How to Preach the Gospel

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0:00:00 – (Matt Smethurst): If you’re ready to go deeper in theology, Southern Seminary’s PhD programs were built for you. With flexible formats from fully online to modular to in person. Southern makes serious doctoral level theological training accessible to the pastor called to bring the depth of God’s word to God’s people. Study with faculty committed to strengthening the church and bring that depth back to the people you you lead.

0:00:26 – (Matt Smethurst): Visit sbts.edu PhD to learn more. Paul was seeing in the Hebrew scriptures that ultimately Jesus is not just the kind of main idea. He’s the main point. Welcome back to the Everyday Pastor, a podcast from the Gospel Coalition on the nuts and bolts of ministry. I’m Matt Smethurst and and I’m Luke Duncan and we’ve talked in a previous episode about the gospel. What is the gospel? Being freshly staggered by the news of what God has done for us. But we also wanted to devote an episode. We’ve had people ask about this.

0:01:08 – (Matt Smethurst): How do we preach the gospel in every sermon? We want to be ministers who are distinctly Christian in the way that we’re unfolding the word of God. And we want to not just be gospel centered in name only as just kind of a buzzword or a slogan. We want the gospel to drive everything we do, including actually beginning with our preaching. So what are some ways that preachers should be thinking about this?

0:01:35 – (Ligon Duncan): Well, I mean, first, true confessions. Again, this is something I still want to grow in. Matt. Our mutual friend Mark Dever has been a help to me in this area and a story that Mark tells. You’ll probably remember the specifics of the story better than me, but Mark had preached a sermon on one of the books of the Pentateuc been from Numbers. It may have been from Leviticus. And one of his members, Bill Barrons, yeah, spoke to him, said that was a very helpful sermon. He enumerated a number of things that blessed him. But then he just in passing said, but you didn’t preach the gospel.

0:02:10 – (Ligon Duncan): And Mark thought about it and he said, he’s right. And Mark sort of made a vow. I’m not going to preach again. When I don’t preach the gospel, I want to always make sure that I’m preaching the gospel no matter where I’m preaching from the Bible. I know that conversation had an impact on Mark. Mark relaying that conversation had an impact on me. And I realized I need to be better at that. So I’m a work in progress on that, Matt.

0:02:44 – (Ligon Duncan): And so I have tried to be very deliberate. The sort of the 9 marks sermon application grid is something that Will have a section on have you preached the gospel? I’ve tried to be deliberate.

0:02:58 – (Matt Smethurst): That’s available online. We’ll put that in the Show Notes Sermon Application grid, which is a way to think through application. Because I’ll just say, I think so often in preaching, the application is the hardest thing. And I can actually tell when a preacher is underprepared. Not when his exegesis is off, but when his application is thin.

0:03:21 – (Ligon Duncan): True. And that’s, you know, guilty, guilty as charged. And so that’s something I’ve wanted to get better at. I love preaching the gospel from the Old Testament. That shouldn’t surprise us. It didn’t surprise early Christians, but for some reason it surprises Christians today when they hear the gospel from the Old Testament. Of course, I love preaching from the Gospels. I love preaching from the epistles. There’s no part of the Bible that I don’t enjoy preaching from. But I especially like to link the Old Testament purposes of God in their promise to the New Testament, fulfillment of the purposes of God in Christ. And of course, the New Testament does that repeatedly.

0:04:04 – (Ligon Duncan): And one example of that would be, say, I’m preaching through the story of Abraham in Genesis. And God makes these promises to Abraham in Genesis 12:1, 3. Go forth from. From your country and from your relatives and from your father’s house to the land that I will show you, and I will make you a great nation. I will bless you. I will make your name great. You will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you. I’ll curse those who curse you. And in you, all the families of the earth will be blessed. Well, Paul will explicitly say in Galatians 3, 13, 15 that the seed, the offspring, the descendant, the son, the heir that was promised to Abraham was not ultimately Isaac, it was Christ.

0:04:53 – (Ligon Duncan): The seed was Christ. The offspring was Christ, the ear was Christ. And that means all of those blessings, to use Paul’s language elsewhere, are yea and amen in Christ. You know, I love you.

0:05:06 – (Matt Smethurst): Kind of did the KJV back into KJV while I did the niv showing my age. I just went with yes.

0:05:14 – (Ligon Duncan): So I love when I’m preaching, I want to pay attention to the context. I want to address how that would have been heard by the first hearers. I wanna make sure it’s part of the flow of the story of redemptive history. But I also wanna relate it to Christ and to the Gospel, because the New Testament does.

0:05:33 – (Matt Smethurst): Yeah, I’m happy you started there because we want to avoid preaching the text without preaching Christ that’s the burden of this conversation. But we also wanna avoid preaching Christ without preaching the text.

0:05:47 – (Ligon Duncan): Correct.

0:05:47 – (Matt Smethurst): And it is possible to leapfrog over textual and historical realities in order to make too quick a beeline to the cross. And so talk a little bit more about how we can responsibly get to Christ from the Old Testament.

0:06:04 – (Ligon Duncan): One is to follow Christ’s pattern in Luke 24. So when we’re preaching the Old Testament, we know that Christ specifically drew attention to the humiliation and to the exaltation of the Messiah from the Old Testament. And you can start thinking, like, where? I mean, don’t you wish you were there at that Bible study? I mean, the greatest Bible study in the history of the world. But you’ve got to think that one of the places that he would have gone would have been Genesis 3:15.

0:06:37 – (Ligon Duncan): In the language, he shall bruise your head, you shall bruise his heel. So there’s humiliation and exaltation right there in that passage. So one way is to look for those kinds of places in the Old. The New Testament helps you because the New Testament will point you to a lot of them. It’ll point you to Isaiah 53. It’ll point you to Psalm 110. It’ll point you to Psalment 118. It’ll point you to Psalmma 2.

0:07:03 – (Ligon Duncan): It’ll point you to certain passages in the Old Testament that will help you do that. But then in a passage like this, I’m always asking, where’s this cited in the New Testament? How is it cited in the New Testament? So I’m looking at it in the flow of Genesis. But then part of my work is to say, how does the New Testament take this and apply it to Christ? So the New Testament is a huge resource to you in this area, but it will actually chart out themes for you that you can then be on the lookout for in other places where it may not have an explicit citation.

0:07:39 – (Ligon Duncan): And one of the things that has happened in your and my. In our very time, like in the last few years, is the explosion of the recognition of allusions in the New Testament to the Old Testament. I think we’ve been aware my whole time, since I was in seminary, probably your whole time in ministry of how many quotations there are in the New Testament of the Old Testament. But what wasn’t apparent to me when I was in seminary in the 1980s, is how many verbal allusions there are to the Old Testament.

0:08:18 – (Matt Smethurst): I eat not direct quotes, but echoes.

0:08:21 – (Ligon Duncan): Exactly. And that is incredibly helpful when you’re trying to preach from Old Testament passages about Christ. So one that you’ve already quoted. You and I were talking about something the other day, and you mentioned the baptism of Christ as God’s identification of him as that special son that he talks about in 2 Samuel 7. Amen. You’re exactly right about that. He uses language right out of two Samuel there in the baptism. But one of the things that my colleague, Ben Glad, who’s a colleague of yours and mine at tgc, runs the Carson Center, Ben pointed out to me that right as Jesus comes up out of the baptismal waters and the heavens open, the language, the heavens opened and the Holy Spirit descended as a dove. And that language comes out of the Isaiah passage where Isaiah prays that God would rend the heavens and come down. And so he’s citing Septuagint, Greek language of that passage in Isaiah about the descent of the Spirit. And that helps you so much when you’re working through.

0:09:36 – (Matt Smethurst): It gets even cooler.

0:09:37 – (Ligon Duncan): Yes.

0:09:38 – (Matt Smethurst): So that word, the Greek word in Mark for rend or tear only shows up two times there at the baptism. And with the tearing of the curtain in the temple, same exact word as God there again splits the skies to let us through into his presence. And speaking of Ben Glad, I mean, in illusions, he has this wonderful new resource, which, again, we’re not being paid to say this. This just came to our mind.

0:10:04 – (Ligon Duncan): I was about to go there. Yeah.

0:10:06 – (Matt Smethurst): Okay. Yeah. Connecting Scripture, New Testament, a study Bible of biblical allusions and quotations. Explain to listeners what that is.

0:10:15 – (Ligon Duncan): Okay, so Ben has worked for, with Greg Beale, who’s a wonderful biblical theologian who’s also sensitive to this kind of usage of a language, whether you call it echoes or allusions or whatever, deliberate use of language from Old Testament passages in New Testament passages without necessarily quoting it. And I think this is a Broadman Holman, is that right?

0:10:41 – (Matt Smethurst): Yeah.

0:10:41 – (Ligon Duncan): B and H. It’s Broadb and H Publishers. So they’ve produced this New Testament and it’s color coded. It will show you the quotations, it will show you the illusions. It’ll highlight the illusions in colors so that you can see the ver. It’ll give you the passages to go to in the Old Testament. And they’re working on an Old Testament one as well. So eventually they’ll have the whole Bible. So way to go. B and H.

0:11:10 – (Ligon Duncan): This is gonna be one of the most powerful tools for preachers that I can imagine, because even if you’re not toasty in your Greek, they’re gonna walk you by hand and show you the places that you need to go look in your Greek and see how they connect to the Old Testament. And so that’s another wonderful way, Matt, to make sure that we’re not just making stuff up. The New Testament writers see these connections and they’re sprinkling the breadcrumbs out for us.

0:11:41 – (Matt Smethurst): Yeah, it’s kind of. I mean, I’ve heard that There are only 12 chapters in the whole New Testament that don’t reference the Old. And again, that reference is not always a direct quotation. But for those who have ears to hear and are well versed with the language of the Old Testament, they’re often in the form of allusions. You can almost think about it like the New Testament is hyperlinked. When you’re reading an article online, certain words or phrases will have a hyperlink that you can click on.

0:12:11 – (Matt Smethurst): Well, you can do a lot of double clicking when you’re reading your New Testament and be taken back to previous revelation that the authors were mindful of as they wrote.

0:12:22 – (Ligon Duncan): And speaking of hyperlinking, Logos is going to have this connecting Scripture study Bible available on their. And you will literally be able to click the hyperlink and go back to the Old Testament passages. So I have it in the book form. I. I bought the book as quickly as I could, but I also have ordered it on Logos. And I’ll use both the book form and the Logos form as I’m trying to make sure that I’m catching all the connections between New Testament and Old Testament passages. So when I’m wanting to preach the gospel naturally and exegetically with sensitivity to the text and the context of the Old Testament passage that I’m preaching, the first thing that I want to know is what does the New Testament do with this passage? It might do it through a quotation, it might do it through an allusion, or there might be a thematic connection with the passage. And so those are the ways that I’m trying to be textual and preach the gospel at the same time. When I’m working in Old Testament passage,

0:13:22 – (Matt Smethurst): I’ll give you an example of one of those thematic connections. So if you’re preaching Jonah 1 or 2. Mark 4. So Jonah 1, of course, he runs away from Nineveh, he ends up in the ship. There’s a storm, he’s thrown overboard. Mark four, There’s a storm. Jesus is on the boat with his disciples. Let’s say you’re preaching Mark four. Well, you can say that ultimately the reason that Jesus and his disciples didn’t perish in that storm was because he had come to face down a greater one.

0:13:57 – (Matt Smethurst): And then you rewind the clock 800 years earlier where there was another prophet who was thrown overboard in the floodwaters of God’s judgment for his own sin. But in Christ, we have the final prophet, the ultimate prophet, who is thrown into the floodwaters of God’s judgment not for his own sin, but for ours. And that’s not just trying to be fancy, making things up out of thin air. Jesus himself said, someone greater than Jonah is here.

0:14:28 – (Ligon Duncan): That’s exactly right. Absolutely. So that’s one way when I’m preaching through Abraham, that I’m trying to make sure that I’m not only telling this amazing story of God calling this man out of the Ur of the Chaldees, who is from an idolatrous family into fellowship with him, telling of God’s purposes through his life and through his family line, but I’m also ultimately pointing to Christ. Let’s switch to the New Testament for a second.

0:14:59 – (Ligon Duncan): When you’re preaching the Gospels, it is possible to forget to preach the Gospel.

0:15:04 – (Matt Smethurst): It really is.

0:15:05 – (Ligon Duncan): So what are some of the things you do when you preach through Mark? What are some of the things that you do? Because what happens, I think, is you get down in the weeds when you’re working through a book study or something. What are some of the things you do to make sure that you’re keeping the gospel before the eyes and the hearts of your people as you preach through the Gospel of Mark?

0:15:26 – (Matt Smethurst): Well, it’s not enough simply to name Jesus. It’s not enough to simply talk about Jesus. Just because you’ve named him doesn’t mean you’ve proclaimed him as the solution to our deepest need. But Brian Chappell, our friend, we did an episode with him on Christ centered

0:15:45 – (Ligon Duncan): preaching that’s by the way, well worth people going back and listening to. That was, I think you said to him, I could listen to you all day. And I felt the same way. It was really, really good.

0:15:55 – (Matt Smethurst): Yeah. But he talks about how in every passage we can identify both the fallen condition and the redemptive solution. And this is true for Old and New Testament. So what is the fallen condition, the problem that we deal with as people? And it could be kind of a felt need that everyone is aware of, or it could be more of a deep spiritual need that some are suppressing that truth and unrighteousness. But what is the fallen condition this passage presents?

0:16:23 – (Matt Smethurst): And how is Jesus uniquely and specifically the answer to that problem? And it’s just going to look different with different texts. And so I think it’s important that our preaching of the Gospel doesn’t become predictably. We want to be predictable in the sense that people know we’re going to get to the gospel. We don’t want to be predictable in the sense that people always know exactly how unless they’ve studied the passage. Right, because we’re not trying to be fancy, but we want to do it in a way that’s organic, that arises out of the warp and woof of that particular passage, as you mentioned earlier, for example, tracing the theme of the seed of the woman to the son of Abraham, to the son of David, to ultimately the son of God.

0:17:17 – (Matt Smethurst): And so it’s just going to look different based on what passage you’re looking at. But I think we have an embarrassment of riches today in terms of resources. Frankly, there’s less excuse than ever that preachers have when it comes to figuring out how to do this. But it takes careful, patient, deliberate study. And of course, let’s just be clear. We want to preach sermons that make much of Jesus Christ as savior, Lord, King, friend. We want to do it not just because we’re checking a box, but ultimately because if we’re preaching sermons that would make sense if he was still somewhere in a Middle Eastern grave, then they’re not yet Christian sermons.

0:18:10 – (Matt Smethurst): We should only preach sermons that would get us kicked out of Jewish synagogues because we’re not just preaching generally uplifting theistic messages were preaching Christ and him crucified. And that’s another passage that’s interesting. When Paul says, for I have resolved to know nothing except Jesus Christ and him crucified. What was Paul drawing from in order to preach Christ? The Hebrew scriptures.

0:18:37 – (Ligon Duncan): Well said.

0:18:38 – (Matt Smethurst): And so Paul was seeing in the Hebrew Scriptures that ultimately Jesus is not just the kind of main idea, he’s the main point.

0:18:47 – (Ligon Duncan): I think that that’s important, that as Christians, as we approach the two parts of our Bible, it’s not that the Old Testament is a shadowy pre Christian sub Christian book, and then the New Testament is a Christian book. Early Christians viewed the Old Testament as a Christian book and it was about Jesus. The New Testament is about Jesus. The Old Testament is about Jesus. Now there is a promise fulfillment, there is.

0:19:14 – (Ligon Duncan): There are shadows and such, but it is a book fundamentally about Jesus. Jesus himself said that. I think that’s why Paul says things like he said in the passage you just quoted. And also in 1 Corinthians 10 and in a bunch of other places. I just think he was listening to Jesus and Jesus had said, don’t read that book without realizing that that book is about the Christ and I’m the Christ, it’s about me.

0:19:42 – (Ligon Duncan): And I think one of Paul’s big critiques, and you see this in Jesus too, but one of Paul’s big critiques of the Judaism of his day is the Judaism of his day said, yes, sin is a problem, law is the answer. And Paul said, no, no, no, no. Sin is the problem. Christ is the answer. Your law keeping is not the answer to sin. Christ and Christ alone is the answer problem of your law keeping. And by the way, I think that realization helps you unlock as a Christian preacher how to preach through books like Leviticus, you know, how to preach through Deuteronomy.

0:20:26 – (Matt Smethurst): The lawgiver became the law keeper and then died in the place of lawbreakers. Yeah. You recently were preparing to preach Psalm 88, the darkest Psalm in the Bible, which ends on a hopeless note.

0:20:39 – (Ligon Duncan): Yes.

0:20:40 – (Matt Smethurst): How would you preach Christ from a passage like that?

0:20:45 – (Ligon Duncan): One way that struck me, even as I was reading over the material again, reading some new commentaries, is the searching questions that the psalmists ask. How am I going to praise you from the grave? And as a Christian preacher, you’re just going, oh, you just threw that one right across the middle of the plate, right above the knees to me. Thank you for asking that question. And so from his standpoint, there’s no answer to that question.

0:21:16 – (Ligon Duncan): You only can answer that question with a resurrection. And so I had actually, as I had prepared the message, I was going to have a third point and just say, pause. Okay, I’m going to bring you out of the slough of despond for just a few minutes because he just asked us a question that begged us to talk about the resurrection. And so he invites you to answer a question, question that is unanswerable from his standpoint, that can only be answered. And of course, it’s a question that’s being asked in the New Testament as well.

0:21:49 – (Ligon Duncan): And so that just gets you in. We were talking a few weeks ago about how you can’t preach the gospel and just do Christ’s crucifixion and death and burial. You’ve got to preach the resurrection or you’re not yet preaching the good news. And Psalm 88 just tees it up for you to do that. That there.

0:22:14 – (Matt Smethurst): The pastor who goes deeper in theology doesn’t just become a better thinker, he becomes a better Shepherd. Southern Seminary’s PhD programs are forming pastor theologians, men who have wrestled seriously with the great tradition of Christian thought. And who bring that depth back to the people they love and lead. What you gain in your study, your congregation receives. And Southern Seminary’s faculty are here to support you in your work to strengthen the church.

0:22:42 – (Matt Smethurst): Southern’s PhD program is built to fit alongside your ministry, offering flexible formats from fully online to modular to in person, so you can pursue the kind of rigorous theological training that will change how you pastor without stepping away from your church. If you’re ready to go deeper, Southern Seminary’s PhD program is where that begins. Visit sbts.edu PhD to learn more. Yeah, reminds me also of a place like job 9:33. There is no mediator between us to lay his hand on both of us.

0:23:24 – (Matt Smethurst): Let him take his rod away from me so his terror will no longer frighten me. Then I would speak and not fear him. But that is not the case. I am on my own. And that way of speaking makes complete sense based on what Job knows.

0:23:37 – (Ligon Duncan): That’s right.

0:23:39 – (Matt Smethurst): But we know more. And one Peter talks about angels long to look into these things. And sometimes I tell my people angels could understand celebrating worshiping Christ as creator and maker and king and forever and ever. They sing holy, holy, holy. But only we can know Christ as Savior and friend. And so we can also sing mercy, mercy, mercy.

0:24:11 – (Ligon Duncan): Amen. Amen.

0:24:12 – (Matt Smethurst): And you had asked about preaching the Gospel. For example, the Gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. I think it’s especially easy when we’re there in the Gospels to present Jesus first and foremost as an example, not a savior, which is dangerous. Now, I do think there is a form of gospel centered preaching which doesn’t give full force to the moral demands of the New Testament. Okay, so Jesus is our example.

0:24:42 – (Ligon Duncan): Amen.

0:24:43 – (Matt Smethurst): First Peter 2 talks about that suffering like he did without opening his mouth.

0:24:48 – (Ligon Duncan): Ephesians 5. Yeah.

0:24:50 – (Matt Smethurst): But first and foremost, before he can be our example, we have to trust him as our Savior.

0:24:57 – (Ligon Duncan): That’s so good. Yeah. And good, faithful gospel proclamation is not going to, as Spurgeon has this saying, don’t try and reconcile friends. Justification and sanctification are friends. They don’t need to be reconciled. They’re already friends. They aren’t against one another, they’re for one another. And that’s why in my little Gospel presentation, I’ll go from faith, our answer, to new life, our pleasure, to indicate that, that the consequent growth in grace in the Christian life, the newness of life that Paul talks about in Romans 6 and elsewhere, Jesus talks about it in John 3, that newness of life is a blessing, not a burden.

0:25:45 – (Ligon Duncan): Hey, this is what it’s all about, to be able to walk with God. That’s the thing we want. We want communion with God. Jesus brought us to God. Don’t you want to enjoy that? And so you’re right. Putting that together and explaining that to people. Again, you’ve already mentioned, I think the last time we were together, you mentioned Sinclair Ferguson’s the Whole Christ. I do tell preachers a lot. If you’re trying to figure out preaching the gospel like the whole answer is in St. Clair, Ferguson’s the whole Christ, it really does put those things together so well. And he argues that antinomians and neonomians, legalists and those who just think that we’re saved to do whatever we want to do, they both make the mistake of not realizing the reality of the gracious Father.

0:26:40 – (Ligon Duncan): And so the antinomian kind of, he loves salvation, he loves forgiveness, but he kind of hates the law. Well, I mean, the law’s the gift of the gracious Father. It’s not there to ruin your life. It’s there to bless you. Not a single syllable of the law is meant to curse you. It’s meant to bless you. So the very attitude toward I hate the law, that’s something that. Okay, you haven’t seen the Gracious Father.

0:27:09 – (Ligon Duncan): The legalist, on the other hand, thinks he can keep it and he needs. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. And of you trying to pretend like you keep it, you know, because you think you’re ticking off the box for God, you know, and you’re getting points. You don’t know the Gracious Father. So I love the way Ferguson deals with both of those.

0:27:35 – (Matt Smethurst): Well, he calls them non identical twins from the same womb. And it’s so true. In fact, when Tim Keller died, John Piper remarked that something from Keller’s preaching, something he heard Keller say, revolutionized Piper’s own preaching, his own view of it, and that’s that. Keller said that in a place like New York, he had to preach against legalism. And Piper thought, well, how is that the case? You’re in New York.

0:28:07 – (Matt Smethurst): If we’re Talking about Luke 15, you don’t have a bunch of older brothers. You’ve got younger brothers, you’ve got prodigals, you’ve got lawless people. What they need is some law. And they do. But Keller pointed out, because the default mode of the human heart is legalism, people are going to assume that the alternative, the only alternative to license is legalism, that I just have to. If I’m going to become Religious. I’m going to go from being the younger brother to the older brother.

0:28:39 – (Matt Smethurst): So you have to actually show that there are two ways to be lost in order to show that there’s one way to be saved. I love. There’s an anecdote of a Puritan. I believe it was David Dixon who on his deathbed said, I have made a heap of all my bad works and a heap of all my good works. And I fled them both to Jesus Christ.

0:29:02 – (Ligon Duncan): That’s right.

0:29:03 – (Matt Smethurst): Because naturally we think that what it means to get right with God, to follow Jesus, is to flee from that pile of bad works to our pile of good works. But no, we flee and collapse into the open arms of Jesus.

0:29:19 – (Ligon Duncan): Amen. The Christ continues to be the answer. And so the law becomes your friend. It becomes a guide to help you walk with God. But it’s never the answer. Christ is the answer. And so I think that’s a good thing to remember. By the way, we haven’t talked about the Epistles. I find it. I find the only challenge about preaching the Gospel in the epistles is that again, if you’re so down into a smaller text, you can forget the larger context. The epistles are doing a lot of the work for you in that they’re making an argument. When you’re preaching the Gospels, the theological rationale is always there in what the Gospel writer has given you.

0:30:06 – (Ligon Duncan): But sometimes you have to pull back and ask, what’s the move he’s making right here? Why is he talk about this right now and then talk about the Gospel from that standpoint. The epistles do a lot of the work for you, but if you’re doing a two year series through Ephesians, you could certainly so zero in on one particular. It might even be the doctrine of adoption, as glorious as that is, and forget to bring the gospel to bear on your hearers. You end up maybe comforting Christians and you forget to challenge unbelievers while you’re teaching a beautifully glorious gospel truth.

0:30:48 – (Ligon Duncan): And that’s what I have to remind myself of. Matt, you know, don’t just comfort believers. Make sure that I’m unsettling unbelievers in their comfort, or I’m challenging them with a truth that they may be resistant to figure out some way to get to them with the material that might be a comfort to believers. That’s what I have to remind myself of. What are the things you have to remind yourself of?

0:31:15 – (Matt Smethurst): And I think it’s okay to be provocative at times with a bit of a smile. So friend if you’re here and you’re not following Jesus, we are so glad you’re here. I’m just curious. Even if we were to answer all of your objections to your satisfaction, would you follow Jesus Christ for the rest of your life? Would you lay down your arms and surrender to him? Because if the answer is no, then that might indicate that your objections are not actually what’s keeping you away.

0:31:55 – (Matt Smethurst): Maybe those things are smokescreens. Maybe you don’t want to entrust your life to an authority other than yourself. And so I think that there are ways to respectfully engage with lost people with intellectual honesty, but with a directness that I found that they actually really appreciate because they’ve come to church.

0:32:14 – (Ligon Duncan): That’s good.

0:32:15 – (Matt Smethurst): Expecting to be addressed, or whether or not they’re expecting to be addressed, they want to be taken seriously. And I think in our preaching, we do that.

0:32:25 – (Ligon Duncan): That’s good. I think, as preachers, as we listen to other good Gospel preachers, while it’s wonderful just to bask in the glory of that and drink it in and let it soak in, we probably need to also be asking, why did that land like it landed? What move did he just make to get through to my heart? Because chances are that’s going to work in your own preaching. So you do need to ask some questions. We talked about Alistair Begg’s message, and I think, what did you just do to me that brought. I’ve heard that a million times, and you made me hear like I had heard it for the first time. And I’m crying like a baby while you tell this. And I’ve listened to you do this 40 times.

0:33:11 – (Ligon Duncan): Well, what I think of as Alistair made me realize how simply. How nothing in my hands I bring simply to thy cross I cling naked. Come, I thee for dress helpless. Look to thee for grace foul I to the fountain fly. Wash me, Savior, or I die. That’s what he brought home to me in the way he said what he said in that sermon. As a pastor, I want to make sure, am I thinking hard enough to bring this material to bear, that I make somebody think about that?

0:33:42 – (Ligon Duncan): And so I not only want to love it when I’m listening to another good gospel preacher and be edified by it personally, but ask, how can I speak to people and get them to think, get them to just arrest their attention for a second and look at the cross and look at the gospel and look at Christ and be confronted with the reality of him?

0:34:07 – (Matt Smethurst): Yeah. Another provocative illustration I’ve used before that this is adapted from Tim Keller is if you show up at someone’s house and you knock and they say, come in, Ligon, stay out, Duncan, you would think, what are you talking about? I’m Ligon, Duncan. You can have all of me me or you can have none of me. Likewise, many of us want the compassionate Jesus, the forgiving Jesus, the healing Jesus, but not the mighty Jesus, the king who has creator rights over our life. In other words, we say to him, come in, Savior, stay out, Lord.

0:34:48 – (Ligon Duncan): Right?

0:34:49 – (Matt Smethurst): And if you really understand who he is, you let me. I mean, the distance between the earth and the sun, if you look at just the staggering numbers and the fact that the Bible says Hebrews 1, that Jesus Christ holds the universe together with the word of his power, he holds the universe together with his pinky. That is not someone you look at and say, would you like to come into my life to be my assistant?

0:35:18 – (Ligon Duncan): Right.

0:35:19 – (Matt Smethurst): And so I think that help because so many people who show up in our churches, they are open to Jesus being a part of their life, the way that an app becomes part of our phone. But he’s not interested in just being an app. Even on the home screen. He wants to control it all. And I have found that as I’ve tried again to respectfully but directly engage unbelievers or nominal Christians with hey, I mean, sorry, I’m just multiplying the illustrations, but just, it’s simple. It’s one of the most simple illustrations is just, hey, it’s one thing for you to be driving the car of your life and be happy to have Jesus in the backseat, even giving you some tips along the way. It is another thing to put the car in park, get out and hand the keys to him and say, you drive. I’m in the backseat. And I found that when you engage unbelievers and nominal Christians like that, again, they feel like you’re taking them seriously.

0:36:16 – (Matt Smethurst): And at least when they leave, they know what they’re rejecting. They know what they’re saying no to, which hopefully you’ve presented to them is not just the holy judge of the universe, but is the most beautiful, satisfying, glorious reality there is. And that’s the living, loving Lord.

0:36:37 – (Ligon Duncan): Amen.

0:36:39 – (Matt Smethurst): We hope this conversation of the everyday pastor has been helpful to you. Again, we would encourage, encourage you to check out our earlier episode with Brian Chappell on Christ centered preaching from the Old Testament. We hope that this helps you and other ministers to be faithful in proclaiming Christ from all of scripture so that you can find fresh joy in the work of Ministry.