance, I’m going through Luke now. There are three big massive commentaries that have come out in the last few years. I.H. Marshall was the first big commentary on Luke since J.M. Creed. It’s been about 50 years since he’d done that, and it is sometimes inscrutable and difficult, but you have to understand that as an evangelical, he’s trying to answer all of the critics. Joseph Fitz Myer is a Roman Catholic in two volumes. John Noland has two volumes. They are massive commentaries. Well, I do. I get through those things, but you know you can get through critical commentaries fairly quickly if you’ve already done your work.

Others are Leon Morris, Earle Ellis, and there is a refreshingly original work by David Gooding if you’re not familiar with that. And there are others. After I’ve done that, then I perhaps looked at my illustration file. I file all of my reading, everything so that I can access it. I’ve probably got about 5,000 quotations and illustrations filed and I’ll call that up. And then I sit down and I write my sermon. I didn’t used to write my sermons until about 15 years ago, but I realized I became sloppy in my thinking. And so I worked at writing to write myself clear. I write because I believe that words are important. I reject a deconstructionist philosophy. I reject a lot of what the culture has to say. Words are important. So I work at my words when I preach. I don’t read my manuscript, but because I have worked all that through, it just flows out and I write it prayerfully.

And then Sunday morning I preach at 8:30 a.m. and 10:40 a.m. I get up at 4:00 a.m. Sunday morning. I’m in my office at about 5:30 a.m. and I spend my time going over my sermon, praying myself full of God’s word, so that when I preach, I am preaching as it were, to the best of my ability and my own fallenness, the oracles of God. I have four or five people that meet in the pastor’s room and pray for me while I’m preaching. And then I pray during my sermon. You know, you can pray while you’re preaching. You can talk to yourself while you’re preaching. Have you ever done it? Why is Dr. Scott, the New Testament scholar, turned around backwards while I’m making this application? You can be saying those kinds of things while you’re preaching. I pray as I preach, “God help me.”

Around the Study

With all I’ve said, I believe in books. I probably have 4,000 or 5,000 volumes. I haven’t counted them. I have virtually every lexicon you can think of. I have lots of commentaries. I have 50 commentaries on the book of Romans, maybe 30 or 40 on Mark. I have loads of commentaries. I have lots of dictionaries, all the standard dictionaries. I have a number of primary sources. I have the Loeb Library of Philo, Josephus, Tacitus, the Papyri, Eusebius, the Apostolic Fathers, Herodotus, Polybius, Xenophon, and probably another 50 miscellaneous volumes. I have the Mishnah, I have the Babylonian Talmud, I have the Puritans from the great doctor, Thomas Boston. I have all kinds of Pastoralia. So I believe in books. You ought to have books, but I’ll have to say this, the book of all books is the Bible as Ian Murray said last night. Keep the Bible First.

I think that the key to preaching is a great grasp of the English Bible. That’s what I think. Now we can get very elitist about languages and everything else, and you can talk about translating. The fact is that God speaks to me in English and to be like Spurgeon so that the very blood that you bleed is bibline, I think is the key. I think when I look at Spurgeon sermons and I see everything else. What I see is a massive knowledge of the English Bible.

We think of John Bunyan and Iain, maybe you can correct me on this, but I understand that Bunyan had very few volumes. He had his Geneva Bible, he had Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, he had Bailey’s Practice of Piety and maybe a few other volumes, and he wrote a work, which is one of the great master works of all time. You know why? Well, C.S. Lewis said it in regard to Bunyan. He said it’s because the Bible is an education. And so I think that when you talk about all of it is reading the Bible, taking M’Cheyne’s calendar and reading that, using that as your guidelines, so at the very blood that you bleed like Spurgeon’s is bibline.

Recommended Resources

Your own library, I would suggest if you don’t have books about books that there are a few that are indispensable. Probably the best one, at least in my estimation, is edited by Douglas Moo. That’s an annotated bibliography on the Bible and the church published by Trinity. I think that’s the best one, edited by Douglas Moo. Cyril Barber’s The Minister’s Library is another. Spurgeon has one called Commenting on the Commentaries. That’s a Banner of Truth title. Other helpful books are Ralph Martin’s New Testament Books for the Pastor and Teacher and Brevard Childs’s Old Testament Books for the Pastor and Teacher. There are other specialized ones too, but those are helpful.

Read the book reviews in the “Journal of Evangelical Theological Society,” “The Trinity Journal,” “Westminster Journal,” and “The New York Times book Review.” You may not know this, but you can buy the book review separate from the New York Times at Barnes and Noble, and that’s always a great source of keeping up on your reading.

I’ll just mention some books that I’ve read in the past couple of years and you could ask me about them, but this is outside of what I’m reading for preparation for my preaching. One I enjoyed very much was Alister McGrath’s John Calvin. If you put that together with T.H.L. Parker’s John Calvin and you’ve got quite a bit of information. Jaroslav Pelikan Bach is a great author among theologians. Carl Henry wrote Twilight of a Great Civilization. Here’s a novel: P.D. James wrote The Sons of Men. Other authors are Arthur Schlesinger and Orestes Brownson. James Hunter wrote Evangelicalism: The Coming Generation. Boswell wrote Life of Johnson. Arthur Schlesinger wrote The Disuniting of America. Russell Baker has two volumes called Growing Up and The Good Times.

Kingsley Amis wrote the book Memoirs. Marvin Olasky wrote Abortion Rites. Joe Bailey has a book called Out of My Mind. Carson and Woodbridge wrote Letters Along the Way. David Wells wrote No Place for Truth. John Edison wrote a book called A Study in Spiritual Power. Frederick Buechner wrote Godrick. Graeme Goldsworthy wrote Gospel and Kingdom. Anne Wilson also wrote Imminent Victorians and Daniel Boorstin wrote The Discoverers. Those are books that I have read. Right now I’m reading Mark Knowles’s A Scandal of Evangelical Mind, not with great approval. I’m also just starting Revivals and Revivalism.

Most Influential Books

When I get together with people, I often ask them what books have most influenced their lives. And it’s a hard question to answer because they have to think back chronologically. It doesn’t necessarily mean the greatest books that they’ve read, but the books have influenced their lives. I thought I’d mention mine just for fun. When I was about 14 in 1956, something happened that absolutely changed the evangelical world. Can anybody tell me what that was? What happened in 1956? It was the Martyr and the five missionaries. That went like a shock wave. As a teenager who had just come to love the Lord, I read the Shadow of the Almighty and Jim Elliot became my hero.

I was 16 years old and I read another book that absolutely changed my life. I was in an ultra Arminian context, the Quakers. I read together with another man, Arthur W. Pink’s The Sovereignty of God, and my life was changed. As a young pastor really casting about for some preachers that did theology. I read Martin Lloyd Jones’s Sermon on the Mount and talk about epiphanies. That was like an epiphany. I mentioned last night at the table I wrote him a letter back thanking him not knowing to ever get to the great doctor in London. I had never been to London. I have in my possession today a little postcard that he sent back thanking me for that. I was also impacted by Jim Packer’s Knowing God, A.W. Tozer’s Pursuit of God and The Knowledge of the Holy. And then I was also impacted by the first 60 pages of Bonhoeffer’s Cost of Discipleship.

Also as a young man, my imagination was baptized when I read Lewis’s Perelandra. And then as of late, I’ve gotten a lot out of Paul Johnston’s Intellectuals in Modern Times. I always ask people about their books. In fact, have you seen Disciplines of a Godly Man? The back of it has a survey of about 30 different people on what their favorite books are.

Regarding conservation, I mark every book with a pencil. Now I’m a lover of books too. My wife isn’t, she’ll bend a book over backwards. If I have a book that I like and I want her to read it, I’ll go buy her another copy. I just can’t stand to see what she does with books. When I’m done with the book, I go back through the book and I write one or two words in the margin that give the theme of what that’s about. And then I have a secretary, so I have her make a copy of that with those leading words and I write a sentence that describes it and I file it with that sentence so that I have it for recall. I collect everything.

The Priority of Preaching

I spend about 20 hours a week on my morning sermon, and that’s after years and years of preaching. When I preach Sunday nights, I have about 10 hours in it. So when I have a week like that, I have about 30 hours in the study and I have to say that I still do hospital visits. When my children grew up, my children didn’t say, “Dad, you spent too much time away.” They said it was great to be in a pastor’s home. I take my time off, I spend my time with my wife, I administrate the church, I’m accessible to my staff, but I have a priority in preaching and it’s always existed. When I started a church, my office was in a trailer and Steve Cro can testify to this, that when you’d open the door and one side of the trailer, the whole trailer would shake. I gave my time to God’s word and people are dying today for a lack of God’s word. People are going to techniques, they’re preaching consciously therapeutically. They’re editing God’s word to reach what they think are perceived needs when they don’t understand that maybe the man on the street and the person that pew doesn’t know what their deepest needs are, but God’s word does. We need to preach the word of God.

Question and Answer

Could you reflect on your current reading of Scandal of the Evangelical Mind? Also, please express some of your concerns as far as what a pastor’s intellectual habits should be.

Well, I’m about halfway through the book, so I haven’t read it all the way through, but as I’ve thought about his concern about being acceptable to the secular intellectual community, and that is a great concern that he has of really doing real scholarship, I think that in his criticism of history that is written sympathetically and from the inside, like revivals and revivalism, that a way to understand maybe how what is going on is that you have the phenomenon of weather. You can have a weatherman describe the weather and he will talk about all the things that are going to make it snow tomorrow. He’ll give you all the reasons why it’s going to snow. But there’s the other side of it that God has just determined that it’s going to snow.

Well, I think that Christians who sometimes want to be so acceptable and have their history acceptable in the academy are so concerned about not introducing God into the equation. They’ll give the sociological reasons for this, the economic reasons for this, and they will name all those reasons. And oftentimes I think of playing to a certain small group and want to please that group. And as I think of the group that’s involved there, I think of people like Ronald Numbers from University of Wisconsin and a whole group of evangelical historians that kind of write for each other. I think the same thing happens in critical scholarship. People end up writing for a school of scholars somewhere.

I would like to turn my office into a study but it’s just a busy place. Is there anything you would recommend?

Early on when I really didn’t have an office that worked, I would take my books in my car and either go to the public library for my study time or even sometimes I ended up in the shopping center parking lot, parked in the anonymity of all the rest of the cars. No one would find me there and I would read and study. I’ll even do that now. For instance, coming up here, I xeroxed my commentary passages and brought them along in my briefcase so that if I caught a couple of hours I could do some reading. I’ll do that kind of thing.

I’m very sympathetic and I think that in many churches a church will call you and say, “We want you to be in the study pastor”, but they really don’t mean it. You have to get that straight. And my office, the present one that I have, you could hear everything through the door. Well, I had him put another door on and make the wall twice as thick. There are two doors to get into my office. It’s like the Sancta Sanctorum to get into my office. And it’s good to keep a study place in your office and a place where you do business too.

If our culture has lessened most people’s ability to listen so that they need visual aids to get the point, how far do you go in becoming all things to all men by using visual aids, by preaching a 20 minute sermon instead of a 35 or 45 minute sermon? What kind of accommodation do you give to preach two Americans today?

I’ll try to answer that as best I can. There is one sense in which you do not accommodate them. If we’re going to give our minds up with a postmodern type of thinking and this therapeutic type of preaching where we just say people don’t think and we can’t make them think, then we will miss the focus of preaching. I think they can follow reasoned discourse, but I think it is difficult. Now, I preach maybe 35 or 40 minutes. That’s about the outside for me. Others preach longer than that. Some people preach shorter.

I don’t think there’s any particular morality in the length of time that you preach, but it means that I have to be as clear as possible and I follow a canon, which is clarity is style. It has to be as clear as possible. And so when I am preaching the text, I am consciously aware that there are people that have a hard time following. I’m constantly referring them back to the text as best I can. I have a well-structured sermon. I do use illustrations, but let me say that there is an ethic to illustration. I never use an illustration that does not illustrate the point that I’m saying. That’s the first thing. And the second one is I will not use an illustration that is so powerful that it overpowers the biblical text.

So if you’re a person that you’ll say, “Oh, I’m losing interest. I’ve got to have something interesting to say,” your people will begin to figure that out. They’ll go, “He doesn’t have anything to say. He’s telling a story. He thinks we’re losing interest. So he’s telling a story.” I don’t do that. The other thing is that I do think in a postmodern, subjective culture that one of the great things that will communicate is honest God-given passion. If you are on fire about what you believe and you are clear about what you believe, you could have someone come in off the street who has not heard reasoned discourse before, but because you are on fire and you believe it, they will listen.

So I believe that an honest passion communicates and that that’s what I’m always saying to my congregation and to myself, “Do I really believe what I’m saying? Do I believe what I believe?” Because if I do, the people are going to listen. I’m talking about honest passion. You’ve heard the great story of the skeptic Hume going off at 5:00 a.m. to hear George Whitfield preach and someone saw him and said, “Why? What are you doing going to hear Whitfield preach? You don’t believe this?” And he said, “I don’t, but he does.” It gets down to what you believe about the word of God. Do you really believe it’s God’s word? Do you really believe you’re called to preach? Do you really believe your truth is vital? So that’s part of it.

What would you change about your study habits if you had to go back and do it again as a 20 year old man?

I don’t want to be full of hubris in saying this, but I was a youth pastor for 10 years. That was during the decade of the 1960s. I remember Robin William’s great line about the 1960s: “If you remember the sixties, you weren’t there.” Actually, I was there. He actually stole it from George Carlin. I remember it because I was doing ministry during the 1960s and I was a youth pastor for 10 years. I wore sandals, bell bottoms, and sat on the floor with a rabbit skin covered bible, tie-dyed shirt, long sideburns, and I taught the Bible. But I always was serious about the word of God. I would have 15 hours for my Wednesday night Bible study with my high schoolers sitting on the floor with 100 high school kids. I remember a year just teaching the word of God where every week somebody got saved during the 1960s. Sometimes I think that was the most fruitful time of my ministry. I’ve always been committed to God’s word no matter what I was doing. So it was 10 years as a youth pastor, five years founding church in the last 17, and now into 18 years at college. Church has always been my priority. So keep it as a priority and don’t fold to people around you telling you that preaching God’s word is passé. I haven’t found it passé. I haven’t haven’t found the pews empty. I found the pews filling up.

If you’re emphasizing reading the English Bible and not mastering Hebrew and Greek and reading in those languages, could that not function in the same way as reading commentaries first?

I’ll just be perfectly candid with you. I can read the Greek Testament fairly well, although I oftentimes feel pretty humbled by Luke. I have to have tools with the Old Testament, but I taught Greek in seminary, so I can read it fairly well. But when you’re talking about the whole English Bible, I think that probably if you’re talking the vast majority of people out here, most people don’t have the capability to get comfortable enough to be like Luther who basically had the whole Bible memorized in the Vulgate and the New Testament pretty much memorized in the Greek. You’re talking about an immense mind. So I think it has to do with intellectual capacities. And what I am saying is that God has raised up great preachers who haven’t had that technical expertise, but they have been people of the book.

I don’t know about Lloyd Jones in what all he knew, but I’m saying that that really is the key. I have a saying, you cannot be profoundly influenced by that which you do not know. If you don’t know the Bible, you can’t be influenced by it. Now, if you aren’t full of Scripture, ethics are not going to be influenced by it. So I would say on that level, however it can be done, it needs to be done. And it’d be a wonderful thing to be able to just carry your Greek and your Hebrew, like S. Lewis Johnson and some people do. One more.

In many of our evangelical churches, there is a concern for an emphasis on evangelism in the Sunday morning service. Would you say something about the concern for evangelism and teaching and how you try to bring them together?

Well, I believe that preaching God’s word is evangelism. It’s always more radical and more penetrating in its exactness than virtually anything we can dream up. And so if you’re going through, for instance, Luke, as I am now, time after time after time, what becomes obvious is that it is only possible for regenerated people. And so I’m constantly making those appeals. Those appeals don’t end up in the commentaries necessarily that you read, but I always have elders and wives upfront ready to deal with people. Probably every other Sunday I offer an invitation to come forward for prayer and be involved. I see it as just an ongoing work of the pulpit and the church. That’s the way it works for me.

I had a pastor tell me he couldn’t preach without the use of a computer. Could you give your thoughts regarding the use of computers in preaching?

Well, I wish it fit into my mind better. I just bought about a year ago a beautiful Toshiba laptop with everything on it. I hadn’t typed up to that time. Everything’s been written by longhand. In fact, I’ve been to the doctor many times because my right thumb is twice as big as my left thumb, and I have problems with it. So I can’t really answer that except to say if I actually am working on it, if I can get computer literate and get the typing fast enough, I’m going to be doing myself a great favor. But I’m sure many of you can answer that.

What do you do when you read a commentary, or multiple, and disagree with what they are saying?

Well, the commentary I mentioned by David Gooding is clear that he has read Luke for himself. He’s divided Luke for himself. And you’ll see oftentimes he’s at variance with the critical commentators. I think David Gooding is right, quite often. You have to understand that, especially if it’s come out of highly trained technical study, oftentimes it is just a matter of commentators reading every article that’s been written, synthesizing it, arguing with them, and giving an answer, which is respectable within the academic community. And it really isn’t necessarily right there in the text.

So you ought to have the confidence to say what John was saying last night: “It isn’t there. It doesn’t fly. It’s not there even though they say it’s there.” But you need to have the humility to be corrected too, which is, I get my outline. I think I’ve got it figured out, and I read a couple things and say, “No, I don’t think I really did understand what the theme of that passage was.” And that often happens to me. But the great thing is to think for yourself.