Three Practical Gleanings

Driving home: Suffering for the sake of Christ is an inevitable and an indispensable aspect of authentic Christian experience. If you are the real thing in Christ, sooner or later you will suffer for Christ.

Martin describes his frustration as a preacher when visitors are present for an installment of a sermon series, feeling he cannot do justice to the current message without re-laying the foundation of previous installments. This illustrates the challenge of sequential exposition and the desire for listeners to grasp the full context.

and seeing visitors who have not been with us for the previous expositions and everything in me wants to say. We come to installment four in our study of these passages and it's void if we don't have the foundation of the previous three. And we are delighted to have visitors with us for installment number four, but when, as a preacher, you feel the pressure of the Word of God coming to us in its own units of thought and its own connectives of thought, it's very, very frustrating to feel that one is not doing justice to installment number four without going back and laying down the truths of th...

1:59 - 2:46 Read in full sermon

The point: Look at this composite picture of a healthy, growing Christian and ask, is there much similarity between this composite picture and you?

Martin uses the analogy of police creating a composite picture of a criminal from witness descriptions. This helps listeners understand the concept of a 'composite picture' of a healthy Christian, made up of various features described in the text, and encourages them to compare their own lives to this ideal.

Have you heard the terminology before? you hear that a certain crime has been committed, and the police are going to try to find if there are any witnesses, and they find two or three people who saw the perpetrator. And so they take them down to the police station, and they have a resident artist who has a special ability in this area or has knowledge of the stuff that I imagine much of it's done with computers now, and they try to put together the various features that will in some way resemble the perpetrator as seen by the witnesses. We'll start with the face.

26:38 - 27:16 Read in full sermon

Driving home: You ought to be as competent a theologian as grace and pains and the stewardship of all your other responsibilities will allow you to become.

Martin quotes an extended passage from Lillie's commentary on 1 Peter, which expounds on the nature, ground, object, and influences of Christian hope. This quotation provides a rich, detailed explanation of what a believer should be ready to articulate when giving a reasoned defense of their faith.

Among all the commentators that I consulted in preparation for these studies in this section, nothing moved me more with respect to this very issue than this paragraph from the commentary on 1 Peter by a man named Lily, L-I-L-L-I-E. He has the phrase, the hope that is in you, and now he's going to expound it, its nature, its ground, its object, and its influences. Tell another how you too, like those around you, were until now living without hope in the world, with no hope toward God, no hope for a dying hour, no hope for eternity. then speak to others of our God and Savior

35:15 - 36:01 Read in full sermon

The point: If you're really serious about becoming a healthy, useful Christian, then you've got to start making acquisitions of the stuff of the Bible.

Martin shares his personal story of being absorbed with sports as a teenager and making a vow to abstain from organized sports after his conversion to break his idolatrous attachment. This illustrates the seriousness of spiritual commitment and the need to prioritize biblical knowledge over worldly interests, especially for young people.

I remember as a young believer, having been absorbed with an idolatrous attachment to sports through many of the formative years of the early teenage years, and then God saved me as a senior in high school. And I can remember with nobody telling me to do it, making an internal vow for at least a year that I would take no part in organized sports till I could get myself off my addiction to sports.

43:46 - 44:14 Read in full sermon

The point: When opportunities are given to live before people for a time, prior to a judicious opportunity to bear verbal witness, our lives should be constantly preparing the ears of those who watch us to receive our witness as cr…

Martin gives an example of a 'Jesus freak' whose verbal witness is undermined by his inconsistent behavior (ogling a woman in the office). This vividly illustrates how a lack of agreement between life and lip can cause the enemies of God to blaspheme and destroy a Christian's credibility.

Ah, another one of those Jesus freaks. He talks, he hands out his tracks, but I saw him there. I saw his eyeballs when that shaped dame walked down the aisle in the office. He was looking right where the rest of us were looking.

57:18 - 57:33 Read in full sermon