Preaching as a Means of Grace (3)

The point: Be prepared to throw the whole of your humanity into listening to the sermon, or you mock God and your prayers.

Just as a preacher labors intensely after praying for God's help, hearers must labor in listening, otherwise they mock their prayers for blessing.

Whereunto I labor also, striving according to his working, which worketh in me. Now let us again pause and ask the blessing of God upon preacher and hearer alike. And just as the preacher, having prayed for God's help, does not lean back on the pulpit and hope something edifying will come out, but throws all of his faculties into the labor of preaching, you must do the same in listening. You mock your prayers if you lean back.

1:53 - 2:35 Read in full sermon

In this part of the sermon: He expounds Acts 13:1-3, showing how God prepared the church at Antioch for its missionary thrust by furnishing it with prophets and teachers, emphasizing that deep roots in…

The description of the Antioch church (prophets and teachers, praying and fasting) might seem like a 'letdown' compared to spectacular events, but it illustrates God's ordinary means of preparing a church for great responsibility.

Now, does it strike you as rather strange that in describing the church that is going to be this base of an entirely new dimension of the forward movement of the gospel, there is nothing spectacular set before us. We are not told anything about this church, experiencing a fresh outpouring of the Spirit, and miracles happening, and people being raised from the dead, and speaking in tongues, and walking over the ceilings, and nothing of the sort. As it were, the curtain is pulled back, and there we see a church that God is going to use as the launching pad to take the gospel out into the Roman E...

17:54 - 19:04 Read in full sermon

In this part of the sermon: Martin concludes the apostolic examples with Acts 28:30-31, portraying Paul's continued bold preaching and teaching under house arrest in Rome, likening it to a grand musical…

The way the book of Acts closes with Paul preaching and teaching is compared to a brilliant composer ending a concerto with a mighty crescendo, leaving the sound of 'preaching' ringing in the listener's ears.

because you'll get so distracted you won't listen to the rest of the sermon at least if you're susceptible to music as I am I can hear right now the strains of the particular composition I'm thinking about and everything is building in that last movement to that final crescendo where all of the percussionists the timpani are whomping away and the drums and the cornets are blaring and the trumpets blaring and the trombones with their unique raspy sounds and the stringed instruments are about to pop all their strings in this mighty triple forte and then it stops with the conductor's wave of his ...

50:22 - 51:50 Read in full sermon

The point: Never allow anything at any time for any reason to rival or replace the centrality of teaching and preaching the word of God in our stated meetings of the Lord's day.

The intentional architectural design of the church building (compression ring, pulpit planes, narrow platform, no baptistry) is used as a concrete example of how the centrality of preaching influenced its very structure.

we must never never allow anything at any time for any reason to rival or replace the centrality of the teaching and preaching of the word of God in our stated meetings of the Lord's day in our stated meetings of the Lord's day I am not saying that the occasional missionary report in the adult class a missionary by office a missionary biography the testimony of an elder is irregular and out of place and sin no I am not saying if national calamity came and we gave ourselves to a day of prayer and fasting on a given Lord's day that that would be sin I am not saying that what I am saying is this ...

56:11 - 57:38 Read in full sermon

The point: It must be evident that you, the professed people of God, are profiting from this God-ordained means of grace.

The Israelites complaining about manna, even though it was perfectly nutritious, is used to illustrate how believers who do not profit from the Word of God exhibit 'spiritual scurvy' (unmortified sin), creating skepticism about preaching.

it must be evident that you the professed people of God are profiting from this God ordained means of grace if we would maintain the centrality of the preaching and teaching of the word of God it must be evident that you the professed people of God are profiting from this God ordained means of grace in my preparation my mind went back to that whole incident several times repeated in the Old Testament the people of God who are being fed with the bread of God out of heaven called manna they grew rested and said we're tired of this and the onions and the cucumbers of Egypt and they said we want f...

66:26 - 67:54 Read in full sermon