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CHAPTER 1

Preaching, above All

Q. What is God's chief end in preaching?

A. God's chief end in preaching is to glorify his name.

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The Lord passed before him and proclaimed, "The Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness."

Exodus 34:6

Above everything else, those of us who are called to preach need to know that God is love (1 John 4:8). The church's great news to a dying world is that there is a living God, whose love for his creation is inexhaustible. Could we ever love and serve anyone else before him?

Without this conviction our preaching will shrivel and die, and we preachers will soon go the same way. With it, we can believe and do all things. The church has no other and no better message. This is her great declaration.

"God is love" is actually not the same as "God is loving" or "God shows love," though both of these are, of course, true. A God who is loving might be a God who decides to be loving only at times, but no more. The same would be true of a God who shows love. The apostle John means neither. What he is saying in 1 John 4:8 is far bigger and far more exciting. God loves, and shows that love, because he is love. Love is of God's essence. And so the source of all reality is a God of ardent, consuming, and delighting love. This is who he is.

Can we speak too much of God's love, though? We all know how the love of God has been pitted against the other divine attributes, as if it somehow neutralizes them. On the one side, there are those who feel that the doctrine of God's love, unless given a myriad of qualifications, might lead to theological liberalism. On the other, the voices insisting that "love wins" effectively state that everything else loses. God's justice, holiness, and sovereignty have all been made to bow to love, as if God's love somehow triumphs over them. Thankfully, such views are wrong. God's love neither conquers nor is crushed by the other attributes. Each exists maximally in the Godhead, for his glory and our good. Let God be a lover, and every man a liar.

God's attributes are never to be viewed as in some sort of tension with each other. We are never in danger of seeing God as being, for example, too sovereign, any more than we might see him as being too merciful or too holy. That is not biblical thinking. God is holy, merciful, sovereign, and loving. He is each one, utterly and completely. He is all of his attributes in their fullest expression, all at the same time. Our preaching about God, as we explore one of his attributes, never needs qualifying or rebalancing by talking about another attribute. Preaching is declaring all that God is.

And God is a preacher. He declares himself the loving Lord. He commanded creation into existence and upholds it all by his Word. His Word governs the planets, and he speaks to our consciences. In his book, the Bible, he shows us what he is like and how we should live. He preaches, in other words. He preaches all the time.

God speaks many words, but he has only one ultimate purpose in the world. As our catechism says, "God's chief end in preaching is to glorify his name." He draws people to discover delight in his Son, Jesus Christ. That is the delight the Father has. He says of his Son,

Behold my servant, whom I uphold,
Those words are echoed at Christ's baptism and transfiguration, when the voice from heaven says, "This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased; listen to him" (Matt. 3:17; 17:5). "The infinite happiness of the Father," said Jonathan Edwards, "consists in the enjoyment of his Son." Our infinite happiness, as saved sinners, consists in enjoying the Son of God. Delight in Jesus is distinctly godlike, and is God's redemption purpose for the world. The Father is redeeming sinners to be delighters in his Son.

Our salvation involves experiencing the love of the Father, Son, and Spirit. Moments before Jesus was arrested in Gethsemane, he spoke to the Father in prayer: "I made known to them your name, and I will continue to make it known, that the love with which you have loved me may be in them, and I in them" (John 17:26). Knowing Jesus also means knowing the Father.

The God who is, is triune. The Trinity is the revelation of the God who is love. The persons of the Trinity love one another. Delight and mutual honor characterize the persons. The never-lonely, never-needy, majestic and holy God is triune love.

Delighting, serving, being contented, and sharing all things are basic to all authentic love. We long for this sort of commitment and this sort of contentment. Our hearts were created for it, and we know it as love. Augustine said: "Love is the delight of the lover in his beloved. Love's heartbeat is its delight in something else."

The "something else" for each person of the Trinity is the other two persons. Our salvation involves the outreaching of that triune love to bring us into this eternally loving life. Christian discipleship and Christian ministry are life lived in Jesus. Mike Reeves comments:

We not only come to share the Father's pleasure in him [Christ]; we come to share the life he enjoys before the Father. We stand in him with his own unspotted confidence before his Father — and there the Spirit draws us to live out his life and sonship. That is why he lived and died in our place, that we might live (and die) in his.

What is your heartbeat? Do you love to preach, or do you love the One you preach? Do you love to prep your sermons, enjoying the hard mental and spiritual work, or do you love the One you are discovering more about? As Sunday comes, do you long to lift up the name of the triune God in your preaching, declaring the wonder of the three persons, or is your heart set on getting a bit more congregational love in your direction?

Our challenge as preachers is to remain lovers, to refuse to let our calling, however important and exciting, obscure our primary calling to be captivated ourselves by God's love in Jesus Christ. We must teach others that God is love, and that life on earth is an invitation from heaven to know that love and to live in the light of it. Sermons that are mere information downloads are dry discourses and make for dry Christians, if Christians at all. Rather, we preach so that our hearers discover that the God of love has come to meet them in his Son.

You can only preach what you love. You can only truly love if you know and are daily fed by the love of God. God is always preaching himself, as the God of love. He has no greater message, no other gospel, and no greater purpose. Neither do we.

Enjoying God

Q. How do we enjoy God?

A. We enjoy God as we submit our hearts to all that he tells us.

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With joy you will draw water from the wells of salvation.

Isaiah 12:3

God loves a cheerful preacher. Our ever-blessed, ever-joyful God wants to be proclaimed by those who are brimful of the joy his grace in Christ brings. He calls us to delight in him and, out of that joy, to call others to the feast. Preacher and sermon must be filled with gospel joy. "With joy you will draw water from the wells of salvation" (Isa. 12:3). Preachers who taste, teach, and share the joy of the gospel are truly fulfilling their calling as they serve those who listen.

What I've just said causes some to smart. Life can be so hard, and surely joy is just one of our experiences among the whole range of what we encounter. What about the tears, the heartaches — for some, the months and even years of numbing grief or debilitating illness? It's true, we preachers are often deeply sad — just as everyone else can be. So, why single out joy when joy is so often crowded out by almost anything else?

The reason is that joy, like nothing else, shows whether we really believe the gospel. Joy is gospel authenticity. Joy is not an emotional buzz, an escape from the difficulties we face. To know Jesus Christ means to taste, and to want to taste more, the delights of peace with God the Father, who cares for and smiles on us, the Son, who journeys with us, and the Spirit, who empowers us. Crushingly hard days come, and conscious fellowship with God may be overshadowed for a season; but the triune God is with us. He is our joy.

Joy in Christ and his grace is the most convincing sign that the gospel has won our hearts. If we say we've been brought toJesus and are his willing servants but live joyless lives, then there is a problem. If we preach out of a heavy sense of obligation, we are in trouble. And if we honestly believe that people will be won for Christ through our dutiful, even faithful and conscientious — but actually joyless — preaching, then we are deceiving ourselves. The whole world is looking for joy. The church is looking for it, too. And everyone's looking at you. You're the preacher, who's supposed to have a message, even a life-transforming one. Are you being changed, then, in this one area that everyone longs for most of all? Are you a joyful preacher, whose words match the revolution you're experiencing?

The men who framed the Westminster Shorter Catechism knew that we are redeemed in Christ to know the joy of God's love. That is life's purpose. As they put it, "Man's chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy him forever." Life in Christ is not, above all, a set of commands to obey externally but the inward work of the Holy Spirit to remake our minds and hearts. Only then does faith express itself in glad obedience. As those who are led by the Spirit, we are to be led into a life of deepening and joy-filled contentment in Christ.

The Christian life begins with hearing the Word of God in the power of the Spirit and responding to Jesus Christ in repentance and faith. Christian maturity is an ongoing experience of the same: we see Christ in his Word, and we worship him, gladly giving our hearts to his lordship. We repent of the ways in which we deny his rule of grace over our lives, and we recommit ourselves to him.

The discovery our astonished hearts make as we live the Christian life is that discipleship is an invitation to taste joy. Jesus gives his disciples the promise, "You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free" (John 8:32). That first step with Christ is a step into understanding, reality, truth, and freedom. All the world is looking for those things but failing, as we once were. Now we've been brought by grace to encounter them all in a person, Jesus Christ. Sin once controlled our hearts, but the invasion of God's forgiveness has brought us into a new life of forgiveness and peace. And joy. Joy is offered to us in Jesus (John 15:11; 16:24). Those of us who preach must be eagerly seeking out joy in Christ.

True joy in Christ has many distractions and opponents. One of its greatest opponents is ministry. At times in my own ministry, my heart has felt like a wind tunnel, with prayers and sermon prep all focused on the needs of others rushing through it, while I was struggling to give enough time to ministering to my own spiritual needs. Sunday and midweek deadlines may focus the mind and will, but they can also be the slow (and stressful) death of even the keenest preacher. Jesus ceases to be the delight we're knowing and commending to others and becomes the one whose sweetness has faded. Preaching his Word is no longer the overflowing of joy-captured hearts. If that is the situation we've fallen into, we need to take time out, and begin over again.

So what do we do? We need to give our hearts time and space, and bring them, distraction free, back to the gospel. We need a fresh discovery of just how loved we are in Christ. In life's busyness we need to fight for the time to listen to God's Word. If we don't, the thistles and thorns of work, ministry, and worry will choke our souls. Our hearts need time — time for the Word. We must pray, sing, and worship. Joy-crushing sins and patterns of ungodly behavior must be identified and confessed. There are the many, many blessings that unmerited grace has brought us to reflect on and much joy to be found in our Savior. "Joy in God is a duty of great consequence in the Christian life; and Christians need to be again and again called to it," wrote Matthew Henry. God designs that his church be served by Word-soaked, joy-seeking, and joy-sharing preachers of his delightful gospel. He purposes that those same preachers be mastered by his Word, preaching out of experience.

For that to become reality, the sermon prep will have to wait, and some areas of our lives need a careful and principled neglect. The lawn can grow long, and the bike can rust a little. There are wells of salvation to draw from, and our joy in Christ is at stake. This heart work (as the Puritans would call it) is not an extra duty to add to the many in your busy life. It is the preacher's first responsibility, and not an optional extra.

Martin Bucer, friend and mentor to John Calvin, gave this counsel to ministers of the Word:

The health and life of the inner man consists in a true living faith in the mercy of God and a sure confidence in the forgiveness of sins which Christ the Lord has acquired and earned for us. This faith and confidence make us truly love God and everything which pleases Him, and bring us his good Spirit, who effects in us a right will and ability to avoid everything that is evil and to do everything that is good.

Good advice. Our crowded age needs to rediscover the wonder of going to God empty-handed but with expectant hearts. Before we would dare to preach his Word, we must ask him to preach it to us, for our growing delight in his Word. "Our joy in the word is the litmus test of the value we actually place on that word."

The One We Preach

Q. Who is God?

A. God is the one who perfectly lives, rules, loves, and speaks, all to his own glory.

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Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways!

"For who has known the mind of the Lord,
For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be glory forever. Amen.

Romans 11:33–36

Preachers have a single calling, to express who and what God is. This is our mandate, to declare what God has revealed about himself. What could be a greater task than being called to preach God?

So who is God? Define God. Or try to. A growing acquaintance with our Bibles makes us ready to offer our opinions. For those of us familiar with church and ministry, answers rush into our minds and out of our mouths. Wisdom pauses, though. Words matter, and definitions are vital when we talk about God. The more we know about God, and claim to know him, the more we will use our words with care, especially when we're using them about him.

When the men who met at Westminster considered question 4, "What is God?" they struggled to state their answer. The story goes that the debate went back and forth as to how they should define the God of Scripture. No form of words satisfied them, so prayer was called for. One man was asked to pray and so pleaded with God for help. As they prayed with him, all present knew that the words he used must became the catechism's answer to the question. Those words have become a classic expression of what all Christians must believe about God: "God is a spirit, infinite, eternal and unchangeable in his being, wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness and truth."

Reread that sentence, and then read it once more. Turn those words over in your mind and feel their truth in your soul. This is your God. He is the great reality who gives all things their meaning. He is the Life all people blindly grope after while instead trying to content themselves with substitute life in success and pleasure. He is the power to which the most jaw-dropping displays of power in nature can only begin to point us. In a world where we are used to being disappointed and lied to, he is the source of all satisfaction and truth. We preachers are to be proclaimers of the truth that is found in God.

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Excerpted from "The Preacher's Catechism"
by .
Copyright © 2018 Lewis Allen.
Excerpted by permission of Good News Publishers.
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