Introduction
If you will, take your Bibles and turn to 1 Corinthians chapter 2. I will be focusing on chapter 2, verses 1 through 5, but this really has a context and an important one. I actually would like to back up and preach through chapter 1 before I get here, but I will at least take the time to read through, and I’ll start with chapter 1, beginning with verse 17.
“For Christ did not send me to baptize, but to preach the gospel, and not with words of eloquent wisdom, lest the cross of Christ be emptied of its power. For the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. For it is written, I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and the discernment of the discerning I will thwart. Where is the one who is wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since in the wisdom of God the world did not know God through wisdom, it pleased God through the folly of what we preach to save those who believe. For Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men.
Consider your calling, brothers. Not many of you were wise according to worldly standards. Not many were powerful. Not many were of noble birth. God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise. God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong. God chose what is lowly and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are. So that no human being might boast in the presence of God. He is the source of your life, in Christ Jesus, whom God made our wisdom and our righteousness and sanctification and redemption. Therefore, as it is written, let the one who boasts boast in the Lord.
And I, when I came to you, brothers, did not come proclaiming to you the testimony of God with lofty speech or wisdom. For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified. And I was with you in weakness and fear and in much trembling. And my speech and my message were not in plausible words of wisdom, but in demonstration of the spirit and of power, that your faith might not rest in the wisdom of men, but in the power of God.”
Let’s bow together in prayer. Our Father, too seldom do we recognize and appreciate the great treasure that we have in your Word. To be able to come to a book to know that this is inspired of God, that you have given this, your Word to us, coming to us, making yourself known to us. Grateful for the privilege, the honor of it. We pray that you’ll give us a greater appreciation of that today. Help us in particular as we look at our own church, as we seek to understand better how you have ordered the church and its gathered meetings. Give us an appreciation of this matter of not only the treasure of your word, but in the proclamation of your word and what we should be doing and how we should be hearing, what we should be looking for in it. We pray in Jesus’ name, amen.
As you know, we’re working our way in a brief series on the ordering of the church. Originally, my plan was to be done with the last message. We looked at church life, gospel-shaped church life in Ephesians chapter 4. My original plan was to conclude with that. But someone in the congregation suggested, and I thought it was a really good suggestion, that I preach on the subject of preaching. Now, I know it’s one of those questions you haven’t been asking, but it is a very important question, and for this series in particular, and particularly at this time, we’re looking to bring on another pastor here, and so we discussed this among the elders at our last meeting, too. We thought it was a great suggestion.
What should you be looking for when we bring a guy in? We’ll want you to consider him, to look at him. We’ll want you to hear his preaching. What should you be looking for? What are the things that are important? What is this business of preaching all about? How do we shape our thinking about it? This is a huge subject, and the more I think of it this morning, I have about decided I won’t be able to finish the message this morning. It’ll probably be next week as well. But that’s the goal of this.
What should we be looking for? And there are endless books that are written on this subject. There are plenty of passages we can turn to, but I think 1 Corinthians 2, verses 1 to 5 is probably the best passage for us, the most directly to the point of answering that question of what we should be looking for in preaching and what preaching ought to be. So you think of this in terms of what you should be looking for when we bring in a candidate for pastoral ministry here. You should also look at it in terms of what you should expect from us who preach the word here. What does God expect of us in this matter of preaching?
Well, in this passage, verses 1 to 5 here, Paul sets himself up as a model. We’ve seen that before, that the apostles are to do that, but he sets himself up here as a model for what preaching ought to be and how ministry is to be conducted. In chapter 1 he has expounded at some length the uniqueness and the unique effectiveness of the gospel of Christ. Verse 17 of chapter 1: he didn’t send me to baptize, but to preach the gospel, not with words of eloquent wisdom, lest the cross of Christ be emptied of its power. I’m here simply to preach a message that the whole world thinks is stupid. And in that, preaching that message from God that everyone thinks is foolish, God saves his people. That’s the testimony of every one of us. That’s the long and short of chapter 1: the unique effectiveness of the gospel when it is proclaimed.
And so now, this first words of chapter 2, here Paul is pointing to himself as the example. What we just saw in chapter one is what I tried to model in my own ministry, he says, when I came to you. “When I came to you, brothers, I did not come proclaiming to you the testimony of God with lofty speech or wisdom.” But notice here, let’s look through at a quick glance what Paul says about this.
First of all, what he did not do. Verse 1: he did not come proclaiming the testimony of God with lofty speech or wisdom. We’ll get to that. Next, what did Paul do? What is it he did when he came to Corinth? Verse 1: I proclaimed the testimony of God. We’ll look at that this morning. Verse 2: I proclaimed the testimony of God about Jesus Christ, about the person and work of Jesus Christ. “I determined not to know anything among you except Jesus Christ and Him crucified.” So what did Paul do? He proclaimed the testimony of God. Verse 2: he proclaimed the testimony of God about Jesus Christ. And then verses 3 and 4: I proclaim the testimony of God about Jesus Christ in the power of the Spirit. “I was with you in weakness and fear and much trembling, and my speech and my message were not in plausible words of wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power.” And as a result of what he did, following this model, verse 5: “that your faith might not rest in the wisdom of men, but in the power of God.”
But today we’re going to look at Paul’s model of preaching ministry, make some observations about it, try to unfold what he is saying here, make some applications to our own setting, and ask the question: what should we be looking for in preaching ministry? I’m a little bit uneasy preaching about what I do here, and yet this is such an important task. This is just central to everything we do here at the church. So on another level, I’m really eager to expound this for us.
Proclaiming The Testimony Of God
All right, first of all, what did Paul do? Verse 1: he proclaimed the testimony of God. He says, “When I came to you, brothers, I did not come proclaiming to you the testimony of God with lofty speech or wisdom,” and I’ll get to that in a minute. But what he is saying here is that “I came proclaiming the testimony of God.”
Now this word here translated “testimony” in this context and in this case simply means what God has revealed, what God has made known. God has revealed himself; there’s been divine revelation, and that’s what I’ve proclaimed. I’ve proclaimed the testimony of God. The primary—I mentioned this in the Sunday school hour this morning—the primary foundational distinctive of Christianity, you should recognize this. The foundational, primary distinctive of Christianity is that it is a revealed religion.
Christianity is not, in any sense, about our search for God. It is not our finding our way to Him. Christianity is not, in any sense, a religion that works its way upward. Christianity is, in every sense, God coming to us. God in grace making himself known. That was the case in Genesis chapter 3, and it’s been the case ever since. Christianity is about God coming to us and making himself known. That’s the character of this book that we call the Bible. Unlike any other book in the world, this is God coming to us. This is not our working our way to God. This is not the reflections of men who’ve thought long and hard on this subject and reasoned their way up to God and figured things out. This is a book that comes to us from God. And its outstanding claim throughout is, “Thus says the Lord.” “The word of the Lord came to me saying,” or when we come to the apostles, “This I say to you by the word of Christ.”
This is God coming to us. We saw in our first message in this series that was the role of the apostles in John 14 through 16, even into chapter 17. We have the Lord Jesus telling his disciples just before his crucifixion that this is what he has chosen them for. This is the role that he has given to them, that they will be his spokesmen to the church and to the world. They will bring God’s Word, revealed fully in Christ, to the world. And so the apostles then, as we saw, are the ones who bring us the full revelation of Christ—once for all delivered to the church.
Peter, the apostle, talks about this in 2 Peter 1 in a very pointed way. The scriptures have this distinction, this unique distinction: they did not come to us by the will of men. And they did not come to us as any kind of human disclosure or human interpretation. It specifically is not a book of men reasoning their way upward, but holy men of God spoke as they were moved by the Spirit of God. This is the doctrine of inspiration that we’ve received from the first century onward. The church has held this doctrine of divine inspiration of scripture, that all scripture is given by inspiration of God.
That He has spoken in this word that is given to us from the pen of other men through the mouth of other men is, in fact, God moving them along to give us his word. God revealing himself to us. We have famous passages of this in the scriptures like David saying, “The spirit of the Lord spoke by me. His word was in my tongue.” And we have New Testament writers referring back to it and they’ll say things like, “The Holy Spirit through the mouth of David said.” Over and again we have in the New Testament, reciting the words of Isaiah, of David, of Moses, and they will say, “God said.”
The character of scripture is that this is God coming to us, making himself known. Benjamin Warfield used to enjoy—I say enjoy because he quoted this many times in his works—he enjoys citing a line from one of Rudyard Kipling’s characters. And that character declares, “The heathen in his blindness bows down to wood and stone. He don’t obey no orders, except they is his own.”
Very insightful remark that Kipling gives. The heathen in his blindness bows down to wood and stone. He don’t obey no orders, except they is his own. That is to say, human religion lacks authority. It formulates its own system of thinking, its own ideas, its own belief structures, and then it conforms itself to it. They obey their own orders. They work their way up. “This is the way it must be. This is the way God is. We’ve figured this out and so here’s what we believe and here’s how we live and here’s how we obey.” We obey our own orders.
And by contrast, a Christian is someone who’s acknowledged at the outset that he’s under orders—that God has spoken. There’s a such thing as external authority. God has come to us and he has spoken. And this religion that we call Christianity is a revealed religion. We are not ourselves the touchstone of truth, God is. And that’s the character of Scripture. And so then, that’s the defining distinction of Christianity.
We are first and foremost a people with a message. We say that God has spoken and we have a message to proclaim—a message to proclaim that every last man and woman on earth is obliged to embrace. That’s the boldness, the audacity of the Christian religion. God the creator has spoken. He has made himself known. And that message that we have been entrusted with is a message that you are obliged to believe and obey.
We see that in the book of Acts. First thing we see of the church, they’re investigating this message that the apostles are proclaiming, and they’re searching the scriptures, and they go about everywhere they go proclaiming this message. God has spoken. Here it is. Often they’re under persecution. They proclaim the message. That’s what we’re here for: proclaim the message.
Acts chapter 13, the persecution becomes so intense that the people are scattered. And what do we read? They go everywhere preaching the word. Everywhere they go, they’ve got a message to proclaim. That’s the character of Christianity. That’s what we’ve been entrusted with. God has spoken. Here’s what God has said. People don’t like that. Sometimes they feel offended. “You think you have all the truth.” Well, in one sense, I do, because God has spoken. But it’s not that it’s my truth. It is that God has spoken. Here it is. That’s what we’re here for.
Come to the Protestant Reformation; the big thing was to uncover this message that had been overlaid with so many layers of tradition and things that were, in so many ways, contrary to the gospel. And one of the big items on the agenda of the Reformers: take the scriptures. Put them in the common tongue. Let the people see what God has said. Go to church and they hear a priest mumbo-jumbo in Latin that means nothing to anybody. Let’s get it into the common tongue.
Martin Luther, at the very outset of the Reformation in the 16th century, he’s hid away for protection of his life and he’s translating the scriptures into German. Comes to the English language, it’s William Tyndale, who literally gave his life so that every, as he put it, every last plowboy in England can read the Word of God himself.
The reason for every Christian, the reason for every church is to give a voice to God. God has spoken in his Word, and we’re here to proclaim that message. And Paul says then in verse 1, that’s what I did when I came to you. I came proclaiming to you the testimony of God.
What He Did Not Do
Now we should also say, this is very important to clarify it, in verse 1 he tells us what he did not do. He did not come proclaiming to you the testimony of God with lofty speech or wisdom. That’s how he started this discussion back in chapter 1 in verse 17. He came to preach the gospel, not with words of eloquent wisdom, lest the cross of Christ be emptied of its power.
Now, in its historical setting here in the background, there’s a tradition of oratory, rhetorical skills. It was “the thing.” You wanted to make an impression, learn to speak. That’s still very effective that way. But what became important then was form over substance. It’s not so much what he’s saying, it’s how he says it. And it’s fine-spun rhetoric. It’s impressive. It’s moving. People are persuaded by it. And most importantly, they’re impressed by it.
In Paul’s day, that might be well-honed rhetorical skills. In our day, we see very little of that. But in principle, we see it. It might be emotionally manipulative stories. Some guys are really good at doing that. It might be a bombastic style that’s captivating. And when he’s all done, you leave just really impressed with the preacher. “What did he preach about?” “I don’t know, but he was really good.”
Now, Paul here, when he says, “I did not come with lofty speech or wisdom,” he’s not making it an excuse for poor preaching. He’s not making an excuse for lack of study and preparation. And I’m very confident that if the Apostle Paul were to come here today and give preachers instructions about preaching, he would tell them something like, “Look guys, if you’re going to say it, you might as well try to say it well.” He’s not making an excuse for poor preaching. He’s simply saying, “It is not the polished way that I proclaim the message that will save the lost. It is just the message itself. I don’t need to help it. I don’t need to add to it. I don’t need to make it more palatable for people. It’s just the message itself that saves.”
And so Paul says, “I came proclaiming the testimony of God.” I just give them God’s word. There’s no help needed. And so when I came to you, I did not come as an orator. I came as a preacher. That’s it. My job was simply to tell you what God has said. Paul addresses this again, and keep your hand here, we’ll be right back, but I think it’d be helpful for us to look over at 2 Corinthians chapter 4.
2 Corinthians 4, Paul addresses this very subject again. Beginning at the end of chapter 2 and then all through chapter 3, Paul is speaking of the effectiveness of this new covenant ministry that he’s been given from God. Christ has come. He’s enacted a new covenant. And the uniqueness of this covenant is that it transforms lives. The old covenant was a covenant of death. All it could tell you is, “Do this or die. Don’t do the other or you’ll die.” It can’t give you the enablement. But this new covenant, it gives you the enablement, so that I don’t need, he says in chapter 3, I don’t need a letter of endorsement from anybody. You are our epistle that’s been written, written on your hearts by God. And the transformation continues all the way through chapter 3; he talks about that. We’re transformed, verse 18, from one glory to the next. This is God powerfully at work in us.
And so in chapter 4, he says, “Therefore, having this ministry by the mercy of God, we do not lose heart. But we have renounced disgraceful, underhanded ways. We refuse to practice cunning or to tamper with God’s Word.” We don’t need to help it. We don’t need to add to it. I don’t want to mess it up. To change it, to add to it—it just messes it up. But what he does do, he says in verse 2 again, “but by the open statement of the truth, we would commend ourselves.” That’s my job. Just the open proclamation of the truth that’s been revealed. And Paul says, that’s why I’ve come to you. To proclaim the testimony of God.
What Should We Look For In Preaching?
Now what does this tell us about preaching? What should we look for in preaching? Preaching, you can see already then, as Paul conceived it, is simply saying what God has already said. I’ll say it again: preaching, as Paul conceived it, is simply saying what God has already said. It’s not necessarily just reading the scriptures back, but it is in a sense a saying again of what God has said. God has revealed himself through his word. Preaching then ought to be—Don Carson put it this way, I think it’s very perceptive—preaching then ought to be, if God has revealed himself through his word, preaching ought to be a re-revealing of God through his word. A re-revealing of God through his word.
Now for us it’s not new inspired reading or proclamation; we don’t have that—the Apostle Paul did. But it is just giving God a voice so that God’s word is heard again. Expounding the text at hand in such a way that people are—and I’ll use this word—confronted by God. God speaks, and the preacher’s job is to say, “Here’s what God has said,” so that the people are brought face to face with God’s promise, God’s commands, God’s encouragements. And when God makes a promise, we are obliged to believe it, to trust in it, and to hope in it. God gives a command; we’re obliged to obey, to comply with that command. The preacher’s job is just to say, “This is what God has said. Look at this verse. Do you see what God has said?” There’s a sense in which the preacher’s job is to hide behind the text of scripture so as he’s not seen and what you’re focused on is what God has said. And in that sense, you’re brought into God’s presence.
The point has nothing to do with the style of speaking. There are many different styles of preaching. Some are lively; there are some guys who get into the pulpit and it’s like they just explode with enthusiasm and sometimes it’s marvelous and marvelously moving, presenting God’s Word. Other guys get up in the pulpit and it’s more of a laid-back conversational tone and it can be just as effective. It has nothing to do with style. Preaching is simply giving God a voice, re-revealing His Word in the hearing of the people, so that those who listen hear the word of God afresh.
Reformer Martin Luther had a way of saying things often that had a shock value to it to get your attention. There’s one in this respect that he did. He said, “When the preacher speaks, God speaks.” What do you think of that? When the preacher speaks, God speaks.
Now there’s something about that that goes down crooked because we’ve all heard preachers preach and you know that wasn’t God speaking. There was one occasion here I remember years ago at RBC. We had a guest speaker in an evening service and he got into error, and it wasn’t just a minor error, and poor old Pastor Greg had to get up afterwards and issue a correction at the end of the message. So in one sense, that’s not a good thing to say, “When the preacher speaks, God speaks.” There’s another sense in which you can say that if when the preacher is done, he cannot say, “God has spoken,” then he ought to leave preaching alone. There’s no other point served but to give voice to God.
Now, this, I think, is the best argument for what we call expository preaching. I think most of you at least are familiar with that expression. There are various kinds of ways to approach a sermon. One is topical, where you pick a topic and you say, “Here’s what the Bible says about it here, and here’s what the Bible says about it there,” and you go hither and yon and talk about all those things. And there’s a place for that. In a sense, that’s what systematic theology is, and it’s extremely important. It’s the queen of the sciences and all of that.
But an expository message then takes the passage at hand and expounds it in its context, follows its train of thought, follows its main line of thinking and its point as the point of the sermon, and it lays it out and expounds the argument and uncovers the implications of what God has said. It unpacks it in terms of application to contemporary life. But the whole time you can look and see, “That’s what that text is saying. That’s what that passage is telling me.”
So even in a topically arranged series, you’re trying to look through at the same time to expound what the text itself is saying. So the point of the sermon ought to be the main point of the passage at hand. The main lines of thought of the sermon are the main lines of thought in the passage at hand. It’s expounding, exposing the passage. Simply put, the point of the sermon ought to be the point of the passage. At that point, you know that you’re letting God speak.
It doesn’t happen often, but now and then somebody will contact me on email or Facebook or something and say, “We’re moving to such an area, we’re looking for a new church, what should I look for?” And I’m really glad when they ask that; it’s the way they ought to be thinking. There are a few answers that I give, but when it comes to the preaching, this is always first. I’ll tell them, “When you go there and you hear that preacher, you ask yourself this question: Is what I’m hearing from the pulpit what I see in the passage in front of me? If it’s not, find another preacher. Go somewhere else.” What we ought to be able to do is say, “All right, this preacher is just giving voice to God. I see it. This is what God is saying.” Now, he may have expounded it and unpacked it in ways that I haven’t seen before, but it’s clear that the message that I’m hearing, the point of the sermon, the main lines of thought, the application, the implications of it that are drawn out are all right there. This is God speaking. This is what we’re looking for.
And that’s what Paul says here then in verse 1: “I came to you proclaiming the testimony of God.” It’s what I’ve at least been trying to do in this series. It’s been topically arranged. We’ve not been working successively through a book of the Bible or something like that. But at each point, I’m trying to take a text and expound what God has said through it.
So for example, in Acts chapter 6, when we preach on the role of deacons in the congregation, it’s not just, “Well, here’s the historical account of when deacons first were appointed.” But we follow Luke’s own argument, and that is this movement of Christianity. The gospel’s been growing, and it’s been growing, and everything’s going swimmingly. There’s even persecution, but Christianity keeps growing, the gospel is increasing, the word of God multiplies. And then suddenly we come to chapter 6, and there’s this infighting in the congregation. That’s a legitimate issue; it needs addressing. But the apostles’ response right away: “We can’t give up preaching. We can’t give up the ministry of the word to wait on tables. Somebody else has to take care of this.” And so they arrange it accordingly, and then Luke finishes up the account with: the word of God increased, and the number of disciples multiplied. There’s the point. So the ordering of the congregation becomes a gospel issue. We look at it in the context, unfold the argument. It’s not just explaining this word and the next, but it’s driving the message that God himself is giving in the passage.
In Ephesians chapter 4, what we looked at last time, the burden of the message was not simply to extol the virtues of humility and patience and long-suffering and forbearance. But it’s to look at it in the context of what Paul is driving at: “Here’s how you preserve the unity of the church in the bond of peace.” If you’re going to have peace in the congregation and maintain this oneness that we have in Christ, here are the virtues that you need. And it’s to that end that we are humble and patient and meek and so on.
And even here in 1 Corinthians chapter 2, I’m taking my time with verse 1, but I’m trying to unpack what Paul is saying when he says, “I came to you proclaiming the testimony of God.”
We had one applicant who was interested to talk to us, and we received the audio of it. A wonderful man, I’m sure. Not a word of criticism of him. But we decided—we talked about it together—we decided we just have to pass. Because he said lots of good things in the message and lots of true things, but it wasn’t brought out of the text. He read a passage and he started talking about lots of different things. We thought, “That’s just not how people are going to learn to read their Bibles.” The responsibility of the preacher then is to take the passage and say, “What is God telling us here? What’s the message he is after?” And his job then is just to unpack that and bring it to the congregation accordingly. Some men are great storytellers. They can move a congregation to tears and then to glorious laughter, and at the end of it all, you’re moved. But what’s the message of the passage? What has God said? That’s what we’re looking for.
Paul’s saying here, “Here’s what I did. I came proclaiming the message that God has given. From day one, I came with this conviction. I came with this method, this plan of order: proclaim the message of God and never in such a way as to distract from it. Just to say, here’s what God said.” I have to ask, why in the world would anyone go to church for anything else? If you’re not going to hear what God has said, what’s the point?
Now, we all who do it, we all have varying degrees of success in doing it, in doing it well. I can’t tell you the number of times I go home from church on a Sunday morning complaining to my wife, “I wish I could have said it better, and those poor people, I wish they had a better preacher,” and that kind of thing, and you’re discouraged. But I do think we can say here, for all of us, that we come intending to say, “Here is what God has said.” The point is simply to expound that.
We have the pulpit placed at the center of the platform, and that historically is not an accident. Churches prior to the Reformation, it was usually to the side, and what they called the altar was at the center—blasphemous thing in itself. We have one altar; it’s the cross. It’s there we meet with God. The Reformers said, “No, the center of our meetings together ought to be the proclamation of the word of God. Let’s bring the pulpit to the center. The people hear what God has said.” And again, why would anyone go to church for anything else? I don’t.
And as I suspected, I’m only halfway through my message. And the most important point that I wanted to get to, and exactly the point that someone has asked me to address, is verse 2. And I can’t do it justice. And I suspect that you would rather I let you go early than to keep you a half hour late. So I think we will call it there. But notice verse 2. Verse 1: I proclaim the message of God, the testimony of God. That’s what I came for. That’s it. Verse 2: I proclaim the message from God about the person and work of Jesus Christ. Verse 2: “I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and Him crucified.” Our goal then next week will be to unpack that. How does that work out in preaching? Paul speaks exclusively—it’s all I do is preach Christ. What does that mean in light of all the other things that Paul has to say? And we’ll try to unpack that next time.
Amen. Let’s pray together.
Our Father, it’s good for us to be focused better on what to expect. And not only that, but having understood that, to gain a sense of the privilege that is ours to hear from you. I pray, first of all, for those of us here who preach and teach. Lord, give us a sense of the importance of this. Give us an understanding of our task. We pray that you’ll give us efficiency in it. And for all of us, as we look ahead, we pray that you’ll give us the discernment to expect this, to expect it of those who are brought into us. We pray that you will bless us then by your word as it is proclaimed to us. We pray in Jesus’ name, amen.