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THIS IS a
special day for me: the 20th anniversary of my induction
as pastor of this church. The actual day was Wednesday,
but this is a good time to celebrate.
One delight of these years was being called a fundamentalist
by Bill Hunter. I don’t usually call myself a fundamentalist,
and Bill and I are not peas in the same pod of doctrine.
But I still appreciated what he said.
Back then, some people criticised my preaching.
I tried hard to avoid jargon and churchy phrases, and
some people said I wasn’t preaching the real gospel.
At the time, I was just out of College and my
appointment had to be reviewed annually. It was the
meeting to decide whether I should stay here. There
was some criticism of my preaching, and Bill spoke up.
He said that I was a fundamentalist. Then he
said he didn’t always agree with me. But he said, “The
pastor preaches the fundamental doctrines of the Bible
and he preaches them from the Bible, and that’s what
we need.”
There was no more debate on my preaching. Bill
had spoken.
In Acts 2, straight after we hear of the baptism
of the believers, we hear how they shared their lives
with one another. And the first thing we hear is that
...they continued steadfastly in the Apostles’ teachings.
or, as we read it in the New
International Version,
They devoted themselves to
the apostles’ teaching
This is fundamental for all Christians: sticking firmly
to what the Apostles taught.
The Bible sometimes compares God’s people to a temple,
in which each of us is a living stone.
Maybe we can change the image a bit and say that that
temple is built on the bedrock of Christ, the doorway
is baptism and the four main footings are the apostles’
teaching, fellowship, breaking of bread and prayer.
These provide a level base for a sound building.
Maybe I have fundamentalist
leanings. After all, my early years as a Christian were
in a fundamentalist Baptist church. Sometimes they had
the most fanciful interpretations of the Bible; sometimes
they insisted on theories or doctrines that just don’t
hold water, but they loved the Bible, and they taught
me and everyone else who attended that church to love
and respect the Bible, too.
When I left the fundamentalist
ways, it was not so that I could abandon the Bible,
but because I needed to be true to the Bible even if
the people around me disagreed with me.
They said that spiritual gifts had ended; but I read
a Bible that spoke about gifts and how to used them.
They taught Darby’s view of the Return of Christ; but,
as I read the Bible, I couldn't find that theory there.
They taught Genesis but missed the main point
and got lost in secondary issues.
When it's a choice between
the Bible and man’s teaching, there is no choice.
And I still want to
see two things in this church. I want you to love the
Bible and respect its teachings; and I also want you
to follow its precepts, because the Bible is what the
Apostles taught and it is what we need to devote ourselves
to today.
NOTHING BUT THE FACTS
Above all, the apostles taught the facts as they had
experienced them. If you remember the recent sermon
about what the apostles preached, you will remember
how much of their preaching was about their experience
of Jesus and about the mighty deeds he performed, including
his death on the cross and his resurrection on the third
day.
Maybe you don’t understand why I am emphasising the
facts of the gospel here, but I believe that there is
a very good reason. We need the facts.
The world today isn’t
about definitions and facts and ideas. It’s about responses
and feelings and impressions.
Once the ads told you the product is, say, Lifebuoy
Soap, the special feature is that it is antiseptic,
and you will feel clean and be attractive if you use
it.
Now the ads skip the special feature and sometimes even
skip the product name, and just leave you with two images:
pink soap and sex appeal. You make the connexion!
Today, even in the field
of science, we might expect that facts and ideas are
the outcome of research. Yet more than one scientist
has discovered that personal attacks and even death
threats can result if people don’t like the results.
It’s not about research and confirming or disproving
results: it’s about how people feel and respond and
might use the results of science. Politics, economics,
emotions take precedence over facts.
God’s perspective is
this: go back to the facts; begin with the Apostles’
teaching.
The other three main pillars of Christian living are
fellowship, communion and prayer. All of those can proceed regardless of the facts of
the Christian message. But they are meaningless
without the meaning that the gospel message gives to
them.
One thing we can learn from the revolution in thinking
in our times is that reality is far more than bare facts.
When President George W Bush informed the public that
the combat stage of the war in Iraq had successfully
come to an end, the bare facts of that statement were
true. The US Government had decided. The army had changed
from being an invading force to being a maintenance
force.
But we all know that
more US soldiers have died in battle since the end of
the war phase than died while combat was underway. There
is more to life than bare facts.
How people might use
or misuse facts must be our concern — but it can never
be our only concern.
We can value today’s
emphasis on responses and feelings and political outcomes,
but we also believe in objective truth. We believe that
there are facts. We believe there are fictions. And
we believe there is a lot of grey in between.
And our world particularly needs the Biblical emphasis
on facts. “The Apostles’ teaching” must top our list
of things to live by.
We begin like the TV
version of the FBI operative: “The facts, please, madam:
just the facts, and nothing but the facts.”
FINDING APOSTOLIC TEACHING
But the Apostles are dead, so how do we get their teaching?
Of course, start in the New Testament. If you open it,
almost at random, you find writings by various apostles. Romans, I & II Corinthians,
Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, 1 &
11 Thessalonians, Timothy, Titus and Philemon:
they all come from the apostle Paul and his team. James and at least one of the letters
from Peter are from the apostles of those
names, and many scholars say that the other letter of
Peter was just tidied up first by
his secretary. Jude was probably written by Judas,
not Iscariot — the Judas mentioned in John 14. Those
are easy ones.
Mark was written down, as Papias
reports, from Peter’s preaching, because Peter was not
a really great writer. Luke and Acts are by Luke, who researched
what the apostles and others remembered.
Hebrews may have been written by Apollos.
Paul considered Apollos to be an apostolic preacher.
I know we could argue
forever about authorship issues. All am trying
to do is to show you that the New Testament is full
of apostolic writings and the few books that weren’t
directly written by apostles seem to have been written
under their supervision.
In other words, the
New Testament is very clearly an apostolic document.
It is our only comprehensive source of information about
apostolic preaching and teaching. We must know what
the New Testament teaches us.
But we also need the Old Testament. I admit that I preach
much more easily and much more frequently on the New
Testament than on the Old. That is a failing of mine.
But I try to uncover the Old Testament background to
New Testament teachings, which is a vital aspect of
knowing the Old Testament.
We are quite unlike Muslims, who mention God’s inspiration
of the Old and New Testaments and say that God continues
his revelation in the Qur'an. That sounds noble and
lofty. But, in practice, Muslims claim that the Old
and New Testaments are so corrupt that they are now
useless.
In other words, they radically disconnect their beliefs
from either the Old or the New Testament.
On the other hand, Christians
can never detach the New Testament from the Old. Without
the Old, the New has no root; without the New, the Old
bears no fruit.
We Christians need the
Bible that the Apostles knew — the Jewish Bible. And
we need the Bible that the Apostles wrote — the New
Testament.
The more we read it
and the better we know it, the more we will know of
the Christ
...who died for us, the just
for the nujust, to bring us to God.
But there is more to the apostles’ teaching than mere
words and concepts.
Too many Christians are afraid of the more pragmatic,
more practical side of the gospel. The early Christians
were open and unafraid.
So, we also read in v43 of our passage,
...many wonders and miraculous
signs were done by the apostles.
The apostles taught not only ideas, they taught by example.
Verses 43 ff amplify the four basic pillars. Christianity
is never just about filling our heads with facts. It
is about learning to live as Christ’s people in the
world.
I think this is probably one of the most important things
that the late John Wimber restored to the Christian
Church. He was never content with merely teaching what
the Bible said: he always emphasised modeling it. He
had a passion that ordinary Christian people should
learn by example and side–by–side encouragement. He
wanted people to know even how to perform wonders and
miraculous signs, but, most importantly, how to perform
the everyday miracles of love and care and sharing their
faith in Jesus.
DOUBLE–BARRELLED ENDING
I want to conclude in two different ways.
First, I declare that, in twenty years, I have always
tried to preach the Bible. I may have used other material
as a springboard, but I have never departed from the
Bible and its teachings at the core of what I teach.
I have not always preached well. I have learnt a lot
about preaching, particularly in the last three or four
years. I have learnt to be more focused and to prepare
so that I can speak rather than prepare something to
be read. But I am happy that I can say that I have tried
very hard to keep the plain, fundamental teachings of
the Bible in focus.
On that point, I also want you to note and remember
that, while I have been quite happy to be controversial,
I have resisted any efforts to force us all into an
imposed conformity. Well, I have tried to resist, anyway! I know
that this church contains people with quite different
views of the Bible. For some of us it is the inerrant,
inspired Word of God, for others it contains the Word
of God, or perhaps it reveals the Word of God.
I have been tempted
to pressure some people over their views, and maybe
I have done so at times. But I am still convinced that
the most important thing is to read, know and effectively
use the Bible, regardless of what theories we might
hold about it. I go back to Spurgeon. He said that to
defend the Bible is like defending a caged lion. “Don’t
defend it,” he said, “Let it go, and it will defend
itself!”
The other thing I want to say is that we all need to
work on our Bible reading.
One of the best ways
to start is to begin. It works every time. And one of
the best places to start is Mark’s Gospel.
Read a chapter a day — or half a chapter if a chapter
is too much or contains too many themes. We are all
different. You don’t give a half kg pepper steak to
a 2-year-old, and you don’t give strained vegetables
to a Wimbledon tennis ace.
Feed yourself on what you need.
Do it daily. Set aside a time, find a place where you
will not be disturbed. Take a notebook and jot down
a few notes, so you know what you read, and how consistent
you have been. Look for what the passage teaches you
about God — about the Father the Son or the Holy Spirit.
Look for an example to follow or a sin to avoid. Ask
the Lord to reveal to you what he wants you to know
from that passage. And do what the Bible tells you to
do!
Read the Old and the
New. Follow Mark with Genesis 1– Genesis 12. Then go back to, say,
Galatians.
The practice is more important than the pattern.
There are many useful Bible Reading helps, like the
Scripture Union
notes or Navigator
courses. One benefit of Navigators is that it teaches
you to memorise Scripture.
As we read in Psalm 119:
Thy word have I hid in my heart,
that I might not sin against Thee.
BIBLICAL BAPTISTS
I once heard a talk by Rev Arthur Payne, a church planting
missionary who had worked in the bush in Western Australia.
He said that, at first, there was some snobbery among
the Anglicans and Catholics and Unitings about these
newcomer Baptists. But it soon disappeared when they
discovered that the Baptists knew the Bible and lived
by it.
After a while, he told
us, the pastors of the other churches were even approaching
him when they needed a quick reference for what the
Bible teaches.
Let’s make sure that people can say the same
about us from now on!
AMEN
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