On preaching and preachers

The latest edition of Mortification of Spin is up and running.

What role does preaching play in today's church? The Rev. Dr. Jonathan Master joins Carl Trueman and Todd Pruitt to talk about the importance and gravity of preaching. Through the book "Preaching & Preachers" by Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, they show the necessity and primacy of the proper preaching of the all-sufficient Word of God. Listen the Mortification of Spin to learn more about this imperative and perennial topic.

J.I. Packer

HT: Carl Trueman

Taking God into the pulpit...

From Carl Trueman:

This last Friday, I had the privilege of being in Vancouver to give Dr. James I. Packer an honorary doctorate and to interview him for the Westminster website. The interview will be posted on the Westminster site in the next week or two. Suffice it to say that, if I had known what answer he was to give on my question about the damaging effect of upper class English public (for US, read private) schoolboys on Anglican theology, I would have walked from Philadelphia to Vancouver in my bare feet. Nay, on my knees in the rain. I love talking to someone who shares the same basic prejudices that I do.

One other question I did ask was about Dr Lloyd-Jones. 'He took more of God into the pulpit with him than any other preacher I have ever known,' was Dr Packer's reply. One can be nostalgic about the past, but I wonder how many of this generation's archetypal, aspirational model preachers will have that said about them thirty years after their death? They were funny; they had huge churches; they took more stand up comedy into the pulpit -- or onto the stage -- than anybody else; they looked cool; they were branded and puffed by the powerful evangelical patrons as role models for the rest of us; they had great hair-does; they were so hip and young, at least until it became painfully obvious that they had passed forty many years before. I can imagine all these things being said. But that they took so much of God into the pulpit? That seems somehow less likely.

Those of us who preach need to reflect on Dr Packer's comment, repent daily of our pride and pray without ceasing that we take God, not ourselves, or Chris Rock, or our mastery of street talk or postmodernism, into the pulpit with us. A preacher should be remembered not for the numbers he once attracted or for his slick engagement with the wider culture but for whether he spoke the words of God as a man of God.

Listening to Lloyd-Jones

Great news from the Martyn Lloyd-Jones Recording Trust. It was announced at T4G that the good folks at the MLJ Recording Trust will now be making some 1,600 sermons from "the Doctor" available free of charge.

Serious Gospel Exposition

Carl Trueman writing of Martyn Lloyd-Jones:

We have leaders with a lot of swagger and `street cred’; Lloyd-Jones had gravitas and did not care to be cool. Lloyd-Jones may have been less than clear on what he wanted in 1966, but he always had complete clarity about the gospel and little time for trendy diversions. We have leaders whose politeness too often creates an atmosphere of ambiguity and uncertainty; Lloyd-Jones spoke on doctrinal issues with unerring clarity. He was obviously a serious man of conviction with a seriously convicting message. And, for the record, I would take five minutes of his serious gospel exposition over an hour of the conversational stand-up of today’s cutting-edge preachers any day.

Read the whole thing HERE.

The Doctor

For those of you who may be wondering why some of us make a big deal about Martyn Lloyd-Jones, the following video is a brief biography on "the Doctor."


If you are interested in knowing more I highly recommend the two volume biography by Iain Murray (one of my favorite biographies):
The First Forty Years
Fight of Faith

Carl Trueman on Packer and Ecumenism

The break between J.I. Packer and Martin Lloyd Jones was a sad event. They are both heros to me. They were certainly wonderful gifts from God to His church. I have spoken to Carl about the schism. As a historian and a Brit Trueman has keen insight into those events. I'm posting this in part because Carl is among the folks present at Westminster Weekend.

Incidentally, Trueman's chapter in THIS BOOK is outstanding.

Thanks to Martin Downes for posting this video and the following thoughts:

Have a listen as Carl talks about his recent essay on Packer "An English Non-Conformist Perspective" in Timothy George [ed.], J. I. Packer and the Evangelical Future. You can read some sample pages here.

I don't suppose that my following comments will make any sense unless you have watched the video clip. Perhaps they won't make any sense even if you have watched it.

I have heard Carl talk about some of these issues before, and he is surely right about the lack of a systematic theology from Packer. That said he has given to the church a remarkable written legacy. As a sixteen year old I heard Packer preach in Cardiff on the doctrine of hell. I have listened to the recording many times since then, and had no appreciation at the time of what I was listening to, or who Packer was. I must find a way to get that message from audio cassette to mp3.

I have yet to read Carl's essay and so have no idea about the connection between my comments and what he has written as they appertain to Packer and Lloyd-Jones. The break with Lloyd-Jones came in 1970 and not in 1966. Indeed this Sunday will mark the 43rd anniversary of that definitive moment in post-war British evangelicalism when Lloyd-Jones, the speaker, and John Stott, the chairman, publicly disagreed over evangelical policy on ecumenism at the Evangelical Alliance meeting.

The break between Lloyd-Jones and Packer, in 1970, came after the publication of Growing into Union. The book was written by four authors, two evangelicals and two Anglo-Catholics. But the positions advocated were representative of a common mind ("We are all four committed to every line in the book...and we are determined that no wedge be driven between us." I am referring to a footnote by Iain Murray in Lloyd-Jones: Messenger of Grace and am not able to verify what has been omitted from this sentence).

Certainly from Lloyd-Jones' standpoint the parting of the ways was due to Packer's ecumenical commitment expressed in Growing into Union. Lloyd-Jones expressed his concerns to Packer in a letter dated July 7th 1970. Referring to a discussion about the book at the monthly ministers' Fellowship (the Westminster Fellowship) Lloyd-Jones wrote:

The general opinion there, without a single voice to the contrary, was that the doctrinal position outlined in the book cannot be regarded as being evangelical, still less puritan. The three of us [the free church members of the Puritan Conference committee] therefore feel, most reluctantly, that we cannot continue to co-operate with you in the Puritan Conference. To do so would be at the least to cause great confusion in the minds of all Free Church evangelical people and indeed a number of Anglican people.

This I feel sure will not come as a surprise to you as you must have known that the views expounded in the book concerning Tradition, Baptism, the Eucharist and Bishops, not to mention the lack of clarity concerning justification by faith only, could not possibly be acceptable to the vast majority of people attending the Puritan Conference.

Packer, of course, continued to follow this trajectory, culminating in the 1994 Evangelicals and Catholics Together document, The Christian Mission in the Third Millennium, of which he was an endorser. That document contained the joint affirmation that "we are justified by grace through faith because of Christ," an affirmation notable for the omission of the Reformation's solas. This, above everything else, was surely the great failure.

It is somewhat ironic that the pursuit of a wider ecclesiastical unity, a pursuit that could never be fulfilled by a policy of temporarily suspending the practice of gospel essentials in order to achieve more visible agreement, has been the cause of the open divisions among evangelicals in the twentieth century.

Lloyd-Jones' letter also stressed something of Packer's literary failure that Carl noted in the video:

You have known throughout the years not only my admiration for your great gift of mind and intellect but also my deep regard for you. I had expected that long before this you would have produced a major work in the Warfield tradition, but
you have felt called to become involved in ecclesiastical affairs. This to me isnothing less than a great tragedy and a real loss to the Church.

The More Things Change

Okay, so I’ve been re-reading a lot of Lloyd-Jones while on vacation! But what he said and wrote on almost any topic bears repeating in our own time. As I read The Doctor’s thoughts on preaching and the church I cannot help but observe how relevant he still is.

Observing the “feel good preaching” that was so prominent in the church of his day Lloyd-Jones wrote:
“It is made perfectly clear in the pages of the New Testament that no man can be saved until, at some time or other, he has felt desperate about himself…Present day preaching does not save men, the churches are not getting converts. There is something even worse than that about the situation as I see it, and that is that present-day preaching does not even annoy men, but leaves them precisely where they were, without a ruffle and without the slightest disturbance…The church is regarded as a sort of dispensary where drugs and soothing mixtures are distributed and in which everyone should be eased and comforted. And the one theme of the church must be ‘the love of God.’ Anyone who happens to break these rules and who produces a disturbing effect upon members of his congregation is regarded as an objectionable person.”

Of Lloyd-Jones’ preaching, Iain Murray writes:
“Modern preaching, Dr. Lloyd-Jones believed, had gone fundamentally wrong. He saw the main proof of that fact in the failure of the pulpit to recognize that he first work of the Holy Spirit is to convict of sin and to humble men in the presence of God. He knew that any preaching which soothes, comforts and pleases those who have never been brought to fear God, nor to seek his mercy, is not preaching which the Spirit of God will own. The truth is that he was going back to a principle once regarded as imperative for powerful evangelistic preaching, namely, that before men can be converted they must be convinced of sin.”

Finally, this from the good reverend Spurgeon:
“In the beginning, the preacher’s business is not to convert men, but the very reverse. It is idle to attempt to heal those who are not wounded, to attempt to clothe those who have never been stripped, and to make those rich who have never realized their poverty.”

The more things change the more they stay the same. In our own city we see the pastors of evangelical churches buying into the notion that if men and women are going to come to Christ then he must be made more palatable than the writers of Scripture were able to manage. Jesus is presented, if he is presented at all, as the one who will fix marriages, fix kids, and may even provide a job promotion. This is far from the Jesus of Scripture who is pleased to save those who turn to Him in desperation. Rather, this is the Jesus of man’s own undisciplined felt needs. He is the Jesus who offers many gifts but makes no demands. He is the Jesus who makes no exclusive claims to Lordship and would never offend the sensibilities of modern people by calling attention to their sinfulness. Unfortunately, while this Jesus is certainly palatable, the popular Jesus simply cannot save.

Good Medicine from the Good Doctor

In 1927 the 27 year old David Martyn Lloyd-Jones left a prestigious career in medicine to follow God’s call to pastor a small impoverished church in rural Wales. The churches in Wales were not even a shadow of what they had been at the turn of the century during the great Welsh revival. Now the churches were empty, powerless, and increasingly pastor-less. But something extraordinary began to happen in the little church in Sandfields Aberavon where the former physician ministered. God lit a fire in the heart of their young pastor and brought forth from him a new kind of preaching that had not been heard in years. It was the preaching of God’s Word with total conviction but conspicuously absent of the worldly trappings and entertaining flourishes that had come to characterize the church in those days.

When I read some of the things written by Lloyd-Jones on revival and read reports of what God did in Wales during his ministry there my heart leaps to see God move the way he saw God move:

“Pray for revival? Yes, go on, but do not try to create it, do not attempt to produce it, it is only given by Christ himself. The last church to be visited by a revival is the church trying to make it.”

“We say we are concerned for the sin of the town! How much prayer do we offer for the sin of the town? When we pass a drunkard it is not our business to say, ‘What an awful man, what a beast!’ No! judge not, but pray without ceasing. Christ came not to destroy – sin does that – but to save and release men from their sin. Will you as a church pray for the sinners of Aberavon and pray for God to save them through His Spirit? That is the meaning of a church…May God give us this power to pray for a visitation of His Spirit! God give power to all doing this in all places!”

In 1930 a reporter named J. C. Griffith-Jones, the South Wales correspondent for the News Chronicle wrote these words in an article he titled “A Physician of Souls”:

“Seven years ago Martyn Lloyd-Jones, M.D., M.R.C.P., was on the threshold of a brilliantly promising career in Harley Street. He renounced it to labor in one of the most difficult fields of Forward Movement evangelism in Wales. The Sandfields district of Aberavon is a dead end. Even when the sun shines, sandy wastes and dreary, crowded houses convey a sense of desolation, almost hopelessness. What could a man denied work, disillusioned by social callousness, do here but live for a day, deteriorate, drift and die?

“Into this desperate little world came the young physician-minister, preaching, living the gospel of old-new hope. He shocked the locality out of its despair. This world had failed them; there was another world.

“Men listened amazed. Here was one who practiced the gospel that he preached with such tremendous conviction. He had given up a great career – fame, money, leisure – to live and work among the poor and hopeless.

“Not only in Port Talbot, but all around the district, the word went forth that surprising things were happening at the ‘mission hall’ on the sand dunes. Curious, skeptical, doubting, hoping, believing, people flocked to the church.

“It was no passing wonder. Today, years after the first revelation of new power, the congregations still overflow the church. Every meeting is a ‘big meeting.’

“A working-class (and unemployed) membership raising 1,000 pounds a year for church work. Crowded prayer meetings, a crowded church meeting in mid-week, a crowded brotherhood meeting on Saturday, of all nights, when men discuss the problems of spiritual salvation and the pastor sums up the discussion. Sandfields now shares the glad tidings with all Wales.”

So the little church in Sandfields could not chalk up their influence to money, impressive facilities, a seasoned pastor, or a ‘strategic location.’ The church was poor in every sense of the word. But they became rich in the things of God. And now, almost 100 years later, people still read and write about what happened there.

blessings,

todd