The Sermon

Thank you for reading this sermon from Christ Fellowship. I hope and pray that this sermon will be a blessing of grace and truth to you. With that said, let me encourage you not to use this sermon as a replacement for your local church. Christ Jesus did not establish his Church simply for us to consume content. Instead, He calls us to be part of a real, covenant family.

You’ve probably noticed, if you’ve been attending Christ Fellowship for long, that we have a really high view of the Bible. Every Sunday, you’re going to hear a sermon on the Bible.

The sermon accounts for half the time of the entire worship gathering. If you think of worship as a meal, the sermon is the main course here.

And today, the main course is a sermon on the sermon. Why do we do this? Why does it matter?

We should start with an explanation for why we place such a high value on the Bible. It’s because we believe the Bible is the Word of God. And our primary text today comes from 2 Timothy, Paul’s words to a young preacher, but also God’s Word to us.

At the end of chapter 3, Paul writes this:

[16] All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness,

[17] that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work.

Scripture is breathed out by God and given to us for our good and for His glory. Put simply, God uses the Bible to shape us into the people He wants us to be.

The early church met every Sunday and devoted themselves to the teaching of God’s Word, because the Bible is necessary, trustworthy, and sufficient. It is our only rule of faith and practice.

To quote David Strain, “The preaching of the Word of God is the Word of God.” That’s exactly what the Bible says about it in 1 Thessalonians 2. Paul writes to the church:

[13] We also thank God constantly for this, that when you received the word of God, which you heard from us, you accepted it not as the word of men but as what it really is, the word of God, which is at work in you believers.

The preaching of the Word is itself the Word of God. But there is an important qualification. That’s only true when the sermon is faithfully explaining and applying the Bible.

That doesn’t mean that any sermon should be received as the Word of God, no matter what the preacher says. If Scripture is God’s Word, then preaching must either faithfully echo it or be judged by it.

The same Apostle who wrote 1 Thessalonians also praised the Bereans for receiving his words with eagerness but then examining the Scriptures to verify he spoke the truth.

Preaching then is important and it should be received as the Word of God, provided the content stays faithful to the Bible.

But what kind of preaching should we value? What kind of guard rails should we put in place? And how should the congregation receive it?

For that, I want us to keep reading in 2 Timothy chapter 4:

[1] I charge you in the presence of God and of Christ Jesus, who is to judge the living and the dead, and by his appearing and his kingdom:

[2] preach the word; be ready in season and out of season; reprove, rebuke, and exhort, with complete patience and teaching.

I’ll pause here to say that preaching is a weighty thing for the preacher. This is not just a book report. I’m not just transferring information.

To quote John Stott, the preacher finds himself between two worlds every Sunday… the ancient world and the modern world, and, more importantly, between God’s kingdom and the enemy’s.

I’m not an expert delivering a lecture. I’m a steward bringing God’s bread to God’s people at God’s table. That’s a heavy thing to do, especially when it isn’t likely to be received well.

Paul tells Timothy to be ready in season and out of season. In other words, you have to preach the whole counsel of God even when no one wants to hear it. Verse 3:

[3] For the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions,

[4] and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander off into myths.

If ever there has been a time in 2,000 years of church history when these two verses have been true, it is now. Instead of evaluating sermons by examining the Scriptures, people are evaluating sermons by their own preferences.

Is this worth my time? Can you hold my attention? Do I like what you’re saying? Does it make me feel better about myself? Do I agree with you?

I understand that delivery matters. A terrible preacher can be a distraction. But the Bible is full of warnings against listening to great communicators with dangerous content. The snake in the Garden of Eden was pretty convincing.

And I’m going to make a bold claim. A lot of professing Christians in America are listening to preaching that is not faithful to Scripture. Here’s how I know that’s true.

Last year, a nationwide survey of professing evangelicals who regularly attend church produced the following results:

65% believe everyone is born innocent in the eyes of God.

51% believe everyone sins a little, but most people are good by nature.

43% believe that God accepts the worship of all religions, including Islam.

That’s just a brief sample, and it shows that a lot of people are consuming bad teaching.

Another survey in 2019 found that only 3% of sermons nationwide even mentioned the word sin. Why? Because people don’t want to hear it. They want to believe that they are mostly good and that God is going to love them no matter what.

Except that it’s not true, and it completely destroys our need for the cross.

I need to recognize that temptation, even in myself, to say what people want to hear instead of what God has said. That’s exactly what Paul anticipates in 2 Timothy.

And to help manage that temptation, we have some guard rails in place.

First, the elders have the responsibility of making sure the Word is preached faithfully. And I can tell you from experience, they are not afraid to tell me if I step out of line.

Second, we encourage everyone in the church to know their Bible. One of things I love about this church is that you ask me hard questions. You are good listeners and many of you know your Bible well enough to challenge me. That’s a good thing! I don’t want you to take my word for it. Look for yourself!

Third, most of the time we move through large chunks of the Bible systematically, usually one book at a time. This is called expository preaching, and it prevents us from picking and choosing the parts of the Bible we most agree with. It also prevents me from saying whatever I want to say every Sunday and using the Bible to say it.

We do sometimes have a short topical series, like we are doing now. But we still approach the sermon with the goal of letting the Bible speak for itself.

There are a lot of other good reasons for preaching this way. It respects the way God communicated His Word to us – not in a bunch of unrelated verses, but in stories and songs and poems and history.

It helps us to understand the beauty and the unity of Scripture. One of the main reasons I’m a Christian is because our holy book is a collection of 66 books from 40 writers over 1500 years in multiple genres. And still, it is remarkably consistent and unified in message.

Studying the whole Bible like this also stretches us as individual Christians and together as a church. We have to deal with difficult verses and strange stories. Sometimes our minds are being challenged, sometimes our hearts, sometimes our actions.

But we believe the Word of God is alive and powerful… that God uses it to change our lives and to make us more like Christ.

In other words, Sunday Worship is not an event we attend to get some good advice. If God is speaking to us in the sermon, then this is a divine appointment we need to keep.

We should come prayerfully ready to listen with an open Bible and an open conscience. We should judge the sermon, not by its entertainment value, but by its faithfulness to the text and the fruit it produces.

And finally, we should be anxious to hear the preaching of the Word because, above all else, it is a joyful encounter with Christ Jesus Himself.

We’re not just hearing about Jesus. We are encountering Jesus. In Ephesians 2, Paul says that Christ came and preached peace to them. Jesus never physically visited Ephesus, but He came with the apostles preaching!

When we hear faithful preaching, God’s Spirit opens the Bible to show us Christ. Listen to how Paul describes his preaching ministry in 2 Corinthians 4:

[1] Therefore, having this ministry by the mercy of God, we do not lose heart.

[2] But we have renounced disgraceful, underhanded ways. We refuse to practice cunning or to tamper with God’s word, but by the open statement of the truth we would commend ourselves to everyone’s conscience in the sight of God.

[3] And even if our gospel is veiled, it is veiled to those who are perishing.

[4] In their case the god of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelievers, to keep them from seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God.

[5] For what we proclaim is not ourselves, but Jesus Christ as Lord, with ourselves as your servants for Jesus’ sake.

[6] For God, who said, “Let light shine out of darkness,” has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.

This is the goal of preaching: communicating the plain truth of the Gospel so that people encounter Jesus… the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.

The world considers the act of preaching to be foolishness. But God uses this foolishness to save those who believe, according to 1 Corinthians 1:21. The foolishness of God is wiser than men and the weakness of God is stronger than men.

And that’s why we hold up the cross. God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise. God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong.

Jesus Christ has become, for us, our righteousness and sanctification and redemption.

When the Word is faithfully preached, it is as though God Himself says, ‘Let light shine out of darkness.’ It’s not just helpful information. God is giving us, in the preaching of the gospel, the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ!