What Should I Look For in a Church?: Preaching that Changes …… · · 2015-02-12What Should I Look For in a Church?: Preaching that Changes Me ... toraise)money)tobuilda)school)inBondeni.)There

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Transcript March 8 & 9, 2014

What Should I Look For in a Church?: Preaching that Changes Me Aaron Brockett | 2 Timothy 4:1-8

If you have a Bible, go ahead and grab it and get to 2 Timothy 4. That is where we are going to be tonight. It is really good to get back to you. I’ve been gone a couple of weeks and just got back from Nairobi, Kenya. We had a group of about 31 people from our church go over. If you have been around here a while, you know that we have been working with Missions of Hope and CMF in the Mathare Valley of Nairobi, Kenya now for about five years. The Mathare Valley is one of the largest, one of the poorest urban slums on the continent of Africa. When we first went over in 2008, they really wanted us to go into that valley and, as a church, partner up with a specific village in that valley known as Bondeni. At the time, I was like, “Hey great, let’s go check it out. I’d like to walk through it and see it.” They are like, “No, we can’t walk through. It is too dangerous.” Now we send about three or four teams of people every year to go through and walk through. The people in the community know Traders Point and they ask us why we have that name. They don’t understand it. So, that is fun, explaining it to them. Yeah we are a church of traders and so um… We’ve been going over there now for several years and it was my third trip. To see the progress over there is so encouraging. Our initiative five years ago was to start a school, to start a church, and to help them with some micro-‐financing opportunities. To help them break the cycle of poverty for the next generation in a way that helps and doesn’t hurt. There is a school now of over 900 kids and there is a church that I got to preach in two weeks ago. The pastor of that church just graduated from Bible College. I got to speak at his graduation when we were there; it was so cool. A team of people from our church, a bunch of medical folks, they treated over 600 patients in 2 ½ days. We had some small business people that went over from our church and trained some of them in micro-‐financing; there were about 40 of them. Then two of our elders and Matt Hessel was with me; we did two days of pastor training with 65 ministers, elders, and deacons in the Kenyan churches. It was such an enriching time. But the highlight for me of the trip was, as many of you know we just got done building the children’s wing in a campaign called Generous Giants, and part of that effort was not only to raise money for this, but to raise money to build a school in Bondeni. There are more kids in Bondeni that need education. They can’t all get in. There are 900 kids in the school but every day there are kids coming up to the fringes trying to get in. There is a marked difference in the health and the vitality of the kids in the school versus those that aren’t. So we are going to hit child sponsorships again this spring to sponsor more kids to get in. We are building a building; it is going to be about a six or seven story building, in the slums for a school there. They have already got the walls of the first floor up. I think we have a picture or two. We were able to stand outside. That building in the back is where they are currently meeting. It is temporary. Once they get this building built, they are going to dismantle that one. I think we even had a chance, an opportunity, to pray, to lay hands on the walls and to pray over this facility as well. So I want to take an opportunity to thank you for your generous giving to Generous Giants. I know that our section is done and the indoor park is done, but the work is not done. We are sending about $25,000 per month to Bondeni to keep the construction going and so I want to thank you for your

What Should I Look For in a Church?: Preaching that Changes Me March 8 & 9, 2014

Intellectual materials are the property of Traders Point Christian Church. All rights reserved. 2

continued generosity in that effort. Let me just say one last thing. I am slightly jet-‐lagged, so this is going to be fun. If you have not had an opportunity to get over there, I want to ask you to make an effort to get there at some point, maybe in the next year, the next three years, the next five. I know that many of you are involved in various mission efforts around our church. I don’t want to pull your attention away from those, but I do want to ask you to get over there to at least see it once. This is one of the most major missions initiatives our church is involved in, and it will inform greatly of what we value and care about, and you will not return the same. Now every time I issue that challenge I get pushback. Let me just go ahead and bring up what I know some of you are thinking. Why do I have to go? There are needs here. You are right, there are. But the great commission is not ‘either, or’, it is ‘here, and’. By going there, it will make you more effective here. Let me tell you why you should go. The last night we were there, one of the ladies was telling us that when you walk through the slums and you ask the poorest of the poor… (And they are living, most of them, in 4’x4’ shanties making less than a dollar a day. The same pair of clothes has been handed down ten different times; raw sewage running out the front door.) When you walk through there and you ask them what they think of Americans, most of them tear up. They say, “Kenyans ignore us,” (Because not all Kenyans are poor; there are some very wealthy Kenyans.) “Americans fly around the world and serve us.” You should go because when you hop on a plane and fly half way around the world, and when you sacrifice time and energy and money, and you walk through there and you touch them, and you love them, and you pray for them, it makes a dramatic statement of God’s love for them. That is why you go. So I want to ask you to go. I know all the excuses and I’ll help you try to dismantle them. We’ll try to figure out a way to get you over there; finances should not be an option. We will try to pay for you to go in some fashion. I just made a promise that our Finance people will kill me for later. But I need you to go. Here is why, because every time you come back, you make our church here stronger. I even see some of you right here in the crowd who were on this trip. You are nodding your heads, saying, “Yes, preach it brother.” So I want to issue that challenge. Let me pray and then we are going to get into the message here tonight. Father, I just thank you for this church. It is such a joy for me to always come back after I have been away for a little bit of a period of time. It gives me a healthy perspective. I pray that you would speak clearly, just as the song said, “to hear our hearts, to hear our hearts”. Now speak. We ask this in Jesus’ name. And the church says, “Amen.” Well we are five weeks deep into this series that we have been talking about now on the church. One of the things that I have learned is that anytime I do a sermon or series on the church, it at least requires a little bit of deconstruction because in a room like this everybody comes in here with a different perspective or an angle on what the church is. So some of you have a background with the church that was very healthy, some of you have had a nightmare of an experience with a church somewhere. So when I say you should love the church and you should serve the church and you should be involved in the church that hits you in a very bitter way. You have a visceral reaction to that. Some of you, this is the very first church experience you’ve ever had. This is very new to you. So it requires a little bit of deconstruction and reconstruction so we are all on the same page. For me personally, I grew up in the church and my experience in the church wasn’t necessarily bad, it just wasn’t especially good either. Are any of you in that boat with me? It just kind of was. I grew up in the church, I was born into the church, I am an April baby so the very first week I was alive I went to Easter dressed up in the blue little outfit. I have been there ever since.



For whatever reason, and I am trying to decide if this is good, bad, or indifferent, the most vivid memory that I have growing up in church as an elementary student was going into the sanctuary, sitting on a hard pew next to my mom, and she was desperately trying to keep me from being bored or causing distraction in the service. She would either take out her checkbook and rip out one of the deposit slips, or she would grab an offering envelope out of the back of the pew and say, “Here, draw on that.” Let me tell you, like it is really exciting to draw on a deposit slip. There is lots of room. So she would hand me a pen, she would give me a stick of gum. I would chew that gum so furiously that it would lose its flavor, it would become hard and stale and I would fill up the whole offering envelope with scribbles. For whatever reason, that was the most vivid memory that I have as a small child growing up in church. That says more about me than the church I grew up in. Here is the thing, when I graduated high school and I got released into general population without parental oversight, I was faced with two crucial questions. Here was the first one – Am I even going to go to church? Some of you have face that question as well. Some of you young people are getting ready to face that question. It is this issue of I wake up on Sunday morning and mom and dad are not there to drag me out of bed. Am I even going to get up? It was this great kind of freedom. Hey, I don’t know if I even have to go to church. So I had to wrestle through that and kind of contemplate this. Am I even going to go to church? Is this important to me? Was this just my parent’s faith? Am I going to make it my own? I wrestled through all that and then once I did and I really needed to go, here was the second question. Where do I go? I was completely unprepared for that question. I had no grid to think through. I didn’t know what was important. I didn’t know what the Bible taught about church so here was my only criteria -‐ I am going to find a church that isn’t boring. Now that is not bad. I don’t want you to be in here and to be bored. In fact, we shouldn’t be bored. Christians should be some of the most joyful people in the world. One of the reasons why the Gospel message is so ineffective is because so many Christians aren’t. Like who wants to be part of that? We need to be a church that is exciting and joyful, but just finding a church that isn’t boring isn’t good enough. This is largely what is motivating this series. For any of you who have said, “Aaron, we are home here. This is our church, we love it, and we are all in.” If any of you, throughout this series, have wondered, is this series for me, I want to answer this for you. It is, in this sense. What we are doing as we walk through this is helping us to see what the Bible teaches about the church, so that it can get reinforced in our mind what it is we are to be about so that we do it better. Does that make sense? -‐ Apparently not. So I will take another lap on that. We want to look at these ten crucial things and this is not comprehensive by any means, but ten vital things, that the Bible says we are to be about as a church so that we can do it better and more effectively. Here is the second reason. If you are here, and you happen to be looking for a church or you anticipate that you one day will be, we live in a very transitory community. There are a lot of medical people here on residency getting ready to move. They know they are going to move in six months or a year. You know you are going to have to find a church at one point. I want to give you a grid, give you a set of criteria that comes out of the Bible so that you can find yourself in a healthy church. Now, we can’t talk about the church without beginning, at least briefly, in Matthew 16. You don’t need to turn there. I just want to run past it quickly. In Matthew 16, a lot of times we would say Acts 2 is the birth of the church and it is, but really the birth of the idea of the church is Matthew 16. In Matthew 16 Jesus is speaking to Peter and He says to Peter, “Who do people say that I am? What are people saying about me?” And he gives a few answers and then Jesus asks him the question that he asks every single



person in this room, “Well, who do you say that I am?” It is fine that other people are saying these things, but who do you say I am? And Peter said, “You are Christ, the Son of the Living God” and Jesus says in that chapter, He says in that chapter, “Peter, upon that rock of confession.” Now some of you have been taught that He was talking about Peter as the rock. It is my opinion that He is not talking about Peter. Peter is not a rock. Something to do with denying Jesus three times before the rooster crows doesn’t sound very rock-‐ish. He is talking about the confession. It doesn’t matter how broken you are, how inconsistent you are, how air-‐filled you are. You get that right (Jesus is the Son of the Living God), and He says, that is a rock. Upon that rock of a confession “I am going to build my church.” I love that. It is one of my favorite passages of the Bible and in that passage Jesus is saying here, number one-‐-‐ did you notice He speaks of the church in possessive language? He says it is His. He says I am going to build her. That is not a suggestion, it is a promise. He says I am going to build my church with or without you. Now, building could include numerical growth but it certainly more than that. It has to be more than that. We don’t want to just draw a crowd, we want to draw disciples. Jesus wants people to be maturing in their relationship with Him. And then He says this, “The church is going to,” and I love this word, “it is going to prevail. It is going to prevail.” Now you look back over 2,000 years of church history and there are some pretty dark spots in church history. Can you say crusades? Can you say slavery? It shouldn’t surprise us. Fallen men and women fumble the baton. We mess it up. I am fully convinced that in another 100 years we will look back on this era and say, what were we thinking? Because we are fallen human beings. But the church has prevailed through some pretty dark days. It shouldn’t surprise us. Jesus says the church will prevail into eternity. Then He uses this peculiar way to phrase this. He says, “And the gates of hell shall not prevail against her.” Here is a pop quiz question – Are gates defensive or offensive? They are defensive, right? Nobody ever says, “Close the gates. Now let’s go get them.” No, you close the gates because you are on the defensive. You are afraid someone else is taking your territory. He says that is what hell is, as it relates to the church. Now it doesn’t seem that way. It seems like Satan is making a lot of noise right now, but he is making a lot of noise in the sense that a drowning person makes noise flailing around. In our series on Revelation we talked about it is sort of like a chained up dog barking really loud. He only has so far on the leash. So Jesus says here, you shouldn’t shrink back, you shouldn’t be afraid, you shouldn’t stick your head in the sand. The church is going to prevail and be victorious. Now not in a destructive sense, this is not crusades all over again. But in a victorious sense, over what? Over the fallenness, the darkness, the brokenness that exists in this world today. The thing I need all of us to understand and be reminded of is that this world is not as it should be. This world is imperfect, this world is God’s creation, but one day He is going to come back and He is going to right the things that have been made wrong upon the introduction of sin. But right now things are not right and we get reminded of this on a daily basis, every time I look in the mirror. This is not right. I shouldn’t look this way. This is not how I look in my mind’s eye. Our bodies are not as they should be. Our bodies are breaking down. We get reminded of this on a regular basis. Just yesterday I went to Costco to pick up a few items and I was walking through the aisle. I felt pretty good yesterday, I was having a good day, and I felt pretty good. I was walking and all of the sudden I just had this lower back pain. It just came out of nowhere. Some of you are like, “Welcome to old age,



brother.” I was just walking and, “Aw,” doing like this (bending over, holding his back) you know? Someone asked, “Are you ok?” “Yes, I’m fine. I can’t breathe but I am fine.” I just get reminded of this all the time. Are any of you tracking this stuff with Russia and the Ukraine? We all wonder when is this stuff going to end? The answer is, not until Jesus returns. You see natural disasters that occur and the next tornado that is going to come, and the next tsunami, and the next earthquake. The Bible talks about this as “labor pains” before Jesus returns again. He is not going to just return and beam us all up to Heaven. He is going to return and bring Heaven to us and He makes a new Heaven and a new earth here. But until that time He has placed the church as a preservative of the Kingdom in the world. He says, I want you to stay in the world and I want you to be a preservative of the Gospel of grace. This should be a little bit of Heaven on earth, as imperfect as it is. Jesus says, this is the only thing that will last from this side of eternity into the next. I love how Paul says it in Ephesians 3. He is expressing his deep desire that people would come to know the mystery of the Gospel that has been veiled to their eyes and he says to them in that chapter, “To me, though I am the very least of all the saints. This grace was given to me to preach to the gentiles the unsearchable riches of Christ and to bring to light for everyone what is the plan of the mystery hidden for ages in God who created all things.” And then he says this-‐-‐ is this on the screens? Can you say these three words with me, actually there are more than that. “So that through the church the manifold wisdom of God might now be made known.” How is this wisdom going to be made known? Through the church. Not individual Christians, just me and Jesus, just me and my private faith, but through the church. And what the church is, it is a group of imperfect, fallen, mistake-‐ridden men and women who have been called by the Gospel of grace to be reborn in Christ. And His Spirit lives in us and He draws people together who wouldn’t have anything in common other than the fact that Jesus is their Savior and makes them brothers and sisters in Christ. So the church, as we have already said, should be multi-‐cultural because heaven will be multi-‐cultural. And the church should be multi-‐generational because heaven will be multi-‐generational. We shouldn’t want to attend a church that is just full of older people because you have all this wisdom but no future. You don’t want a church of a bunch of younger people because then you have all this energy but no wisdom. So you need both. You need the pouring into-‐-‐ one of the things I’ve found as just a sidebar: most of the younger people I interact with want an older mentor, they just don’t know how to get one. And most elder people would love to pour into a younger person; they just don’t think the younger person wants to hear it. In church one of my favorite images of our church in the last six years. It was a picture I saw, I don’t even know what worship service it was. But there was an 85 year old woman standing next to a 21 year old kid and they both had their hands up like this and their eyes closed in worship. That should be a picture of our church as God brings us together. It is imperfect, and it’s messy, and it’s fallen and yet there is the preservative of the Gospel that keeps us together. I love what Charles Spurgeon said about the church. He said, “The church, although she is not perfect, is the bride of the One who is.” So the church is imperfectly perfecting us. So, listen, your salvation is not dependent upon you being here in this seat tonight. Your salvation is not dependent on your church attendance, involvement, or membership, but your discipleship is. Your salvation is not tied to being involved in any church. Your discipleship is completely dependent up it. As Derek said last week discipleship is maturity; it is growing in Christ. If we were to say, I don’t want to go to church because there are all those hypocrites there and they are imperfect, that is exactly the thing that will mature your faith because you have to put up with my mess, and I have to put up with your mess. If everything



was just hunky dory (and I just used hunky dory in a sermon), if everything was grand, we wouldn’t grow. So God says, I am going to take all this imperfection and through the Gospel of grace I am going to be growing you in that. So what should I look for in a church? Here is really the dominate thing I want to see happen as we are at the midpoint of this series. As we discover what the Bible teaches about the church we not only learn how to find a church, but more importantly, we learn how to be that church. I’ve said this in the past and I want to say this again. Be the church you’ve always wanted to attend. Quit looking for the perfect church and be the church. Be the church you’ve always wanted to attend. I thought I’d maybe get an Amen out of that somewhere -‐ Maybe tomorrow. So on week number one we talked about the Gospel; on week number two I talked about the Great Commission; Jake hit worship, Derek hit discipleship; and tonight we are talking about preaching. Here is the dominant thought here – the church you belong to should place a healthy emphasis on the importance of Biblical preaching. Now let me just go ahead and give voice to what some of you are thinking. Really Aaron, you are going to preach a sermon on preaching? That sounds awesome. I saw somebody last week, and they said, “Hey it is good to have you back. Are you preaching this weekend?” I said, “Yeah.” They asked, “What are you preaching on?” and I said, “Preaching.” The look on their face was priceless. They said, oh, awesome, that will be great. Man, quit lying. Here is what I want us to understand about this topic of preaching. Preaching is communication and communication is a form of affection. So when you love somebody, when you care for that person, you have this desire to communicate with them and you desire to receive communication back. If I were to grab your cell phone sometime tonight and if I were to pick it up and if you allowed me to look through it, and I were to look through your text messages, and your emails, and your call history, I would be able to very quickly tell you the five or six people you have the most affection for, because you communicate with them more than anyone else. You love them. So a mark of affection is communication. Now the opposite could be true as well. When your relationship with somebody isn’t going very well, does the communication increase or decrease? It decreases, right? You say, “Yeah, we are not speaking. We are no longer on talking terms.” You get around somebody and the conversation is laborsome, it doesn’t flow easily, you are not connecting very well, because when communication breaks down then the relationship breaks down. So what I want us to see is that God is a God who desires to communicate with people that He loves. So when God communicates with us, it is an expression of His great affection for us. So when God communicates with us, we call that His Word. He has given us a whole book of things He wants us to know. The Bible says of Itself, it is not a static book, it is not just a book that sits on a bookshelf and collects dust, but it is living and it is active; meaning, you can read the same passage 100 times and God will hit you with something different in all that because it is living and it is active. When God speaks to us through His Word, it is an expression of affection and the way we speak back to God is prayer. So what I want us to see is that God is always communicating. He is not a cluttered God with vague thoughts, He is not a passive-‐aggressive God that wants you to guess what He is thinking. He wants to be very clear. The definition of preaching that I want to give to you tonight, and I know not all of you are note-‐takers and I don’t expect you to be, but you might write this down just as a definition to reflect



upon later. It would be this – Preaching is giving voice to what God wants said. It is giving voice to what God wants said with great passion and urgency and authority. So our passage tonight is 2 Timothy 4:1-‐8. These two letters, 1 Timothy and 2 Timothy, are letters from an older pastor to a younger one and he is giving him some counsel, and some direction, and some insight into the ministry. He hits specifically this act of preaching here and it greatly should inform the way that we see it. I know the majority of you may never preach a sermon here, but you will listen to one. You are listening to one right now. Paul’s direction here to Timothy should inform not only how we preach, but how we hear it and how we receive it. So starting in verse 1, he says, “I charge you in the presence of God and of Christ Jesus, who is to judge the living and the dead, and by His appearing and His kingdom.” What I want you to know about this is these are strong words. This says, “I charge you.” He is not suggesting, he is not hinting, he is not saying, if you get around to it. He says, this is an order. Verse 2, “preach the Word.” What are we to preach? – The Word. We are not up here to preach our opinions. We are not up here to vent our frustrations. We are not up here to talk about our insecurities as it relates to the culture and politics. We are to preach Christ. We are to preach Christ crucified, buried, and resurrected. We preach the Gospel of grace. He says, “Preach the Word; be ready in season and out of season.” Now that doesn’t mean you should preach in the Fall, Winter, Spring, and Summer. He is saying this is the condition of people’s hearts. Some people are in season. They are primed and ready to hear God’s Word, and other people are not. He says it really doesn’t matter if they are in season or out of season. You be ready and you communicate God’s Word. It is always amazing to me that in the same sermon I can have somebody come up to me and say, that is the message that I needed to hear. It was like God was speaking directly to me. This is a pivotal moment in my life; and then someone else can email me and be all upset about what I said. Our hearts, even here tonight I just ask you to reflect upon your heart, are you in season or out of season? Are you receptive and wanting to hear what God might want to say, or is there anything in you that is resistant? It says, Timothy, “be ready in season and out of season; reprove (that is, to correct sin), rebuke (that means to point out error), and exhort (that means to encourage, to build up).” So a good sermon is going to do all those things simultaneously. It is going to correct sin, point out error, and it’s going to build up. I don’t want you walking out of here feeling beat up. I don’t mind if you feel a little worked over. I don’t want you walking out of here limping, feeling all beat up. I don’t want you to think, oh my goodness, Aaron had a bad week. That is a failure as a sermon. Sometimes I have done that, sometimes I have made that error. Because there has to be that balance there. I’ve said this to you before out loud. I’ve said, “Don’t mistake my passion for arrogance.” There are just some things I can’t say in a monotone, conversational way. It is just too powerful. I’ve got to get worked up about it. And-‐-‐ thank you. I don’t want you to misinterpret that and sometimes that has happened. I may get asked, Aaron, are you angry or upset? Are things ok at home? Are you just trying to take it out on us? May I never do that. However, sometimes there are some necessary things that can be said in a group like this because you’ve got some anonymity, but God is zeroing in on you. So reproof, rebuke, correct, and build up. Verse 3, “For the time is coming (and I would say we are already there) when people will not endure” (That word endure is interesting. It is that idea that it takes some time to unpack Bible truth. I am not just talking about the length of a sermon; I am talking about the season of life.) “sound teaching, but



having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions.” Can you say, Oprah? Can you say any of the self-‐help book section of the bookstore? Itching ears means, tell me what I want to hear. Tell me what is already affirming to what I believe and the way I am already living. Itching ears… well if I don’t like you I’ll just go somewhere else and I’ll receive teaching that just affirms the way I am already living. Verse 4, “And will turn away from listening to the truth and wander off into myths. As for you (Timothy), always be sober-‐minded, endure suffering, do the work of an evangelist, fulfill your ministry.” See in this passage Paul is saying some things here about the church and about preaching, and he is saying that effective Bible preaching keeps the church faithful. Effective Bible preaching feeds the church spiritually so that it grows up into maturity. Whenever there is great disunity, whenever there is significant spiritual immaturity in the church, chances are there is not a steady diet of Bible preaching that comes to life. See what I want you to understand is that preaching is not Bible explanation only. Preaching is not just a nice lesson. Preaching is not a homily. Preaching is not story-‐time. Preaching is not comedy hour. But preaching is a proclamation of God’s Word. John Stott, who is an Anglican minister in London, I got to visit his church last Sunday night. It was so encouraging to see because a lot of people say that all of the churches in England are dead; that is not true. John Stott’s church still has 1,000 people coming. John Stott wrote a book that I read in Bible College called Between Two Worlds. It was a book on preaching. He said what should happen in a sermon is that you start on this side of the canyon with the Bible, and you don’t just explain the Bible and say amen. That is like shooting an arrow up into the air and it lands right where it started. But you build a bridge across the canyon and into people’s lives and then you lead them back across to the Bible, and you go back across to their life, and you weave it back and forth so that Bible knowledge comes to life. Preaching is giving voice to some things that God desperately wants said because communication is a form of affection. God desperately wants to communicate truth to you and He wants to show you why it matters. A steady diet of Biblical preaching in the church should make that church long for Jesus’ appearing. I just so desperately want to be in His presence. I just want to be done with this life. One of the most encouraging things that you all say to me-‐-‐ I had a lady at Costco, I am always at Costco. I was at Costco like three weeks ago and I was buying bacon. All great conversations happen outside the bacon freezer. I was standing there and there was a lady and she turned around and said, hey, I go to your church; so we were talking for a while. She said this to me, just before we left she said, you know, the preaching at Trader’s Point just makes me want to follow Jesus better and it makes me long for His appearing. Here is what I know every single week. I know that many of you endure your week and get beat up and you take shots for your faith. You get worn down and you’ve got trouble with the kids and you have bills you have to pay. You desperately need a Word from the Lord. It will speak to your heart, it will come to life. Through the sermon-‐-‐ something should happen in the sermon. We should be wading into the content, we should introduce it, and then at some point in the sermon you go, “Oh, God’s here.” He is speaking to your heart. See the thing is, in Heaven, I will be out of a job. We are going to worship a lot in Heaven. John Staub and Rhet, they are going to love Heaven. They will be so busy leading us all in the worship. I am going to be on the sidelines like when is the preaching? There is no preaching. There is no preaching in Heaven –



do not say amen to that, alright, because we will be in the presence of the Lord. There won’t be anymore need for faith and take this in faith. He is right there. But what this is now is a glimpse, it’s a portal, it’s a “I want to give voice to what God wants said in the midst of all this fallenness.” You see Biblical preaching is a lot like physical food. If I were to ask you, what is the most important meal, you would say, the next one. Hey do you remember all the meals you had throughout your life? I don’t’ remember them – maybe a few memorable ones, but I don’t remember all of them. Does it even matter? The same way – it’s like why do we go to church every single week? And why do we listen to all these sermons? I don’t remember all of them. You don’t need to remember all of them. The point is, in this moment God is not punishing you, He is trying to get your attention to move you down the road toward your maturity. Jesus said in Matthew 4:4, “Man does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the Lord.” John Stott said it so well. He said, “Churches live, grow, and flourish by God’s Word, but they languish and perish without it.” So what I want us to see is that back in Genesis 1 God created the world through a sermon. God is a God who speaks and Genesis 1 says, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” And so God spoke, in fact ten times in Genesis 1 it said, God said, God said, God said… And then seven times it said, God saw, God saw, God saw… What did God see? He saw what His sermon had accomplished. When God speaks, things happen. But in Genesis 3, somebody else shows up preaching a sermon as well. Satan shows up preaching a sermon and he starts preaching to our first parents, Adam and Eve. The thesis of his sermon is simply this: Did God really say…? Did God really say…? He interjects some doubt; he interjects some suspicion; and he interjects some insecurity, and Adam and Eve are faced with the issue of whose sermon they are going to believe. And to their detriment and ours, they chose to believe and apply the other sermon. They doubted God and they decided to be their own gods. See what I want you to see is that preaching is not just something you get exposed to when you go to church, preaching is 24x7. All of life is a sermon, anything spoken. So the media outlets, song lyrics, the newspapers you read, the magazine articles you ingest, the books you devour, the movies you go see, without you even realizing it, they form your values; they shape the way you see the world. It is like food. Did you ever hear you are what you eat? Isn’t that so annoying? I am going to eat those Twinkies, thank you. But what you ingest, you become. Forty-‐five minutes of a sermon once a weekend isn’t enough to face the onslaught of the sermon you get throughout the week. All of life is a sermon. So what God has been doing every since the Old Testament, He would raise up prophets to push back the false sermons. You see all throughout the Old Testament, prophets, their favorite phrase was, “Thus saith the Lord. Thus saith the Lord.” They are trying to push back the false sermons. So preaching is giving voice to what God once said. Now when the New Testament uses the word ‘preacher’, it is this idea that there is only one true preacher. Everyone else is just a messenger. Everyone else is just delivering the mail, but there is only one author. So throughout the New Testament, Jesus is the only true preacher and everyone else is just heralding, or delivering, the message that Jesus has preached. In 1 Thessalonians 2:13 it says, “And we also thank God constantly for this, that when you received the Word of God, which you heard from us, you accepted it not as the word of men, but as what it really is, the Word of God, which is at work in you believers.” And so a herald comes from the King and brings a message of great urgency and passion for the people to give voice to what the King once said. And our King is Jesus and the message is His Word.



In Romans 10:13 it says, “For everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved. How then will they call on Him in whom they have not believed? And how are they to believe in Him of whom they have never heard? And how are they to hear without someone preaching? And how are they to preach unless they are sent? As it is written, ‘How beautiful are the feet of those who preach the Good news!’” And all throughout scripture, God’s plan is He is going to find somebody, raise them up, and tell them, go where I tell you to go, say what I tell you to say and it will most likely not end well for you. Oh please, can I go? Can I say that? You just look all through the scriptures. You see with Moses, God says, Moses, I’ve got some things I need to articulate to my boy Pharaoh, and you are the guy. Moses says, “I don’t talk no good, God. I don’t think I can say some things.” And He says, just go. I’ll give you the words to speak. I’ll figure this thing out. I mentioned to you a few weeks ago before I left, Isaiah 6. Isaiah was a man of unclean lips and God touches his mouth and makes him clean and then God says, I’ve got an assignment for you, Isaiah. Go and herald the message to people who will never, ever receive it. Are you excited about that Isaiah? Jeremiah-‐-‐ the same thing. It is like you don’t need to be afraid. I am going to put my words in your mouth and I want you to go and I want you to speak. I’ve shared this with many of you before, especially if you have been around here a long time, but like nobody is more surprised that this is what I do than me. I grew up in southwest Missouri. I was kind of a shy, reserved kid. My grandfather was a preacher, which is most of the reason why I never saw myself as a preacher. Not because he was a bad model, but because that is what he did. So when anybody would say, “Reverend Brockett,” I would just think of my grandpa. I always just kind of thought that preachers were guys who naturally had the gift of gab, naturally loved to be in front of people and talk. Hey, let me leverage that for ministry. That would be a nice career. I got C’s and D’s in speech class in high school. My youth pastor, every time I go back to my home town and he sees me and he says, “I don’t get it. I never saw that one coming, Brockett.” He has even dragged me up in front to pray in front of the youth group and I would fight him on it. I would just like spite him. I was like, “Dear Lord, Amen. Let’s go to Pizza Hut. I am not going to talk in front of people, alright?” So I never saw this coming and so my freshman year in college, I am 18 years old, I am sitting in a chapel service in the back row, half paying attention and half drawing on an offering envelope. There is a guy who is up front and he is a preacher from California, he is preaching a sermon entitled, The Greatest Job in the World, and I had no idea where he was going with this. He is talking about what could you give your life to? And he is just kind of whittling away at this, all the way down. I literally had no idea where he was going with it. He finally came down and dropped the hammer. He said, “The greatest job in the world is to herald the message of God’s Word.” Then he said, “I fully believe there is somebody sitting here, you are half paying attention, half not. God is calling you to preach. You need to unclog your ears and wake up and listen.” Have you ever been a room where you just felt like everyone else just faded away and you were the only one sitting there? I was so uncomfortable. I’d like to tell you that I stood up, walked down the aisle and said, “Here I am. Send me.” I didn’t do that. I got up and I walked out. I didn’t even stay for the conclusion of the sermon. I was so uncomfortable, I walked out, went back to my dorm room, and for three or four hours literally just wrestled with God. Like He wouldn’t let me take a nap, He wouldn’t let me rest, and He wouldn’t let me take a nap or concentrate on anything else. There was just like this visceral, physical call to go and to preach.



My dad didn’t want me to do it because he had grown up in a preacher’s home. They didn’t make any money, it was a rough life. He said, man, you don’t want to do that. I thought, I never once had been up in front of people and they said, “Hey, that was a good talk, Brockett.” It didn’t make any sense. And I came down to the passage in the Gospel of John where it says, “He must become greater and I must become less,” and that was it. That was like the knockout blow and it was like the most weak-‐willed, “I’ll go” ever. I was like, “I’ll go-‐-‐ but you will hate it. It will stink. You will be sorry.” The very next week-‐-‐ I am 18 years old-‐-‐ and the very next week the secretary of the Bible College president calls my dorm room. I thought I was in trouble. She calls the dorm room and says, that the president was supposed to go speak at a small church in Arkansas this weekend. He can’t go and wanted to know if you would go for him. I’d never had a preaching class yet. I had never had any training. Nobody had come along beside me and taught me how to write a sermon and I was like, “Here we go!” I had no idea what to preach. I just opened my Bible and was (closes eyes and points) -‐-‐ it was the good Samaritan. I went to the library, I pulled out three or four commentaries, I plagiarized, I copied, I took things out of context. The theology was way off. I am fully confident that the people who listened to that sermon are going to hell. It was awful, it was bad. I wrote a 25 page manuscript and got into my car. Nobody went with me. I don’t even remember where this town was in Arkansas. I drove down and the church met on the corner, downtown area. I pulled in, walked in, and there were maybe 65 people in this small building. They had one of these huge wood pulpits. Do you remember Home Improvement with Tim the Toolman Taylor and his neighbor that would always come to the fence and they would never let you see his face? That is what the pulpit was like. It was like this high. It is good to be here with you fine folks. I remember trembling. I remember sitting there during the worship time. I was like, “What am I doing here? What am I doing here?” I got up and laid out my notes and I opened up my Bible and I took a deep breath and I never looked up, not even once. Eight minutes later I was closing down the sermon. I remember collecting my notes, walking down front, and taking my place on the front row and the worship leader woke up and went up there and tried to conclude it all. After the service, there were a couple of elders in that church, I believe there were three or four of them. They came up to me and they said, “Hey, can we speak to you before you leave?” I seriously thought I was in trouble. I didn’t know how the game went down. I didn’t know if you got a pink slip, if they went three strikes you are out. This is going to go on your permanent record. I just didn’t know. So we go into the Sunday school classroom, they huddled up around me and they looked at me and said, “Son, is that the first time you ever preached?” I thought, is it that obvious? They said, “Yeah, we thought that was probably one of your first times.” I’ll never forget what one gentleman said next. “The three of us got together after the service and all three of us agree. We don’t know you, we have this deep impression that God is calling you to preach. We just wanted to encourage you in that and pray over you before you leave.” Have you ever tried to get a fire going with just a flickering flame and it could go out? Did you ever make a commitment, “I’m on board,” and then three weeks later you are not? That was me in that moment and those three gentlemen fanned that flame. I walked out of that church building, and I fumbled for my keys, and I opened up my car door. I closed the door and I was sitting there in complete silence. It was a warm sunny day. Everybody had left the church by that time. I am sitting there and tears were streaming down my face and I didn’t close my eyes and bow my head. I just looked up and I said, “God, I don’t get it. That was the scariest thing I have ever done in my entire life. When can I do it again?”



You see I appreciate the encouragement and the applause. I don’t want you to clap for me. I am just an imperfect, mistake ridden, temporary fallen vessel. There is not a sermon that I preach that at one point in the sermon I don’t wince because I said something I shouldn’t have. Or I said something distracting or destructive to what God wants said. You see that is the whole beauty of our God. He says, I’ll partner with you even though you mess it up and I am going to speak through your imperfect words.” God’s got some stuff He wants to say and He raises individuals up to say it, and the thing you need to do as a congregation is to come hungry and ready to hear it every single weekend. Some sermons will be duds. Some sermons you will say, “Aaron, that was a nice try,” but every single weekend you come ready with your apron on. Lord, we know you want to show up. So would you please move Aaron out of the way so we can hear you? That should be your prayer every single weekend. God, we know there are some people that are resistant to the Gospel, we know there are some people who are hurting, we know that maybe today this will be the first time that you speak and get their attention. Would you please move Aaron out of the way so that can happen? What happens is, good preaching is not just on my shoulders. Good preaching is on your shoulders too. Have you ever gone to a restaurant where everybody is hungry? As a result, the food is so much better. When you come in here and you are hungry for God’s Word and that person who has a weak faith and is skeptical and doubting will look around and say, “Man, these people are ready to eat!” That does something in their hearts to. You see at some point in every sermon, Biblical knowledge should come to life. I love it when you start off furiously taking notes because I know you are hungry, you are ready, you want to get this. And I love about ¾ of the way through when everybody stops taking notes and they are looking right at me, because then I know God is speaking to your heart. In every point in every message there should be a moment when you get cut to the heart and God speaks to you. I pray for that every single time I take this platform. And the moments when I walk away and beat myself up because I didn’t think I did a very good job, it is because I got in the way of God’s speaking. Just yesterday, last weekend, our friends at College Park church had John Piper come and do their conference and he spoke for them last Sunday. My good friend, Mark Rodoff, who pastors that church, invited me to come over and meet John Piper and spend some time. I couldn’t because I was traveling. As soon as I got back I was like, “I want to listen.” There was a Q&A with John Piper and I was on the treadmill at LA Fitness, and I am listening to it. He starts talking about scripture memorization and I honestly wasn’t that interested. I was like, “Yeah, you should do that.” Then he starts talking about why. He said his 82 year old father suffered from dementia. He said, “I have every reason to believe I’ll suffer from dementia. I am 68. I have another decade of clarity before that happens.” And he said, “The reason I memorize scripture is because in dementia, the vulgar, impure thoughts that you stored away in the deep recesses of your mind end up getting spilled out. You lose your filter.” And he said, “When I suffer from dementia I don’t want to ruin the testimony of all these years of preaching the Gospel of grace, I don’t want my church to be ashamed of me, I don’t want my wife to be embarrassed of me, I don’t want my kids and grandkids to suffer in their faith because of foolish, dark things I say in my dementia, because they are there.” So he goes, “Over this next decade of clarity for me, I am furiously trying to memorize scripture so that is what comes out in my dementia.” I went from yeah, yeah, yeah scripture memorization-‐-‐ to almost falling off the treadmill, cut to the heart. We should come anticipating and expecting every time someone preaches, that God would do the same to us.



Let us pray. Lord God, I thank you for your Word. We know that all scripture is God breathed and it is useful for teaching, training, correcting, rebuking, and edifying for all righteousness. We know that as a church a steady diet of your spoken Word helps us to grow up and to mature in our faith, not just to be puffed up in Bible knowledge, but to be gracious, joyful people so that others see what we have and want it as well. God I pray that we would be a church that never compromises with God’s Word and that we would be a church that comes every single weekend expectant and ready for you to speak. So would you do so, both tonight, tomorrow, and the following weeks, months and years. We want to be a church where we give you voice, because churches don’t die, your voice in them dies. When your voice in the church dies, our days are numbered. But you promised that when your name is lifted up, we should order more chairs because there are some things you want to communicate to your creation because communication is a form of great affection. We love you. God please speak to our hearts and may they be moldable and pliable enough to receive it. We ask this in Jesus’ name.

What Should I Look For in a Church?: Preaching that Changes …… · · 2015-02-12What Should I Look For in a Church?: Preaching that Changes Me ... toraise)money)tobuilda)school)inBondeni.)There

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