Preaching the Cross
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Preaching the Cross
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Overview
Proclaiming the gospel is without a doubt the most important task of pastoral ministry, yet often other, seemingly more urgent activities obscure it. From time to time all pastors and preachers need to be reminded of the primacy of the gospel.
Preaching the Cross does just this. It is a call to expository, gospel-centered preaching as the center of pastoral ministry. This volume showcases an unprecedented combination of pastors representing a variety of evangelical traditions. Though they differ on some secondary points of church practice, they all enthusiastically celebrate the centrality of the cross of Christ-keeping the main thing the main thing. That message every reader can take away from this book and adopt in his pastoral ministry.
Authors Mark Dever, J. Ligon Ducan III, R. Albert Mohler Jr., and C. J. Mahaney are joined by colleagues John MacArthur, John Piper, and R. C. Sproul in calling pastors to pursue gospel-saturated, preaching-centered ministries.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781433519000 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Crossway |
| Publication date: | 04/05/2007 |
| Series: | Together for the Gospel |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 176 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
About the Author
Ligon Duncan (PhD, University of Edinburgh) is the chancellor&CEO and the John E. Richards Professor of Systematic and Historical Theology at Reformed Theological Seminary. He previously served as the senior minister of the historic First Presbyterian Church in Jackson, Mississippi, for seventeen years. He is a cofounder of Together for the Gospel, a senior fellow of the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, and was the president of the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals from 2004-2012. Duncan has edited, written, or contributed to numerous books. Ligon and his wife, Anne, have two children and live in Jackson, Mississippi.
R. Albert Mohler Jr. (PhD, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary) serves as the ninth president and the Joseph Emerson Brown Professor of Christian Theology of Southern Seminary. Considered a leader among American evangelicals by Time and Christianity Today magazines, Dr. Mohler hosts two programs: The Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview, and Thinking in Public, a series of conversations with today’s leading thinkers. He also writes a popular blog and a regular commentary on moral, cultural, and theological issues.
C. J. Mahaney is the senior pastor of Sovereign Grace Church of Louisville. He has written, edited and contributed to numerous books, including Proclaiming a Cross-Centered Theology; Don't Waste Your Sports; and Sex, Romance, and the Glory of God. C. J. and his wife, Carolyn, are the parents of three married daughters and one son, and the happy grandparents to twelve grandchildren.
John MacArthur is the pastor-teacher of Grace Community Church in Sun Valley, California, where he has served since 1969. He is known around the world for his verse-by-verse expository preaching and his pulpit ministry via his daily radio program, Grace to You. He has also written or edited nearly four hundred books and study guides. MacArthur is chancellor emeritus of the Master’s Seminary and Master’s University. He and his wife, Patricia, live in Southern California and have four grown children.
John Piper (DTheol, University of Munich) is the founder and teacher of desiringGod.org and the chancellor of Bethlehem College&Seminary. He served for thirty-three years as the senior pastor of Bethlehem Baptist Church in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and is the author of more than fifty books, including Desiring God; Don’t Waste Your Life; This Momentary Marriage; A Peculiar Glory; and Reading the Bible Supernaturally.
R. C. Sproul (1939–2017) was founder of Ligonier Ministries, an international Christian discipleship organization located near Orlando, Florida. He was also founding pastor of Saint Andrew’s Chapel in Sanford, Florida, first president of Reformation Bible College, and executive editor of Tabletalk magazine. His radio program, Renewing Your Mind, is still broadcast daily on hundreds of radio stations around the world and can also be heard online. Sproul contributed dozens of articles to national evangelical publications, spoke at conferences, churches, colleges, and seminaries around the world, and wrote more than one hundred books, including The Holiness of God, Chosen by God, and Everyone’s a Theologian. He also served as general editor of the Reformation Study Bible.
C. J. Mahaney is the senior pastor of Sovereign Grace Church of Louisville. He has written, edited and contributed to numerous books, including Proclaiming a Cross-Centered Theology; Don't Waste Your Sports; and Sex, Romance, and the Glory of God. C. J. and his wife, Carolyn, are the parents of three married daughters and one son, and the happy grandparents to twelve grandchildren.
Ligon Duncan (PhD, University of Edinburgh) is chancellor, CEO, and John E. Richards Professor of Systematic and Historical Theology at Reformed Theological Seminary. He previously served as the senior minister of the historic First Presbyterian Church in Jackson, Mississippi, for seventeen years. He is a cofounder of Together for the Gospel, a senior fellow of the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, and was the president of the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals from 2004–2012. Duncan has edited, written, or contributed to numerous books. He and his wife, Anne, have two children and live in Jackson, Mississippi.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
A REAL MINISTER: 1 CORINTHIANS 4
Mark E. Dever
* * *
Churches today must be recovered. They must once again put the Word of God at the center; and that happens most fundamentally through preaching.
The great Puritan pastor Richard Baxter said that "All churches either rise or fall as the ministry doth rise or fall, not in riches and worldly grandeur, but in knowledge, zeal and ability for their work." As I thought and prayed about the role of the pastor and the work of the ministry, my attention naturally turned to the situation at Corinth, where fake ministers were threatening to spoil the fruit of Paul's ministry. This crisis called forth from Paul some of his most pointed words and sustained meditations on the role of the pastor. In this chapter we will consider particularly chapter 4 of 1 Corinthians as we ponder what it means to be a real minister.
In 1 Corinthians 4 there is a striking contrast between the real ministers of Christ and the fake ones, the impostors. As we turn to the passage, we find a pastor defining his role by means of three marks of a real minister.
The First Mark of a Real Minister Is a Cross-centered Message: 1 Corinthians 4:1–7
Paul writes, "So then, men ought to regard us as servants of Christ and as those entrusted with the secret things of God." (1 Cor. 4:1). "The secret things of God" — that's what a real minister is all about. And that's why, Paul says, these Corinthians shouldn't divide over competing loyalties toward different ministers or preachers of the true gospel. If it is the gospel that has truly brought the congregation in Corinth together, then they will know unity rather than division among the various ministers of that same gospel.
Of course, they (the Corinthians) are not the ones appointed to be the final judges of God's ministers. Undergirding this situation at Corinth is an important principle: It is God's prerogative, and his alone, to judge ministers, because everything is done according to his purposes. Ministers of the gospel especially are stewards of God's mysteries, his secret things — the gospel. A steward is someone who is not an owner but one who is entrusted with someone else's property. So ministers must remember that the churches they lead are not theirs, regardless of how long they have been there. The entire church is the Lord's church, and God has entrusted his servants with the message of the crucified Messiah.
Paul wanted the Corinthians to understand that these servants, the preachers, would all be judged by whether they were faithful to their master — and their master wasn't the Corinthian congregation, and it certainly wasn't the worldly standards that seemed to control them. Look again at verse 1: "So then, men ought to regard us as servants of Christ and as those entrusted with the secret things of God." Even the apostles were ministers, not masters! They were fundamentally servants, not of the Corinthians but of Christ. As Matthew Henry put it, "They had no authority to propagate their own fancies, but to spread Christian faith." They were sent out to preach the gospel and so see churches created.
Why does the postal service exist? What do we pay mailmen to do? Do we pay them to write letters to us and put them in our mailboxes? No. We pay them to deliver faithfully the message of someone else. The mailman has been entrusted with other people's messages to us. The same is true with ministers and their ministries. We are not to invent the message but to faithfully deliver God's message to his people. That is our calling, which means that we are called as ministers only insofar as we present God's message to his people. It is God who owns the church, and it is by his Word that he creates his people.
While attending a reception in Washington, I had a conversation with a Roman Catholic friend about a recently published book that we had both read. I asked him what he thought. "Oh, it was very good," he said, "except that it was marred by the author's repeating of that old Protestant error that the Bible created the church, when we all know," my friend said with assurance, "that the church created the Bible."
I was in a quandary. How should I respond? What should I say? But I decided that if he could be so openly dismissive, then I could be as contradictory as I wished. "That's ridiculous," I said, trying to sound as pleasant as I could. "God's people have never created God's Word! From the very beginning, God's Word has created his people. We see this in Genesis 1, where God literally created all that is by his Word, including his people. We see it in Genesis 12, where God calls Abraham out of Ur by the Word of his promise. We find it in Ezekiel 37, where God gives Ezekiel a vision to share with the Israelite exiles in Babylon about a great resurrection that will come about by God's Word. In John 1 we see the supreme coming of God's Word in Jesus Christ, his Word made flesh. And in Romans 10 where we read that faith and spiritual life come by the Word, it is again clear that God has always created his people by his Word." It's never been the other way around!
I can't exactly remember what happened through the remainder of our conversation, but this portion of it certainly helped to gel some of my own understanding of the absolute centrality of the Word. The understanding I speak of is not simply an abstract one of how God has worked but one that influences our priorities in ministry in practical ways.
Consider the promotional mail pastors receive. The advertisements assure us success in ministry if we buy a particular product. No matter whether it's audio equipment, music, curriculum, a conference, or parking consulting, investing our money will make all the difference between our ministry's succeeding or failing. Many people have an economic interest in making us feel guilty, inadequate, and unequipped. The way to avoid such a snare is by convincing ourselves of the priority and the sufficiency of the ministry of the Word and to stake our whole service on that.
Do you see how important this is for the glory of God and the good of his people? Why, in so many of our churches, is it unusual to see someone giving their all to follow Christ, and growing in him? Is it because we allowed people who are in open unrepentant sin to continue on in our congregation, and so have diluted the witness, the fellowship? Why have we so neglected church discipline? Is it because we've not followed biblical instructions on leadership in the congregation (which we need in order to successfully practice church discipline), and we've also neglected the Bible's clear teaching on church discipline itself? Why have we neglected discipline? Is it because we don't teach about what church membership entails? And why would that be? Because we haven't made it clear what it really means to be a Christian in the first place? And why would that be? Because we've misunderstood the gospel? How could that be? Because we have misunderstood the Bible? And why would that be the case? Because we've had pastors who — with the best of motives — have given themselves to everything in the world before giving themselves to the study and preaching of God's Word! We've spent more time reading our email than our Bible. We have defended the Bible's authority more than experienced its power in our own lives.
Ministers are servants and stewards of God's Word — that's the message we are to deliver. We are stewards of the church in caring for a congregation; we don't own the church. Steward is a great word for a minister, isn't it? We are God's employees; he is our boss, and we work ultimately for him. The main task he has given us is making known the secret things of God — the gospel of the crucified Messiah!
Above everything else, a steward is called to be faithful. Paul continues, "It is required that those who have been given a trust must prove faithful" (1 Cor. 4:2). Paul's statement was an implicit condemnation of any unfaithful teacher among the Corinthians. The apostle Peter stated that all Christians are stewards, but ministers especially must be trustworthy (1 Pet. 4:10). We teachers of God's Word will be held accountable to a stricter judgment (James 3:1). We are like bankers, entrusted with a great deposit, and so we ministers of the Word must be faithful in our work because of the great value of what has been committed to us. Reliability, not originality, must be our concern as we recount the gospel of Christ crucified.
If the Corinthians thought less of Paul because of his commitment to this message, if other people dismissed him, if Paul himself even began to stray from it — none of these had commissioned him, and so none of these had the authority to change the message that had been entrusted to him. God alone was to determine what Paul did as a minister of his gospel.
Paul says here that "I care very little if I am judged by you or by any human court; indeed, I do not even judge myself. My conscience is clear, but that does not make me innocent. It is the Lord who judges me" (1 Cor. 4:3–4). Paul is unaware of anything against himself, but he knows that he is not acquitted by his self-assessment. It is the Lord who judges him. Of course, Paul isn't saying that self-examination is wrong; in fact, he calls for it later in this letter (9:24–27; cf. 2 Cor. 13:5), but our self-assessment — a clear conscience — simply isn't the ultimate issue. The nature of our fallenness is such that we can have a clear conscience and still be wrong, which is why our conscience must be educated by the Word of God. Self-esteem can't be the final arbiter of judgment because we esteem ourselves too highly! We are called to make provisional judgments (so Matt. 7:6) — as Paul is about to do forcefully in 1 Corinthians 5! — but no mere human is our ultimate judge because, as Paul says in 4:4, we will be judged by the Lord (cf. 2:10–16).
Do you see the freedom you have in knowing the identity of your ultimate judge — that there is only one and that he can be well-disposed toward you? The marvelous truth is that the One who knows us best is the One who loves us most. As Don Carson succinctly put it, "What matters most in God's universe is what God thinks of us."
Assure yourself of God's verdict through Christ, and you can have a more accurate regard for the judgments of others (see v. 3). If you fear the Lord, you can deal with your fear of man. But remember that you cannot please God if you live to please men. I often think of a letter written by the Scottish pastor John Brown, which contained words of fatherly advice to a young man he had trained for the pastorate and who had recently been ordained as the minister of a small congregation. Brown wrote:
I know the vanity of your heart, and that you will feel mortified that your congregation is very small, in comparison with those of your brethren around you; but assure yourself on the word of an old man, that when you come to give an account of them to the Lord Christ, at his judgmentseat, you will think you have had enough.
Can you hear the echoes of the minister-as-steward in those words? Remember this also: "Obey your leaders and submit to their authority. They keep watch over you as men who must give an account" (Heb. 13:17).
A true minister of Christ, according to Paul, is one who lives to please Christ, the one and only coming judge. That's the time for ultimate judgment, not now and not by these Corinthians. "Therefore judge nothing before the appointed time; wait till the Lord comes. He will bring to light what is hidden in darkness and will expose the motives of men's hearts. At that time each will receive his praise from God" (1 Cor. 4:5; cf. 3:13). Perhaps the Corinthians were tempted to wrongly esteem teachers impressive by worldly standards or striking in external appearance and manner.
In Washington eloquent spokesmen are hired to speak on behalf of particular men and women whether or not they agree with the opinions they represent. But the confidence of the spokesmen lies in the greatness of their skills rather than in the truth of their message. In ancient Corinth eloquent orators were also prized, and they were celebrated, honored, and well paid. The regard for such speakers had crept into the church — men were honored not for giving the message of the cross but for how well they presented themselves, regardless of their actual message.
But such skills must not be the basis of evaluation for a Christian minister! For that reason, it is incredibly inappropriate, according to Paul, to allow a worldly, comparative pride of one Christian teacher over another. If each is a true Christian teacher, then each has been commissioned by the same master with the same message for the same purpose — glorifying God by proclaiming his reign. Allowing partisanship, as the Corinthians were, was to lose sight of the value of this one message. They were distracted by various messengers and their particular gifts. When such distraction occurs, we don't have far to go until we are following a particular messenger rather than the Word of God.
Brother, do you think you will be the last pastor called by your church? Are you leading the congregation toward loyalty to you or to God's Word and Christ's gospel? We pastors must be very careful about the loyalties we cultivate in the temporary stewardships we hold.
Paul continues, "Now, brothers, I have applied these things to myself and Apollos for your benefit, so that you may learn from us the meaning of the saying, 'Do not go beyond what is written.' Then you will not take pride in one man over against another" (1 Cor. 4:6). Scholars are uncertain about the origin of this quotation beyond the fact that it seemed to be well known. Most likely it was a reference to the expression, "it is written," used in the New Testament to quote the Old Testament. So it seems that Paul is exhorting the Corinthians not to go beyond the text of Scripture, and in so doing, he encourages the Corinthians to be committed to the message and to cherish faithfulness in their preachers.
We should be careful to remember that, as ministers, we are to be esteemed as instruments pointing to Christ. We must be faithful to deliver this particular message. Paul and Apollos were not in competition, as Paul carefully explained to the Corinthians in the opening chapters of this letter, because the gifts of God's ministers come directly from God: "For who makes you different from anyone else? What do you have that you did not receive? And if you did receive it, why do you boast as though you did not?" (1 Cor. 4:7).
These three questions have been some of the most important questions in the Bible down through the history of Christianity. From Augustine to Martin Luther, God has used this verse to affect people powerfully, humble them, and exalt himself. Let this question echo in your own soul for a little while: "What do you have that you did not receive?"
The last Sunday night of his life, John Knox reported that he was tempted by Satan to trust in himself and to rejoice or boast in himself, but, Knox said to his servant, "I repulsed him with this sentence: 'What do you have that you did not receive?'" Earlier in the letter Paul had written about boasting: "Let him who boasts boast in the Lord" (1:31).
What do we have to boast about more than the cross of Christ, by which God has satisfied his love and his justice, his mercy and his holiness, and displayed it to all the world as he saves all who trust in him? A real minister has the cross at the center of his message, and his delivery of this message is the center of his role as a minister.
The Second Mark of a Real Minister Is a Crosscentered Life
C. J. Mahaney addresses well the cross-centered life in a later chapter where he considers Paul's words on the subject to Timothy. But the cross is an integral part of Paul's instructions to the Corinthians too, and it involves discerning which teachers they should trust. Paul refers to the apostles as "like men condemned to die" (1 Cor. 4:9), and that was Paul's experience. This true apostle led a Christ-like life in stark contrast to the Corinthians, who saw prosperity as the mark of a true teacher. In this section of his letter, Paul uses some very sharp, ironic questions to deflate their pride and to reorient them to the cross and what Christ himself had taught about the nature of discipleship.
The use of heavy irony and a number of sarcastic statements are not Paul's normal manner of teaching. But such irony and occasional sarcasm are not always outside the bounds of appropriate communication. In fact, irony could be particularly useful in helping the Corinthians to see how the false apostles had confused them and how topsyturvy their view of the Christian life had become. Paul launches in: "Already you have all you want! Already you have become rich! You have become kings — and that without us! How I wish that you really had become kings so that we might be kings with you!" (1 Cor. 4:8). Paul is mocking the Corinthians' prosperity. Some of it may have been real prosperity, some imagined. Either way, it's clear that many in the Corinthian church were feeling confident and fulfilled in a worldly manner.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Preaching the Cross"
by .
Copyright © 2007 Together for the Gospel.
Excerpted by permission of Good News Publishers.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Introduction,
1 A Real Minister: 1 Corinthians 4 Mark E. Dever,
2 Preaching Christ from the Old Testament J. Ligon Duncan III,
3 Preaching with the Culture in View R. Albert Mohler Jr.,
4 The Center of Christian Preaching: Justification by Faith R. C. Sproul,
5 Preaching as Expository Exultation for the Glory of God John Piper,
6 The Pastor's Priorities: Watch Your Life and Doctrine C. J. Mahaney,
7 Why I Still Preach the Bible after Forty Years of Ministry John MacArthur,
Appendix: Together for the Gospel Affirmations and Denials (2006),
What People are Saying About This
"This is a book about what matters in the church, not about what is trendy, weighty, or popular. Preaching the Cross is about what endures, not what is momentarily successful. It is about what God intends for the church-that we preach his Word with its center in the person and work of Christ-and it is about what the church needs most to hear. These essays are written with wisdom, winsomeness, practicality, and biblical fidelity."
—David F. Wells, Senior Distinguished Research Professor of Theology, Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary
"This book on preaching the cross is written by the best of men who know the grace of the crucified Christ and serve in the power of his resurrection. It is a call for other ministers of the gospel to faithfully proclaim the message of the cross and the empty tomb. It is also an invitation to share in the fellowship of godly pastors who stand together for Jesus in a world that needs the gospel."
—Philip Graham Ryken, President, Wheaton College