In Conversation with Sinclair Ferguson

well I was brought and caring devoted way in go in Scotland where where we didn't go to church but in God's providence I was brought up in an era of history when it was still the decent thing to send your children to Sunday school and so I was just sent to the son school at the end of the road my parents wouldn't have known one church from another said that one was Roman Catholic and one was Protestant and really literally was just the church at the end of the road and over a period of years I had a I had a number of Sunday School teachers who left an impression on me I mean I wouldn't have been able to articulate it until after I became a Christian but they were very definite Christian people and I saw i well saw I sense there was something special about them I couldn't have told you what it was and then one of them when I was nine encouraged me to join the scripture Union the Bible reading society and I started reading the Bible when I was nine and I kept reading a year year upon year through 14 I guess I missed I don't know that I missed a handful of days of reading my Bible and praying and helping old ladies across the street and that kind of thing and basically I thought that's what Christian was and although I was young its kind of I mean in retrospect was real illustration of my spiritual blindness that I was I was reading the Bible every single day and I still didn't get its message and then two things happened well a number of things happen but two in particular strike me as being significant one is that as I was reading through John's Gospel I came to the words of Jesus you search the Scriptures because in them you think you have eternal life and you won't come to me to have life and I think that was probably the first verse and the Bible in which I felt the Lord was actually speaking directly to me because this just seemed to sum up my situation and I and I realized I've got it wrong this is exactly what I was doing he's saying you're not doing what you need to do and the other thing was there was something about kind of miniature awakening in this local church but I attended so there were young people are we bit older than I was who became Christians and I think then I began to make connections between what was reading in the Bible and why I saw in their lives and I remember arguing with some of them basically I think on the basis you know I've been reading this book all these years and I don't I have never experienced what they've experienced and they've not been reading this book all these years so you know by faulty reasoning I concluded you know there there's something not right here and I'm sure a number of them were actually praying for me and when I was just before my 15th birthday if somebody said when did you become a Christian of it was shortly before my 15th birthday so went through a period of a few months in the midst of all this when I became when I discovered to my horror that I wasn't basically someone who was trying to be good and occasionally failed but that I I actually was a sinner and that was a tremendous shock to me it really was a huge shock to me it was debt it was actually pretty devastating to me but it really set me on the road to understanding why it was I needed a savior so that was very shortly before my 15th birthday in Glasgow and that was that's just the beginning of the story I guess I had I have no memory of ever wanting to be anything when I was a young teenager and one day I overheard conversation between a friend who was in the church he was at a different school but he was in the church and someone said to him what are you going to do when you leave school and he said I'm going to be a minister and the only way I can express it is it was as though someone flicked on a switch in my brain and I saw the whole of my life in a completely different way you know those optical illusions of the of the ugly hag and the and the beautiful young girl and some people never see the other one they see a beautiful young girl but they never see the hag and often you see the hag and I remember one day sitting down with my optical illusion and trying to work out what I needed to do to flick the picture and there's a spot at which you can look and it just seems to flick the picture and the only way I can describe what happened to me was that in the Providence of God it just seemed as though the picture of my life changed from I've really no idea what I'm going to do with my life and actually it's not really a big concern to me at the moment what I'm not to do with my life - oh that's it and it was I mean in that sense of it like I SIA you know I SIA in Isaiah 6 is not Isaiah will you go for me it is who we send and who will go for us and I saw our realizes you know it's me the Stein is me and from that moment onwards I never I never really thought of doing anything else I mean it was just it just became a growing conviction I you know you can never really tell but I would have found it very much more difficult to get there were it not for the encouragement of other Christians encouraging me to believe that I was on the right track and encouraging me to believe that God had given me the gifts that were needed to be so in that sense the church I mean as the people of God and people in the particular church I was and more a huge huge help to me and then other Christians along the way and I remember when I was when I was going through the process of being accepted as a candidate for the ministry I was actually asked what will you do if we turn you down and I mean maybe it sounded arrogant to the men who are interviewing me but the words that came out of my mouth well of it I've never actually thought about that and I realized in retrospect then I was really very very clear and more in mind but that was what I wanted to do and so I said to no you know I've never thought about it maybe I'd be a detective or a journalist just for something to say so I but that was what that was when I was 20 when I was going through that process so I know at least looking back that between the ages of probably 16 and 20 I was heading in that direction and at 20 there was nothing else in my mind I mean so much so I never actually crossed my mind that I would be turned down and you know to some people that might sound very arrogant but it was just the way I mean I just felt God's hand was on me and this was what I was to do that was the Church of Scotland in and I remember it must have been round about then I remember our minister on asking three of the young men who were going into the ministry to speak and I remember I remember giving a talk about what we expected in the future and I remember giving a talk from Jeremiah that must have sounded extremely gloomy about the future of the church so I had a sense then that you know maybe the maybe my future would not be very straightforward in those terms and you know life has turned out very differently from anything I've ever expected it would in terms of you know what what has happened during the course of my life as a minister I mean I was very very very determined I would never teach in a Theological Seminary but spent actually most of my working life teaching in a Theological Seminary and that's been a lesson to me that you know the Lord enables you to be clear about certain things but you shouldn't be too quick to conclude from your clarity how the whole of your life will develop and - certainly developed in ways I would never have expected and you don't have to say now looking back it's really it's actually been a very exciting kind of life you know yeah I mean there's I think there's a basic principle that all nations are under the commandments of God for example the Westminster Confession of faith distinguishes between the moral law of the Old Covenant and the ceremonial and civil dimensions of the application of that law and emphasizes that the civil application no longer applies to the nation's but there's still something we can learn that the ceremonial law is fulfilled in Christ but that the moral law is a fundamental reality not just of Christian life but for all life because it's the law that was written into Adams being at the beginning that is then rewritten in tablets of stone in the context of one particular nation and in a sinful world but if you reach into those Commandments you find not only that which is negated but you find also died a positive director about how God intended us to live and whenever a nation which should be subject to those Commandments because all nations are under God the political rulers the magistrate is a minister of God in his own sphere and is responsible to God for that whenever any nation begins to adjust those Commandments it always ends up giving more work to lawyers in order to try and cope with the consequences of breaching the basic commandments of God and you see that in many ways in in the 17th century and you see I think you see it more clearly in our modern Western world than it has ever been since the time of the Reformation because our governments in a world in which we have flaunted the command the Ten Commandments is is trying to put all that has come out of Pandora's box back into it and so long as that is true there will just be more and more legislation that can actually deal with the basic problem so for example governments will will begin to invade the private life of the individual the life of the family because either they neither understand or I think are not prepared to admit because it would not bring them voids that the real problem is the people problem the family problem you know and the under sin problem and until that is recognized you know the simple biblical principle that the law never works grace you know one illustration of that is I guess in the in the in the 1960s certainly after my time at school but it was just coming in and my time in high school we need to give our youngsters more sex education because edge as the solution we tell them about these things and clearly it's not the solution and I'm a good friend who has done a great deal of work and published just on this theme governments are spending a tremendous amount of money reassuring youngsters that they are wonderful they are princesses they can do anything they want but what is actually happening is that youngsters caught self-image it's actually hate the more that happens the more a headstone in the other direction so law can never want grace it's fascinating to me to see government regulations and moves that seem to me to be somewhat reminiscent of what we criticized the communist countries for when I was a youngster so they I think it is now already coming to pass that there are certain there are certain professions or at least specialties in those professions from which defect or a Christian will be barred no as yet the law doesn't say if you're a Christian you may not do this but if you're a biblically instructed Christian you wouldn't do that and therefore that area thinking of some areas of medicine for example thinking of nurses and in kind of odds and gynie area and the whole question of abortion but you have no clue you have no right of conscience to withdraw at any point and that's a that is a big difference from 50 years ago where Christians had Liberty to practice their Christianity and the next stage has been you have Liberty to be a Christian but you do not have the Liberty to practice that Christianity and therefore either the employer or the state Trump's the conscience of the individual and in just in terms of what happens in in family life movements and government for example with respect to the gender of children the desire that there is in some quarters that if little Johnny aged seven tells the teacher he's actually Jessica then the parents of the pimps are almost removed from the family responsibility as a first port of call to be responsible for that situation now little Johnny understate become responsible parties which is a it's an astonishing thing that there are some areas in which governments make those decisions whereas in parallel areas they make the very reverse decision you know if little Johnny says I don't want to go to school the government says you know and the parents are responsible if the parents don't get Johnny to school and we think of situations where recently Ken's have been fined for taking the children away from school for a week for vacation there are so many areas where the failure of society to conform to God's law leads to government's bring in legislation that in a sense become foolish at the end of the day you know one of the things the church and the West has been so deficient in his prayer and the United Kingdom is a very different place from the United States and I've spent most most of my working life has been focused in the United States where there are very large churches and very obvious evidences of success and yet one is fair very conscious that there isn't that does not seem to be a relationship between by manifests success and the prayerfulness of the people you know actually a relatively few congregations seem to meet seriously for prayer and so you know I think always we always we need to have a sense of who God is and prayerlessness is an away an indication of the fact that we don't really know who God is so we just have a perennial need to know God and to have our lives determined by him and by His Word and I think this is a this just a huge weakness know that we make up our own Christian lives and in that sense we're very and we're very influenced subliminally by the world that tells us you got to create your own identity and you know our greatest need is really to get back into Scripture and to allow scripture to do its own work in our lives because we are also in a world and this has been true of the Christian world where the Bible tells you to do things and you do them but very little emphasis on the fact that the Word of God does its own work in God's people and I think that's an emphasis that really needs to be restored to the church I mean I think we have become such society schooled in individualism and subjectivism that often we read the Bible as thought what about ours and we go to the Bible for ourselves and all of that needs to be reversed and that can be very painful way I sometimes put it is you know it's possible for somebody to read through or gospel and even for somebody to preach through a gospel and the underlying question all the way through is where are you in this gospel where am I here and that means my eyes are being diverted from the main issue which is in a gospel who is Jesus Christ and so one of the things the gospel does is it tuns us from looking inside and focusing on self and seeing ourselves as the center of the world to looking outside and understanding that God is the center of the world and that our lives need to be arranged around his word and his will and that that's our saw repentance is not just something that you do once and for all at the beginning of your Christian life you know Luther said but in fact Luther's very first thesis of the ninety-five theses was when our Lord Jesus Christ said repent he meant the whole the Christian life should be repentance and I think that's a tremendously important lesson that that we need to learn today yeah some pastors and teachers is a book of I don't know maybe thirty something essays chapters papers bits and pieces of things that I have published before in relatively obscure places and one day a number of them just gonna fell into a kind of odd or around this theme of pastors and teachers which is a phrase from Ephesians chapter 4 some of them are historical about men who were pastors and teachers some of them some of the chapters are about the teaching and some of the chapters are about actually about preaching so it's a mixture of biography and theology and and pastoral ministry and it's a big book well almost all the chapters are things I was asked to write and almost all of them at some point when I was writing I thought I wish I'd never said I would do this because it kind of stretched me in a when I had already got plenty to do and one of my motives in publishing the book was the hope that maybe young younger ministers would be open to doing things outside of the narrow sphere of their art nor a ministry because at the end of the day I'd come to feel that actually feeds back into your ministry as a kind of investment it's a kind of opening up the air system and letting some oxygen in and that it's really very helpful for you know for an individual's ministry so the only reason as the only reason that's published is because having written all these things they kind of the I think I usually use this as an illustration it was like standing in front of the big departures board at a major airport and then a couple of flights have taken off and everything just kind of rolls around and there's a new order and these thirty odd papers and aces and chapters and written and other books just all seemed to kind of fall into my head or fall out of a file in my head in this rearranged form and occasionally that kind of thing happens you know things that you've thought about just here and there and here and there you know or suddenly come into your brain and they seem to have an order to them so I so you know apart from the embarrassment of thinking that people need another big book I hope it's some contribution

Channel: Dan Pugh

Views: 7,228

Rating: 4.9142857 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: AEJJDNXqFhw

Length: 24min 22sec (1462 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 22 2018