Music What I'm going to do is just as Scott said, give you a bit of a nuts and bolts on how I go about preparing an actual expository message. Dan did an excellent job I think in the topic of self preparation, but of course you can prepare yourself, fine, but you still need to prepare the message, okay, and there needs to be something that you bring with you into the pulpit and you need to have something to say. And that's a very serious stewardship. Just think about it practically. We have about 400 people, let's say, on a Sunday morning listening to me preach.

I preach for about 45 minutes. That's a lot of man-hours. And I have been entrusted with that time. And it's very important for me to make good use of it, that we spend the time well and that I'd be well prepared. And so it's a very serious thing that we're talking about here.

Sermon preparation. Let me just bring you through some practical steps before I look at some of the handouts I've given you. I just want to for the next 20 minutes or so just take you physically how I go through the actual task of preparation. The first thing that you have to decide is what to preach on. We already know we've resolved it's going to be the Bible.

We know that, but the Bible is a big book. And as I mentioned yesterday, you will not finish going through the cities of Israel before the Son of Man comes, there's always more to preach on. It's very challenging to figure out what part of God's holy word, all of it useful, all of it God-breathed, but what's going to be the best use for your people to decide what to preach? Are you going to preach a series? Are you going to preach a topic?

And by the way, I don't think it's wrong to preach occasionally a topic dealing with certain issues here and there. I just want to be sure that when you hear that sermon, you're hearing scripture faithfully exegeted and expounded, that's all. But I don't think it's wrong to do an occasional, just one-time only issue. I've done, last few years, generally in January, something on the Christian family, you know, Deuteronomy 6 or something on memorization that's helpful and it usually interrupts the mainstay of my ministry. Generally, however, I'm going to be preaching a series of sermons on a book of the Bible.

John MacArthur, he'll preach series on books, but he'll title them under some topic of the Christian life, like the Christian family or something like that, but he really is just exegeting a passage of Scripture and going through it. So that's a different approach. For me, I don't do anything like that. I don't give, let's say, the whole series on Colossians that I just finished a certain name, you know, the supremacy of Christ or something like that. Because I just think there's more in Colossians than just that.

I mean, obviously the supremacy of Christ is important. That's what I'm going to preach on in the example of an expository sermon this afternoon. So it's important, but that's not all there is in Colossians. So at any rate, I think a series is helpful. Paul's epistles are good.

I think you can probably get through the whole epistle all the way through. But the longer books, like I have a series going now in Matthew, but When I say going now, I'm saying like Calvin, I'm taking a Strasburg kind of vacation and I'm going to come back to Matthew. But I'm the one that's self-imposed. I just don't want to spend three years or four years going through the Gospel of Matthew. So what I do is I try to go through a certain amount of time, anywhere between six months and a year in a book, and then get to a good stopping point, I hope, and then go to a different book, and hopefully even a different genre.

So I might go from a gospel like Gospel of Matthew over to an epistle or something from the Old Testament. I recently did an analysis of my own preaching in the 10 years I've been at FPC, and I think three quarters of my preaching has been from the New Testament. So I think it's good for me to do a little more emphasis on the Old Testament in the upcoming year or so. So I'm going after two sermons on the cross and then a resurrection day sermon. I'll go into a series on Isaiah and be in Isaiah for a while.

You could be in Isaiah the rest of your life, I can assure you. There's plenty in there. But at any rate, deciding what to preach generally. By that I mean series, what kind of thing you have to start there. And then the next thing you could say, well then that makes it easy at that point.

Now you're in a series in Colossians, it's easy. Actually it's not. At that point you have to decide how much of Colossians to preach this Sunday or in this sermon. And that's not necessarily an easy thing to do, especially not before you begin the exegesis. You know, you begin, you do some work, and if the thing just is flowing and you're learning tons of things and all that, you might actually end up being two sermons or maybe even three in the same passage.

You don't want to go too long that way. And one of the analogies I've used before is of a microscope. You remember back in your days in high school biology, and you've got your microscope and you can click it at 10x, 100x, 1000x, 10, 000x. The Scripture will bear that kind of scrutiny, but it doesn't mean that you should preach at that level. If you had it clicked in at 10, 000x, you won't even get through a single book of the Bible, probably.

You know, if it's a long book like Romans, you could be in Romans like Lloyd-Jones was for 13 years. And you could say, well, what's wrong with that? I don't think there's anything wrong with it. I'm not saying there's anything wrong. But isn't there that sense of all scriptures God breathed, and that God has come at us in different ways, different genres?

And I know we're going to have a genre message after me. And I think it's that we're not, we don't all think alike. And I think some people respond better to Proverbs and Psalms or the Poetical passage or the Visionary passages than they do maybe some of Paul's epistles. Anybody can get anything from any, any Christian can derive benefit from any genre. But I think there's a wisdom, there's clearly a wisdom to the fact that God hasn't spoken to us all in the same way.

Many times and in various ways it says in Hebrews 1, God spoke to us. So I think there's a benefit in just strategically not sticking just with Paul's epistles, like going from Colossians to Galatians to Philippians, and then you're just that way. But again, I wouldn't fault a brother for doing it. I think it's not wrong, it's not a sin or anything like that, but I think in a way I just want to submit to what God has given us in the Bible, and he's given us so many different genres that I think it's wise to go to something entirely different after you've been in an Apolline Epistle for a while, to go to an Old Testament narrative or something like that. It also does challenge you as a preacher, because it's a whole different thing to preach through a narrative.

Like I remember I preached a sermon on Abraham's servant getting a wife for Isaac. And that's a challenging passage because it's so long. It's really long. I forget how long, but it's like 60 plus verses. And You are not going to handle it the way you handle something from Ephesians.

You're just not. And so how are you going to preach through that whole thing? Just reading it would take a good chunk of time. And I think you should read it. But then it stretches you and challenges you as a preacher to rely on God and get that message across.

So there's some value. Another issue that comes up from time to time, and this just came up from me in preaching Colossians, is to preach what the text says, but there may be an issue that comes from the text that you need to deal with if you're going to be faithful in the whole council. I've not hesitated or I haven't shrunk back from proclaiming to the whole council of God. And you come to a passage that brings up a really hot issue. And to deal with it faithfully, you're going to have to go across the whole Bible, but it is coming right up off the text.

So that Sunday, the issue for me was the issue of slavery. Okay, so I was preaching through Colossians and the first Sunday that I touched on master slaves, I just preached it simply from Colossians and I said I can make the case that this translates to the employer-employee relationship now. I know there's not an identical connection, I talked about that, but I think there's obviously a value here on how we work. And it's talking about work, and it's talking about relationships at work, and let's preach that, and I did. But the next week, I preached on the issue of slavery itself.

And specifically the question, why are there no clear prohibitions against slavery in the Bible? Why doesn't Jesus abolish it? Why doesn't Paul abolish it? And I'll tell you this, The more I got into that topic, the deeper it got. It was an incredibly powerful, powerful topic.

And you know where I ended up? I mean, my sermon ended up right at the throne of God in the New Jerusalem, where it says his servants will serve him. And in Revelation 22, 3, and two verses later, it says, and they will reign forever and ever. And I say that is amazing how both servanthood and rule like a king are so redeemed and transformed that both of them are going to be there in the new heaven and the New Earth. It was really a powerful sermon and many people commented.

Some people have said that unbelievers have brought this up as one of the flaws of the Bible and how people make biblical defense for slavery right from the Bible. So it was a very interesting time. We had a number of African Americans that were there from the community. We've had a pretty good community outreach recently and they were there and it was it was just one of those like Jesus Don't fail me now. I'm preaching on slavery as a northerner from a southern pulpit Just talking about that was just an amazing time But again that our congregation has reached the point where they just want to know what the Bible says.

Was it exposition? I don't know what to call it, but I felt led by God that I definitely wanted to address the topic of slavery and find how rich it is that Jesus is called a doulos, a slave, in Philippians 2 and how powerful that is. So you're going to do that. Another good example of that is preaching through Romans, and you come to Romans 13 and you come to the issue of the Christian and his relationship with government and again you know there is no more important passage in the Bible on government then Romans 13 So I think to be faithful to that you're going to be raising up issues of a believer in government there. Separation of church and state, other issues that come up there, how that relates.

How long should you be in a book? I think you ought to calculate it, try to figure out how many weeks would be reasonable. I think it's good to be open to the leadership of the Holy Spirit. I think what Lloyd-Jones says is right, and I don't agree with Charles Spurgeon that you have to prepare the sermon the night before and be immediately ready for the Spirit to change things and be that submissive. I understand why he's saying that.

I am ready whenever I preach to stop from my prepared notes, if led by the Spirit and say something different. I can do that and I frequently do, not every week, but I do. The people don't know that I'm doing that. I don't say, oh, by the way, I'm getting off from my prepared notes. They don't care about my prepared notes.

They don't matter. All right, so I don't say it, but if I feel led, I'll just do it. So I'm available to do that and I'm ready. But I don't think there's anything wrong. It bothers me that people don't see the Holy Spirit as somebody who prepares in advance.

He does, He's a preparer. And so he can be with me eight weeks in advance, six weeks in advance to help prepare a message and know that it's going to be directly applicable to our people on the Sunday I preach. And we've seen that numbers of times, how something just lines up beautifully and I've prepared it a long time in advance. So it's a beautiful thing. So what do I do then?

I've decided the text and then I've kind of cut it. Talk about orthotome, rightly cutting. You're trying to decide how much is enough for one sermon. And that may change a bit. You know, you may end up with, like you're going to get the sermon I preach this afternoon, is the supremacy of Christ part one.

And you'll never hear part two, you have to go to the web for that. But my church heard part two the next week. And that just came from the fact that these were incredibly rich verses from Colossians 1. He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation, etc. They're very rich.

And so the more you go on, you actually may find yourself generating things that are all worthy of preaching to your church at that time, and it's too much for one sermon. And so then you can slow down and just go, you know, to two sermons, something like that. So you're working on a certain text, but you have to have some idea so that you know where to concentrate your efforts and your preparation. By the way, one practical thing is you need a day to do this. Okay, A day in which people know that you're doing this.

Closed off from interruptions so that you're working on your sermon that day. And you could say, is it just one day? For me it is. I'm not saying I don't just work on my sermon that one day, but I only have one study day. I'm available to the people the rest of the week as they need.

And I'm available that day if there's emergencies, but people just know that's the day in which I'm just going to be working on sermons. And it's good for you to know that too. So you're coming in and you're saying, this is my day to really focus. So that point, obviously you're going to, I think it's very important to pray and say, Lord, show me. I just think those prayers from Psalm 119 are so important.

Open my eyes that I may see wonderful things in your law. To pray and to ask the Lord for guidance, for illumination, for the Holy Spirit to illuminate the text to you. I think that's Psalm 119 verse 18, Open my eyes that I may see wonderful things in your law. You want to see wonderful things and they need to be wonderful to you. And I think it's important to some degree to take your people to a place they haven't been before.

Just prayer, seeking God, say, Lord show me something Because I think the point is that I think we need to see new things. We need to see new things in the text. We don't need new doctrine. That's not it. But I think we need to come at it fresh in a new way.

Have you ever sung a song that you really loved, is powerful, and you get a tape of it and you just sing it into the ground? Have you ever done that? I've done that. And you ruin the song because I don't, like knowing you from Philippians is like that for me. It's going to be a while before I can probably sing it again because I sang it like 180 times in three weeks.

I think the fact is that we need to have the same old truths, old truths, ancient truths coming at us in different ways. And I think the scripture is sufficient to the task. But we're not necessarily going to be able to come up with that. It's going to be something flowing from the scripture. So you're just going to say, open my eyes, Lord.

Then I might see something new, something wonderful in your law. And here's the thing. I just have a general instinct in my preparation of sermons that if this is a new thought for me, it's going to probably be a new thought for most people there. I don't think that's arrogant. It's just that I think that I do think about scripture a lot.

I don't say I think about it more than most people, but I'm saying if it's new for me, there's at least a very good chance it'll be new for most of the people listening to me. And that will be fresh and it'll be exciting and invigorating. So we pray and ask the Lord for guidance and then what I do is I read the text out loud. I literally Stand up in my study and I just get the Bible and I read it out loud three or four times You know somewhat like we're doing now with this memorization, but my goal here isn't to memorize it's just to hear it read and to read it dramatically, to read it with understanding and try to discern what's going on there. By the way, I use BibleWorks and I think BibleWorks is a great piece of software.

BibleWorks is probably the best Bible search software that you can get. There may be another program, I don't know, but this is just really phenomenal. It's a well-designed Bible search software. It's not a commentary, although I think there's some add-ons that give you Matthew Henry or some other things with it, but that's not why you get it. What it is, you can get up on the screen any translation you want.

There's, I don't know, how many English translations. Friends, do you realize how rich the English language is in Bible translations? I don't think there's any other language on the face of the earth that has this many Translations I was missionary in Japan for two years There were two translations the Japanese Christians are using one of them is Catholic and the other ones over a hundred years old All right, that's what they have in the Japanese language That may have changed in the last ten years, but I don't know. And in English, it does change every ten years. There's another new, big, most recent translation.

Why? Because of money. I mean, there's just a big seller. But there are a lot of good English translations. Why is that important for exegesis?

Well, you don't really have to know Greek like you used to. Okay, if you get five or six good reputable translations up, you know, whatever they are for you, you list them. You get them up there, ones that you know they don't have a theological ax to grind, like Don't put up the New World translation or the Jehovah's Witnesses, the Kingdom Hall. Don't put that up there because they have an axe to grind. You know, and there are others like the NRSV that has a gender axe to grind.

You don't need that. But you get up translations that are just trying to do their best to understand. And whether you agree with the translation strategy or not is up to you. You don't have to put it up on the screen if you want. But what I'm saying is you can get different translations and you can read each verse literally side by side right up on the screen.

They're just right up there. And what that'll do for you is as you're reading these verses, where there are substantive differences in the translation, that's where you'd want to do your work on the Greek and Hebrew. In other words, where the two translations don't really even sound alike in English, that's an interesting point of study for you and you ought to pay attention to it. Let me give you a very good example of the way I learned something by this whole Bible Works approach, and that was in Hebrews 11.1. Hebrews 11.1 says something like this, depending on the translation, now faith is the assurance of things hoped for and the conviction of things not seen.

That's a very important verse because it gives us a definition of faith. It's maybe the only faith is kind of definition you're gonna find in the New Testament. So it's a very important verse, but if you look at the King James version, it says, now faith is the substance of things hoped for and the evidence of things not seen. Well, let me tell you something. Substance is different than assurance, and Evidence is different than conviction.

So it caused me to study it and to try to find out, I don't care ultimately that much what the King James says or the NIV or the NAS. I want to know what the Greek is, because that's the authoritative language. That's what God gave it to us. And so I looked at it and I came to find that the word that the KJV translates evidence, that NAS translates conviction, usually means to give evidence to someone for the purpose of convicting them of sin. It really is frequently translated reproof or rebuke.

And this is the thing that's fascinating is that there's like 17 uses of the verbal form and all of them have to do with confronting somebody about their sin. And that's when I realize first of all conviction is a better translation than evidence, because evidence gives you a sense of just proof that heaven is real or that the invisible world is real. But that's not really what I think it's saying. It's basically coming and confronting you about your sin. That faith gets in your face through invisible things and shows you that you're a sinner all the time.

And do we need that? Well, we absolutely do. But that's not all we need. We also need the assurance of things hoped for. Does anybody hope for negative things?

Anybody hoping for condemnation? Anybody hoping for anything negative? You never hope for negative things. Just like Romans 8 says, we don't hope for things we already have. We hope for future things.

So hope has to do with future good things. Conviction has to do with sin. And faith therefore has a two-sided, a double-sided coin. And you need both of them while you live. You need a sense of certitude that you're going to heaven when you die.

That Jesus has died for you. That your sins are forgiven through faith in his name. You need that certitude, that hope that you're going to be well received on judgment day. That's important. That's hope.

That's what that is. But you also need conviction, don't you? And you need to have the power of the Lord coming to you. Well, all of that came just out of looking at the difference between the KJV and the NAS and the NIV and all these. They're just different.

I said, wow, this is worth studying. So that leads you to the next kind of mechanical thing, and that's find words that are worthy of doing a word search on to find out how they're used. Again, with Bible works, it's really easy. You just click on the word in the Greek, you double click on it, and it's gonna give you everywhere it's used in the New Testament, just like that. You used to have to use a concordance for that, a Greek concordance.

Now you just have this piece of software. It's not cheap, something like six or $700, but it's worth it for me anyway. And so there it is. You've got a search, and then you're just gonna zero in on these important Greek words or Hebrew words and study them. Concerning syntax, you know, listen, I went to seminary.

I took four semesters of Greek. I'm no Greek scholar. I mean, I'm OK. If you sat in front of me, a Greek paragraph, whatever, I'd probably do better than Charles Taze Russell did on the witness stand up in Toronto, in which he couldn't figure out the difference between an alpha and a beta. I could do that, okay?

But I think, for me, a specialized study of the Hebrew and the Greek language, I left it behind. Once I got my MDiv, I was done with it. But I am familiar with the languages, and therefore I can use commentaries that are going to make arguments based on syntax, based on grammar and all that. Beyond that, look, if you're into sentence charting in the Greek language, be my guest friends. That's something that you can do.

Some people do that, propositional analysis and all that, they're comparing Greek particles and all that. For me, I think it's enough just to read it in a multiplicity of good English translations, and those translations are, in effect, some scholars' Best effort at translating from the Hebrew or the Greek if they're all reading exactly the same thing You don't need to spend any time on it friends Why would you do that? It's like well I'm gonna find something no one else has ever seen could be that pride is creeping in at that point and it's not likely to happen Alright, So if you're looking and you've got seven reputable translations up on the screen and they all say read exactly the same thing, I think it's time, you know, it's like I read one verse and it was exactly the same in every translation. Oh magnify the Lord with me, let us exalt his name together. You don't need to work on the grammar, okay?

You probably need to work on doing it. Let's magnify the Lord, work on what magnify means and why we need to magnify an infinite God, work on thoughts, but you don't need to work on translation. But there may be other cases that you do. So you're going to look at the text, you're going to read it and zero in on issues from the Greek and the Hebrew, differences in translations, etc. Then you're going to start isolating on a notebook what is what I do, preachable topics and issues, things that are coming up from the text.

Now, don't be allergic to the word topics. Topics are just things. They're ideas, concepts that come from the text. So you're going to be bringing out these topics and you're going to start listing them. And you're going to find a treasure trove of things that need to be discussed.

Realize like Perkins, remember what Perkins said? We're looking for a few key doctrines. Do not suppose I'm going to give every key doctrine that's coming from this passage. First of all, you're not. What you're looking for is, Lord, lead me to those things that our church needs to deal with coming from this passage.

So those doctrines. So at that point, I take a break and I use commentaries and other sermons that are existing on this passage to try to get me out of my own rut. I'm already in a rut, probably, thinking just one way. If I could look, you know who's really good at getting me out of a rut is Spurgeon, okay, because he's so creative. He's going to come at it a very different way and it'll help protect me from going just in the one direction I want to go.

So, I might read a Spurgeon sermon. I'm probably not going to read every word. I'm probably just going to scan it for ideas. I don't have a ton of time for commentaries and for other sermons. I might put an hour or two into commentary work.

Part of the thing about commentary is just be sure you don't have any blind spots, you know, that you're not missing some big thing. I don't lean on the commentaries at this point. I just want to be sure that I'm not missing something. So I look through there and then I discern at that point an outline for the passage. An outline doesn't have to just be three points.

It probably ought not to be 76 points, our dear Puritan friends, but that's up to them. They can do that. It's got to be something manageable, three to five, six points, something like that. Really what you're doing at that point is you're putting names to things. You know, like Adam naming the animals.

You're looking and you're giving a name to what this paragraph is about. And that really is a very powerful thing at that point. You're taking five or six verses or something or a number of words, concepts, and you're grouping it together and giving it a name. Like in the sermons I did in Colossians 1, you've got Christ's supremacy over the physical creation, Christ's supremacy over spiritual creation, Christ's supremacy over the church, and Christ's supremacy over the process of redemption. But it's all supremacy, supremacy because I think that's what Paul is giving.

But you're putting a name to it. A different preacher may put different names. But that helps people know what you're saying and what you're thinking. Those are handles that they can bring concepts with. So you're putting an outline with names, etc.

So discern an outline with the headings. And then develop cross references. And here you need to be careful, okay? Because if it's a rich passage, you could cross reference the thing to death. And it's really easy to do with Bible works.

Click, click, and there you got seven cross references. All right? I don't think that that's best. What you want to do is be sure you use cross references that are really needful and helpful at this point. Other than that, just stick to the verses that you're explaining.

But if there's something else that is going to help your people to understand it, then by all means bring it in. All right, so you get through, you go through verse by verse, you get a complete outline of the sermon you have now exegeted the passage. It takes for me much of the day. And so now you've got a good exposition of the text, but it's not a sermon yet. There are two things that are really necessary and they take a long time for me.

This is one of the reasons that I try to preach five weeks in advance because I'm willing to just wait on some of these things and let them develop over time. For me, direct exegesis of a text is more automatic and definitely will happen more than these two things. And they are illustrations and applications. Those two things take a long time for me. Illustrations and applications.

First of all, what do we mean by illustrations? Well, it's just things that illuminate aspects of the text that help people remember them, that are memorable and fascinating for them. I'm going to talk about illustrations in a minute. And then applications is bringing it across the centuries, across your exegesis, and bringing it home to your people where they live. Those two things for me take a long time.

Now, others may be very, very good at them, I don't know, but for me, I can work on them for three or four or five weeks. Okay? After the applications are done, I then have an outline. It's generally too long, in my opinion. Fifteen, sixteen pages.

And I know, I've preached long enough to know how long that's gonna be. It's gonna be too long. It's gonna be heading toward an hour and so then I have to keep in mind our dear brother John Calvin. Anybody tell me what he was all about? Lucid brevity.

Okay, lucid brevity and so what you're gonna do is you're gonna go through and I imagine myself, here's an illustration, I imagine myself on a hot air balloon making a transatlantic flight. Okay? And I'm nearing the shores of France. I'm about 100 feet over the ocean. I'm now 70 feet above the ocean, 50 feet above the ocean.

Not quite to the cliff yet. I'm 30 feet above the ocean. What are you going to do? I'm going to be pitching stuff overboard. I'm going to be pitching a lot of things, all right?

And here's the thing. You think, well, you're pitching good things. You are, but you're pitching them for better things. And that's the hard thing with shortening a sermon, okay? And let me tell you something, I've found anyway, I'm going to pitch anyway.

I'm not going to preach till 1230, I'm just not. What's going to happen is I'm going to pitch on the fly at the end of the time that I think is reasonable to preach. Somewhere around 12.15 I'm going to start pitching anyway. So I might as well pitch intelligently ahead of time. You see?

And that is to labor to get the thing down to the length that I think the people are expecting to hear me preach. That's about 45 minutes. And that's a good 10 to 15 minutes longer than when I first got there. I mean, the people have grown. But am I urging, am I pushing from 45 to an hour, and from an hour to an hour and 15?

No, I'm not. I'm not heading in that direction. So, others may argue with me on that. I think it's reasonable to go for lucid brevity. I mean think of the sermon on the mount.

How long do you think it took Jesus to preach that? Well just read through it. I guarantee it's less than 45 minutes just read through it at a regular reading rate. My feeling is it's heading more towards 20 minutes. Alright now I'm not saying that was a full sermon.

It may or may not have been. It's certainly full of ideas, my goodness. You know, Lloyd-Jones gave us thick book on the Sermon on the Mount. But at any rate, I tighten it down and try to get it to something that I can preach in a natural pace in 45 minutes. I tighten it.

That is how I do it. That's the practical side of what I do. Now what I'd like to do with the rest of our time, I wanna talk about some other aspects. I wanna start by talking about illustrations. Illustrations are necessary.

They are important. We've already talked about how dangerous they can be. Like, you remember the flying kitty. We don't need the flying kitty. The flying kitty is all about entertainment.

One thing is I never use a preacher's story. I don't mind using an Aesop fable or something like that, but I just want people to know it's a fable. I don't want to ever present something as true that isn't true, okay? If there's a moralistic story that people have used and I want to use it for some reason, I usually don't, but whatever, I want them to know ahead of time, this is just a story, This is a parable or something like that. But illustrations are important.

Spurgeon was a tremendous user of illustrations. To him, I think he likened it in lectures to his students to feathers on an arrow. So it enables it something to fly straight into the mark. People remember these illustrations. And wasn't he great?

I think Dan used one concerning a clock. Remember how everyone, if your own pocket watch goes bad, that's bad for you. But if the town square clock goes down, like the Greenwich Observatory, then that's bad for everybody around. That is an illustration, friends. He used tons of them.

I remember one he used talking about justification by faith alone apart from works. And I think he was also talking about let all that is hungry come and buy and eat without money and without cost. So he's talking about this idea without money and he used an illustration of an auctioneer at a town fair, something like that. And he said that this evangelist was preaching, I don't know if it's true or not, but the evangelist was preaching and the auctioneer was doing what auctioneers do and the evangelist said he's trying to get you up to his price, I'm trying to get you down to mine and that's free. Salvation's free but pride, we want to pay something, don't we?

We want to put something of ourselves towards salvation. And it's just a great illustration of the auctioneer. I've never really forgotten that. It's very strong. Spurgeon was a great illustrator of scripture.

Another one is John Bunyan. Tremendous illustrations. You look at Pilgrim's Progress. How many are there? You get the slew of despond, right?

It's a swamp of depression is what it is. What an illustration. Or the arrows that go into the wicked gate as he just manages to get in there, an illustration of Satan's attacking somebody just as they're coming to Christ. Or then in an interpreter's house, it's nothing but illustrations. Interpreter kind of like is a pastor.

And he's just taking them. I mentioned one yesterday, the wall with the fire and the oil That's a tremendous illustration or the woman remember the woman is trying to clean a room And it's filled full of dust and the more she sweeps the dustier it gets and he's choking and coughing because of the dust But Then she sprinkles some water around and then it says, I'll never forget, cleans it with pleasure. All right? So the water is grace and the dust is the sin in our lives and it's the process of sanctification. When God's grace comes in, after you've come to faith in Christ, you can actually do some real clean up in your life.

That's an illustration of the man in the cage who's so depressed and discouraged he thinks he's apostatized because of his sin and he just can't get out. And what a warning that is that when you go into willful sin you might entirely lose your assurance of salvation. And then it's so brilliant the way Bunyan does it because you're not really sure whether the guy actually is in the end going to be saved. And he doesn't know either. You just don't know, don't know, don't know.

And that's what happens when you willfully sin. You just lose your assurance. And you just have no idea. Bunyan was a tremendous illustrator. So also many others.

John Newton, John Piper talked about his illustrations. He was a great illustrator. Piper and his thing on Spurgeon, he's talking about Spurgeon, but he used Newton and how Newton used illustrations. And it was of a man going into a city to receive an inheritance. And en route, his carriage broke.

And he's walking in the rain, in the muck, and he's going in to receive 50, 000 pound inheritance, which back then, that'll do you. It's billions of dollars, all right? And he's walking in and he's muttering, my carriage is broken, my carriage is broken, my carriage is broken, Muttering to him. And if you're his friend, you're like, you idiot. You're going to receive an incalculable inheritance.

What is the matter with you? And it's an illustration of how ridiculous it is for Christians to complain about earthly circumstances when we're en route to getting an incredible inheritance. Well that'll stick with you friends. I'm saying illustrations are so powerful, they must be used but they have to be used well. Did Jesus use illustrations?

Well earlier today I was starting to think about that question. Yes he did, many of them. He used illustrations from nature. Consider the lilies of the field. They don't labor or spin, yet I tell you that not even Solomon and all his splendor is dressed like one of those.

That that is how God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today and tomorrow thrown to the fire. Will he not much more clothe you, O you of little faith? And what about the birds of the air? They don't sow or reap or stow away in barns, yet I tell you that your Heavenly Father feeds them. You look at that.

Those are illustrations from nature. Consider them. Look at the world around you. He used illustrations from daily life and from common sense. Daily life, the kingdom of heaven is like yeast that a woman took and mixed into a large amount of flour until it worked all through the dough.

All right, that's the parables. The kingdom of heaven is like a merchant looking for fine pearls. The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field. These are illustrations from common everyday life. They know about a woman making bread.

They know about a farmer sowing seed. They know about a man finding treasure hidden in a field, and he's kind of sneaky about it, hides it again, and goes and sells everything handed. And it's all legal, though. You know, it's the great net, the fisherman, right? He's using illustration in common life, everyday life.

Or he says, which of you, if you have an ox or a sheep and it falls into a pit in the Sabbath, will you not take it and lift it out? It's common sense. It's an illustration though. He's using illustrations from common sense and daily life. What about from current history?

Does Jesus use illustration from daily events in current history? Yeah, what about those Galileans whose blood pilot mixed with their sacrifices? Do you think that they were worse sinners than any of the others that survived? He said, unless you repent, you will likewise perish. It went about the 18 that died when the Tower of Siloam fell on them.

This is Luke 16. Current events in history. What about object lessons? Somebody came and asked him about taxation. He said, show me the coin used for paying the tax.

He looks at it. Whose portrait is this, and whose inscription? Well, that's Caesar's. Well, then give it to him. It's his.

And give to God's what is God's. You know, it's powerful. Those are illustrations. Jesus used a lot of them. How about science?

Did Jesus use any illustration from science? Yeah, how about in Matthew 16 when he says, in the evening you say, it'd be fair weather for the sky is red, and in the morning it'll be stormy today for the sky is red and in the morning it will be stormy today for the sky is red and overcast. You know how to interpret the appearance of the sky but you cannot interpret the signs of the times. What is science but an observation of our surrounding world and it's making just drawing deductions and conclusions from it. Meteorology, you know, red sky in morning, sailor take morning, red sky at night, sailor delight.

There you go. So he used illustrations from science. What about biblical illustrations? Did he use illustrations from the Bible? Oh yes.

There were many widows in Israel during the time of Elijah, yet he wasn't sent to one of them, but to a pagan out there in Zarephath. And there were lots of people suffering from leprosy, but only the foreigner, Naaman the Syrian, was healed. He's used an illustration of how the word of God is going to do very well among the Gentiles and poorly in Israel. Jesus used illustrations all the time. Alright, well where do we get illustrations?

Well there are books you get, no I'm just kidding. A thousand illustrations. Let me tell you something, I think if I ever used one of those my folks would know immediately because they'd be so different from the illustrations I do use. But the ones that I do use take a long time to find. They don't come to me right away.

They just don't. And so you just look around in the world around you. You think, what are you trying to illustrate, God? And you pray and say, Lord, show me some things that are going to make this come to life. Now beware of illustrations that take over the whole sermon though.

That's dangerous. I remember one well-known preacher was talking about how we're supposed to lay aside every weight and run the race with endurance. And he talked about how he likes to run and he actually completely, I'm not even gonna do it, but you can know where that illustration goes. And you get this image of the preacher getting ready to run. You don't need that image in your head, okay?

So beware of an illustration that swallows the sermon, the great illustration that swallows the entire sermon. These things take a long time to develop. Okay? What about applications? What about applications?

Well, take the outline that I've given you here and let's say go to the end. There's an outline called Putting the Truth to Work. It's the second to last one in there. It's about three pages from the back. This book by Daniel Doriani is one of the best books I've ever read.

It's definitely the best book I've ever read on the science of scripture application. Application is a notoriously weak part of many sermons. Generally, you just come down to the same three or four applications all the time. You need to pray more, witness more, be a better person, you know, that kind of thing. It's so weak compared to the rest of the acts of Jesus and I felt that it was so for me.

I ended up with the same three or four applications every time too. And he does a great, great job in this book, putting the truth to work, the theory and practice of biblical application, does a great job of giving us application. The summary is here in these handouts. We want a God-centered application. Jesus said in John 17, 3, Now this is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.

Tozer's famous quote, what comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us. And John Calvin put it this way, nearly all the wisdom we possess, that is to say true and sound wisdom, consists in two parts, the knowledge of God and of ourselves. So basically we want to ask all the time, what is this text teaching us about God? What are we supposed to know about God as a result of this? That's an application.

What is God saying to us? And then the goal, salvation in Christ, justification, sanctification, glorification. What Doreani does is he gives us seven sources of biblical application from which we can get a whole treasure trove of ways to apply the scripture to ourselves. The first are rules. Look at the list.

There's rules, there's ideals, there's doctrine, There's exemplary acts and narrative, biblical images or symbols, and songs and prayers. These are the seven sources of application. And from each of them come different kinds of applications, right? For example, look at rules. Definition.

Rules summon obedience to specific commands. They require definite actions in narrowly defined cases. The problem with rules is that they're seemingly easy to apply. The application becomes a challenge when the specific circumstances no longer exist in today's world or in our lives. Let's say the goring bull, for example.

You know the goring bull? If a bull gores a man or woman to death, Exodus 21, the bull must be stoned to death, and its meat must not be eaten. But the owner of the bull will not be held responsible. If, however, the bull has had the habit of goring, and the owner has been warned, but has not kept it penned up and it kills a man or woman, the bull must be stoned and its owner also must be put to death." Wow. However, if payment is demanded of him, he may redeem his life by paying whatever is demanded.

How are you going to apply that to daily life? Let's say you work in New York City, you take the commuter rail every day and you've got a job on Wall Street or something like that. You haven't seen a bull maybe in your whole life. I don't know. Maybe on TV you saw one.

How would you apply something like that? The law is about, they're passing out that dog's responsibility, it bites, you track it right down the line, is that what it says? Okay, so if you own a dog and it bites, you got a responsibility, okay. So it teaches responsibility, taking responsibility for your possessions. It might say something to you about parenting, right?

The tendencies of your children and seeing it coming and that you're accountable and responsible for them. There might be a number of applications, but these are rules. It's a law. And by the way, these laws given by Moses or given to Moses, they were meant to be suggestive too. They don't cover every single scenario there could ever be in life.

They were meant to be suggestive and so they also needed to be applied. So rules generally. How about meet sacrifice to idols? You know that whole thing. You know, how does that get applied?

Or bribes given to judges. These are different things that you could read and you want to see how do we apply. Then there's ideals. Ideals are principles guiding a wide range of behavior without specifying particular deeds, such as love your neighbor as yourself. That's a general ideal, right?

How does it get applied? Well, it's up to you to apply it. As a preacher, you're going to say, okay, we know that we need to love our neighbors as ourself. How does that get applied in my daily life? How do I love my neighbor as myself at work?

As a boss or as an employee, How do I do that? How do I love my neighbor as myself during a natural disaster? Okay, how do I love my neighbor as myself in this or that scenario? Okay, you're driving by somebody on the road and they have a need etc. What how did Jesus apply?

These are things you're gonna ask seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness and all these things will be added to you as well. That's a general principle. How do I apply that to my life? And I tell you what, our folks are hungry and thirsty for how to apply the Bible. I remember one of the best responses I ever got to a sermon was describing how to follow the prompting of the spirit through an everyday regular day I remember I took them through a date I had experienced from the time my alarm rang until I went to bed that night And I did it all in about eight to ten minutes And I talked about how the Spirit prompted me and whether I obeyed or didn't obey and how it went etc a sense of the prompting Quiet time my encounters with my kids my drive to work, you know phone calls I had during the day various issues My wife called me and asked me to pick something up at the store on the way home.

You know, practical things all the way through. And people responded well to that because they want to know, how do I put the truth to work in my life? Well, I'm not going to go through each of these, but you get the suggestion. The handouts are for you to read. In the end, he comes up with four, I look at page four in this section of the handouts, four aspects of duty, or sorry, of application.

They are, what should I do? That is, what is my duty? Who should I be? That is, how can I become the person or obtain the character that lets me do what is right? To what causes should we devote our life energy?

That is, what goals should we pursue? And how can we distinguish truth from error? That is, how can we gain discernment? So duty, character, goals, and discernment are four things that he came up with that are helpful. If you take my outline and look at the very first couple of pages, we're going to finish our time with that.

I gave my folks six steps to effective Bible study. I think it was Dan yesterday that covered a number of these things and I don't know that I need to go through them again. But Pray, ask the Holy Spirit to give you illumination and guide you into all truth. Select the Bible text, read the whole passage through, and then do your context work. Many of the sheets in your handout here are to help you do context work.

Okay? Alright, look at the next page. There's Rightly Divided in the Word of the Truth. See this chart here? Context, there are seven issues of context.

See? Immediate context, literary context, author context, historical and cultural context, biblical context, theological context, and church context. Those are the seven areas of context that I bring a passage through. And I've got on the next page, I believe, context is king, see that? Well, I got that from my New Testament professor.

I challenged him and said, I thought Jesus was king. He said, well, he is. But when it comes to exegesis, context is king. So that's why I stuck that in there. And then top 10 questions of context.

Grammatical context, literary context. You see the 10 questions. Word, what are the impact words or phrases in this passage, and what is the range of meaning of these words in the Bible? Sentence, how does the main sentence logically connect to what precedes or follows it? Paragraph, how does the main idea of the paragraph logically connect to what precedes and follows it?

Literary context, genre, how does the type of writing, narrative, parable, poetry, apocalyptic, prophetic, et cetera, help us understand the words in grammar and flow? Other writings, has the author written anything else that would help us understand this passage? Historical and cultural context, what are the historical circumstances? According to the Bible and other non-biblical sources, what was the situation of the writer and readers and subjects of the passage? So I'm doing a Bible study on Sunday evenings in the book of Daniel.

I want them to know where are we at in redemptive history. Daniel was during the exile of the Babylon. Okay, what led up to that? What's coming next? Why does Daniel pray toward Jerusalem three times a day?

Why? That's important for us to understand. And so I applied that. I said, okay, he was praying for, in my opinion, the next event in redemptive history, the restoration of the Jews from the exile back to the promised land, which many prophets had spoken of, not just Jeremiah, but many had. He was praying, God, do the next thing on the redemptive timetable.

Well, we are not there. We should not be praying that God would restore the Jews to the Promised Land after the exile. Are any of you praying for that? No? Well, I'm not shocked.

Because you know it's already happened and there's no need for that. What is the next thing in redemptive history? What should you be praying for? It wouldn't be the completion of the great commission so that Jesus can return. This gospel of the kingdom will be preached and the whole world is a testimony to all nations and then the end will come.

Pray for that. But Daniel gives us a good example of faithfulness in prayer, even though he's praying for something different in the redemptive timetable than we are. You see? So I locate it in redemptive history. All right?

Then theological context. I'm going to ask the question, are there any theological issues coming from this passage that are worthy of discussion. I gave you in this outline the table of contents to Wayne Grudem's systematic theology. It's four pages, and that's just an overview in grid form of all the theological topics Wayne Grudem felt it was worth dealing with in his systematic theology. Is that of any importance to you?

What Wayne Grudem thinks is worthy of addressing in systematic theology? Well, first of all, who is Wayne Grudem? Well, it turns out he's a brother in Christ who loves the word and is evangelical and all that, who spends his full time thinking about systematic theology. Do you see how arrogant it would be for us to say, I don't care what Wayne Grudem says, I'm gonna come up with my own theological grid. Well, I can tell you, it's either gonna be wrong or incomplete compared to his.

All right, you're gonna come up with some extra topics he hasn't dealt with? He's published this thing now, okay? Some publisher thought it was good to publish it. Do you think there's any missing topics? I would think not.

You may not agree with what he says, but I don't give you what he says. I give you the topics. The topics are good to look at when you're preaching on a passage. You see what I'm saying? Is there anything here about eschatology?

Anything here about Christology? Anything about soteriology, salvation? Anything about the ecclesiology, the doctrine of the church? What are we dealing with here? That's what you're asking, questions of theological context.

And then church context. How has this passage been interpreted by other Christians in the past? That's not always going to be helpful. But when you do something like Jesus' statement in John 6, this is my body, or I mean in Matthew 27 and John 6, dealing with you have to eat my flesh and drink my blood, it's good to know what the Catholics have said about that and to address it in your sermon, et cetera. And then present history, what is our present context, question of context.

So go back, if you would, to the little diagram there, Rightly Dividing the Word of Truth and with this I'll close. This is a little picture that I drew for my folks that like cartoony kind of pictures. There you go. This is how I go about preparing an expository message. See the little person?

Some days I feel like that, brothers. Reduce to stick figure. There it is. At least I'm smiling. The individual is looking at the text, reading the text, praying to the Holy Spirit for guidance and illumination, drawing from the text language, words, grammar, propositions, getting the idea or concept, logic, what's the point.

The concepts are then washed through a seven-fold grid of context. Do you see that? Just read them to you. All those questions of context are coming through. Out of that are coming the idea, author's original intent, and major and minor points.

I bring that growing database of concept back into the grid. I look at it again, and from it come truths, okay? Biblical truths are flowing from that process. Are we done? No, turn the page.

Now you've got a bunch of truths and those major points and minor points, author's original intent, you have to bring it across the hermeneutical bridge to present day application, fourfold, understand, believe, be, and do. That's what we're looking for. What do I need to understand? What do I need to believe? What do I need to be as a man and what should I do?

Then from This comes the sermon. For more messages, articles, and videos on the subject of conforming the church and the family to the word of God, and for more information about the National Center for Family Integrated Churches, where you can search our online network to find family integrated churches in your area, log on to our website ncfic.org.