WEBB: Well, good afternoon everyone, and welcome
back to the worship center as we continue our time together. A belated welcome from
me, my name is Lee Webb and it's been my privilege for the last nine years to serve
as the host of Renewing Your Mind. And it's been the richest blessing of my professional and
personal life to be part of Ligonier Ministries. It's also been a delight to get to reconnect
with old friends and meet new ones, and I'm just delighted to be here
today with you all and to welcome Dr. Steven Lawson back to the platform.
Dr. Lawson, thank you for being with us. LAWSON: Yeah, yeah. WEBB: We were just talking and I looked out. You
know, I spent most of my career speaking to an inanimate object. I spent thirty-eight years in
television news and I would speak to a camera. And my Dad asked me, he said, you know,
"What was it like? Were you nervous when you first went on the air?" I said, "No,
I wasn't nervous, I was scared to death." But speaking to people has always been far more
nerve racking to me than speaking to a camera or into a microphone. But I asked Dr. Lawson,
"What's the most number of people that you have preached to?" and he said, "About ten thousand."
But then you said something that I thought was great, a noble ambition. Repeat that if you will. LAWSON: I just simply said, "I wish I could preach
to the whole world. I wish I could preach to every single person on the planet at one time."
And I don't mean that in an egotistical way, I just mean that to fulfil the Great Commission
and to bring the Word of God to bear upon every mind, heart, and soul. I mean that's our
ambition. I mean, George Whitefield said, "The world is now my parish." And I
think we would want to reach the entire planet with the gospel of Jesus Christ. So,
I'll never be able to do it I'm sure, but that's certainly in my heart. I would want to do
that, and I think that would be a holy ambition. WEBB: You wrote a biography of George Whitefield. LAWSON: I did. WEBB: And you talked about his mind-boggling travel schedule. How
many times did he cross the Atlantic? LAWSON: Yeah, he crossed the Atlantic thirteen
times. He spent at least three years of his life on a ship crossing the Atlantic. So, he
preached for a little over thirty years, and during that time he averaged at least
two sermons a day on a regular ongoing basis, and something like eighteen thousand sermons, but
there are other sermons he would preach after he would preach and people would stay. And he would
preach before he would preach, and when you add it all up it's more like thirty thousand sermons.
And you can do the math for thirty-plus years. So, he was God's gift to the
church as well as to the world. And, George Whitefield, I remember him saying
this, that there is no greater blessing that God can bestow upon a nation
than to send them godly preachers, and there is no greater curse upon any
nation than for God to withhold preachers and to give them blind leaders of the blind. So,
the high points in church history have always been those seasons when God has given the strongest
preachers who are most deeply grounded in the Word of God. And, certainly, George
Whitefield was one of those. Interestingly enough, Martyn Lloyd-Jones said of Whitefield, "Other
men merely existed; Whitfield lived." And Charles Haddon Spurgeon said, "I've only had one mentor
in the ministry, and that is George Whitefield." And so you'll never understand Charles Haddon
Spurgeon unless you first understand George Whitefield. And Robert Murray M'Cheyne said,
"Oh, for just one week of Whitefield's life! If I could just know what it would be like to be
Whitefield for just one week." And the interesting thing to me about Whitefield, I know, we
weren't scheduled to talk about Whitefield, but. WEBB: Well, this is a good
transition into our topic. LAWSON: Yeah. As I studied Whitefield, the
interesting thing is (and he was the most gifted evangelist God has ever given to the church since
the Apostle Paul) is that his godliness exceeded his giftedness, and he was the most humble of
preachers, and he would sign his letters, "I am the least of all." And, I know, I
jokingly, sometimes with people, say, "I'm your humble servant," and I get a laugh
from that. Whitefield actually meant it. And he studied the Bible on his knees. He read
the Bible on his knees. He just would get on the floor and open a Bible and he had a Matthew
Henry commentary and studied the Word of God. So, you know, the more that we humble ourselves, the
more God will exalt us; and the more we exalt ourselves, God will humble us. So, we're going to
be humble one way or the other, either we choose to be humble or God will humble us. But it's good
for the preacher to know that our responsibility is to "Humble ourselves beneath the mighty hand
of God and He will exalt you at the proper time." WEBB, LEE: I read a great quote from Whitefield.
He was talking about trying to work our way into heaven. He said, "I would just as soon try
to climb to the moon on a rope of sand." LAWSON: Yeah, that's true. I have that in my book. WEBB: Do you? LAWSON: Yeah. WEBB: Maybe that's where I read it. LAWSON: Which you need to buy, Lee,
and I've done all the work for you. WEBB: Where is that available? LAWSON: I hope it's available
over in the bookstore. WEBB: I believe it is. I believe I saw a copy. LAWSON: Or I hope it's already sold out. WEBB: You're doing your best to imitate
George Whitefield in your travel schedule. LAWSON: Yeah. Well, if I could
be anyone in church history, I would be George Whitefield. There is
just something so noble about what he did to try to reach as many lost souls as he
could with the gospel of Jesus Christ. So, I just admire Whitefield, I love Whitefield,
and yes, I have had an itinerant ministry, especially for the last decade, but especially
the last five years, though the COVID virus has brought a halt to my international travel. And
so, I've just travelled domestically the last two years. I'll be taking a group to Ireland the
beginning of May. So, it will be my first overseas trip. But yeah, I just love Whitefield's
zeal for God, his passion, his drive, and really, just his boldness in
preaching the gospel. He would go into towns and he electrified the
Eastern Seacoast of the United States. More people saw George Whitefield than ever
saw George Washington. I mean, in a real sense, Whitefield was the founding father of the United
States, because the United States was founded really in the afterglow of the Great Awakening
that Edwards and Whitefield were the leaders, though Edwards was confined to one place,
Northampton, with very few little short travels. Whitefield was just on the move,
on the go up and down, up and down, and when he preached in Philadelphia he preached
to over twice the population of Philadelphia. When he preached in New York, he preached
to over twice the population of New York and the same in Boston. So, his impact upon the
early colonies with the gospel was incredible. I mean, I can go on and on, on Whitefield, but
we'll talk about what you want to talk about. WEBB: Well, but this is a great transition into
our topic which is "The Importance of God's Word." It was certainly central in Whitefield's
life. We wanted to talk about this in terms of the importance of God's Word in preaching and
the importance of God's Word in our daily lives. LAWSON: Yeah, it cannot be
overstated, but go ahead. WEBB: Well, what does a church look
like that makes God's Word central? LAWSON: Well, it really begins with the pulpit. There must be the primacy of the preaching
of the Word of God in the local church, and no church will rise any higher than its
pulpit. A church may not live up to its pulpit, but it will never exceed its pulpit. It is what
the Puritans referred to as "The primary means of grace," that the primary means of grace to come
into anyone's life would be through the preaching of the Word of God. In fact the Puritans
would say, "If you only had one hour a week to give to God, which of these
two would most profit your soul: If you spent one hour alone with God
with an open Bible and reading your Bible or if you spent one hour sitting under the
preaching of the Word of God by a man who is gifted to preach, who has invested time in the
study of the Word, who knows theology, who is filled with the Spirit, and who brings the Word of
God in a heart-searching manner with exhortation? Which of those two one-hour blocks
would most profit your time?" And to a man, the Puritans would have said, "To
sit under the preaching of the Word of God." I don't think we believe that today. I
think, we think that there is greater good and just need individual by myself with the Bible
or in a small group Bible study. And both of those are commendable. So, it's not an either/or. The
issue is which would most profit your soul. And God's design from cover to cover in the entire
Bible is to sit under the preaching of the Word of God. The entire Old Testament is just the record
of God sending prophet after prophet after prophet after prophet to say, "Thus says the
Lord." You come to the New Testament and John the Baptist was a voice, not a
pen, a voice crying in the wilderness to "Prepare the way for the Lord." Jesus was
a preacher. He was an itinerant evangelist, and He was constantly on the move preaching the
gospel from city to city to city. God had only one Son and He made Him a preacher. He spent three
years training twelve disciples to be preachers. And in the Great Commission,
He charged them to preach repentance for the forgiveness of sins to all
the nations. When you read the book of Acts, we all want to have a first-century church.
Well, go back and read the book of Acts. One out of every four verses was a sermon.
The book of Acts is mistitled. It's not the Acts of the Apostles. It's the Preaching
of the Apostles. The early church was a preaching church. And then when you read the
pages of the New Testament, there are three books, the three pastoral epistles that are directed
to the preacher to tell him to preach the Word. The book of Hebrews is simply one sermon. It is an
evangelistic sermon. It's called in Hebrews 13:22 a "word of exhortation." That same term "word of
exhortation" is used in Paul's missionary journeys for the preaching of the Word of God. And so,
anyone who would pick up a Bible and just read it with open eyes would clearly see the primacy and
the dominance and the centrality of the preaching of the Word of God. And when you read two thousand
years of church history, the high-water marks, the lofty peaks of church history have been
those seasons when we have had the strongest preachers of the Word of God. And the low ebbs of
church history, those desert wilderness seasons, have been when there has been a famine in the land
for the hearing of the Word of the Lord. So, what would a church look like that was a true church?
Martin Luther addressed that in the Reformation, because every church before that was a Catholic
Church, and in the Reformation there began to be this transition from Catholic Church to a
Protestant church. And as people were travelling, how would they find the true church? What would
the true church look like? How would they identify it? And Luther gave three identifying marks of a
true church. I will take them in reverse order. The third is they exercise church discipline. The
second is they practice the ordinances, baptism and the Lord's Supper. But number one on the list
is the preaching of the Word of God. So if there is not strong biblical preaching, it's not a true
church. It's just a social club, a religious club, but it's not a true church. So, there has to be an
open Bible in the pulpit and it's a certain kind of preaching. It's not just more preaching that we
need. We have enough hot air in churches as it is. In fact I think we need fewer preachers, not more
preachers. We would be better served if we lost a lot of preachers. And we don't need a church
on every corner. And there have been so many splits and this and that and this and that,
we don't have enough preachers to match up with the number of pulpits that we have. And
so, I think a lot of churches need to merge back together and finally have one God-called,
God-gifted preacher to stand in the pulpit, rather than it be amateur hour and somebody try
to preach and doesn't even know what preaching is. Thank you. Nobody claps for me at home. So,
thank you, thank you for that. I appreciate it. WEBB: This is what you're doing though with
The Institute for Expository Preaching. You travel the country and indeed the
world teaching preachers how to preach. LAWSON: Well, of course. If you only had one
bullet to fire and you wanted to impact the world, where would you fire that one bullet? If you had
only one dollar to give to maximize the gospel, where would you give that one dollar? Well,
it's very simple. The pulpit should be the greatest influence upon the church and the church
should be the greatest influence upon the world. So, it's a domino effect. And so, if you can
impact the pulpit, if you could put a man in a pulpit with an open Bible, who would
rightly divide the Word, who would preach and herald the Word of God, what that would do
for that church? It would electrify that church. It would shake the worship of that church because
he would be preaching a high-view of God. And the preacher is actually the worship leader in the
church, not the music leader. He's the music guy. He's not the worship leader. The worship leader
is whoever holds this book and preaches this book. No song can ever measure up to a sermon. A
three-minute song cannot hold water to an hour of exposition of the Word of God in height
and depth and breadth and length a presentation of truth in the power the Holy Spirit. So, I'll
tell you what's going on in churches right now. We've cancelled midweek services,
so there's no preaching there. We have cancelled Sunday night services, so
there's no preaching there. We have cancelled Bible conferences, so there's no preaching there.
We have shortened sermons on Sunday morning, so that we can have more announcements and more
music. And so, the average Christian sits under such little preaching. It should be no wonder
why our churches are so anemic and so weak and so lacking in convictions, because they sit under
such little preaching of the Word of God. And that's also why we have such mediocre preaching
because most preachers don't preach enough to rise to a level of excellence. They stay at a level
of mediocrity because they preach so little. They only preach like twenty-nine minutes a week.
It used to be we called the pastor, "preacher." We don't call him "preacher" anymore, because he
doesn't preach enough to be called "preacher." And so, if you were trying to learn how to
play the violin, do you think more practice or less practice would help you? Well, the
answer is obvious. If you were trying to go to Carnegie Hall and play the piano, do you
think more practice or less practice would get you to Carnegie Hall? The answer is obvious.
If you were trying to get on the PGA golf tour to support your family, do you think more
practice or less practice hitting a golf ball would get you to the PGA Tour? The answer is
obvious. Well, you just apply that to preaching. George Whitefield, to quote Whitefield, said,
"The more we preach, the better we preach," because you're more deeply immersed in the
Word of God, you know your commentaries better, you are sharper theologically with sound doctrine,
you know how to put a sermon set of notes or manuscript together better, you have a fuller
grasp of Scripture the more you preach. It just forces you into the Word of God. I mean, today
we have pastors who are plagiarizing sermons. Can you even believe that? And the more you're in the
Word of God as a pastor preparing a sermon, that truth is flowing through you and it is having a
sanctifying effect upon you. You've been preaching to your own heart and your own life for twenty
hours this week, for fifteen hours this week, and it's flowing through your pipes and
it's having a godly effect upon you. If you take out your study as a pastor of the
Word of God and just go to whatever guy and stand in the pulpit with an iPad and just read
somebody else's sermon to the congregation, you have short-circuited the sanctifying power of
the Word of God in the preacher's life. And so, that's why even his own spiritual life is
committed to mediocrity, because he hasn't been in the Word of God enough for it to have
a transforming effect in his own life. So, we don't need less preaching; we need more preaching
in the church. And everything else has come along to supplant it. And every program that's added and
every class that's added and every this and that and this and that activity that's added, it's
displacing preaching in the life of the church. And so, we need these other auxiliary ministries,
but we have lost what is primary in the local church, which is the preaching of the Word of
God. And to preach the Word of God, it involves so much, but to put it in simplest terms, it
involves two things. It involves, first of all, the teaching of this passage. The preacher has
nothing to say apart from the Word of God. And when the Bible speaks, God speaks. And so, he
is merely a mouthpiece for a text of Scripture, and he is opening it up and giving its true
understanding, its God-intended interpretation of this passage of Scripture, and you're
pulling the theology out of this text of Scripture. Martyn Lloyd-Jones said, "What is
preaching?" He said, "It is theology on fire." And so, he is showing the theology
that is taught in this passage. So, that's the first thing that takes
place with preaching. We've got guys, too many stories, too many illustrations. I
can hear R.C. Sproul giving this illustration. The last sermon Martin Luther ever preached, he
preached in Eisleben and he made this statement, Luther did, "You are looking for the power in all
the wrong places. You are looking for the power in the relics. You are looking for the power
in pilgrimages. You're looking for the power," and he began to walk through all the relics, "if
you could just see these relics, if you could just make this journey to see, you know, Moses' staff
or the steps leading up to Pilate's judgment hall, you would think that you would be more of like
God." Luther paused and said, "God put the power in the Word. Preach the Word." And so, we've got
too much other stuff in sermons. That's why when I step into the pulpit, the first sentence out of
my mouth is, "Take your Bible and turn with me to" and whatever the passage is and I begin by
reading that text of Scripture just to orient everyone to the text, because I'm going to now
spend an hour opening up what is the God-intended meaning and the theology in this passage. That's
part of it. The other part is exhortation. And there must be the exhortation, is the
application, but it's more than just showing people. It is persuading people. It is urging
people. It is pleading with people. It is begging people. It is encouraging people. It is inviting
people. It is summoning people. If you only have the instruction, that's not a sermon; that's a
lecture. And as Lloyd Jones said, "A lecture can be given any time." A lecture can be given today,
tomorrow, next week, next month, next semester; but a sermon must be delivered now. There is a
sense of urgency about a sermon, not only for the preacher to give it, but for the church
to hear it and for the church to act upon it now, today, this moment. And so, we've lost a
sense of even of the immediacy of the moment in preaching. "Behold, now is the accepted time;
behold, today is the day of salvation." That is 2 Corinthians 6:1 and 2, "Boast not yourself of
tomorrow, for you know not what a day may bring forth." And so, preaching has this exhortation in
which you're not content just to put it out there and you make the decision, you take it or leave
it. No, it's the Greek word peitho, P-E-I-T-H-O, which means "to persuade." It means "to win
someone over." And true preaching must try to win over the listener. You call for
the verdict, you ask for the order, you call for a commitment; and that is involved
in true preaching. And if you don't have that, then you're not really a preacher. You're
just a lecturer. And lecturing is fine in the classroom. It stinks to high heaven in the
pulpit. It falls short of the biblical standard. And so, with Jonathan Edwards, for
example, he preached in a Puritan style. And in the Puritans, they would have three
main headings. Whatever the text was, many times there would be these
same three points. The first was the explanation of the text, opening up the
God-intended meaning of this passage of Scripture. Then the second heading was the doctrine,
to teach the theology that is found in this text of Scripture. What does this passage teach
us about God? What does it teach us about Christ, the Holy Spirit, sin, salvation, sanctification,
the church, etc.? But it's this last heading that gave such power in Edwards' preaching
and it was what Edwards called the "uses," which is the application, the exhortation.
And one Edwardian scholar put it this way, that in the first two headings, explaining
the text, teaching the doctrine in this text, Edwards was simply putting the ammunition into his
cannon. It was on the third heading with the uses that he fired his cannons. And it has
made me think, "How many preachers spend their whole sermon just putting the
ammunition into the cannon, but they never fire the cannon?" Preaching gets to this third aspect,
dimension, in which there is pressing the truth upon the mind and the conscience and the
heart and the soul of the listener. And so, a young man once came to Martyn Lloyd-Jones
and asked him the difference between teaching and preaching (and I get asked that a lot).
What is the difference teaching and preaching? And Martyn Lloyd-Jones said to this young man who
asked him this question, "What's the difference between teaching and preaching?" Lloyd Jones
said, "Well, young man, if you have to ask me the difference between teaching and preaching,
it is obvious you have never heard preaching." WEBB, LEE: Wow! LAWSON: Because if you've heard preaching,
you know the difference between teaching and preaching. All preaching must start with
teaching. There is the didache, didaskalia, there is the teaching of sound doctrine, but it must
escalate to the proclamation, to the heralding, to the declaring of the truth of what is being
taught that places demands upon the listener. What will you do with this truth? When
I studied under R.C. Sproul in seminary, when I studied for my doctor of ministry,
I remember the class before R.C.'s class. It was a Christian worldview
class. I remember it very well. And I remember the professor telling us this,
and my own kids say this to me on a regular basis still after these many years, he said to us,
"Men, I'm going to come hear you preach one time, and I'm going to sit in the
middle of the front row, and halfway through your sermon I'm going
to hold up a sign that no one else can read, and it's just going to have two words on it, 'So what?'" And I can still see that sign
every time I step in to the pulpit. So what? So, what does this mean to me? What does this
require of me? What does this demand of me? What encouragement, what comfort am I to take
from this? So, there has to be more than word studies and parsing of verbs and historical
background and cross-references and sentence diagramming and all of that, which is critically
important for the infrastructure of a sermon, but you've got to get to the "So what?" where
the listener is brought to the fork in a road and you're going to have to
decide which way will you go. And I'm not talking about a public invitation
to get up out of your seat and walk forward. If someone walked forward at the end of one of
my sermons, I would send them back to their seat, okay? I want God to do business with you right
where you are. The whole sermon has to have a "So what?" about it. So, Lee, you're talking
about what would it look like for a church to have a, it would be a Bible-centered
church, I think was your question. WEBB: Right. LAWSON: I just didn't, I didn't. WEBB: Do you know how many questions
I had prepared for you today? LAWSON: I just didn't want
him to interrupt me anymore. WEBB: What's fascinating is that you've covered
every one of the questions I had to ask. LAWSON: That's because I wrote
the questions for you. So, not really, I didn't. But the deal is it's not
just we need more, we need preaching. Of course, we need preaching, but we need preaching
of a certain kind. There is a book that has been written by a good friend of mine, T.
David Gordon called Why Johnny Can't Preach. And he was dying of cancer or he thought he was
dying of cancer and he thought, "What is the one book I want to write for the church to leave
posthumously?" Well, God allowed him to survive, but he broke down why 90% of preachers are
committed to mediocrity in their preaching, why it doesn't rise to a certain level of holding
the attention of the listener and renewing their mind and challenging their life. It's an
incredible little book, Why Johnny Can't Preach. And Johnny can't preach because Johnny can't
write, and Johnny can't write because Johnny doesn't read. And there is this domino
effect of you just repeat yourself, month after month and year after year just from a
different passage that you don't really address. So, when you have that kind of a pulpit that
is a dominant pulpit, that shapes the worship with a high view of God, that is equipping
the saints to do the work of the ministry, that has a life-changing sanctifying effect
upon the membership, that is igniting evangelism and is modelling for the church how to study
the Bible and how to understand theology, there will then be other strong men who
want to stand around that pulpit, strong men want to sit under strong preaching of the
Word of God. And you will have strong elders and you will have strong deacons and you
will have strong Sunday school teachers and you will have young men being raised up feeling called to preach because they
see it modelled multiple times every week and are being sent off to seminary and are
being raised up to go to the mission field. But what sets everything in
motion is that strong pulpit. And what we have today is the feminization of
the church. We have a church. It's a soft church. And even the music is soft, the tone is soft, the
tone of the preaching is soft, and that's why many men don't want to come to church. And what godly
women want is a husband who is on fire for God. WEBB: Amen. LAWSON: And that's going to require,
that's going to require a manly pulpit and it's going to require even manly music,
worship. And the wives will be greatly excited when their husbands are greatly excited to come to
church. And so, you know, 1 Corinthians 16 says, "Act like men," and the woman, 1 Peter 3 is the
"weaker vessel." And there is a certain uniqueness about how God made a man and how God made a
woman, but there must be this manly pulpit in which there is strong exposition of the Word of
God, an R.C. Sproul, a James Montgomery Boice, a John MacArthur, a Derek Thomas; I mean, that
kind of a man standing there. And obviously, not everyone has that measure of gifting but
everyone does have the same Bible to preach from. And they can buy the same commentaries and buy the
same systematic theologies and be used by God to greatly impact untold numbers of lives. But if you
have a feminized pulpit, you're going to have to have feminized music to go with that, and it's
a package deal or you end up having two worship services in one worship service. You know, the
first part is the music and it has a certain tone, but then you have the pulpit and it's totally
different. You've got to marry the two together or you're going to have a worship service
where it's like gas-brake, gas-brake, gas-brake. It has got to be the pedal to
the metal for the whole service. WEBB: We've got to be put the
brake on here though, because. LAWSON: Hey, I. WEBB: We're seven minutes over. LAWSON: Seven minutes over right now? WEBB: Yeah. LAWSON: I think I did pretty good. WEBB: Would you join me in
thanking Dr. Steven Lawson?
