pastoral ministry

Simplicity and Clarity are Not the Same as Vapidity: Dig Deep in your Preaching

/ Richard Bargas / 2 Comments

“Do your best to present yourself to God as one approved, a worker who has no need to be ashamed, rightly handling the word of truth.” (2 Timothy 2:15, ESV) 

I don’t have any doubt that we live in a time when people clamor for mindless entertainment, where it seems that the more outlandish and stupid, the better. How else will history be able to understand pop cultural trends like the current infatuation with “poop emojis”and YouTube videos of people eating Tide laundry detergent pods? 

However, as a pastor, I am troubled that the mindset that some people have had is that since this empty-mindedness is not going away, that people cannot handle the preaching of the Word of God with any depth. The argument usually is that people just don’t know their Bibles today, and so we must shorten the length of our sermons and simplify our messages—with some even saying that the church will need to abandon preaching altogether and instead should just have “talks.”

What is particularly dismaying is that theological liberalism often chooses to move away from the Bible, stating that Scripture cannot be accepted as it is given because it is intellectually untenable. A person could not believe in the Bible as it is presented in its grammatical, historical and literal setting andalso believe in science!

But that isn’t what we have all too often in Bible churches. Instead, there is a movement away from the Bible because even though we Bible-believing Christians can all affirm its truthfulness, we don’t want to dig too deep—it makes our heads hurt with all that history and geography and cultural stuff. And don’t get us started on theology! We have Bible churches that are often filled with people who prefer Bible-lite sermons that tell good stories and have lots of moralizing, but woe to the pastor who would dare to go deeper!

At least that is what a lot of pastors I have spoken to seem to think…

What I have found out is something quite different. Yes, many Christians are against boring sermons, and overly-long sermons. They sleep through sermons that have no point but are simply data-dumps and half-baked sermons that meander nowhere slowly. They leave churches where the pastor seems to want to talk about only his hobby horse doctrines or wants to flaunt his ability to use Greek grammar. Yes, it’s true, people don’t want  that.

But we seem to confuse simplicity with simplemindedness. We think that because they don’t want to hear a 45-minute sermon on the history of Tiglath-Pileser that they can’t stand real Bible preaching! So, in frustration, some pastors go back to vapid sermons. Stories, jokes, cutesy alliterations, we dress up like John the Baptist or the angel Gabriel. Why? Because we have not worked hard at going deep and wide. We have not prepared our biblical meal for everyone at the table to be able to digest the truth.

We can’t forget that people are at all sorts of different levels spiritually. Every church is like this. Some are unbelievers, some are babes in Christ, some are plateaued in their walk, some are maturing and others are going through a spiritual growth spurt. Don’t get frustrated by that man who wants you to go deeper every Sunday! Put a nugget or two in the sermon for him to chew on. Don’t scoff when that young couple ask the simplest questions—they are hungry! Feed them some application alongside your explanation of the text! Don’t chuckle at the hard-headed fellow who never seem to get it. Speak at his level and give him clear illustrations to cause that light to go on for him. We preach to real people, and so our sermons need to speak to real people!

My experience has shown that committed Christians don’t want shorter, watered down sermons. They don’t want a bunch of silly stories or jokes. They want the Bible! They want theology! They want to go deeper! And those “millennials” that so many people like taking jabs at, they thrive in churches where the Word of God is preached with conviction and depth.  

Our sermons can’t be empty. But they can’t be boring either. We need to present the meat of the Word in the most pleasing way we know how. We need to break it down for the young in Christ and give those who are more mature something to continue to work out in their own personal study. By doing this, we will raise the bar of our churches—they will all grow in depth and breadth of their knowledge of the Word and their learning will, Lord willing, blossom into changed lives. 

Help for New Expositors – Don’t Photobomb Jesus

/ Richard Bargas / Leave a comment

photobombIsn’t it interesting that there are no physical descriptions in the Bible of what the Apostles or Jesus looked like. This is hard to believe in our self-driven culture where the Instagram selfie perfectly captures the ethos of our day.

There is one extra-biblical description of Apostle Paul found in The Acts of Thecla, where it says that Onesiphorus described Paul as “a man short in stature, with a bald head, bowed legs, in good condition, eyebrows that met, a fairly large nose, and full of grace. At times he seemed human, at other times he looked like an angel.”[1] It appears that Paul had a face for radio!

In our world, “image is everything” and yet, for those who stand before the world to proclaim the Word of God, we are simply called to be a faithful, unwavering voice of truth in a dry, wilderness of error and darkness (Mark 1:3; Amos 8:11).

When this is the case, we shouldn’t worry about being impressive or even whether anybody notices us. We shouldn’t be jockeying for prominence among the evangelical superstars or trying to be seen so we can move up the ladder of fame. This is exactly the opposite of what Jesus expects of his servants. Mark 10:42-45 shines brightly against the growing evil of popular Christianity and its longing for attention. It hurts to read Jesus’ words and think about how much modern evangelical Christianity ignores these words:

“And Jesus called them to him and said to them, “You know that those who are considered rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great ones exercise authority over them. But it shall not be so among you. But whoever would be great among you must be your servant, and whoever would be first among you must be slave of all.” (Mark 10:42–44, ESV, emphasis mine)

It is when we open our mouths, when we speak the Word of God that people should be amazed–not at us, but at our great and awesome God. If we draw attention, let it be to our Lord and Savior. If we thunder and rail, let it be against sin as we call men to holiness. If we speak with great authority and power, let it be from the Scriptures alone and not ourselves. And when we leave a room where we have preached the mighty deeds of our God, and people stand back and say, “What a mighty God! O, how I want to know Him more!” may we be content to slide out of the room and rejoice that our God chose to use us, sinners saved by grace, to bring more people into His presence. SDG

[1] The Acts of Thecla 3. Translation by Bart D. Ehrman in Lost Scriptures: Books That Did Not Make It into the New Testament (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 114.


Who Will Be the Leaders of the Church in 10 years?

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“Knowing that fighting the good fight requires a multitude of leaders and realizing that leaders sometimes become casualties, Christian leaders must intentionally reproduce themselves and multiply. Some leaders are casualties by divine appointment, and unfortunately some are casualties by carelessness. But eventually all of us will be called home. Who will be there to take our place?…The church as the family of God must be committed to the reproduction and multiplication of leadership. One of the reasons the church falters in the next generation is because we do not pass on the legacy of Christian leadership and fail to disciple effective leaders who can take the church and its mission forward to extend the kingdom of God to the next level in the next generation.”—Harry L. Reeder III and Rod Gregg, The Leadership Dynamic

Help for New Expositors – Develop Patience in Your Hearers

/ Richard Bargas / Leave a comment

Lord willing I will step into the pulpit of my church this Sunday and I will continue my journey through the book of Acts. I will be in Acts 26 and as of last night, I’m not sure how far I will get into Paul’s defense before Agrippa. I have been saturating myself with the text, doing word studies, background, translation and all the good stuff that comes with Bible exposition done well.

As a part of my study, a small phrase in Acts 26:3 stuck out to me that is helpful to think about more, not only as we prepare to preach, but as we think about the overall ministry of preaching to our congregations. The phrase that Paul says is this, “Therefore I beg you to listen to me patiently” (ESV). There are a lot of reasons that Paul says this, and I can’t go into them here, but I do want to say this–expositors need to learn to develop patience in their listeners and we need to be such skillful expositors that people are willing to be patient when we preach.

You see, Paul was well aware how critical sound doctrine is, particularly in preaching the gospel. He is about to expound on the differences between traditional Judaism as practiced in his time and how they differed from the gospel message of Jesus Christ. To the Jews, Paul had committed sins worthy of death while Festus couldn’t figure out why everyone was so upset. It all sounded the same to him!

Agrippa was a Jew and he knew Judaism well (Acts 26:3), and yet Paul still begged for patience from him as he laid out this complicated doctrine of the gospel. Paul didn’t abandon sound doctrine, but he also didn’t abandon his listeners either!

Brother preachers, let me be candid for a minute. Sometimes people don’t reject sound expositional preaching because it is not informative, but because we have not done all our work to be clear and concise. The church is not a seminary and your pulpit is not a seminary lectern. We cannot dump raw meat on our congregations and expect them to digest our poorly assembled sermons. We can ask and expect patience, but we must deliver on feeding the sheep! They cannot digest raw exegetical data. Reject the false dichotomy that our preaching must be raw meat (unrefined doctrine) or baby food (little or no doctrine). We have been called by our Lord to dig deep, understand the text better than anyone else in our church, and then to assemble a sermon that imparts much of what we have learned in a way that does not choke them because it is too far over their heads or factual but unhelpful.

As you prepare, go deep but go patiently, walking with the weak and the babes. Recommend further reading and study for those that are more mature. Add in scholarly insights at appropriate places to entice deeper thinking, but return to the average maturity level of your congregation for most of your exposition. Let them up for air after a long explanation of a particular concept by showing them why this doctrine is so important to their lives and how it can be put into practice to the glory of God.

That is how you develop patience in your listeners. You are a shepherd. Lead them, don’t drag them or abandon them. Ask for their patience, but deliver the goods every time you make them work to understand. Reward thinking by showing the soaring heights of spiritual truth. Then the next time you open your Bibles, they will have grown a little more and able to keep a little faster pace with you.

Pastor Like Paul, part 6

/ Richard Bargas / Leave a comment

Paul in prison.jpg

“You, however, have followed my teaching, my conduct, my aim in life, my faith, my patience, my love, my steadfastness, my persecutions and sufferings that happened to me at Antioch, at Iconium, and at Lystra—which persecutions I endured; yet from them all the Lord rescued me. Indeed, all who desire to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted,” (2 Timothy 3:10–12, ESV)

In this “Pastor Like Paul”series we looked so far at 6 ways we need to follow (or strive to be) a godly Christian leader:

  1. Follow the Same Doctrine
  2. Follow the Same Conduct
  3. Follow the Same Purpose
  4. Follow the Same Faithfulness
  5. Follow the Same Patience
  6. Follow with the Same Love

At verse 11, Paul builds upon this list with a capstone of leadership–being willing to follow Jesus in our suffering. From his prison, Paul reminds Timothy that he has followed Christ, and that Timothy and all those who would follow Jesus should also be willing to suffer as well.

But doesn’t that make Christians “lemmings?” Lemmings are small rodents that have been said to follow one another off a cliff to their deaths in some sort of weird instinct when their populations get too large. It has become a figure of speech to call people “lemmings” who thoughtlessly follow the crowd.

Interestingly, the idea of the lemmings jumping off cliffs as they follow one another is based upon a fraud. Encyclopedia Britannica reports, “For the 1958 Disney nature film White Wilderness, filmmakers eager for dramatic footage staged a lemming death plunge, pushing dozens of lemmings off a cliff while cameras were rolling. The images—shocking at the time for what they seemed to show about the cruelty of nature and shocking now for what they actually show about the cruelty of humans—convinced several generations of moviegoers that these little rodents do, in fact, possess a bizarre instinct to destroy themselves.”[1]

Why do I bring up lemmings? Because we are still talking about following the leader, and 2 Timothy 3:11-12 speak about following our leaders, both Jesus and the Apostle Paul into the very real possibility of persecution and suffering.

But just like lemmings don’t do this, neither do Christians unthinkingly thrust themselves to their deaths. We love life! But we know that this life is temporary, and that if we must risk this life to remain faithful to Christ, then the exchange is worth it.

For this post and the next in this series, we will see the need to faithfully follow Christ as Paul followed Christ, even to death if necessary. We will see this first, through the specific examples of Paul, and then through the universal principles of Scripture for all of us.

  1. The Specific Examples of Paul (v. 11)

“my persecutions and sufferings that happened to me at Antioch, at Iconium, and at Lystra—which persecutions I endured; yet from them all the Lord rescued me.” (2 Timothy 3:11, ESV)

My persecutions which you saw…

It is interesting that the Apostle Paul didn’t give an exhaustive list of all the places where he had suffered persecution, nor had he given the most recent places. Instead, it appears that Paul mentioned Antioch, Iconium and Lystra because these would have been the places where Timothy first encountered the severe persecution that Paul suffered for the faith as a young boy just setting out with Paul. Timothy may have been an eyewitness to the dramatic account described in Lystra, the city he was from. He may have heard stories told of how Paul had preached to boldly and survived a brutal stoning, walking back into Lystra after being left for dead (Acts 14:20). These early accounts would have been vivid reminders that persecution was not a rare thing that happened only to a few, but that it is normal for most Christians, and that Timothy should expect it.

My persecutions which I endured…

The word for “endure” means to bear up under a burden. Paul’s body was undoubtedly covered in scars and deformities from the many hardships and persecutions he had endured for the sake of Christ.

But there was no way that the Lord would ever give Paul more of a burden than he would give him the ability to endure it. Paul’s body was a record book of his faithfulness to proclaim the gospel everywhere he went. He bore up under the burden gladly because he understood the message of the cross is life to those who would believe.

“We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed;” (2 Corinthians 4:8–9, ESV)

My persecutions which the Lord rescued me from…

Paul’s survival was attributed to the Lord alone. He didn’t give glory to God for delivering him sometimes, or even mostof the time, but “from them allthe Lord rescued me.”

This word “from” at the end of v. 11 in the ESV, is translated “out of” in the NASB and KJV. But there can be confusion when we use the words “out of” or “from” because we can understand this idea in two ways. We might mean that God rescues his children from ever having to be involved in persecution or suffering.

But we might also mean that God rescues his children when they are in the midst of persecutions and suffering. In other words, they are experiencing it, and yet God will continue to be with them and they shall be saved, but not yet.

When we look at Paul’s life, we recognize that he had both experiences, where he was delivered unharmed by his persecutors, and those where he barely made it out alive after surviving painfully through an ordeal.

Paul is imprisoned, and he does not expect that he will be released. In fact, in 2Timothy 4:6-8, Paul wrote, “For I am already being poured out as a drink offering, and the time of my departure has come. I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith. Henceforth there is laid up for me the crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous judge, will award to me on that day, and not only to me but also to all who have loved his appearing.” (2 Timothy 4:6–8, ESV)

In verse 6, Paul clearly believes that he is going to be put to death, which he was. But v. 7 shows that he still has confidence in the Lord, that the Lord will carry him across the finish line of the race of faith. And then in v. 8 he envisions the awards ceremony where the crowns are given to the competitors, and Paul full expects that he and all those who trust in Christ will receive the reward of eternal life.

In those three verses we can understand what Paul was teaching Timothy in 2 Timothy 3:11, that whether it is out of the persecution or even through the persecution, the Lord will deliver him from the suffering he has faced.

Now we might read this and come to the conclusion that these things were true for the Apostle Paul, but that they may not be true for you and me. But there was a reason that Paul was telling Timothy these things. There was divine purpose in this letter.

Gordon Fee “insists that it was the Apostle’s intention to underscore that Timothy had known from his earliest days that persecution was a part of faith in Christ and that he should therefore not lose heart in his current sufferings.”[2]

Remember that Paul has mentioned the pattern from v. 10 that Timothy had followed, and Paul was commending him for this, and encouraging him to keep on going in this same direction. It is no different when we come to the matter of persecution and suffering. Timothy was to follow Paul’s example as well.

To aid him in doing this, Paul laid out three universal truths that state work together with Paul’s personal examples to show that Paul was not the exception. We will see that in tomorrow’s post.

[1]https://www.britannica.com/story/do-lemmings-really-commit-mass-suicide

[2]Kitchen, John, The Pastoral Epistles for Pastors, 408.