How Then Shall We Live?

What is the goal of good preaching? What should a great sermon be? Should it be an act of great oratory? Should it be full of passion and verve? Should it touch us emotionally? Should it reach us logically?

Ideally a great sermon would be all of the above, but fundamentally what should a great sermon do? It should cause us to ask the question how then should I live? Given what I have heard from God's revealed word how should I alter my life? How should I change my life so that it is more conformed to the image of God's son Jesus Christ?

Yet as I reflect on nearly eight years preaching periodically I think this is still the thing I struggle with most...how do I apply this passage to people who are listening? How does the exegesis of this passage help the lady in the pew struggling with infertility? How does the exegesis of this passage help the man struggling with envy? This is difficult because it requires us to know the people we are preaching to, to make an accurate application we need to know the struggles of the people, the pains of the people, the hurts of the people.

Of course we can make general applications of the "now go and do likewise" variety, but yet in order to make application which is real and heartfelt we must know the people. We must never use the pulpit as a battering ram to hammer someone who has confided in us but yet the word of God needs to be applied. For it to be applied effectively it requires knowledge of the people, knowledge of their struggles and knowledge of the situations which they find themselves in. In short it requires us as preachers to love the people we are preaching too, it requires us to desire not that people think we are a great orator, a passionate speaker or an intellectual giant but that we desire that people come away from our sermons thinking in light of todays sermon i really shouldn't gossip about that women in work, in light of todays sermon i really don't need to spend all those extra hours in work.

What makes a great sermon, of course it should be logical, of course it should be delivered with passion, of course it should be intellectually stimulating, but above all a great sermon should cause us to ask how then should I live in light of God's revelation to me? How should my life be changed and moulded by what I heard today?

A Most Prized Doctrine?

If i asked you tonight what the most prized doctrine of your faith was, what would you say? God, salvation, man? If you had asked me the same questions a few years ago I think i probably would have had to first clarify what you meant by doctrine and then probably would have vehemently stuck to salvation being the most key doctrine of my faith.

But yet over the past three years my opinion has changed...three years spent studying have convinced me that the most important doctrine of my faith is not salvation, its not my doctrine of God, its not my doctrine of man but my doctrine of scripture.

This may seem like a radical statement and may lead some of you to think that I have lost all common sense I may or may not have had but allow me to explain. I have come to the conclusion that our doctrine of scripture underpins every other doctrine we have:

GOD: Fundamentally how can we know what God is like if he has not revealed himself to us in scripture? Sure we have general revelation such as the Psalmist speaks of in Psalm 8, but yet as Paul reminds us that revelation on its own leaves men without excuse but yet it can never lead to salvation.

I have seen some spectacular sights in my time, times when nature has taken my breath away, Table Mountain in South Africa being probably the most notable, and yet Table Mountain in all its splendour can't reveal God's holiness to me, it can't reveal God's plan of salvation, it can only reveal a part of God to me. Yet in Scripture we have God revealed in so much more detail (and yet amazingly we still only scratch the surface of who God is).

MAN: How do we explain evil in the world? Is God just mean and capricious? Are some people just bad while others seek to live a good life? In scripture we get the most complete doctrine of man, that they are made in the image of God, that they are fallen and sinful. That they are made for a purpose. None of this is accessible purely from looking at a man or woman on the street.

SALVATION: Only in scripture is it revealed to me how I as a sinful fallen human being can be made right with this God. I can't figure this out on my own, left to my own devices I have no hope of right relationship with God. Yet thats why the gospel is such good news because it does hold out that hope of relationship restored.

Why does all this matter though? Well everywhere we look, even in many evangelical churches the doctrine of scripture is under attack:

Paul didn't really mean that. 

That was in the Old Testament when people related to God in a different way. 

There are cultural differences here that we just can't appreciate. 

Yet all of this undermines any of the doctrines which we hold to be true, because only as God has revealed Himself to us in His word can we be sure that we are building on solid ground. If we remove the stability of God's revelation we are in danger of building our whole theology on jelly, with insecure foundations which will one day give way.

Whats the most important doctrine to me? My doctrine of scripture because everything else is built upon that...

The Economics Of Manna

Whilst listening to Sunday Sequence on Radio Ulster this morning there was a discussion around the World Economic Forum which is meeting in Davos this week. The main thrust of the report was that the most wealthy 80 people in the world have more money than the bottom 50%.

During the course of the discussion one of the contributors who was there to provide the Theological angle said that the story of Manna in the wilderness teaches us a great economic lesson. The children of Israel are told to gather the amount of Manna they need for the day and if they collected more then it rotted. If you have too much money gathered into the hands of a few people then eventually it will rot. This is an interesting theory but is it an accurate reading of the story of the Manna in the wilderness?

To be honest I think this is a prime example of Isogesis rather than exegesis, of reading a meaning you want to find into a text rather than letting the text speak for itself. The whole point of the story of the Manna in the wilderness is not to teach us an economic lesson, the whole point of the story of the Manna in the wilderness is to teach us to trust in God to provide for us. 

The people are grumbling, wishing for a return to slavery in Egypt where they at least had food to eat, the grumble against Moses and against God. God therefore seeks to test them seeing if they will indeed listen to Him and follow His instruction or will they continue to gather more bread than they need? Will they trust God even in situations which seem so unpromising?

As we look out into the world today there are so many situations that seem unpromising, be it the rise of secularism within our own culture, the rise of IS in the Middle East. So much in which there seems no hope but yet will we trust God today to provide for our needs? Or will we look to ourselves? 

The story of the Manna then exists not as an economic lesson but as a lesson to trust God, trust in His  provision for us and his sovereignty over His creation