Growing in Grace by Christian Community

The Apostle Peter drew his second letter to a close with these wise and pastoral words: “But grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. To him be the glory both now and to the day of eternity. Amen” (2 Peter 3:18). The word “grow” is an exhortation and a command, and it implies that if we’re to progress in Christ we must play an active role, by the grace of Christ, in building habits that nurture that progress. Therefore, I am offering a series of devotionals this spring on eight essential habits that help us to grow in grace. For today, let’s consider the place of Christian community in our walk with Christ.

So far in this series we have considered the place of the Word of God, praising God, praying to God, fasting, and giving in the life of the growing Christian. Today I want to add a simple but very important idea, specifically, that we are designed by Jesus to grow in these and other ways together. Life in Christ is life together. This idea is not hard to understand or see on nearly every page of the New Testament. The difficulty comes in the living.

In the early days of the church, those who believed in Jesus Christ were utterly committed to the worship of Christ, and they were utterly committed to one another. They shared in a host of spiritual blessings together, and they shared in life and even material possessions together. They were neither communists nor communalists, but they did believe that their bond in Christ was the defining bond of life and the way they lived from day to day served as proof of what they believed (see Acts 2:42-47; 4:32-37).

As time went on, serious issues arose within the church that threatened to tear apart the unity they enjoyed in Christ. They, like us, still struggled with sin, and at times they really hurt each other. But the book of Acts boldly testifies that regardless of their internal struggles, the bond they shared remained because the bond they shared was Christ himself. Life together was not easy, but it was possible, and unstoppable, because the devil had to defeat Christ in order to destroy the church. Not likely to happen!

When the Apostles later wrote the New Testament, they gave much counsel regarding life together, including the famous string of one another commands that exhort us fix our eyes on Jesus and press on with one another. Taken together, these commands show us (1) that life together is the desire and command of Christ upon his people, (2) that life together is not easy, but (3) that life together is possible, profitable, and inevitable because it depends on Christ himself who has promised to build, prosper, and protect his church.

Life in Christ is life together. In order to grow in Christ we must do so together. It’s hard at times, but it’s good, and again, the power for pressing on is in Christ himself. So may we commit ourselves anew this day to doing life in Christ with our fellow believers. 

Living by Faith: The Faith of Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph

Having led us to briefly contemplate the faith of Abraham and Sarah, the author of Hebrews leads us to consider the next three generations after them in as many verses. And of all the things he could have highlighted in the lives of Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph, he chose to take us to their moments of death and point out that when they were about to lose their grip on earthly life, they still hoped in God because they were living by faith. Therefore, the blessings and prophecies they spoke were not words of the flesh but the very words of God pouring through them for the glory of his name and the blessing of the nations.

In the interest of time, I’m going to leave you to meditate on Isaac and Jacob on your own, and draw your attention to Joseph who, on his deathbed, prophesied about the Exodus and gave instructions concerning his bones (Hebrews 13:20-22). Now, that might seem like a strange or random thing for the author to focus on here, so let’s look at Genesis 50:22-26 and see exactly what Joseph said to his family and why.

Moses writes, “So Joseph remained in Egypt, he and his father’s house. Joseph lived 110 years. And Joseph saw Ephraim’s children of the third generation. The children also of Machir the son of Manasseh were counted as Joseph’s own. And Joseph said to his brothers, ‘I am about to die, but God will visit you and bring you up out of this land [and how does Joseph know this?] to the land that he swore [or promised] to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob.’ Then Joseph made the sons of Israel swear, saying, ‘God will surely visit you, and you shall carry up my bones from here.’ So Joseph died, being 110 years old. They embalmed him, and he was put in a coffin in Egypt” (emphasis mine).

Beloved, do you see what’s going on here? Joseph knew and understood and believed the specific words of the oath or the promise God had spoken to his forefathers, and he was speaking on the basis of faith in that promise. He was not concocting his last words. He was not simply trying to be hopeful and positive with his family in his final moments. Rather, Joseph was looking back three generations and expressing simple faith in the faithfulness of God. He was clinging to God’s words because he was clinging to God. He was hoping in the specific and ancient speech of God and, more than that, he was preaching faith to the next several generations. He was spending all the strength he had left to persuade his loved ones to put their faith in God and his promises, even as his forefathers had done. This is what it looks like to live by faith.

And having believed to the very end, Joseph now rises up with Abel and Enoch and Noah and Abraham and Sarah and Isaac and Jacob and all of creation, and he stretches out his arms and lifts up his voice and pleads with us, “Hope in God, believe in God, trust in his promises, rest in his words. You will find that God is faithful to the end, and like me you will die in joy and hope unless Christ first returns.” Beloved, Joseph’s faith is not about Joseph, rather, it’s about the faithfulness of God, and I pray that we will have ears to hear and hearts to receive his testimony to us today. 

Book Review: “Biblical Preaching” (By Donald R. Sunukjian)

Sunukjian, Donald R. Invitation to Biblical Preaching: Proclaiming Truth with Clarity and Relevance. Grand Rapids: Kregel Publications, 2007.

The premise of Donald Sunukjian’s Biblical Preaching is that sermons should be the preacher’s way of saying, “Look at what God is saying to us.” Thus, he argues that the “Bible is God’s voice, spanning the ages. The role of the biblical preacher is to echo that voice in this generation,” which means he is to present the “true and exact meaning of the biblical text…in a manner that is relevant to the contemporary listener” (9-10).

Sunukjian thus divides his book into two parts, the first of which deals with “what God is saying” and the second of which deals with what God is saying “to us.” Part one includes four chapters and covers the basics of biblical exegesis. Sunukjian’s method is not surprising but his insistence on adherence to the meaning of the text is refreshing in this day and age. The heart of his process is that the preacher should articulate, through three separate outlines, the meaning of the passage (what happened), the truth-value of the passage (what happens), and the application of the passage (what is happening). By the time the preacher has articulated these things, he ought to be able to develop a pithy “take-home truth” which both captures the essence of the text and grabs the attention of the hearers.

Part two of the book, then, includes twelve chapters and advances the assertion that good, biblical preaching must offer both relevance and application. Relevance is when the people see how the text connects with their lives and it should therefore occur throughout the sermon; application is when the preacher draws out specific implications of the text for the listener’s lives and it most often happens near the end of the sermon. With this in mind, Sunukjian concludes his work by offering detailed advice on how to develop and deliver sermons which are faithful to the text and relevant to the listeners.

The central strength of Sunukjian’s book is his passion for the primacy of the Word of God in the process of preaching and his equally strong insistence that the task of the preacher is to discover and display how that Word speaks “to us.” I find this emphasis, and order, so refreshing in a day when many preachers are minimizing the Word in favor of entrepreneurial creativity.

Second, I very much appreciated Sunukjian’s explanation of the meaning and importance of relevancy in preaching, and its relationship to application. In a day when the word “relevance” is often used to mean “satisfying consumer desires,” I was pleasantly surprised to hear him present it as helping modern people see how the ancient Word of God relates to their lives today. And to be sure, a sermon that does not do this is not worth preaching or hearing. I do think he could have said a bit more about how this must first take place in the preacher before it develops in the sermon, but alas, one can only say so much in one book.

Finally, while I appreciated many of the things Sunukjian said about the process of developing and delivering sermons, I found his method of outlining to be both cumbersome and impractical. Frankly, I think it’s a bit much for the preacher who must balance praying, studying, teaching, leading, counseling, raising a family, exercising, and so on each week. That said, the convictions that led him to the processes he suggests are worth adopting and somehow integrating into our various processes as preachers.

As for my personal reflections on this book, first, Sunukjian writes in the introduction, “The purpose of the sermon is not to impart knowledge but to influence behavior—not to inform but to transform” (12). This is fairly standard language, and I do get the point, but I would prefer to state this in a slightly different way. Specifically, I would prefer to say that the purpose of preaching is to glorify God and transform lives which is founded upon, but not equal to, a right knowledge of God.

The endgame of preaching is neither the preacher nor the results of his preaching, but the exaltation of the being, will, and ways of God. God himself is the blazing center of preaching and all of the other details revolve around him. This implies that a right knowledge of God really matters and that, in fact, one of the central purposes of every sermon is to impart such knowledge. One can only love God as she ought if she knows God as he is. I completely agree with Sunukjian that a certain kind of emphasis on knowledge only creates Pharisees but this doesn’t mean we should de-emphasize knowledge itself but rather that we should rightly teach the connection between knowledge and love. Where there is no right knowledge there can be no love, or to use his word, there can be no transformation.

In the course of my ministry, I have come across many preachers who have brushed aside sound doctrine in favor of a number of other things and I fear that minimizing the place of right knowledge in the process and goals of preaching lends support to this tragic error. Thus, although it’s clear to me from the whole of his book that Sunukjian values the place of knowledge in the practice of preaching, I think he could be a little more careful with how he states his case.

Second, I was deeply moved by this paragraph: “Biblical preaching is the best thing we can do for our ministries, and it’s the best thing we can do for our own personal lives. To drink deeply of the Word of God, to saturate ourselves with its truths, to have our lives changed by its transforming power, and then to stand before God’s people, proclaiming with joy and confidence, ‘Look at what God is saying to us!’—who could be called to anything greater?” (15) When I read this passage, I was sitting at a table in a retirement home waiting to attend my grandfather-in-law’s funeral. I literally said out loud, “Amen!” I just couldn’t help myself.

Biblical preaching has produced more fruit in my personal life than almost any other thing because my process begins by going to the Word and studying it as deeply as I can, not because I have to write a sermon, but because I so desperately need to be more like Jesus. And as our gracious God uses his Word to shape my life, somehow a sermon is born. And somehow as God speaks “to me,” I come to see how God is speaking “to us.” Oh what a beautiful thing! What a high privilege! It’s literally bringing tears to my eyes as I write. 

Growing in Grace by Giving

The Apostle Peter drew his second letter to a close with these wise and pastoral words: “But grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. To him be the glory both now and to the day of eternity. Amen” (2 Peter 3:18). The word “grow” is an exhortation and a command, and it implies that if we’re to progress in Christ we must play an active role, by the grace of Christ, in building habits that nurture that progress. Therefore, I am offering a series of devotionals this spring on eight essential habits that help us to grow in grace. For today, let’s consider the place of giving in the Christian life.

Paul writes in 2 Corinthians 9:6-8, “The point is this: whoever sows sparingly will also reap sparingly, and whoever sows bountifully will also reap bountifully. Each one must give as he has decided in his heart, not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver. And God is able to make all grace abound to you, so that having all sufficiency in all things at all times, you may abound in every good work.”

The law of God is that we will reap what we sow, and this law extends to our finances. Sometimes, by his amazing grace, God violates this law, but generally speaking, it is a law indeed. When it comes to giving our money, Christians should understand this truth, but we should also be compelled to give from the inside by the Holy Spirit rather than from the outside by some person, group, or organization.

Giving that glorifies God must come from the heart because heartfelt giving is an expression of praise. God loves a cheerful giver because he loves a heart that overflows with love for him to such an extent that it’s willing to give of its time, talent, and treasure. For God, and hopefully for us, giving is about the heart, not the wallet.

Another reason God loves a cheerful giver is because a giving heart is a faith-filled heart. It’s a heart that trusts that God will provide. And God is able to make our provisions abound so that we can abound in every good work. God knows how to supply and multiply that we may live for the glory of his name and the good of others, and this is what giving is all about. “You will be enriched in every way to be generous in every way,” and this will produce thanksgiving, or praise, for God (2 Cor 9:11).

So the reason that giving money is part and parcel of growing in the grace and knowledge of Christ is because it is a way of imaging the God who is abounding and gracious, of praising his holy name, and of being a blessing to others. My exhortation to you today, then, is to prayerfully consider the way you use your money, and to make a firm decision to use all that is in your possession for the glory of your Father and the good of others. May God cause all of us to be cheerful, worshipful, bountiful givers. 

Living by Faith: The Mature Faith of Abraham

While the author of Hebrews has already said a few things about Abraham’s and Sarah’s life of faith in 11:8-12, he brings us closer to the heart of their journey beginning in verse 17. There he draws our attention to that time in Abraham’s life when he grew old and his trust in God had grown very strong. Just then, when Abraham was ready, God gave him what is in my mind the second hardest command in the history of the world, only paling in comparison to the command upon Jesus to willingly take up his cross and die to satisfy the wrath of God and provide the all-sufficient sacrifice for sins. Specifically, God commanded Abraham to take Isaac—his beloved son of promise for whom Sarah and he had waited for twenty-five years and then raised for another fifteen or twenty years—God commanded him to take Isaac and sacrifice him on an altar.

Beloved, this was an impossible command, but by this point in his life, Abraham had walked with God for a long time and he had many experiences with God that caused him to trust God very deeply. Therefore, when the impossible command came, Abraham didn’t even blink an eye. He asked no questions. He raised no objections. He did not hesitate. Rather, he simply and promptly obeyed the Lord.

Now, it does say in verse 19 that Abraham “considered” that God could raise his son from the dead and the Greek word here literally means “to calculate something.” So I do think Abraham spent some time processing what the Lord had commanded of him, but whatever the case may be, the fact of the matter is that we have no record of Abraham resisting God at this time of his life. We do have a record of his resistance at other times, and thus it seems to me that if Abraham had pushed back against God at this point, the Bible would tell us so. Since it doesn’t, we can assume he didn’t.

By this time in his life—he was about one-hundred-fifteen or one-hundred-twenty years old—Abraham knew that God was faithful. He knew that God could do anything. He knew that God would never violate his promises but would fulfill them all. Therefore, despite the difficulty of the command and the seeming impossibility of the situation, Abraham obeyed God and acted out on the world’s stage what is perhaps the most important prophecy of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ in the history of the world.

After leading him to the crest of a hill to which God directed him, and having affixed him to an altar on which he would soon take his life, Abraham began to follow through with God’s command but when he was only seconds away from doing so, the Lord intervened and provided a ram for the sacrifice and in this way Abraham essentially received his beloved son back from the dead. This experience led Abraham to name the hill where this had taken place, “Yahweh-Yireh” which means “The Lord will Provide,” and it was known by that name for more than twenty centuries, even to the time of Christ. When we look carefully at where Abraham was living and where he might have taken Isaac at that time, it’s most likely that this scene transpired in Jerusalem and, who knows, perhaps even on the very hill where Christ would later make the all-sufficient sacrifice, where God the Father would not pull back his hand but would fatally strike his beloved Son as the once-for-all sacrifice for sins.

Whatever the specifics of the place, the point of this story is clear: Abraham lived by faith in the promises of God to the point that he was willing to sacrifice his beloved son who, humanly speaking, was the path to those promises. And as he obeyed God, he found God to be faithful—all the way to death, he found God to be faithful. And now he rises up with Sarah, his bride, and Abel and Enoch and Noah and all creation, and pleads with us, “Trust in God and in his word, for he will surely do all that he has promised to do. God is faithful and you can put your hope in him!” This is the testimony of Abraham to us today, and Beloved, I pray that we’ll have ears to hear and hearts to receive it. I pray that we will put all our faith in the God who is forever faithful. 

Book Review: “Planning Your Preaching” (By Stephen Nelson Rummage)

Rummage, Stephen Nelson. Planning Your Preaching: A Step-by-Step Guide for Developing a One-Year Preaching Calendar. Grand Rapids: Kregel Publications (2002). 

The thesis of Stephen Rummage’s Planning Your Preaching is that an effective preaching ministry is built over the long-term rather than the short-term, that consistency over time is therefore of paramount importance, and that good planning is the key to consistency. His aim in this book, then, is to help pastors organize their various teaching ministries into one cohesive plan in order to enhance their long-term effectiveness.

He builds his system from 2 Tim 4:2 and argues that we’re to preach biblically, consistently, persuasively, and patiently. He then offers ten reasons why planning one’s preaching is a good thing, the most important of which is the first, namely, that “planning allows for greater [not lesser] leadership of the Holy Spirit” (23).

From this foundation, he moves on to articulate the biblical objectives of preaching, which he argues are building faith, equipping the saints for the work of ministry, and edifying the saints toward maturity in Christ. With these goals in mind he suggests several ways in which a preacher can get a good read on his congregation so that his planning will connect well with the will of God and the lives of the people.

Finally, Rummage devotes several chapters to planning for different occasions and styles of preaching, and concludes with some preacherly wisdom as to how to work the plan. “Good preaching requires hard preparation. It requires a lot of work and discipline. It might require rearranging the priorities of your weekly schedule” (213). Amen, these are wise words from a seasoned preacher.

The strongest aspect of Rummage’s book is the sharpness and correctness of his central thesis. He is right to say that “successful preaching is not about any single sermon but about many sermons” (11), and to argue on that basis that consistency in preaching is more important than occasional perfection. Furthermore, I do think he’s right to say that consistency is best nurtured in the life of a fore-thoughtful preacher, and I do think he was successful in showing that planning does not quench but rather gives release to the movement of the Holy Spirit in the life of the church.

Second, related to this first point, Rummage also provides a good balance between dependence on the Holy Spirit and old-fashioned hard work. He wisely remarks that “[n]othing is spiritual about failing to plan” (21), and yet he counsels his readers to follow the leading of the Lord rather than the plan if the two are ever in conflict (25). In this and other respects, I found him to be a sensitive man of God, a wise shepherd of the flock, and a seasoned preacher.

Third, while I’m not sure I would state the argument in just the same way, Rummage is right to exalt the “audience” in the eyes of preachers and lead us to think more carefully about them. In the final analysis, we simply cannot play our part in impacting the people with the truth of the Word if we don’t give as much thought to the people as we do to the Word.

Finally, Rummage’s treatment of this subject is thorough and he provides useful tools for a variety of preachers. Therefore, I would commend the book to any preacher at any stage of his ministry. He provides those who do not plan well with a method by which they can do so, and he offers those who do many helpful, collegial insights.

As for my personal reflections on his book, first, by the grace of God and the influence of my pastors and professors, I've always been thoughtful about my preaching ministry, and I've always devote regular time to thinking through various aspects of it. However, I have shied away from long-term comprehensive planning for two reasons. On the one hand, I often find methods of doing so to be somewhat like Saul’s armor—they seem to work well for others but they are cumbersome to me. This is not to suggest that I don’t have a kind of process by which I operate because I do; but it is to say that there’s a fair amount of “art” in my process and that I do not simply proceed by a list of preconceived steps.

On the other hand, the Lord has changed the course of my well-thought-out plans so many times that I’ve come to understand he would rather me leave the details to him. Believe me, I am a born planner but I learned pretty early on that God has fairly decent planning skills as well and that my job is to draw near to him, listen to his voice, and submit to his plans for my preaching. As with other aspects of the preaching process, I find that effective planning has much to do with personal intimacy with God.

Because of this, I wasn't all that excited to read this book but in the end I gleaned quite a lot from it. I found Rummage not to be too rigid or mechanical, but rather Spirit-led, wise, and collegial. I often felt as though I was sitting around the table with a fellow practitioner discussing how we can better glorify God and serve his people through our preaching.

Second, I really appreciated the idea that planning and the movement of the Spirit are not mutually exclusive. I have often thought of my preparation process as a sort of “John the Baptist”: the plan is not the message but it “prepares the way” for the message. As such, the message outweighs the plan and may well change the plan, but more often than not it uses the means of the plan to deliver the ends of glorifying God and transforming lives. When conceived in this way, the details of the plan are not so important as the fact that we have a thoughtful approach to handling the Word of God in the presence of the people of God. God seems to smile on this effort, even when he sets our plans aside.

Third, over the years, I've most often preached through books of the Bible, albeit at a varied pace. I don’t over-plan my trek through any particular book because I’ve found that my most important insights are often owing to the flow of many weeks, or even months, of study and preaching. There is simply no way to foresee the most important ideas that will emerge in a book series before the fact. However, Rummage helped me see that I can benefit very much from a long study retreat wherein I do nothing but seek Jesus, bathe in the book I’m about to preach, and lay out a basic road map for how I hope to preach it. 

Finally, because preaching through books is my dominant style, I tend to view holidays and special days as good and necessary interruptions to the flow of working through a book—but interruptions nonetheless. Rummage helped me see that if I’m more thoughtful about these kinds of events I can work with the Lord to heighten the value and effectiveness of such special days in the life of the church, and I’m thankful to him for this insight. To make the most of these occasions, I think it's best to plan the annual flow of them along with the other pastors and leaders, especially those involved in the planning and execution of the worship services. But whatever the details, Rummage is right to encourage us to be as thoughtful as possible about special Sundays well before they come. 

Like me, you may be hesitant to read a book like this, but I want to encourage you to acquire and read Planning Your Preaching. I'm confident that if you approach it with a humble heart, you'll learn from our fellow preacher, Stephen Rummage.