J.C. Ryle was a master of a simple, forthright style. His advice to fellow-preachers is invaluable.
Here’s a summary.
Prefatory remarks
1. Simplicity in preaching is of the utmost importance. We cannot be useful if we cannot be understood, and we cannot be understood if we are not simple.
2. Simplicity in preaching is not easy to attain. It is easier to appear clever than to be intelligible.
3. Simple preaching does not mean childish preaching.…
Richard Bewes writes:
Way back on September 1st, 1957, Billy Graham spoke to some 120,000 people crammed into New York’s Times Square. Basing his address on the visit of the apostle Paul to Mars Hill in Athens, his text was Acts 17:23 –
‘For as I passed by, and beheld your devotions, I found an altar with the inscription to the unknown God.’
The speaker might have made four academic points. Instead, he emulated Paul – drawing attention, not to surrounding religious altars, as in the case of Mars Hill, but to their modern equivalents in Times Square; the surrounding advertising hoardings for four cinema films then showing. …
A.W. Tozer:
There is scarcely anything so dull and meaningless as Bible doctrine taught for its own sake. Truth divorced from life is not truth in its Biblical sense, but something else and something less. Theology is a set of facts concerning God, man and the world. These facts may be, and often are, set forth as values in themselves; and there lies the snare both for the teacher and for the hearer.
The Bible is among other things a book of revealed truth.
John Stott (1921 – 2011) was rector at All Souls, Langham Place (London) from 1955 until 1975. After that, he became Rector Emeritus, and was thus released more fully for world-wide ministry and writing.
Formative influences included his family background and education (he was son of an eminent London physician and was educated at Rugby School and at Cambridge University). He was one of a number of talented young men to have been nurtured by Eric Nash at the so-called “Bash Camps”.…
C.H. Spurgeon is known as ‘the Prince of Preachers’. It is worthwhile, then, enquiring about his attitude towards, and practice of, expository preaching.
Peter Masters considers this in an article entitled ‘Expository Preaching – Benefits and Pitfalls.’
Masters begins defines expository preaching as ‘preaching that draws the message from the biblical text, clearly and methodically, honouring the sense of the text, and the style of communication employed.’
He outlines some of the benefits of expository preaching:
Some have taken Paul to be teaching universalism here. For Kasemann, ‘all-powerful grace is unthinkable without eschatological universalism.’
In The Lost Message of Paul (ch 19), Steve Chalke insists that, for Paul, ‘all people’ must mean ‘all people without exception’. The gift of life is co-extensive for ‘all men’ with the sentence of condemnation ‘for all men’. To interpret otherwise, he says, is not only ‘disingenuous’, but also renders Paul’s language incoherent. I think that Chalke’s summary rejection of alternative views, together with his dismissal of those who hold them as ‘disingenuous’ is irresponsible.…
Election was never intended to prevent men making a diligent use of all means of grace. On the contrary, the neglect of means is a most suspicious symptom, and should make us very doubtful about the state of a man’s soul. Those whom the Holy Ghost draws He always draws to the written Word of God and to prayer. When there is the real grace of God in a heart, there will always be love to the means of grace.…
The Elect of God can only be discerned from those who are not Elect by their faith and life. We cannot climb up into the secret of God’s eternal counsels. We cannot read the book of life. The fruits of the Spirit, seen and manifested in a man’s conversation, are the only grounds on which we can ascertain that he is one of God’s Elect. Where the marks of God’s Elect can be seen, there, and there only, have we any warrant for saying “this is one of the Elect.”…
John Piper’s recent book, Coronavirus and Christ (Crossway, 2020) has quite a lot on common with John Lennox’s Where is God in a Coronavirus World?
Both are written from an evangelical perspective by men with long experience in Christian ministry, and who have experienced significant ill-health in the past. Both books are quite short, appeal to the same kinds of biblical teaching, and extend an invitation to accept the Good News of Jesus, crucified, risen and returning.…
John Lennox, Where is God in a Coronavirus World? The Good Book Company, 2020.
I’d like to offer a brief resume of this book by an Oxford mathematician, philosopher of science, and Christian apologist.
I think that I have faithfully reflected – albeit mostly in my own words – the main lines of thought.
1. Feeling vulnerable
Lennox writes in April, 2020, just a few short months into the world-wide emergency that has been precipitated by the rapid spread of the Covid-19 coronavirus. …
