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We Preach Christ The Lord By Gary Shepard

2 Cor 4-5
23/01/1999 Welwyn Garden City Herts. England

Ordination and Induction of Stephen Bignall

Let me say at the beginning that I do appreciate this opportunity to be with you on this occasion.
And I'd have to say also that I'm the least worthy and the least qualified to stand here and deliver this charge.
I have just opened my mouth, and you know immediately I'm just another crude colonist and a country preacher, just a country preacher.
But I'm here today as one who for something like 20 years has tried to preach the gospel of the grace of God in an obscure place.
And I'm come as one who stood before that as a preacher and as a pastor who knew neither the gospel or the Christ of the gospel.
I was in some measure at a point what some would call reformed, but I was not regenerated.
I was someone who had a knowledge of the doctrines of grace but had not experienced the grace of the doctrines.
And I was one who told men and women about someone called Jesus Christ, but the Lord had not been pleased to reveal his Son in me.
And since he was at that time pleased to do so, from that time I have desired to be in fellowship and be a part of a fellowship beyond all others, not only as a preacher but as a believer.
And that fellowship is made up of those that Paul includes in one little pronoun in the fifth verse.
He says, For we, I find a lot of people to groups which scare me very much.
I find a lot of people who are looking for the least little thing to unite over.
And then I find some who are looking for the least little thing to divide over.
And I fear them both.
And I desire to be a part of this WE.
He says here, We preach Christ.
And whatever distinction some find it necessary to make, let it be said that we are a part of this fellowship and body.
We preach Christ.
And for just a moment I want to point out a few things in this verse that I believe are of some importance.
When the apostle says that we preach Christ, he is saying that this is our doctrine and this is our message.
A friend of mine likes to say that middle C is the chief note of our song.
We just keep striking the middle C of Christ and Him crucified.
And so vital is this that the apostle says that if anyone comes and they have not the doctrine of Christ, then they are not to be received joyfully or welcomely or as if they are the children of Christ, it is so important that this distinction be made.
And oftentimes when this distinction is made, as I'm sure this brother has found out and will find out a lot more in the days ahead, when this distinction is made, you're often found somewhat left to yourself.
But I read something that Mr. Spurgeon said a long time ago and it helped me.
He said, I'd rather be a lean bird in the wilderness than a fat bird in a cage.
I'd rather be lean in a wilderness place with the liberty to preach Christ, with the liberty to tell men and women the truth about God, with the liberty to serve Christ in that liberty of conscience and not be bound in the cage, restrained from doing any of these things.
When the Lord saves us, we are brought, every one of us, to a certain woe.
We're brought, like Isaiah of old, to say, woe is me, for I am a man of unclean lips and I dwell amongst a people of unclean lips.
So when God sets his hand upon a man and calls him into the ministry of the gospel of Christ, he brings that man into another certain woe.
And that is the woe that Paul speaks of when he says, woe is unto me if I preach not the gospel.
And one of the most wonderful things that any man can be brought to is when he is brought to the realization, if he is called of God, that he doesn't have to preach, that he doesn't have to pastor, but if he does preach, if he does pastor, he must preach the gospel.
Woe is unto me if I preach not the gospel, not a gospel, but the gospel.
And here is the first thing that I notice in this fifth verse, and this is what the apostle says by the Spirit of God, the first thing he says here is this, he says, we preach.
Whatever this fellowship is and whoever it is that is in this body that he speaks of, this is one of the things that characterizes them.
He says, we preach.
And I realize that in every pastorate there is a measure of administrative work and a measure of social work of sort and a measure of counseling and such as this.

But the first role and the first duty of this man and everyone who is called of God, the first order of business is that we preach.
And we find that everywhere in scripture commanded and yet it is a thing in our day that falls on our country like a plague.
Here are all these men who are administrators and I call them religious cheerleaders and counselors and all these things and they do everything, but they don't preach.
They don't preach.
I'll never forget of all the things that our brother Bill Clark said to me and told me
and instructed me in, I'll never forget this and that is when he stood in my own pulpit
and he said, we do not need more preachers and we do not need more missionaries.
What we need is more men who will preach the gospel.
Not just be preachers in name and not just be preachers in title, but be preachers of
the gospel.
We preach, Paul says.
That is, he says in 1 Corinthians 1, Christ sent me not to baptize but to preach the gospel.
Not with wisdom of words lest the cross of Christ should be made of none effect for the
preaching of the cross is to them that perish foolishness, but unto us which are being saved
it is the power of God.
And I realize that what he's talking about there is he's talking about this preaching
of the doctrine of the cross, of a crucified Christ.
But when he says this, it's in this context of the ministry that he's speaking about.
We preach, he says.
And then he says, for though I preach the gospel as I said, I have nothing to glory
in.
He says, for necessity is laid upon me.
Necessity is laid upon me, laid upon me by God.
And this necessity, this thing that I need to do, that I must do, that as the prophet
said it burns like a fire in my bones, is to preach, it is to lift up and to proclaim
the Lord Jesus Christ.
I'll never forget the first time I ever read in Acts 16.
And here is the Apostle Paul and he's figuring on one place to go and the Spirit of God forbids
him.
And then he turns and he starts to go in another direction and the Spirit of God forbids him.
And then all of a sudden it says that night that he had a vision in the night of a man
of Macedonia.
And that man of Macedonia was being shown to him by God and saying, come over and help
us.
When I read about that and I thought about that situation, I thought about how many hungry
people there must have been in the country, how many sick people there surely was in the
country, how many problem families and all these things.
But listen to what Luke records here in Acts 16.
And after he had seen the vision, immediately we endeavored to go into Macedonia assuredly
gathering that the Lord had called us for to preach the gospel to them.
We preach.
And men and women hear all the news and they can hear about all the social issues and all
these other things, but what they won't hear unless the servants of God declare it is,
they won't hear preaching of the Lord Jesus Christ.
Paul commanded Timothy, he said, preach the word.
Be instant in season, out of season, reprove, rebuke and exhort with all long suffering
and doctrine, all of this which is a part of preaching.
It is surely not in all the things that we find that have been replacing the preaching
over the years.
I have nothing against singing and it's a necessary thing, but it's not preaching.
He says it's not by all the films that can be shown and not by all the puppets that can
be used or all the dramas or all the discussion groups or all the things that now are put
in place, but it is by this business of preaching, which means to lift up and to cry and to herald
this message with the authority of God upon it.
And when men employ other means they exalt their wisdom above God's.
When they employ other means they refuse this message and show just another way of rebellion.
And when they do not delight in the preached word or desire something instead of it or
above it, it simply reveals the dark desires of an unregenerate heart.
Paul said, we preach.
We preach.
That's your chief responsibility.
You'll have a lot of it, but that's the chief one.
That's the call of the day.
That's the need of the hour.
That's what God sends out his servants to do.
Paul says, we preach.
Then he says something else.
He says that we do not preach ourselves.
Oh, we have a great tendency to.
And it seems like the best I can do sometimes, myself gets involved and gets in the way,
but this is our goal and this is our mission.
We preach, not ourselves.
Oh, we're just like everybody else.
We have an opinion.
And as someone said, we have our own opinion, which we highly respect.
And we have our own ideas and we have our own thoughts and we have our own traditions
and backgrounds and we have our own circumstances.
But this is not the gospel.
We may have learned some things.
We may be wise in the things of this world.
We may know a lot about business or philosophy or one thing or another.
We may be leaders among men in the natural realm, but this does not qualify us, nor is
it to be any part of the message of the gospel.
I like what the apostle says by way of his own confession.
He says, when it pleased God, who separated me from my mother's womb and called me by
his grace to reveal his Son in me that I might preach him among the heathen, immediately
I conferred not with flesh and blood.
God's preacher does not run for a second opinion.
Sometimes we have, when we are confronted with things plain in the Word of God that
we know are going to be hard for the people to swallow, we'll start running around sometimes
and we'll pick up this commentary and we'll read this creed or we'll read this confession
to see if there is a softer, more palatable way to present this.
But most of the time there's not.
You see, it's not that we're to preach the creeds or the confessions or the writings
of old men, old preachers, or any of these things, good as some of them might be, but
we're to say what thus saith the Lord.
If someone has a problem with that, they'll have to take it up with the one who said it.
He said, we preach not ourselves, and it's easy to set forth things in a way that people
can sit out and hear us and say, well, that's what he thinks or that's his opinion or that's
his interpretation, but God's servants, we do not preach ourselves.
We set forth what thus saith the Lord.
Then he says something else, after having warned Timothy about being engaged in endless
debates and profane and vain babblings and such as that, which will profit nobody and
only work to the spiritual detriment of men, he says this.
He says, we do preach Christ.
We preach, we don't preach ourselves, but we do preach Christ.
And I like the way he expresses it here in the translation that I use.
He says, but Christ Jesus, the Lord.
And my country, I hear a lot of folks talking about Jesus.
And I hear a lot of preachers preaching about Jesus.
But you don't have to listen but for just a moment, if you know anything about the Holy
Scriptures to know, they are not talking about Christ Jesus, the Lord.
He's like a little piece of putty, a little piece of clay that they can take and shape
and mold to fit any situation, to please anybody, to blend into any situation, but he is not
Christ Jesus, the Lord.
You see, we do preach Christ.
We preach God's eternal purpose and covenant in Christ.
You cannot preach the Christ of the Bible without preaching the covenant God and that
covenant which he has made in Christ.
We preach God's choice of a people in Christ.
We preach God's predestination of a people to be conformed to the image of Christ.
We preach God's hand in the death of Christ.
We preach the hand of God's Spirit in the effectual call of Christ.
We preach Christ, which means the anointed one, and which means that if we preach Christ,
we have to preach him in those offices of which he was anointed of God as Christ the
prophet and Christ the priest and Christ the king.
We preach him as the one appointed and the one approved and the one accepted, the one
and eternal Son of God, the Lord Jesus Christ.
And we preach him in his full accomplishment.
Some years ago, a preacher friend asked me on a Monday morning what I'd preached on Sunday.
And I thought that he believed the gospel.
I thought he had some understanding and some desire to preach the gospel.
And so I said, I just brought a simple message on Matthew 1.21.
One statement of Scripture about the Lord Jesus Christ.
Thou shalt call his name Jesus for he, and he alone, shall without any doubt save altogether
in every sense his people, not everybody, but his people from their sins.
And he stood back and shrieked almost in horror, and he said, You know you didn't.
I said, Well, what else could you preach from that verse?
Because you haven't identified the person unless you have set forth what the Scripture
says are those accomplishments that distinguish him from the false person and the true Jesus.
He shall save his people from their sins, every one of them, from all their sin without
any doubt.
It says that as far as the work that the Father gave him to do, he said, It is finished.
When we preach Christ, we preach how he has already made peace by the blood of his cross.
If we preach Christ, we preach how he has already entered into that holy place and by
his blood already obtained eternal redemption for us, that he has already brought in everlasting
righteousness, that he is, as Joshua pictured him, the one who has left nothing undone.
We preach that he is the Savior who saves his people from the penalty and from the power
and yea, one day, from the very presence of sin.
We preach him as the one who is the just God and the Savior manifests.
We preach him as the one whose righteousness imputed to men and women alone is the ground
of their justification.
And we don't preach him as a way.
We preach him as the only name, the only way, the truth, the life, the one peace, the one
mediator between God and men alone, one hope, one God, one person, the God-man, Jesus Christ.
We may take a text from the Old Testament or a text from the New Testament.
We may start from this starting point or from this perspective or another, but we are always
headed for one person, Jesus Christ.
Friend of mine, some of you know him, brother Henry Mahan.
Some years back, someone got real upset with him, a preacher got real upset with him, or
somebody, I forget who it was, and they laid this charge against him.
They said, he's made a god out of Jesus Christ.
That happened a long time before he was ever born.
And then he says this, he tells us how we preach.
He says, ourselves, your servants, and as you read, bondservants, bondservants.
The bondservant in the book of Exodus was the one you know who willingly, after they
had been set free, willingly had the master in the public place to bore their ear, and
by that identify themselves as those who loved the master and loved the family and
loved the service willingly.
He says we preach, ourselves, your servants, not in a show of intellect, not in a show
of eloquence or sensationalism or in display of a personality, not with words of the wisdom
of this world, lest the cross of Christ should be made of none effect.
I like what Richard Baxter said, I preach as a dying man to dying men.
And we, he says, as examples and not as lords over the Lord's heritage, we preach with great
clarity, simplicity, and the same message to one and all.
Not for filthy lucre's sake, not for what we gain, but as servants, willing bondservants.
When I first started preaching to the group that I've been the pastor of for the better
part of almost 20 years now, with some bit of an exception, they wondered how they were
going to support me, they were wondering how they were going to provide for me and care
for the needs of myself and my family, and all I was wondering was what are they going
to charge me to let them preach.
I hated for them to know that I would probably pay them to let me preach the gospel to them,
because woe is unto me if I preach not the gospel.
Then let me give you this last thing, and that's the reason why we preach.
Of all others, he says, for Jesus' sake, a man needs to get it settled in his mind who
he's preaching for first.
He said, for Jesus' sake.
We preach for the conversion of sinners, but that's not the first reason we preach.
We preach for the benefit of the Lord's converted people, but that's not the first reason that
we preach.
We preach first for Jesus' sake.
We preach for His glory.
We preach because God has commanded us to preach.
We preach because that gospel of Christ goes up as a sweet savor to God.
Every time the name of Christ is exalted.
Brother, if you preach Christ, you may walk out of here some mornings or some evenings
and say, well, I don't think anybody got anything out of it, and they might not have.
But if you exalted the beloved Son of the Father, He did.
He did.
If you preach first to please Him, if you preach first to glorify Him, if you preach
first to have honor from Him, you can never be a failure.
That being true, God has not sent His messengers on a fool's errand.
But we preach this gospel because none are saved apart from this gospel, because the
God of truth does not save by lies and half-truths, but it pleased Him.
Through this preaching of the gospel, Paul says to these Thessalonians, he says, we're
bound to give thanks always to God for you, brethren, beloved of the Lord, because God
hath from the beginning chosen you to salvation through sanctification of the Spirit and belief
of the truth, whereunto He called you by our gospel.
It dawned on me some time ago that every time that Paul speaks along these lines, it's always
with one of these personal and somewhat possessive pronouns, our gospel.
What is our gospel?
Paul said, I determined to know nothing among you save Jesus Christ and Him crucified.
I may say some other things, but God help us to say and to preach only that which has
to do with the person and the work of the Lord Jesus Christ and the working out of that
in the lives of His elect people.
We endure all things for the elect's sake.
So, my brother, I pray that God would keep all of us in this blessed fraternity.
We preach not ourselves, but Christ Jesus the Lord, and ourselves your servants for
Jesus' sake.
God bless you.