I wouldn’t presume to tell other lay preachers how to prepare their sermons, or how to use commentaries. But here’s the first in what might turn out to be an occasional series of posts on my own approach.
The best one-sentence defense of biblical commentaries I have seen comes from the excellent C.H. Spurgeon:-
…It seems odd, that certain men who talk so much of what the Holy Spirit reveals to themselves, should think so little of what he has revealed to others.
The current interest in ‘spirituality’ is both salutary and alarming. It is salutary because in its best forms it challenges not only the prevalent philosophical materialism of the modern world but also the perfunctory corporate exercises of many Christians. It is alarming because, although spirituality is generally regarded as an ‘applause-word’, it is often so ill-defined that it can mask gross error.
A definition of ‘spirituality’ cannot readily be induced from the NT, despite the use by Paul of words translated as ‘spirit’ and ‘spiritual’.…
In the April 2009 edition of the journal Themelios, D.A. Carson ponders the meaning of the word ‘Gospel’.
We must distinguish between what God has done, Carson argues, and what we must do as a response to that. But only the first of these can properly called ‘the gospel’.
…‘If the gospel is the (good) news about what God has done in Christ Jesus, there is ample place for including under “the gospel” the ways in which the kingdom has dawned and is coming, for tying this kingdom to Jesus’ death and resurrection, for demonstrating that the purpose of what God has done is to reconcile sinners to himself and finally to bring under one head a renovated and transformed new heaven and new earth, for talking about God’s gift of the Holy Spirit, consequent upon Christ’s resurrection and ascension to the right hand of the Majesty on high, and above all for focusing attention on what Paul (and others—though the language I’m using here reflects Paul) sees as the matter “of first importance”: Christ crucified.
D.A Carson has a helpful comment on ‘plausibility structures’ – patterns of thought that are taken for granted within a given culture – and how these change over time:-
…As western culture progressively drifts from its Judeo-Christian heritage, new challenges to accurate and forceful communication are erected. It is sometimes helpful to think in terms of ‘plausibility structures’. A plausibility structure is a social structure of ideas that is widely taken for granted without argument, and dissent from which is regarded as heresy.
Graham Goldsworthy (Gospel and Kingdom, 47) has defined the kingdom of God as:
(a) God’s people
(b) in God’s place
(c) under God’s rule
Examples:
(a) Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden
(b) The descendents of the patriarchs in the promised land
(c) The Israelites in the united kingdom of David and Solomon
Along similar lines, we may say that the kingdom of God (or similar expression) is God’s kingly rule manifested in the lives of his people, Lk 17:21, effecting their salvation, Mar 10:28-29. …
It is, perhaps, we lay preachers who are particularly prone to commit exegetical crimes, lacking as many of us do a technical grounding in the original languages of the Bible. ‘A little knowledge is a dangerous thing’ when it comes to drawing conclusions about the ‘literal meaning’ or the ‘original meaning’ of words. Here are some of the exegetical fallacies identified by D.A. Carson:-
1. The root fallacy. This based on the assumption that the meaning of a word is inevitably bound up in the ‘basic’, ‘original’, or ‘literal’ meaning of its component parts. …
Plenty has been thought, said, and written about Steve Chalke and his comments on atonement in The Lost Message of Jesus. Although N.T. Wright (who endorsed the book) has said that he doesn’t think that Chalke intended to deny penal substitution, Chalke has gone on record to confirm that he did. (See here for Garry J. William’s reply to Chalke, and here for a penetrating review by Donald MacLeod).
As for The Lost Message of Jesus, D.A.…
N.T. Wright, in his recent book Scripture and the Authority of God, suggests some of the ways in which the ‘Right’ and the ‘Left’ have misread Scripture. Here are some of the items in Wright’s list:-
Misreadings of the ‘Right’
Misreadings of the ‘Left’
[These are the notes of a sermon I preached at Holy Trinity, Norwich, in June 2007. It was one in a short series in which we sought to address some of the issues raised by Prof Richard Dawkins in his well-known book, The God Delusion. One or two people nearly fell off their seats when they heard what I had to say in the first 2 or 3 paragraphs. But I was just teasing, as you will see:-]
Manx Shearwater! …
It might seem strange to describe the doctrine of the love of God as ‘difficult’. But it is, and D.A. Carson explains why.
1. Because if people today believe in God at all, then they are almost certain to believe that he is a God of love, and yet the very concept of love is likely to be shaped by the surrounding culture rather than by Scripture. For example, in Jodie Foster’s Contact the unexplained intelligence is ‘suffused with love, wisely provident, gently awesome’.…
