Matthew 23:1-12
Idolizing the Ministers of the Word
Pastor Martin completes his treatment of the corporate implications of Christ's prophetic office by warning against the opposite error from undervaluing the ministry: idolizing the ministers themselves. He uses Matthew 23, the noble Bereans of Acts 17, and Paul's command not to become bondslaves of men to plead that God's people honor the ministry of the Word without ever surrendering the right of private judgment under Scripture. The sermon urges critical, Berean-like listening that holds fast only to what is genuinely from God, lest lazy hearers be led into the tyranny that always follows uncritical attachment to human teachers.
Primary Texts
Topics
Outline 10 sections · 45 min
- Review and Introduction to the Second Danger 0:00
- Matthew 15: Blind Guides Leading the Blind 5:22
- Matthew 23: Call No Man Rabbi, Father, Master 10:51
- The Bereans: A Model of Noble Hearing 15:39
- The Right of Private Judgment Under Scripture 20:54
- Pastoral Plea Against the Cult of the Pulpit 25:11
- How Lazy Listening Becomes Tyranny 29:20
- Christ Alone Is Lord of the Conscience 34:37
- Modern Examples of Tradition Without Warrant 38:34
- Closing Plea and Prayer 41:43
Key Quotes
“No true servant of Christ desires to have as his listeners people who are uncritical, superstitious, and undiscerning in the way in which they listen to him.”
“It is not enough to receive Scriptural truth. It must be received because it is the Scripture.”
“I would like to coin the term, the responsibility of maintaining individual conscience before Christ.”
“Don't be a lazy listener. Don't be an uncritical listener. Gird up the loins of your mind.”
“People will sign church covenants and commit themselves to patterns of life that have all kinds of rules and regulations for which the Word of God has not an ounce of direct warrant.”
Applications
All listeners
- Love and honor your teachers, but allow no man — no matter how proven — to become rabbi, father, or master whose word rivals Scripture in your conscience.
- Imitate the Berean combination of teachability and spiritual criticalness: receive the word with readiness of mind while searching the Scriptures daily to test every sermon.
- Even as you love trusted pastors and esteem them highly in love for their work's sake, actively resist the slow drift toward making them into idols.
- Believe nothing, receive nothing, until you see it with your own eyes in the Scriptures — no matter how beloved the preacher who tells you so.
- Refuse to become a bondslave of any man's rules or doctrines — but gladly bow as Christ's bondslave to every word that drops from His lips in Scripture.
- Be wary of popular evangelical doctrines (such as taking Christ as Savior but not as Lord) that have no real biblical substance and persist only because people have stopped testing preachers' words.
A full transcript is available on the tab. 104 paragraphs, roughly 45 minutes.
Review and Introduction to the Second Danger
Our study in the Word of God tonight will, in reality, be the last one-third of this morning's sermon. I mentioned, you will remember if you were here, that I had hoped to bring two points of application, namely the great danger of undervaluing the ministry of the Word of God and thereby undercutting the prophetic rights of Christ in his church, and then to speak of overvaluing or idolizing the ministry or ministers of the word, and thereby also militating against the proper expression of the prophetic office of Christ in his church.
And since the vast majority of you were here this morning, I will not bore you nor insult your intelligence with a lengthy review, but there are a few of you here this evening who were not here this morning, and for your sakes I will take just about two to three minutes to try to capsulize where we are as we come to the last third of this morning's sermon. We are considering together under the broad heading of the salvation we receive and proclaim, the central figure in that salvation who is obviously the Lord Jesus Christ. And having examined many of the pivotal portions in the Word of God with respect to the mystery of His person,
He who is truly God, truly man, one person in two natures forever, we have for a number of Lord's days been concentrating upon those portions of the Word of God which direct our attention to this same person, not so much in the mystery of what he is or who he is, but in the majesty of the offices within which he functions as our Redeemer. And we have seen that the Scriptures set him forth as a priest, as a prophet, and as a king. And we are drawing to a close our studies concerning the prophetic office of Christ, having opened up many portions of the Word of God which give to us some of the broad outlines
of what it means for Christ to be a prophet that he is indeed a prophet how he functions as a prophet we have been concerned for several Lord's days with answering the question so what? Christ is a prophet so what? and we directed the answers of the Word of God to that question which impinge upon us particularly as individuals. And now for two Lord's days, what it means for us as the people of God to acknowledge Christ as our prophet, that is, the corporate implications of the prophetic office of Christ. We touched upon the broad area of what it says concerning the great issue of authority in the church. By what authority shall the consciences of the people of God be bound? Well, if we have a
proper understanding of the prophetic office of Christ, we as the people of God will refuse to have our consciences bound by any authority other than that of Jesus Christ speaking in the Holy Scriptures. And then today we began to address ourselves to the second broad area of corporate implication, namely the ministry of the Word. What is the precise relationship between Christ as the great prophet of his church and the standing ministry of the Word of God. And what we did this morning was to demonstrate from the Scriptures that the ministry of the Word of God through recognized gifts of Christ to the church is in reality an extension of the prophetic ministry of Jesus Christ.
When he speaks through his appointed servants, it is he who truly speaks. And therefore, we must beware of undervaluing the ministry of the word. It is Christ as our great prophet with whom we have to do when we come to the exposition and application of the scriptures. Well, so much for that brief review.
Now I address your attention tonight, or would direct your attention tonight, to this second great danger with respect to this matter of Christ's prophetic office in the church. There is not only the danger of undervaluing the prophetic office of Christ as we undervalue the ministry of the Word, but being victims of extremes, there is always the danger of idolizing or overvaluing the ministry and in particular the ministers of the Word of God. It is a sad fact that the human heart is all too prone to gullibility and to undiscerning naivety with regard to religious teachers.
Matthew 15: Blind Guides Leading the Blind
You pick up your Old Testament and again and again you find that people who should have known better were constantly following the teaching of false prophets. It became such a terrible situation in Jeremiah's day that he had to lament in the words of Jeremiah chapter 6, The prophets prophesy falsely, and my people love to have it so. When we come into the New Testament, we find our Lord using some of the strongest language anywhere in Scripture, when with reference to the religious teachers of his day, the scribes and Pharisees, he said in Matthew 15 and verse 14, these very sharp, these very scathing words.
Matthew 15 and verse 14. Let them alone. They are blind guides. And if the blind guide the blind, both shall fall into a pit.
I wonder if we've ever allowed the force of that figure to come home to us. Picture a poor blind man groping his way very cautiously in an area where he's not familiar with the topography and the geography and all of the dangers and obstacles until finally he freezes in total fear and he begins to cry out, I'm blind, I'm blind, will someone help guide me? I've been told there are ditches and pits and dangers and I dare not move another moment, another foot. And in response to that voice comes a voice saying, I'll help you, stick out your hand.
And so the poor blind man sticks out his hand until he feels another hand grasp it. And he sighs a sigh of relief and he relaxes. And the voice that's attached to that hand says, follow me. And so with no fears now, all of the tension gone, he yields to the pressure of that hand on his And after a few steps, suddenly he finds himself plunging down the side of a rough precipice and at the bottom of a deep ditch, bruised and bleeding.
He says, Sir, what happened? Why did you lead me this way? And the voice answers, says, Well, I forgot to tell you. I'm blind too.
Now that's exactly the figure our Lord uses here. Exactly. and you see it was these blind Pharisees religious leaders who dared to go around and say to people we will be your guides take our hand and Jesus said whenever you put your hand in the hand of such a religious leader and allow him to direct your thoughts both of you will fall into the ditch of error and feel the bruises that come to those who fall in that ditch now I say this matter of gullibility This undiscerning naivety with regard to following religious teachers has always plagued people wherever religious teachers have been found, even in a context where Christ was exercising His rights and His office as prophet.
For remember, it was Christ who spoke through the Old Testament prophets. It was Christ Himself speaking in the days of His flesh when He said, Everywhere there are these blind guides who because they have a turned collar and a reverend in front of their name, people are willing to follow them in this undiscerning manner. And so I would admonish you as the people of God, while holding tenaciously to everything that was established from the Scriptures this morning, that we as God's people have the highest view of the ministry of the Word as a standing office expressing the prophetic rights of Jesus Christ in His church, that we beware of the sin of idolizing the ministry of the Word of God.
Every true servant of Christ is painfully conscious of the frightening possibility that he may, in the name of Christ, lead people into error. He is a man. And there are tendencies to imbalance, tendencies to prejudice, to overstatement or understatement. Therefore, no true Christian minister desires to have as his listeners people who are uncritical, superstitious, and undiscerning in the way in which they listen to him.
Now, there are many false ministers who not only delight in that kind of a hearing, they force such a response, they manipulate people into such a response, but no true servant of Christ will ever desire to have it.
This attitude of an uncritical, superstitious, I don't know what else to call it, that idolatrous attachment to anyone who stands in the official role of a teacher of the Word of God is explicitly forbidden by our Lord in a passage such as Matthew 23. And I want you to turn there for a few moments. Matthew chapter 23.
Matthew 23: Call No Man Rabbi, Father, Master
In this passage, as most of you know, our Lord is condemning, in very sharp language, these false religious teachers the scribes and the Pharisees So the overall thrust of the passage is a condemnation of these people and then a warning against following their example But in the midst of warning his own disciples about their example for he was speaking to his disciples verse 1, then spake Jesus to the multitudes and to his disciples, he also tells them that they are not to be like the poor dupes who follow the scribes and Pharisees. So you have as the dominant note of condemnation a condemnation of the scribes and Pharisees, a warning concerning imitating them as false leaders, but then the second note or the sub-dominant note is a warning not to be like the poor dupes who follow them.
And that warning comes in verse 8.
Be not ye called rabbi. Don't allow people to elevate you to a status of an authoritative teacher and then watch them render to you this superstitious, this uncritical allegiance to whatever you say. Be not ye called rabbi, for one is your teacher, and ye are brethren. You see what he's saying? When it comes to discerning the truth, God has appointed no human instrument as the infallible deposit of that truth, so that we with undiscerning, uncritical minds call such a one rabbi and unthinkingly swallow everything he says.
Nor should we ever assume that posture as teachers. Verse 8, verse 9, And call no man your father. Now that does not mean that if you're a son, you're not to point to a man and say, That's my dad, that's my father. It does not mean that we are forbidden to say, That man is my spiritual father.
The rest of the scriptures condemn such a wooden interpretation. What our Lord is attacking, again, is this mentality, where people would attach themselves to these religious leaders and call them father. You had the sons of the prophets. And you remember that one of the ways in which the sons of the prophets would address the older, more established prophet was by the term father.
You remember Elisha called Elijah by that term. My father, the chariots of Israel and the horsemen thereof. My father. And that was a legitimate term of respect.
a title which bespoke something of the dignity of the older prophet's office. What our Lord is condemning is not the proper use of father as a title of honor. But notice, he says, Call no man your father on the earth, for one is your father, he who is in heaven. That is, you are to yield no allegiance to any person, no matter how esteemed and elevated in his office, that will rival the rights of your heavenly Father who has made conscience and who alone is Lord of the conscience.
We read on, verse 10. Neither be ye called masters, absolute lords, for one is your master, even the Christ. Allow no one to give to you that place that would rival the rights of the Christ, the anointed one who alone is the absolute prophet to whom the conscience is to be bound. So when I admonish you as a people, as part of the implications of the prophetic office of Christ, on the one hand admonishing you, do not undervalue the office of the ministry of the Word of God.
Do not undervalue it. I must balance that admonition with equal force and say, do not idolize the ministry of the Word of the living God. Do not allow any man to become rabbi, father, or master in such a sense as to give up that consciousness that you stand as an individual before Christ and Christ alone accountable to Him. for that which you embrace as truth.
The Bereans: A Model of Noble Hearing
Now the only safe attitude to assume in contrast to this idolizing attitude is that attitude described so beautifully in the 17th chapter of Acts. You've heard this text quoted before, and you'll hear it again and again and again and again, because it is one of the most pivotal passages in all of the Word of God touching this very issue. Luke, in writing his account of the missionary endeavors of Paul and his companions, says in verse 10 of Acts 17, The brethren immediately sent away Paul and Silas by night unto Berea, who, when they were come thither, went into the synagogue of the Jews.
Now these, that is, those who were there in the synagogue, to whom the apostle and his companions spoke, these were more noble than those in Thessalonica, in that they received the word with all readiness of mind, examining the scriptures daily, whether these things were so. Now, who came to preach to them? Well, an apostle did. An apostle who received his commission directly from heaven.
An apostle who had a peculiar office of authority and inspiration. And yet an apostle was not wrenched loose from the categories of Holy Scripture. It would be built upon. It would advance from.
But it would never be in contradiction to. Hence Paul can say in Romans 1, Paul, a bond slave of Jesus Christ and an apostle, separated unto the gospel of God, which he promised be seed of David according to the flesh, and on he goes. But at the outset he establishes that his gospel rests squarely down upon the Old Testament Scriptures. So then, though an apostle is speaking, we read that the spiritual nobility of the Thessalonians, I'm sorry, of the Bereans, was manifested in that they received the word, not with a jaundiced eye, saying, here, who does he think he is standing up there preaching like he knows something?
Who in the world is he? I know as much as he does. I've got a Bible just like he does. No, no.
When Paul stood to preach, They recognized in Him a sent one. They recognized one who spoke in the name of God. And so they received the Word with readiness of mind. There was an attitude of teachableness, an attitude of submission to the authority of the Word.
But then the Scripture says, combined with that readiness of mind was this spiritual criticalness of mind, examining the Scriptures daily whether these things were so. Any man who examined the Scriptures to see whether what Paul said was true to the book came to one conclusion. He is indeed giving us 16 ounces to the pound of divine truth. I must quote the comments on this passage given to us by Lenski, to whom I referred this morning, because I believe they would be helpful to you as God's people.
The attitude of heart described in these words is the mark of spiritual nobility. The Bereans did not know it, but they've occupied a shining place in the New Testament scriptures for nearly 2,000 years. This is exactly what Paul and Silas desired, to have them examine, truly examine the scriptures. That examination properly made could result in only one verdict.
These things are so. And that implied faith, intelligent faith. Now notice this next statement. It's critical.
That statement implied faith, intelligent faith, that rested on the one true ground of faith, the Scriptures. It is not enough to receive Scriptural truth. It must be received because it is the Scripture. That gives that truth to us.
You see the difference? Some people have received scriptural truth, but they've received it only because of a vague notion that scriptural truth ought to be received. But the main reason they received it is their confidence in the instrument who brought it to them. Not these people.
They had great confidence and respect for the apostle. They were more noble than the Thessalonians who said, Who's this babbler? Let's run him out of town. So he could only last three weeks there.
He'd just been run out of town. They had this attitude of unbelief, this hypercritical spirit that was not sensitive to the Word nor to the servants whom Christ had sent. But not so these Bereans. They received the messengers of God, received the message of God with readiness of mind, but they would not, as it were, rest their faith upon any human testimony until it was verified with their own eyes as they beheld it in the Scriptures.
The Right of Private Judgment Under Scripture
Lentzic is on to say, here we have an excellent example of the right of private judgment, which is part of the royal priesthood of believers. Each man is to have direct access to the Scripture and is to see and judge for his own person and conscience. Although Paul was an apostle, his preaching had to be tested by the Scriptures Because he was an apostle, he asked for this. He demanded it.
As an apostle, his whole preaching automatically rested on the Scriptures. But we dare not misunderstand this divine right granted to every man to go to the Scripture in person. It does not mean that you and I have the right to interpret the Scriptures as we please. Your right and my right is to see and find the one divine truth which the Spirit placed into the Scriptures.
This and this alone is in them. If you claim to find anything else, you have not done so at all. You have fooled yourself or have let others fool you. Remember what Peter said, the ignorant and the unstable twist the Scriptures to their own destruction.
Now you see, some have abused this principle and said, Aha! I don't need to listen to anybody. I've got the Bible. I've got the Holy Ghost.
And they can come up with a ton of foolishness in the name of the right of private judgment. The point that Lenski makes is no. You come up with something novel that the Holy Ghost has not shown His people who bowed humbly over that quip through the centuries You come up with something that is spun out of the remaining corruption of your own mind and of your own heart The scriptures are clear, perfectly adequate to present this one truth to every man. Those who deviate from that one truth, no matter how, can do so only by making the word mean what it never meant.
and they and they alone are to blame for such deviation. A great, glorious right indeed, that is the right of individual judgment, but one that is combined with an equally great and serious responsibility. Do not misconceive the right, but also do not treat the responsibility lightly. Rather than the term the right of private judgment, which in our day has negative and bad connotations, I would like to coin the term the responsibility of maintaining individual conscience before Christ.
That's what we're talking about. So that no matter who stands to minister the word, I allow no human instrument to stand between me and my Lord, and His rights to bind my conscience only to that which I am convinced is indeed His truth.
I believe this is essentially what the Apostle is saying to the Thessalonians in 1 Thessalonians 5 and verse 21. It comes in the context of admonitions having to do with verbal utterances of the Spirit. Verse 19, quench not the Spirit. Despise not prophesying.
Don't despise them. Have a heart that is open and sensitive to that which God would say through those who in that epoch of the church had the gift of prophecy. Don't despise them. Don't look down upon them.
Receive them with a ready mind. But prove all things. Put everything to the test. Hold fast that which is good.
He doesn't say hold fast all things. He says prove all things. Hold fast only that which is good. Now having I trust sufficiently demonstrated from the Scriptures what I mean when I speak of the great danger of idolizing the ministry of the Word and thereby undercutting the free exercise of Christ's prophetic rights, I want now to bring the pastoral exhortation to you as the people of God here at Trinity.
Pastoral Plea Against the Cult of the Pulpit
And I want to bring it in the form of a plea that you as God's people resist with all your spiritual vigor the tendency to idolize the ministry of the Word of God. and that tendency will become more and more real the more God is pleased to bless this assembly with true ministers of the word men who earn our confidence both by their manner of life and by being trusted guides in the scriptures and if any of us who minister to you prove to be such then do what the scripture says love us Esteem us highly in love for our work's sake. Do that, yes.
Honor us in the areas that honor is due. But don't ever make idols of us and allow us to become lords of your conscience.
And I say that danger becomes an increasing danger the longer true servants of Christ labor amongst the people. For the bonds of mutual affection and trust and esteem deepen and are strengthened and thickened with the passing of the years until very imperceptibly, because someone has proven to be a true guide to us over this much of the road, we begin to relax in that kind of spiritual criticalness of mind that proves all things, that does not receive anything upon the testimony of Pastor Fisher, or Pastor Martin, or Pastor anybody, but that refuses to receive anything upon any testimony but the Word of God.
And I know not what else to do but to plead with you, lest there be an abuse of the love that is legitimate, that we know and experience to each other. The esteem and appreciation that we have. Nurture those things. Let us plead that they never be ruptured or fractured.
But oh, let us plead that they may be delivered, ever delivered and sanctified by the burning, purifying influence of the Spirit. Lest the subtle form of idolatry take residence in our hearts. One of the classic examples of how this happens is in the whole history of the nation of Israel. Some of you will remember the incidents in the Old Testament history when poor Moses was running himself ragged, trying to run the whole show himself.
And his father-in-law came along and said, look, Moses, you're going to go to your grave before you're 60. You need some help. You're having to settle all these cases. And so they set up a way whereby the little cases where the word of God needed to be brought to bear upon given circumstances could be handled by men of lesser importance and authority.
and then the thorny cases would be brought to Moses. Well, out of that, as best we can trace the history of it, came a body of interpreters of the law in Israel. Now, their original function was to be the instruments of God to take the prophetic word that came to Moses, came from God to Moses or to the people through Moses, and to apply it to the people. But you know what happened?
More and more they assumed a place of authority in the eyes of the people, so that in our Lord's day, their word was actually of greater authority in the minds and hearts of people than the word of God itself. So Jesus had to say, you hypocrites, you make void the word of God by the tradition. You keep the tradition of the elders. Well, where did they ever come to that place where people would give up their consciences to men, and it didn't bother them that they were violating the Word of God.
Well, it was that gradual process, you see. And we're no different. There is no new thing under the sun. No temptation taken us, but such as is common to man.
How Lazy Listening Becomes Tyranny
And it would be a tragedy if with the passing of the years, those of us who have been set amongst you to lead you to the Word of God, to open unto you the Word of God, to apply to your consciences the Word of God, it would be a tragedy indeed. if very gradually and very subtly our word began to have first of all an equal authority and then even a supreme authority over the word of God. That's why I admonish you continually to beware of mental laziness. To fight it as, as it were, the first seeds of spiritual bondage.
Don't be a lazy listener. Don't be an uncritical listener. Gird up the loins of your mind. And whenever the Word is being expounded and you're being led into its precepts and principles, pray that God would give you a fresh measure of the Spirit's grace and power.
That's touching a little bit on the subsequent exhortation and exposition. The inward ministry of Christ, the prophet by the Spirit. But I must inject it here. for God has said, Cursed be he that trusteth in man and maketh flesh his arm.
And one of the fruits of a man trusting, man worshiping spirit in terms of the ministry is God gives people up to a lack of discernment.
You've often heard me say, Don't believe anything unless you see it with your own eyes in Scripture. Well, I'll say it again and I'll continue to say it when I'm old and gray. If God lets me get old and gray and my voice can no longer thunder but only squeak. You'll hear it again.
Believe nothing. Receive nothing. Unless you see it with your own eyes in the scriptures. Why?
I don't want you to be cursed with an idolizing of the ministry of the word of God. For the price you will pay is precisely the price these poor people paid in Israel in the days of our Lord. Spiritual tyranny. Spiritual tyranny.
Look at Matthew 23 and verse 4 in that passage to which we referred earlier. Look at the tyranny. These leaders, they bind heavy burdens and grievous to be born and lay them upon men's shoulders. You get the picture?
Here these teachers have set up rules and regulations that God never gave through Moses. And yet the people come to them and say, Master, Rabbi, Teacher, what should we do to please God? And now they gave out their man-made rules. You know what these foolish people did?
They bent their backs and said, lay them on us. Lay them on us. And so they heaped bird and upon bird and upon their back until you have the picture of these poor souls staggering with this great weight, not of the easy yoke of discipleship to the one who said, Come unto me all that labor and are heavy laden. I will give you rest.
Take my yoke upon you. No, no. They were staggering under the weight of man-made commandments. Why in God's name did they let these false teachers tie those weights on their back?
Why? Because they had given up this matter that I have called the responsibility of individual conscience before God. They had their rabbis. They had their masters.
They had their teachers. They had those whom they called Father.
You see the fruit of their laziness? It resulted in tyranny.
And my friends, that tyranny is going on in the visible church of Christ to this day. And you don't need to go to the church of Rome to see it. You see it in evangelical churches. Poor saints strapped with all kinds of rules and regulations that have nothing to do with the Word of God People will sign church covenants and commit themselves to patterns of life that have all kinds of rules and regulations for which the Word of God has not an ounce of direct.
And they bind their consciences to those things.
Why? because they're too lazy to come critically to the Word of God and listen critically to the ministers who speak in the name of God. The text that came so forcefully to my mind as I was preparing for this exhortation tonight, two texts, one in 1 Corinthians chapter 7 and verse 23, where the apostle, speaking of a specific matter, does as he often does. He enunciates a principle that in its application is much broader than the immediate context.
Christ Alone Is Lord of the Conscience
The immediate context is he's exhorting people to abide in the calling in life in which they were effectually called into a state of grace. So he's telling single people, if you're single, serve God single. Married, serve Him married. If you're a slave, serve him as a slave.
If you're free, serve him as free. And then he's going to underscore what lies beneath these exhortations. And there he announces a principle that utterly breaks over the boundaries of the immediate context. 1 Corinthians 7.23 Ye were bought with a price.
Become not dumb slaves of men. One of the most precious truths that can ever grip the heart of a Christian is that I was purchased out of the slave market of sin to be the bond slave of one master and one alone, Jesus Christ. He paid the whole price and the whole purchase is His. He says, don't you let anyone be guilty of man stealing.
Don't let any man exercise those rights of sovereignty over you that Christ, your only master, ought to exercise over you. That's a wonderful thing, to know that you're Christ's free man. He's slave, yet he's free man. And that's all bound up in that passage.
You've been bought with a price. Become not bond slaves of men. Any man that would seek to bring you in bondage to his own rules, to his own notions, to his own doctrines, you say, No, you're not my master. I'm free from you.
But every word that drops from the lips of our prophet, we say I'm your bondslave. Lord Jesus I receive it as true. By your grace I will bow to it as law. Christ bondslave.
Christ's free man. The same emphasis comes through in John 8. This was the other text that came so forcefully to my own mind in thinking of this. John 8 verses 31 and 32.
Jesus therefore said to those Jews that had believed him If ye abide in my word Then are ye truly my disciples And what will be the result? And ye shall know the truth And the truth shall make you free If ye abide in my word The implication is No other word should bind you No other word should be that to which you subject mind and heart and affections upon which you pin your hopes. And abiding in my word, he says, you shall be free. And so I exhort you as the people of God in this assembly,
as earnestly as you've been exhorted to have a proper view of the ministry of the word, to come reverently and appreciatively to the stated opening up of the scriptures by the proven servants of Christ and to know that you're having dealings with Christ Himself in His Word. So I admonish you, do not idolize or overvalue. You're still in the presence of fallible, imperfectly sanctified men. And the price you will pay for giving up your conscience to any man is spiritual tyranny.
Don't give it up to any man. But you say, Pastor, won't that mean that some people here will abuse that? And they'll go off and say, I don't need to believe that. Pastor said that's what it says, but I know it.
Listen, anyone like that will eventually show himself to be what he is. A headstrong, ignorant, unprincipled, unspiritual man or woman.
Modern Examples of Tradition Without Warrant
His folly will come to light. Just give it enough time, it'll come to light. You see, if someone takes God's choicest truths and concocts them into poison, that's their problem, not God's. It's the ignorant and the unstable that will twist the Scriptures.
And there will no doubt be someone here who will twist what is said tonight. And you will find not fuel for a sanctified, critical mind. You will find in the sermon not fuel for a wholesome, spiritual proving of all things. you will actually find fuel to feed a carnal, unsanctified spirit of rebellion to constituted authority.
You'll find fuel to feed your own pride if you can understand what you define as good as anyone else.
It's what dear Pastor Clark called once the arrogance of ignorance. And I have no doubt that I'm feeding some who will manifest the arrogance of ignorance. But that's alright. That's not my problem.
if you turn the wholesome food into poison. But I would not allow the possible misuse of this principle to silence my own mouth. But out of what I trust is genuine pastoral concern, I admonish you as the people of God to have this attitude that we've described. If time permitted, and I have some thoughts here in the application that we could draw out, but I think I'll leave them.
You just think now of all the doctrines that are held in evangelicalism today as being divine truth. For which there is hardly even a shred of evidence in the word of God. How did they become the common consensus of people who claim to believe the Bible? For instance, this whole dividing of taking Christ as Savior but not as Lord.
That you can be saved but not obedient. That you can be on your way to heaven but not pursuing holiness. Now tell me, is there really much biblical substance to work with to ever come up with a doctrine like that? Once you've taken 1 Corinthians 3, a couple of verses out of context and twist them, and you've tried to use Lot to sort of be the coverall for everything, and David falling into adultery, and Peter denying the Lord and backsliding for a few hours.
Once you've taken all of that, what have you got left? To support the horrendous notion that a man can be indwelt by the Spirit and yet willfully, perpetually dominated by sin and still go to heaven when he dies. I tell you, my friends, nobody can believe that as being truth unless he has given up all independent, critical judgments of what preachers say.
You can't believe it. There just isn't enough substance in the Bible to support such a doctrine. and yet that is held by and large by evangelicalism right across our country.
Well, you could go on with many other things, but that's the kind of thing that I'm talking about. And dear people, it can happen here. It can happen here. May God in His mercy and grace preserve us.
Closing Plea and Prayer
Preserve us in this generation and for as long as we shall exist as a church until Christ returns,
may God write upon our hearts the admonition given that we, in honoring Christ as our great prophet, do not overvalue or idolize the ministry of the Word of God. As we come to the Lord's table shortly, what a wonderful time to renew our determination that having been bought by Him, we will be his free men and women. We will come under the bondage of no human authority but being purchased by him we lovingly, willingly would have our consciences bound by his word in every area of our lives. Let us pray and ask him so to minister to us as we come to his table.
O our Father, we confess with shame that our hearts left to themselves can only lead us to sin.
But we bless you that one of the great promises of the new covenant is that you would write your law upon our hearts and thereby cause us to keep your statutes and your judgments.
And we pray, O Lord, that you will write upon our hearts as a people this sober warning that we will not be the servants of men, that we will indeed prove all things and hold fast that which is good. O God, give us that spiritual nobility of the Bereans that we may on the one hand receive the word with a ready mind, always examining the Scriptures to see if these things be so. O our Father, in mercy preserve this congregation from a sinful attachment to its teachers and preachers. Deliver this congregation, we pray, from an idolatrous regard to any human authority, any creed, any system of doctrine.
grant O Lord that we may be ever open to hear the voice of our great prophet speaking to us always in and by the scriptures of the Old and the New Testaments. O our God we earnestly plead that you would hear and answer this our prayer to the end that the glory of Christ as the only prophet of this church may be seen, that it may be evident to all who come within the pale of our fellowship that here is a people who own no authority but that of Christ, but who take that authority seriously. O God, make it increasingly so to the end that the Lord Jesus may be praised as our great prophet
as well as our only priest and our blessed King. Hear us as we come offering this our earnest plea in His name. Amen.
This transcript was generated by automated speech recognition and may contain errors. It is provided for study and reference only; the audio recording is the authoritative source.
Passages Expounded
Christ's warning against rabbi/father/master titles and idolatrous attachment to teachers
The Bereans as the model of noble, Scripture-testing hearers
Bought with a price; be not bondslaves of men
Texts Expounded
Also Referenced
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