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Practical Directives for Constructing Evangelistic Sermons By Peter Masters

I'd like to first of all make mention of the need for variety in gospel preaching.
We're now going to move into some of the how-to aspects of the subject.
You do have different kinds of hearer.
Also, you need the element of surprise in preaching.
There must be variety.
It is the Spirit's way.
When we look at the scripture, we find a very wide variety of presentation of truth.
You find the Holy Spirit uses history, testimony, didactic passages, experience,
uses parables, miracles, story forms.
So many varieties of presentation are used.
And what we must avoid doing is taking everything in the scripture,
putting it through our expository mincing machine
so that what comes out is always exactly the same
and we lose the literary variety of the scripture.
We reform people like everything to be served up as a set of propositions
and we can murder a parable or a story or an historical event.
So be careful. There is immense variety in the method of the Holy Spirit
and we must reflect that.
If you don't mind my being a little controversial,
I think it's probably best not to adopt a consecutive expository approach for evangelistic work.
Certainly for the teaching ministry, certainly to take people through Bible books and verses.
After all, one of our functions is to unlock the scriptures for people,
to do justice to the great themes that run through the books.
So we must engage in consecutive preaching, no question about that.
But when it comes to evangelistic preaching, I think it is quite a snare and a hindrance.
I'm sure there are some people who have the gift and ability to make it work out.
After all, not every verse in the Bible necessarily has evangelistic potential.
Consecutive ministry is not going to be so easily operated anyway.
I think it is much better to helicopter, as they say, when it comes to evangelistic preaching.
And also because by this means you can engage in great variety
in dealing with different types and conditions of people, different themes, different situations.
So I would advocate that you move around and mix up the sources.
Twenty-five years ago I once decided to do all the miracles in the Gospel of Luke,
which pretty well means obviously the majority of miracles in the New Testament.
And so I went through the Gospel of Luke and did this.
And then I had shot my bolt.
I had run through everything in a very short space of time.
And so I never did that again.
I thought it would be much better to ration these things around or divide them around
so that maybe over four to five years you do all the miracles and parables.
I don't know how you number miracles and parables,
but in round figures I suggest you think in terms of forty miracles,
forty parables of the Lord in the New Testament.
Now I know that there are lower counts than that,
but if you include everything like both fig tree parables, for example, not just one,
then you get up to thirty-eight.
So we'll think of roughly forty. You've got forty miracles, forty parables.
Some of them it's very difficult to preach on evangelistically
because while there's grace in them it has a limited application, maybe only to Jews and so on.
But nevertheless that's counterbalanced by the fact that there are many, say, parables that require two sermons.
If you're doing the lost son you've got to treat the elder son as a separate evangelistic lesson really.
So it comes out at forty plus forty.
That's eighty evangelistic messages in five years for miracles and parables.
In four and a half years, this isn't instant maths, I'm numerically dyslexic.
I'm not doing this in my head, I can assure you.
But over four and a half years that's two hundred evangelistic sermons by the usual rate of, say, forty-four sermons a year.
And eighty of those will be miracles and parables and then you can recycle.
After all, they're the bread and butter and the crowning point of evangelism.
So you might not recycle anything else but your sermons will never be quite the same.
You'll take them differently.
By the way, don't feel you've got to produce stunningly original sermons.
I've heard people say, oh, I never read Spurgeon because then it's very difficult to preach an original sermon.
Well, I would think his is much better than the one you might have prepared.
I'll back off that.
What I really meant to say is this.
If the truth is the truth, pretty well everybody's sermon on a particular parable, if it's evangelistic, will probably trundle along similar lines.
There will be variations.
Maybe we could take a different stress.
But don't be too frightened about preaching something which is the general line in outline.
You may make different applications, different illustrations.
But if that is the message the Lord meant, I would think that we should expect that most preachers working effectively will draw pretty well the same conclusions.
So don't feel you've got to be stunningly original.
If you are stunningly original, it's saying something rather sad about what you're doing.
You're probably way off track.
So it's very comforting that.
We'll talk maybe a little more about that.
But I would recommend that you seek your texts for evangelistic sermons, not on a consecutive expository basis.
I think you'll find much more liberty and variation and freedom in that way.
But I haven't got a chapter and verse for that.
However, you might like to consider that.
Remember that you need to cover many aspects of the gospel.
Now, I said I'd give you a checklist for evangelism.
The list I'm going to give you briefly now could serve as a checklist placed in the back of a Bible.
Or you could adapt it and improve upon it as you think fits.
But it will also serve as a challenge for the different aspects of the gospel that ought to be represented in your preaching, not necessarily in every sermon.
Though I'm sure the saving essentials would need to be explained in every evangelistic sermon.
But here are aspects of the gospel.
The first and most obvious is grace.
Are there principles of grace?
Are there principles of grace?
The free salvation, the free grace of God, that which cannot be earned and will never be deserved, freely given, contrasted with the message of other religions, perhaps on occasions, and so on.
Second, is there anything about God?
His attributes, His holiness, His knowability.
How often do you preach and there is material on the knowability of God?
Of course, you'd never use that term in an evangelistic sermon, I hope.
It's not a word or a form of the word in ordinary everyday usage.
But people outside the church don't know that God is knowable.
This is a revelation to them.
This is the greatest contrast with the other religions, isn't it?
So is there the knowability of God, that He is a God who may be sought and found and known?
Thirdly, is there any aspect of human need?
Depravity, spiritual deadness, lostness, any particular sin emphasized, the general futility of life, any aspect of human need dealt with.
And then, Christ, another heading, His work and His atonement, any aspects of that?
Either in the New Testament, in the report, or in the Old Testament, in the prophecies, or in the pre-figureings.
Another heading, is there any information about the blessings and benefits of salvation?
Don't be afraid of the benefits, we know the Armenians overdo it.
Don't overreact, it is the good news, don't forget.
The reasoning and the sermons of the Bible have the benefits.
And they are glorious, and unbelievers have never heard of them.
Never just do three of anything.
If you find yourself preparing sermon notes and you say, yes, I want to do the benefits, there are the three benefits.
They'll always be the same three benefits.
Always try and write ten benefits, and then if you like reject seven of them.
But if you've written ten, you'll have done some work, and it will ensure that you may mention a different three every time.
Or you may mention four or five, maybe not scope for ten.
But if you only aim at three, your sermons will always use the same three and your preaching will be fairly shallow on detail.
And you'll generalize all the time.
So for your own discipline, even though you only have time for three, search for ten.
It's a simple principle in preaching to increase the quality of our work and our scope.
And it may be you'll get more excited about the tenth than any of the others.
So you'll find a blessing, and it's important.
Anyway, we're talking about the blessings and benefits.
The next heading is the terms of salvation.
Is there information on the terms of salvation, such as repentance and belief and yielding?
And you'll find much about that in the Old Testament.
By the way, if I can interrupt myself, going back to Christ and his work in the atonement,
did you know that there is more information on the atonement in the Old Testament than in the New?
That's not a bold statement or an extravagant statement.
There is more depth of theological analysis of the atoning death of Christ in the Old Testament than in the New.
If you only preach from the New Testament, you're missing a lot.
And to further justify that, if I give you one example, take the atonement, the offering.
Now, it's reported in the New.
There is much on the effects of the atonement in the New,
but there isn't very much on the nature and the content of the atonement in the New.
To plumb the depths of the atonement, you've got to go to the laws of the offerings in Leviticus.
Are you familiar with Dukes's little book, The Law of the Offerings?
Is that widely circulated in Australia? Kriegel do it in America.
It's very small.
Do you know, if you want an atom bomb to go off inside you concerning the potential of Old Testament texts for evangelism
and a real object lesson, do read that old Brethren writer from the last century, Dukes, on The Law of the Offerings.
It's a very manageable book.
It is magnificent.
There he analyzes the offerings for a sweet savor, the offerings for sin, and he goes into great detail, and there's nothing fanciful.
Why is it an ox, a turtle dove, a lamb? Wrong order, but never mind.
What do they mean?
The ox is labor.
The turtle dove is sentiments and emotion.
The lamb is obedience, aspects of righteousness, which Christ had to present in his offering of righteousness.
All the interpretation is so obvious, exactly the way in which these animals are used and the things that are taught from them elsewhere in the Bible.
What about the offerings of refined substances?
There's the animal offerings, then there's the flower offering, meal, all the other things, the frankincense and so on.
The offerings of refinement, the extent of refined character, which Christ had to offer for us in his obedience.
Why, Dukes really brings out these things.
You can take them simply for evangelism.
You can take them deeply for the excitement and edification of the Lord's people.
It's a bit of a digression, but there are themes in the Old Testament that surpass the New even for New Testament-ness, if you like.
And don't underestimate the Old Testament and all that it has about grace and so on.
So then you have another heading, the nature of conversion.
Is there anything in the passage on the nature of conversion?
In the Old Testament pre-figureings of conversion there is much.
The various deliverances of the children of Israel for Egypt give many lessons on the nature of conversion.
Then there are the testimonies, such as that of Manasseh and so on.
Deep exposition of the nature of the great change, the new nature, the transformed character and so on.
So is there any information about the nature of conversion?
This is intensely interesting to unconverted people.
They don't know all this.
They don't know that something happens inside a person, a great operation, and precisely what it accomplishes and what it does.
Our preaching will be very interesting.
Then next, is there anything in the passage about the consequences of rejection?
And then next, are there any convincing arguments?
The Bible's own line in apologetics.
And then next, is there any clear word of God justification?
In other words, is there anything in the passage that justifies the need for revelation and the authority of the word of God?
That may be there.
Authority is a very important subject today.
Then next, is there anything about false religious ideas?
See the broad number of topics that bear on the gospel that are contained in the whole of the scripture.
And next, are there any unexpected events?
This is a slightly different character heading, but unexpected things are very valuable.
Never forget the Lord Jesus Christ used the element of surprise again and again.
I don't mean to plug things, but if you have the opportunity to look at my little book, Strategies, Biblical Strategies for Witness, we bring this out.
The methods of Christ, how he used the element of surprise.
Very often said something that was very true and vital, but it was the opposite from anything they expected.
How provocative among leading Jews to have a Samaritan as the good guy and a priest and a Levite as the bad guys.
That's very provocative, isn't it?
Really stunningly so, when you think of it.
Was he going out of his way to be objectionable?
Was he going out of his way to be difficult?
No, it was the element of surprise at work.
Everybody was riveted because this was the most unusual approach in the precincts of the temple.
So, elements of surprise are very valuable, unexpected events.
And then finally, I'll give you this heading.
Is there anything about the exclusiveness of the gospel?
The exclusiveness, the exclusive soul saving efficacy of the gospel.
That which is now denied by new evangelicals.
Even Dr. J.I. Packer and Dr. John Stott and people like that,
now believing that all Roman Catholics in good standing with their church must be regarded as true Christians,
irrespective of what they think of basic Christian doctrines, irrespective of their experience.
In other words, they say we stand for the gospel, but they deny the exclusive soul saving efficacy of the gospel.
That's off point really, but for unbelievers, is there anything in the passage that stresses and underscores the exclusive saving power of this message?
So these are all gospel aspects and you may like to extend it.
It's a long checklist, but don't you think working with that will help demonstrate that there are elements in a passage which we need to give attention to?
You have a list like that. Believe me, I can testify to it. It will bring to life your examination of the text.
No longer will you say, what shall I preach on?
If I am ever, by some curious mischance, invited back, you will say to me, ever since I started using that checklist,
my problem is my sermon would last three hours if I didn't cut, cut, cut, cut, cut.
You'll find so much in every passage, so much possibility. That's the right way around.
The scripture is full of arguments, full of persuasions, full of matter, full of points.
And the big problem is to preach short, not to get up a sermon when it comes to the gospel.
So I do commend to you the use of a checklist. Remember, you've got to deal with different kinds of unbelievers.
This is quite a new general heading. Again, if you've read Charles Bridge's Christian ministry,
you've seen how well he deals with this. He has four headings.
He was working from a slightly earlier author who had 12 categories of unbeliever.
He was working in turn all the way back to Jerome, who had 42. Though, of course, most of them are ridiculous.
But anyway, the idea in times past of recognising different classes and categories of unbeliever,
I've taken a typical Puritan list. It's not original in that book, Biblical Strategies,
and tried to show how Christ and the apostles had one way of dealing with atheists,
one way of dealing with people who were, in Bridge's terms, ignorant and careless,
ignorant and indifferent. Quite a different way of challenging the self-righteous person
and a different way, again, of challenging the deluded believer.
And there are different distinctive approaches in the Word of God.
And we've got to learn them so that we begin to notice them,
so that we are consciously dealing with different types of unbeliever,
not banging our one general drum, because that isn't anything like so effective
and it isn't the method of the Bible. Another general heading,
we need to check that we are preaching from different portions of the Bible,
Old Testament, New Testament. By the way, types are not always very useful
for evangelistic preaching if they're types of Christ. Some people say,
I know what you mean, I'm going to preach a type of Christ, I'm going to preach the burning bush.
But the unbeliever will find this very curious. If you can explain that to me from the New Testament,
why are you preaching a sermon in which you go to the Old Testament where it's shrouded in mystery,
you spend all your time proving that this is the same as what is in the New Testament,
and then you apply your sermon from there. To the unbeliever, that's mysterious.
Whatever are you doing that for? Why spend all your time showing this is the same as this?
Surprise, surprise, isn't that wonderful? And that uses a sermon.
Now that might, if there are pastoral lessons to be drawn, that might be helpful for believers,
but to preach from the types of Christ evangelistically is probably not a particularly efficient,
useful thing to do. After all, you've got Christ in the full light of day, gospel day.
Why preach from the shadows? But if the type presents some general gospel argument,
it might be different. To stay with the one we mentioned a while ago,
the deliverance of the children of Israel from bondage is a wonderful figure of salvation,
and it enables you to talk about the characteristics of bondage and deliverance in a special way.
The whole picture, the whole history gives you scope, and this is what it's intended to do,
to draw many lessons from bondage and deliverance, which are different from those in the New Testament.
So that is important to do, but to try to find a Christological application for every twig in the burning bush
is irrelevant really to the modern listener. So if that's a hint,
when you're looking at the Old Testament pre-figureings, you're looking more at the great salvation arguments
than actually the types of the Savior that can be done more efficiently, mostly, not always, but mostly from the new.
So do you preach from the types and the salvation types? For instance, the children of Israel come to the Red Sea.
One of the most preached upon passages from the old worthies, and they nearly all have sermons on this,
is stand still, go forward, almost as if they're copying each other.
They all take to that, you can preach on that, there's precedent for that. Isn't there a wonderful gospel message in that?
Two aspects of the gospel, stand still, there's nothing you can do, go forward in faith,
and they all work that seam of the mind for all their worth. That's a very commonly found text in the old worthies.
Do you, for instance, balance your gospel preaching between single verse texts and passages?
Some people become single verse men, and that means they're missing all the pictures and the descriptions, the graphics of the Bible.
Some people stay with the graphics and the passages, and therefore they miss the great single verse salvation statements.
When you're beginning to preach, maybe focus more on the passages. It's harder to preach from a single verse than it is to preach from a passage.
And maybe you want to get motoring before you begin to visit single verses and the great themes that you have to develop more.
But make sure, as you go on, that there is a balance between those texts.
And then make sure, too, that you use much of the illustrative material of the Bible and the warnings.
You've got passages which present the benefits and the tender appeals, and you've got passages which are warning in character.
Do we do justice to both kinds of passage? A more severe man may live his life only with the warnings.
We may get so easily out of balance and not do justice to the Spirit's own arguments and approaches.
A brief word on finding the text. In the last 20 years of doing different types of preaching seminars,
I can tell you the question one is most often asked, even by seasoned preachers, is how do you find a text?
I suspect this is one reason why some preachers engage in consecutive expository preaching, even with the gospel,
because they found some difficulty in finding the text. So maybe just a word about that.
The first way in which you will find texts is by your private reading of the scriptures.
I don't suggest you become a professional, and every time you open the Bible you're looking for your Sunday evening sermon.
But in your own private reading of the scripture, just have another faculty operating,
whereby alongside all the personal benefit you derive from the scriptures, you will also check its usability for evangelistic work.
If you only do that, again, your problem will not be finding a text. You'll have a text queue,
and you'll be quite desirous of preaching from all sorts of passages because you've kept that eye open for evangelistic possibility.
So be on the watch. Also, you'll get many suggestions from reading the sermons of others, for better or for worse.
The most inspiring sermon I ever heard in my life was by a liberal. I don't know whether to tell you this,
partly because of the use you may make of it, and partly because it takes time.
But in around 1958, or thereabouts, my fiancé at that time, and I may get into trouble for including her,
anyway, we went to hear Dr Leslie Weatherhead preach in London. Don't walk out, Dennis.
You know Leslie Weatherhead, the militant evangelicals used to call him Wesley Leatherhead?
But he preached this rank liberal, the most inspiring sermon I ever heard.
The city temple had only recently been reopened, and so it was quite full. They soon emptied it, but it was quite full.
And on the programme, they had lights and everything coming on and going off. It was all rather a theatrical production.
But at the beginning of the sermon, an usher, who was a very old man, would walk in with a big Bible on a blue silk cushion.
And he would enter the church and walk up the altar steps, because they had altar steps,
and he would put this Bible on the altar table, and the programme said to show his mark of respect for the Bible,
he would retreat down the altar steps backwards, which he proceeded to do.
Now, being a very old man with a gammy leg, everybody watched on edge.
I don't know whether this was part of the psychological processing, but anyway, the tensest moments of the service was before it began.
Having shown this tremendous reverence for the Bible, and having sung good old-fashioned evangelical Wesleyan-Watson hymns,
Leslie Weatherhead then proceeded to tear the Bible to bits, and he preached a sermon on the fall.
Of course, those of you who are read in your liberalism know that his sermon was about the fall upwards.
You know the old reasoning? Evolution, moral evolution. Man was once an animal, he was once amoral.
Now he's advanced, he's immoral, and one day he'll be moral.
The onward march of mankind, this is the rubbish he preached, and he said a great many devastating things.
Well, I'll tell you how the service was inspiring. I was only a youngster, but my blood didn't stop boiling for six months.
That was a tremendous inspiration.
And so sometimes you read sermons, you will get a negative inspiration, as I mentioned earlier, with a commentary,
and it'll give you insight and you'll react. Perhaps it's not a bad sermon, but you'll react and it'll give you much food for thought,
many ideas, but do carry out a systematic study of obvious passages.
We've been talking a lot about miracles and passages and parables.
Study them, give special time to them, search for the evangelistic content and arguments,
and I guarantee you, you will become very impatient to preach them.
You will have a wonderful time and make many discoveries. Don't be a hand-to-mouth preacher.
Don't find you never studied a passage carefully until the Saturday before you preached it.
No wonder you're tense. No wonder you wake up in shivers some nights wondering what you're going to do next Sunday.
But if you study some of the obvious passages weeks ahead, don't go away and say,
I said you should prepare a sermon weeks ahead. I've been an awful hypocrite to tell you that.
But certainly make a detached study of the obvious evangelistic passages.
This is your life work. You're supposed to be a gospel man first and foremost, a gospel man above everything else.
What a joy it is to go looking for the evangelistic usefulness and application of many passages.
Of course, pray for your texts, because even though you may be a systematic man and you may work ahead,
through prayer, it will be your experience. Sometimes I'm sure that you really are given a text.
The Lord does that. It may not be the best normal way of seeking for texts, but there are times you are given a text.
There's no question about that. And everything, of course, is subject to intelligent review.
Time is going on. I'll do a little mathematics and then we'll go straight to some examples.
I spoke about a four and a half year program, four and a half being a strange figure, but it's 200 sermons.
So it's useful. Let's suppose you've got 40 miracles, 40 parables, and you've got 20 great statements of Christ.
Now, there are so many great statements of Christ. Obviously, his statements to Nicodemus in John 3,
many examples, his wonderful statement to the dying thief. You've got altogether about 60 great evangelistic statements of Christ.
If you only have 20 in each 200 sermon cycle, that's going to be four and a half times three, whatever that is.
You may want to preach on some of them more frequently. You see the scope there is for evangelistic preaching,
40 miracles, 40 parables in the period. If you want to make it a miracle parable rich period of preaching,
then you've got these 20 great statements of Christ, 50 other New Testament texts,
which may be anything from Peter's conversion to Romans 6, 23, for the wages of sin is death,
great evangelistic statements of the apostles, and so on. Why there are so many.
And then maybe you'll include 50 Old Testament texts. You may want more from the Old Testament.
Give you a few ideas as we close. That means that every year you'd have about 17 miracles,
parables, four to five great statements of Christ, 11 to 12 other New Testament texts,
and 11 to 12, that is roughly a quarter, taken from the Old Testament.
I mean, you're not scratching the surface of the evangelistic opportunities.
Oh, never let it be thought, what will I preach about? This is primarily an evangelistic book.
This is the salvation of God from cover to cover. Think of some of those New Testament texts.
It is appointed unto men once to die. But after this, the judgment, my magnificent texts.
But I must move on to some examples of this kind of preaching and what we can do for the Lord in it.
Now, I'm spoiled for choice here,
and I'm going to take you first of all into the Old Testament to the Book of Ecclesiastes.
I'm coming here because I find few people preach from Ecclesiastes.
It may be different over here, so we'll look at it.
Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.
Mrs. Thatcher quoted this when she wanted to say something derogatory about her colleagues who pushed her out.
She didn't understand the text. She thought vanity meant pride.
Of course, I'm sure you know that it means futility.
One version does say this futility of futility is all is futility, but it really doesn't.
It's not very sayable, is it? So we'll scuttle back to vanity and explain it, I think.
As being much more useful.
Vanity of vanities, written by Solomon.
What a wonderful way into any sermon from Ecclesiastes.
This was King Solomon.
This was the man who had great opportunities and became a great rebel.
I hope you believe that Solomon was converted towards the end of his life.
I know the historical portions of scripture don't say so.
But surely when you read Proverbs, which is the language of an old man counseling younger men,
which is the counsel of a man looking back and saying,
I did all these wrong things and now I have found that it was all futility and all striving after wind.
And now I found this is how things ought to be.
Surely you can't read Proverbs and Ecclesiastes without taking the view that Solomon came back again.
It's inescapable. Otherwise, what are you going to do with these experiential looking back narratives?
Impossible. So he must have come back to the law.
And actually, as you know, here in Ecclesiastes or the preacher, the term there,
Ecclesiastes, the preacher is derived from a term which means either the gatherer or the one who is gathered.
And many of the old writers chose the latter.
They said, well, shouldn't really be called the preacher. It should be called the gathered one.
This is the testimony of the one who's been gathered in once again.
Well, we can't prove that, but it certainly is a very attractive idea, isn't it?
Because this is Solomon's great testimony.
He turned to so many of the commentaries and they are sad here.
They say, what is Ecclesiastes? Well, the moral obligations of the believer.
Moral obligations of the believer. This is an evangelistic book.
It teams with evangelistic arguments. You missed that point.
It's got very little to say to you. It's got some great ideas.
But I hope you come to this book and you come looking for evangelistic arguments.
And some of the most original and wonderful evangelistic arguments of the whole of the Bible are here.
Look at this first chapter. Just a little glimpse. Verses one to eleven.
Here is a man who had the wealth and the abilities and the opportunities to indulge himself in any way he liked.
And yet he found none of it could give him satisfaction.
And so he proceeds in this chapter with the great cycles of life.
Verse four. One generation passeth away and another generation cometh.
But the earth abideth forever. The sun also rises and the sun goes down and hasteth to his place where he rose.
Then the wind. Then the rivers. All things are full of labor.
Verse eight. What's this all about?
Well, it is all about the inevitable, mechanical, predictable cycles of life, isn't it?
One after another. Now, I'm anticipating a sermon, but can't you see how all this reasoning is going to get you to points like this?
Get up in the morning. Have your breakfast. Go to work. Have your dinner. Work some more. Go home. Have dinner.
Watch television. Go to bed. Sleep. Get up in the morning. Have your breakfast. Go to work.
The relentless, mechanical, repetitive, predictable cycles of life.
This is what this chapter is all about. This is evangelistic reasoning. The futility of life without God.
Millions of people all around the world trying to be original and doing exactly the same thing as everybody else.
Doing that which is predictable. That which is futile.
Oh, desire something. Want it. Work. Save up for it. Get it. Grow fed up with it.
Fasten your gaze on something else and start all over again.
Well, I haven't time to develop the theme, but these are evangelistic arguments here.
Nothing new under the sun and so on. In fact, just turn on to chapter three and we could again spend a week on these things.
Have you ever wondered what the meaning of chapter three is to everything?
There is a season and a time to every purpose under the heaven.
And then comes Solomon's style again, a time to be born and a time to die, a time to plant and a time to pluck up that which is planted.
By the way, before I explain this, there are a number of Victorian commentaries on Proverbs and Ecclesiastes that help you a great deal, but not totally.
You get, for instance, that very popular Victorian commentary by Charles Bridges and he'll give you many insights into the meaning of the verses,
but he never or hardly ever applies them evangelistically in the way they meant.
Charles Bridges is with these books almost the opposite of Calvin, say, in the epistles.
You know Calvin is so sure-footed in spotting the themes.
People sometimes complain about Calvin. They say, I bought his commentary on this or on that and he just doesn't have much detail at all.
You've missed the point. Calvin in the New Testament is the ultimate master for tracking the themes.
He's not interested so much in the details, but the great arguments.
He doesn't pay much attention to the supplementary and subsidiary teachings and principles. He sticks with the theme.
He only goes off the point when he's too busy, like the hounds going after their quarry, too busy chasing Rome,
and then he goes off track sometimes here and there because he's got something to say about the papists.
But most of the time he stays right on the tail of the theme.
Whereas in Proverbs and Ecclesiastes, dear Charles Bridges has little time for the theme,
he focuses on just the meaning of the proverb, the meaning of the verse.
You can get much from it, but you haven't finished. You've got the evangelistic argument then.
What's all this about in chapter 3?
Well, I'll tell you. It is one of the most powerful hits in the whole Bible to self-determination.
It takes human pride and it says so. You think you have no need of God.
You think that you can have a good time, succeed in whatever you set out to do, be what you want to be,
have what you want to have, determine your affairs.
No, says Solomon, nothing of the kind. You're a human being and you are not free.
You are a creature of response. That's what you are, he's going to prove.
You are dominated by events. You are a subject being in a fallen world.
You cannot do what you want. That's the passage.
Look, a time to be born and a time to die. Did you decide when you'd be born?
Short of suicide, can you decide when you're going to die?
No, you're a creature of circumstances and you're dominated by things around you.
Don't imagine that you're free like that.
And then he goes on, a time to plant and a time to pluck up.
You know, of course, what that means. There is a time for the seed time and harvest.
You can't rush it. It's very humbling.
Especially to the farming community of those days, you can't say to yourself,
I want to be original. I want to sow in midsummer or whatever or in the wrong season.
I want to reap, not the same time everybody else is reaping, I want to do it differently.
You can't do that. You're a creature of response.
You've got to do as you're told in this world.
You've got to accept all kinds of pressures and events.
What a theme to develop to humble people who had no idea of their spiritual need.
And it goes on and he brings out the irony of this, a time to kill, a time to heal.
One minute, you're killing animals.
The next minute, the demands of animal husbandry, you're replenishing the flock.
You're working against yourself.
Can I indulge in a bit of self-pity?
I was one of the last national servicemen in Britain.
If I'd been born four days later, I would have got out of it.
There you are. I've got over that now.
But the reason for my telling you this is that, you see, in national service, you observed some curious things.
Any of you who've been in service life, you know, they didn't know what to do with national servicemen.
There were too many of them and they were shrinking the forces.
The global role of the British was at last coming to a happy end
and they didn't know what to do with us all.
So they would get up 500 men at six o'clock in the morning and march them to some sort of a vast store
and then they would lump boxes from that store into another store for four or five hours
and then that would be ended for the day.
And then the next morning, you'd move them all back again.
And I couldn't help seeing a note of this in the reasoning of Solomon.
One minute you're killing them, the next minute you're trying to raise them.
And you can't stop that. You can't decide when you do it.
You can't stop this constant contradiction in life.
You kill them when the market says so, when you've got to.
And you replenish them when the need arises.
You don't choose these things, you're a creature of response.
And farming is the same today.
I'm sure any expert here, I'm an inner city person, I'm treading on very thin ice here,
but I'm sure any expert in these things will uphold that.
It may be different forces operate to dominate you now than dominated them in those days,
And we could go all the way down.
Why, he says, there's a time when you're busy trying to find enough stones for a new building
and there's a time when you want the stones for construction
and another time you're going through ground which you want to bring under cultivation
and you're trying to get rid of them all.
What a poor thing you are, working in opposite directions,
but all the time at the dictates of circumstances.
You break down, you build up.
And verse 4, look at this, it now becomes quite sentimental,
a time to weep and a time to laugh,
time for funerals, time for weddings.
They don't happen when you plan, time for birth.
Why, your grandchild didn't come when it was so convenient to you,
came at completely the wrong time, you can't organise these things.
And just in the middle of time when you wanted to be happy,
maybe in the middle of a holiday, a loved one dies and you're mourning.
You can't plan these things, you're a creature of response.
Life dominates things.
There is so much we can derive from these magnificent arguments
but I'll tell you something else about them.
Not only are they devastating descriptions of the subject nature of the human race,
exposing us down to size, exposing our need of the sovereignty
and the overruling hand of God in our lives,
but the whole lot are a beautiful riddle of grace, a marvellous riddle.
Perhaps one day in future years you'll allow me to tell you about that
because I really can't do all of this this evening.
I've got to move to conclusion and I've only got a few minutes.
Let's turn to Luke 7 for a little bit of how-to, if you'll forgive me,
from the New Testament.
Luke 7, and this is the event in which the Capernaum centurion,
who had a servant who was sick unto death,
sent for the Lord Jesus Christ to come to heal his servant
and then sent again to say he didn't need to come,
he could do it from just where he was.
And in Luke 7 and verse 9, when Jesus heard these things,
he marvelled at him and turned him about and said unto the people that followed him,
I say unto you, I have not found so great faith, no, not in Israel.
Now I suggest to you as you read through the passage, that is the pivotal verse.
Don't you think so?
If the Lord Jesus Christ is going to hold up a man's faith
as a perfect example of saving faith,
then the subject of the passage is his faith as an illustration of saving faith, isn't it?
That's going to be the theme.
You know, evangelistic preaching isn't hard.
If you look carefully for what is pivotal, what is major, what is great,
now the old preachers would tend to divide this up in the following way.
A few little things, hints for your information.
I hope you don't think a centurion was somebody who looked after a hundred men.
That's the original notion of a centurion, but by the time of Christ,
a centurion had become rather a general term, such as we would use the term officer.
A centurion could be responsible for far more than a hundred men.
It was very loosely used.
And this man seems to be, if you're colouring in the background,
he's the commander at Capernaum, which was quite a big garrison,
and he has quite authority.
He tells us that.
He just stays on the base and he sends people here and sends people there.
To quell this disturbance and that disturbance, he doesn't go himself.
He's quite a senior chap.
He's probably a very high-born Roman because he's got stacks of money.
He's very wealthy, wealthy enough to have built the Jews a synagogue,
maybe that very synagogue which is available for inspection today,
or at least the ruins of it, the excavations of it,
the synagogue in Capernaum which was thought to have been constructed just around this time,
maybe that's the very one which you're looking at if you visit that site today.
There's just a little background.
If you read that, you don't need background.
You know, the Bible is sufficient of itself.
You certainly never interpret the Bible using background,
but you can use background to colour your preaching and to make it vivid and bring it to life.
Why, there are unbelievers listening to you who thought this was all fairy tales.
They didn't know these people really lived and something they paid for or built you could go and visit today.
People are that ignorant.
This is interesting.
Our friends at home, I don't know whether people do it here,
but at home one of the most popular things is for tourists to go round stately homes
and to listen to tour guides lecturing them on what members of the family did 300 years ago.
People are fascinated by history.
Don't bore them, but give them bits of it and they're very interested.
They say that was a very interesting sermon and they listen to all of your preaching.
So do give background where you can.
Do the homework.
Don't overdo it.
Don't waste your time, but give some of it.
But usually the subdivisions of this sermon would be something like this.
Here is an example of faith.
What is saving faith?
It begins with a need.
The centurion had a great need which could not be met on earth
and that gets you to the way in which a person may have spiritual questions and spiritual needs
and a loss of satisfaction or fulfilment or a desire for things which cannot be met except in salvation.
The beginning of faith is the grasping of a need.
The second element in the question of the Capernaum centurion was an awareness of his unworthiness.
He so grasped the deity and significance of Christ and his power and glory
that he couldn't bring himself to go to him.
He felt his unworthiness.
He gives us.
That is the reason that he's given.
So that's the second ingredient of saving faith.
The apprehension of the need of salvation, a sense of great unworthiness.
In other words that includes a grasp of God's holiness, a grasp of my own sinfulness
and then finally that element is that he grasped the divinity of Christ
and he came out with that glorious statement.
I know he said to Christ that you can do this from where you are.
I understand.
Even I have a limited amount of power.
I understand your divine power and those are the three elements of his faith
which can be discerned in the passage of which Christ said this is saving faith.
Now you see you would build your sermon on those ingredients
while proceeding through the narrative, through the description,
taking them in the order in which they occur.
Oh there are so many wonderful passages.
My wife was speaking concerning the children's application of the parable of the prodigal son
and maybe in this last five minutes I'll move to conclusion with the parable of the prodigal son.
Who hasn't preached on the parable of the prodigal son or the lost son?
Now I don't know how you did it but I believe the parable of the lost son
is the Lord Jesus' own hermeneutics and homiletics class.
Nowhere else do we have such detailed sermon notes.
The ideal way to preach the parable of the prodigal son is not to have sermon notes
but to use the ones provided because it is so detailed.
Let the prodigal son teach you how to explain the gospel and you will be greatly advanced.
I have read, as I'm sure you have, a lot of sermons on the prodigal son
and they only used it as a pretext.
The preacher could have preached that sermon from numerous other passages which is a great shame.
First rule for the prodigal son, almost every word counts.
Problem in preaching the prodigal son? There's too much for one sermon.
It's as rich as that.
So without further ado, let me just see if this might help you to see how we look at passages
if we're going to do it in just this few minutes.
We'll run through it.
Verse 11.
Stunning, isn't it? Just stunning. Pause.
What's the Lord saying here? Never heard anything like this.
A man had two sons and one of them said to his father,
I'm not reading anything into this, I'm sure you'll agree,
the younger of them said to his father, father I hate you.
I can't stand the sight of you. I don't want to be anywhere near you.
The only good that I can see in you is your money.
And even before you're dead, I want half your money, I want your inheritance
and I want it now and I want to get away.
The audacity of it.
What son would speak to a father like that?
What son? Even the most obnoxious son?
Who would go that far?
I wish you were dead and I wish I just had your funds
and I want what would fall to me and I want to clear off.
Well, you hear some pretty rough relationships, but this is devastating
and it needs to be brought out, you see.
Look at the passage.
Don't let familiarity dull its meaning.
There's no story like this in all the world.
And then you have to say, but what's the application?
Ah, I see.
If the father is God and the son is me or the human race,
individuals in particular, then what he's saying is this.
This is God's picture of how unconverted human beings treat him.
They just say to him, I wish you were dead.
I don't want to know anything about you.
All I want is what you're good for.
So if you don't mind, I will take my life, my body, my gifts,
my powers, my abilities, my health, my strengths and I'll be off.
And I'll have all these things to spend on myself
and I will pretend you didn't exist
and I will get as far away from you as I possibly can.
That's the way to deal with a parable,
to go straight to the spiritual application.
And there you have human beings described.
I will rush like fury here because just to give you an insight,
then the father did it.
He divided unto them his living.
And without straining theology, the remarkable thing about Almighty God
is that he gives the human race license even to dishonour and abuse him.
Judgement Day is at the end of the world, but there is this license.
Verse 13, not many days after.
You see, there's a lesson there.
As soon as people have come up in early childhood,
we're rebelling against God.
As soon as we get the opportunity for independence,
the rebellious years dawn and we want to be off and godless
and doing our own thing.
Not many days.
It's not in our 30s or 40s or 50s we become atheists,
but almost as soon as we can think, we're on the run from God.
Gathered altogether, took his journey into a far country.
Why not the next country?
Why not down the road?
Why not just two countries away?
Why many countries away?
A far country because he didn't want to hear about his father
and he didn't want his father to hear about him.
You see, it's an opportunity to talk about the deliberate,
wilful estrangement.
There wasted his substance with riotous living.
Not wasted it like you throw something into a waste paper basket,
but wasted it as your body wastes away
when you're suffering from a terrible disease.
He ran down.
What a way, what a route to the aging process
and the dismal outcome of life,
as strength and faculties run down and life disappoints.
And when he had spent all, there arose a mighty famine in that land,
Matthew Henry's famine of truth and love and meaning and purpose.
But I suggest when you get to verse 14, you have a heading.
Now this is what happens when God begins to work in a life and in a heart
and troubles us.
A famine comes and we are unfulfilled and desperate.
And he began to be in want,
but as you know, if you know the parable,
the first thing he did was not to return to his father.
The first thing he did was to try to solve his problems in that land,
and that's what we do.
As soon as we begin to realize the emptiness and the vanity of life,
we're so stubborn and wilful we don't turn back to the Lord,
we try to solve the problem in this world,
maybe by drink or drugs or entertainment or acquisitions of goods,
possessiveness or careerism or whatever.
But there's even that is mentioned there, and it didn't work,
because he sent him into his fields to feed swine,
Matthew Henry again with that delightful phrase,
man designed for angel's bread reduced to swine's husks.
You see, all the possibilities there.
And he would fain have filled his belly with the husks that the swine did eat.
That's an important verse.
It informs on later in the account.
And verse 17, when he came to himself.
You don't need the himself.
It's better if it just reads when he came to,
because your study of the Greek will show you that it's just when he awoke.
When he awoke.
There's even a message there.
There's already too many messages for one sermon.
When he awoke.
That's what godlessness is, unconverted state.
It's a dream.
It's a sleep walk.
It's not real.
It's make believe.
It's just a dream.
And you can develop that.
He said, how many hired servants of my father's have bread enough and to spare?
What an opportunity for another lesson.
The poorest, simplest Christian is much better off than the most gifted,
wealthy unbeliever and the reasons why.
What a line of arguing, isn't it?
What the Christian has that the unbeliever doesn't have,
which means that even the poorest, most disadvantaged believer has
infinite riches by comparison with the wealthy, successful, worldly.
Yet another line of argument.
And then it goes down, verse 18,
I will arise and go to my father, his determination to repent.
And there is his statement of repentance, but you notice a little later on,
he doesn't get to the end of it.
When it comes to make me as one of thy hired servants,
he's not going to be allowed to finish.
And that's going to be a big route into grace.
But look at verse 20.
I have to move to conclusion.
He arose and came to his father.
Here's the thing.
There's always some point in a parable that you've got to get right
or you're off the track.
But when he was yet a great way off, his father saw him.
The language of the parable breaks down.
His father is God, of course.
He is the unconverted, worldling, the sinner, the rebel.
Are you an Arminian?
I won't ask for a show of hands.
If you are, you'll be comfortable with the idea that he got almost home
and the father came out to him.
If you're a Calvinist, you'll think,
well, I don't think he covered much of that distance.
And you look at the verses and you discover he would have been willing
to eat the husks that the swine did eat.
When you're reduced to that, you're pretty hungry.
When you're reduced to that, you're emaciated
and you've got boils coming and you're starving and you're in tatters.
And if you set out for home,
there's no way you're going to cover more than a few hundred yards.
Here's the meaning of the parable.
To the repentant sinner who's got nowhere at all
and cannot complete that long, long journey from hell to heaven,
that long, long journey from degradation and sin and folly
and spiritual death to the glories of being a member of God's family,
to that hopeless sinner, we're now applying the parable.
God in Christ Jesus saw us and came all the way from glory
to the cross of Calvary and suffered and died.
It's verse 20 that brings in the Gospel.
Oh, but you say there's nothing about Calvary there.
Friends, you supply that.
You get grace in the passage.
You get Gospel reasoning.
Don't say, oh, but there's no Gospel there.
There's no Calvary there.
If that's all that's missing, you supply it.
You bring that in and there you've got the Father coming out.
Isn't that redemption? Isn't that atonement in Christ?
Isn't that Calvary?
And it isn't the end by any means, though it has to be the end for us.
The best robe, Christ's righteousness, the ring on His hand,
membership of the family, shoes on His feet,
I leave that to you to make what you will with,
and the joy and the happiness.
And verse 24, oh, verse 24, I just have to say that's too much.
That's a separate sermon.
That will have to come under the great statements.
There's just too much grace here for one message.
I'll go right over the attention span of those who are listening,
like I'm in danger of going over the attention span of those who are listening.
For this my son was dead and is alive again.
He was lost and is found and there's no time for the elder brother,
which is almost as strong.
But start with the prodigal.
Start with the lost son.
Get the hang of the parables.
Wish I'd had time for miracles.
Maybe one day in the future we'll actually do nothing but how-to.
It's the most enjoyable thing.
And bring to life the passages.
But if you'll forgive me, I thought it was important to try to deal with some of the principles.
May God bless you all.
May you be gospel men.
May you be those who make such glorious discoveries.
Well, your feet will scarcely touch the ground as you prepare.
And may you be moved and inspired to grapple with souls
and demonstrate and present the gospel with all the fullness of scriptural arguments.
So that your people rejoice.
So that they worship.
So that they learn these great themes for their personal witness.
So that they can't wait to bring in the lost and persuade their neighbours to come.
May God bless you all in the future years.