Gentlemen, if you'll find your
seats, we'll start our panel Q&A. My name is Austin Duncan. I'll
be in charge of the Q's, and the A's will be provided by these
gentlemen on stage. The first question, I think,
has to go to Dr. MacArthur. You know, for really
railing against hip pastors, You referenced the Biebs and
Forever 21. Who is your research assistant?
You are. Check the socks if you doubt
that. Thank you. You can never trap him. It's
not possible. We sang, I Love Thy Church, O
God, and the theme of the conference this year is the church, and
it's appropriate. It's, I think, going to be instructive
for all of us. When we sang those lyrics and
heard the sermon we just heard, I think the question to start
with is, where did you learn, men, your love for the church?
There's plenty of people who would say they love Jesus, but
they don't love the church. They've had bad experiences with
the church. Where did you learn your love for the church? Where
did that happen in your Christian life? My mama and daddy. My mother
was the choir director at the church. My father was an elder.
We were always the last people to leave church. Sunday morning
and Sunday evening. Church, I've had the privilege,
I've never been in a church that didn't have a Bible-believing
pastor who was preaching the gospel from the scriptures. And so, my testimony is to God's
faithfulness to me through faithful preaching ministry and through
a faithful biblical congregation from the time I was a very, very
small child. I'm actually going to mention
some of this in my message tonight, so I won't repeat what I'm going
to say tonight, but my story is very much like Ligon's. He
a Southern Presbyterian, I a Southern Baptist, and yet the experience
was very similar. And I'm born to Christian parents,
raised in a Christian home, church, so much a part of life I didn't
know life was possible without it. and genuinely wholesome, wonderful
experiences. So I loved the church even before
I was a Christian. But as a Christian, I came to
love the church in an entirely different way, where once we
recognize this is the bride of Christ, then our love for the
church, especially as preachers and as ministers, just grows
over time. And I will simply say right now,
I think my love for the church is made all the more dramatic
in my life by the context in which the distinction between
the church and the world is being made so unavoidably visible.
And so my love for the church is such that I have no idea who
I am, without the church, and as a believer without the church,
as my primary identity, as I am in Christ, I am of Christ's church. Austin, did you grow up in a
Christian home? Yeah. Okay, well, so unlike you brothers,
I grew up in a nominal home, so I didn't learn to love the
church from that. I think I saw a faithful pastor when I was
a young person, and I think that helped a lot. And the other thing
is, I guess I would say, honestly, I loved the Lord. I'm not sure
I really came to love the church until I was pastoring the church.
I think it was after I was at CHPC, it was in my first couple
of Expeditional series, and then dealing with the individuals
that I think then I much more self-consciously began to, as
you put it, love the church. I'm going to correct you, my
dear brother. I know your heart better than you know your heart
in this. I dare say, how's that? Because
I saw in even the years you were in Cambridge, in letters that
filled two drawers, very precious to me now, when we were writing
each other two or three times a week, I saw so much of your
interest shift from what you might say was a parachurch evangelical
world to the love for the local church during those years. And
I think I could document it with textual criticism. Alright, well,
you know, I'm sure some of that's true too. Yeah. But there was
certainly, I just, for you guys who are pastors here, I just,
I'm aware then I'll say that my love for the church grew a
lot as a pastor of a local church because I have a lot of real
opinions on the church right now. I have a lot of things I
think are true and I think are important and I don't think I
was so full of that before I was a pastor. I think it was working
with a local church that made me care more for the local church. Yeah, I think I understand all
of that. That's been my experience, too.
I loved my grandfather, and he was a pastor. So because I just
adored him, loved him, and saw such warmth and virtue in him,
that's how I felt about the church. And then my father was a pastor,
and it was the same thing. My father was the same thing
at home he was in the pulpit. There was never any question
about personal integrity in his life. He loved the church, he
loved the Word of God, he loved preaching and teaching in the
church. I grew up with these men who were the models of Christianity
in my life, who had a complete love for the church and were
devoted to the church. So what I saw grounded me in
that affection. But it wasn't until I became
a pastor of a church that that transferred from the idea of
the church to the people in the church. And then you begin to
realize, the only way I'm going to last here is to love these
people. And you just start cultivating it. And you sort of will to love
past the challenges of this congregation that doesn't know you when you
first arrive. Well, I love the way you brought up in your message
that the pastor loves the sanctification of his people. I mean, that's
the experience, I'm sure, of every pastor here. Yeah. You
feel the pain in their sins and their failures and their weakness.
And I think from my standpoint, that's why I've never left here,
because I don't think that I could just walk away from this group,
and I know you feel that way as well, and say, I'm going to
go try another batch. And it isn't to say that everybody
has to do what we've done, but I mean, you're there for life,
that's the sense that I get, because you're involved in seeing
these people become what God wants them to become, and in
raising up people out of that congregation to do the very same
thing. I think that that perspective is more likely to keep a man
in a church than any other. How do we instill that same affection
for the body in new believers? Obviously, you were influenced
by your families and by your pastorate, Mark, but when we're
discipling new believers or we encounter those who love Jesus
but not the church, how do we help them understand the priority
of the local church? Mark? Well, honestly, this is
one of the things I'm thinking about for the Together for the
Gospel conference coming up, because I'm going to talk on
how the local church makes a difference in our sanctification. Really,
just kind of what you were teeing off today. And I haven't figured
out how I'm going to do it yet, but I want to try to help pastors
think very practically about how we can teach in our local
church, the Christians, to understand how the local church is supposed
to help them be distinct from the world. So I think we just
have to get very particular, kind of like John was beginning
to do today with Galatians and the rest of the New Testament,
about the sanctification that the Lord wants in His people.
As pastors, one really important thing to do is to stress to parents
that parents often think there's somebody else more influential
than me in the forming of this understanding the gospel, embrace
of Christ, and love of the church, and that there's some other place
more strategic than the local church that will impress that
upon their children. And they're wrong about both
of those things. So as pastors, if you can empower your parents
to realize there is no more basic discipleship unit in the church
than them. And they are far more powerful
than any youth director or anybody else that will ever be in their
children's lives. And that the local church is
where they are meant to be shaped, not somewhere else. And there
are thousands and thousands of godly Bible-believing parents
that they don't realize that, and they need to be encouraged
and empowered by their pastors to realize the strategic influence
that they have. Dr. Moeller, you recently wrote
about the importance of the presence of children in corporate worship
services. Talk a little bit about how that instills what we're
talking about here. Yes, I want to get to that. If
I can begin by saying, just to echo off of this, that Michael
Walzer famously, at least famously in my world, argued about the
distinction between thick and thin theories of justice. I know
that's what you came to think about this afternoon. But the
difference is that the thick theory is comprehensive. The
thin theory is just something you might reference in passing.
And his point is without thick justice, you don't have justice.
Well, translate that to ecclesiology. The distinction between thin
and thick church. If thin church is something you
come to, then it's not going to be all that meaningful in
your Christian life. But if thick church is what you
are of, if that's where your identity is, and that's where
you know Christian flourishing and to exist in Christ to be
honored, then in thick ecclesiology, you're going to have a thick
Christian identity linked to the church. So I don't think
we should expect people who go to church to think much of the
church. People who are the church will love the church. And that
should include the tiniest amongst us. Lig and I will differ about exactly
how to define this. He Presbyterian and I correct. But we will define this similarly
by making the emphatic point that children should be present
among Christ's people. and that they should be welcomed
among Christ's people. And I don't know how much of
my Christian life was forged before I became a believer, when
my legs were dangling off of a pew, unable to touch the floor,
and where my deacon dad, when he finished deaking, you know,
in the service, doing those responsibilities, came and sat with his arm either
around my mother or around me on this hand, to assure, on this
hand, constantly there, ready to thump the back of the head
if there's any wayward movement. And I mean, you just look at
all that, and I realize what a good covenant father my father
was. Just to set me right there, and
I sat through everything. And I don't know how much of
the sermon I ever understood, but I will tell you, we believe
that the Holy Spirit will apply the Scripture and drive it deep
into little hearts. Come on, you were really like
reading the bulletin or something. You were reading. You were sitting
there reading. Well, I will just simply say
I would have been had I been allowed to have had anything
other than the Bible. Tell him the story about when
you were going to quit choir. This is just a good Christian
parent account. I was in everything because I
didn't have a choice. I was just in everything in church.
And that meant about 13 or 14 hours a week, minimally, at church.
And I was in the youth choir. And when I was 15, I decided,
I'm not going to be in the youth choir anymore. I don't even know
why, except I thought, this is just sheer ego. I am me. Hear
me roar. I'm not going to be a part of
the youth choir. So we're at Sunday dinner, and I just said
to my parents, eldest of four children, I just launched out
and said, I decided I'm not going to choir practice. I'm going
to quit the youth choir. And my dad never got angry or
anything. He's looked at me and said words I'll never forget.
He looked me in the face and he said, son, you didn't join. Thus was born your Calvinism.
That was right. It was my father's own doctrine
of election. And so there it was. And honestly,
we need more dads and we need more moms like that who just
say, son, daughter, you're not joining, you're in. Confronted by the word of God
and surrounded by Christ's people in the hope and anticipation
that one day that child will hear the gospel and believe and
believing be saved and grow in grace. John, what were youth
groups like in the 1950s? Bow ties and trumpets. Kind of YFC. Youth for Christ. Yeah. And Bible quizzes. Sword drills. Sword drills. Yeah. I mean, that was pretty much
it. And that was kind of before youth culture was so distinctly
defined. So we were hearing the Bible,
we were reading Bible stories, we were learning Bible verses,
all those things that you would associate now with Awana. Well,
basically, we did in junior high and high school. We hadn't substituted
the external culture for the life of the church. You know, just one footnote to
this. I love to see the children in this church wandering all
around this church. I love it after services are
over to see them walk up here and run around the pulpit. I just love to see that. Every
Sunday, almost every Sunday, some of them jump in the fountain
out there, and there's always somebody there who wants to get
them out, and I say, leave them in. I want them to feel such
warmth and freedom and acceptance in this place that they love
coming here. I want people to treat them with
love and kindness, and I just think it's important for them
not to feel that this is sort of stiff and austere and different
and distant. It needs to be like a home to
them. And that's one of the reasons
that I think it's so important to have activities during the
week for families in the church, so that the church becomes the
place they connect so many of their wonderful memories with
outside of a worship service. So good, and a helpful word for
those of us with young kids, pastors who are trying to raise
their kids to love the church and to appreciate all the blessings
that come from being a part of this. Dr. MacArthur, this is
going to be your 50th Easter sermon at Grace Church, coming
up in just a few weeks. You got any ideas? about how
I can tell the resurrection story for the 50th time. I would stick
with the resurrection. You're known for it. As you think through all these
years of ministering in this one place, and shepherding not
just the church that we have here now, but the generations
that have gone before them. You've cared for and pastored
multiple churches of generations of families who've been raised
in this church. And then this morning we hear you talk about
the burden that you have, your heart for the sanctification
of these people, the passion for holiness, for God's flock. How do you think about having
pastored for so long and seen so many trends and so many difficult
cases, how do you think about your desire to see Christ formed
in them as well as recognizing with pastoral patience that they're
in process? Well, I'm in process, so I'm
not under any illusions. I hear the echo of Paul's words,
not as though I have attained but I press toward the mark for
the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus. We know
what that prize is. It's to be like Christ. That's
the prize of the high calling. And he's pressing toward that
prize even though it's not attainable in this life. And that's why
Paul says, take heed to your doctrine and your teaching. You
start with your own doctrinal conviction. You start with your
own life. You start with the realization that the patience
of God is being exercised in you. You know, one of the things
that you have to, I think you have to overcome sort of in a
consistent way is the fact that you have to preach a better message
than you can live. And so there's always this sense
of shortcoming in your own life. And although I've seen the Spirit
of God in the sanctifying work in my life take me to places
that 30 years ago I never thought I'd be, in terms of my faithfulness
to the Lord, I'm not what I ought to be. And I have to realize
that if that's true in me, that's going to be true in everybody
else. And I don't think the pulpit is a place where you necessarily
hang out all your dirty laundry and grovel about your inadequacies
in life. But I do think you deal with
things in reality. And the second wave that you
deal with is your own family and the people who are closest
to you. And you're living a godly life in front of them, and they're
not everything they should be. And the people you maybe have
invested the most in aren't everything you'd want them to be. And I
think you have to exercise the patience of Christ in dealing
with His own disciples through all this, who were saying the
same thing at the end of the ministry. He said at the beginning, oh,
you have little faith. Why hasn't there been more progress
here? That's why Paul says, preach
the Word, but be patient. And that patience is an expression
of love to people. You cannot get up and preach
some truth and expect that that's going to change everybody instantaneously. It's a small building block that
begins the process of edification and that takes time and years
and you begin to see the change when when people aren't fighting
anymore to do the right thing, it's almost their involuntary
response. The default position is to do the right thing. And
where you'll see it in the life of your church is when you call
for any noble cause and they rush to that noble cause. You
don't have to recruit, right? Something you just said. Mark,
did you want to say something? You signaled with your microphone.
I was ready. Something you just said that
I'd like to hear you expand on, Dr. Dever, and the rest of you
as well. John, you said you have a kind
of, I'm not going to use this word, authenticity when you preach,
right? An awareness that you're a sinner,
too. At the same time, you're concerned
about those who would flaunt their fallenness in the pulpit. Help us think about And Dr. MacArthur, you go first here.
Help us think about how to preach authentically, how to preach
in that way. How do you strike that balance?
Are people accusing you of hanging out all your dirty laundry in
your sermons? No, I don't think so. I've never done that. I don't
talk about myself in my sermons. I rarely ever make any reference
to myself. I'm not there to do that. But
I think the people that know me and live with me all the time,
like you, Austin, and so many others, you know me for who I
am. I'm very much aware that I'm
dependent on you, and the more intimately people are connected
to me, the more I depend on them for the integrity and the moving
of the ministry. So it matters to me supremely
that I maintain a clear conscience before the Lord, that I know
nothing against myself here and I'm not justified. The Lord knows
the secrets of my heart, but that's where I have to start.
And then that the people around me believe in me and believe
in my integrity. So those are critical things.
And yet what drives me is not so much what they think of me,
but what drives me is knowing that's important. Am I right
before the Lord? And that's just a pursuit of
the heart. I don't know if that's what you're
intending out of the question. Yeah, that's really helpful.
Mark, is be yourself in preaching bad advice or good advice? Well,
it's necessary advice in the sense that I can't hear Al speak,
and I've heard Al give some tremendous sermons, and then I try to go
be Al. I'm not my brother. I love him,
thankful for him, but I'm not him. Or Lig and Johnny. I've heard all these men preach
tremendous sermons, and I'm not going to do it exactly like that.
So in that sense, be yourself is crucial. You know, Phillips
Brooks, truth through personality. There's a lot of truth in that.
That's not the most important thing about preaching. And if
somebody thinks that's the most important thing, then they bought
into the idolatry of the kind of authenticity that you were
talking about. But I think we have to be aware, particularly
as preachers, it's not just the world who thinks there are phonies
in the church. There are phonies in the church. There are phonies
in ministry. And we have to be very careful
not to be that. So we have to watch our own hearts.
It's true that we always have to preach better than we can
live, no doubt about that. But are there ways in which we're
getting a hardened conscience to our own sins? And who knows
us well enough that can speak to us about that? With whom are
we being honest enough? Are we being honest enough with
ourselves? Are we spending time with the Lord and His Word each
day? Are we praying for Him to investigate our hearts? So I
think all of that has to start very much with the pastor personally.
And there's nobody who can do that ultimately for you. These
brothers, I love all these men and I'm thankful for them. And,
you know, I'll get texts from them sometimes and we're together
occasionally, but none of these brothers can do that for me.
I have to be there with the Lord or else it's not real. Dr. Moller, you train men to
preach. Talk about how you help them
think through this issue. Well, I do teach them to preach,
unapologetically. But more importantly, we want
to teach them to pastor, in which preaching is the first most essential
act and the first mark of the church. So I think a part of
this is a celebrity culture that wants to point to the pulpit
and say, preaching is what matters, the preacher is what matters.
But it's actually the preacher as pastor as a part of the congregation. So what I'm looking for, When
I'm looking for authenticity and integrity, I mean authenticity
here in the good New Testament sense, what I'm looking for is
someone who is surrounded by spiritually healthy people, not
just by television cameras or by fanboys or girls or bots. Because I'm looking for where's
the church, where's the church, where's the... And as a matter
of fact, so people say, well, Albert Muller is president of
the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and answerable to trustees
elected by the Southern Baptist Convention. It's absolutely true
and absolutely important, but far more important for my spiritual
life is I'm a member of Third Avenue Baptist Church in Louisville,
Kentucky, a part of the body of Christ, a congregation of
believers where we belong to Christ together. And so I would
say if the preacher is ever abstracted and preaching is abstracted from
the life of the congregation and accountability to the body
of Christ, then expect disaster. And so I want them to know that.
I want them to know that we... And that's a part of the reason
why even the nouns, you know, become dangerous. If you just
keep using preacher, preacher, preacher, and don't put it in
the context of church, church, church, congregation, pastor,
then shepherd, That's a good word for us. I want to look at
the sheep for the authenticity of the shepherd. Dr. Duncan,
how has shepherding the people at your church shaped your preaching? Well, along the lines of what
Al just said, Ephesians 4 makes it clear that our job pastorally
and our job in the pulpit is to equip the saints for the work
of ministry. The end of what we're doing is
not so that people will say what great preachers we are or how
authentic we are, but how well they are equipped for the work
of service, how much they are formed, how much Christ is formed
in them, all of these different New Testament phrases to describe
the goal of pastoral ministry. So I think it's really important
for a minister to regularly remind himself That's what I'm getting
up here to do. I'm not the star of the show. I'm the equipper. My ministry
will be certified not by how many people like my preaching,
but by how Christ is formed in the congregation and how they're
equipped for the work of service and how they know the word of
God and these matters of sanctification that John talked about earlier.
You can be a very faithful brother and forget that. I mean, we need
to really work hard to remind ourselves that in ministry. And
by the way, that will beget the frustration that John was talking
about. I mean, there's no way to be
faithful in ministry without experiencing that frustration.
Because when that becomes your goal, you will become painfully
aware that the most exalted rhetoric is not able to produce that.
you will be painfully aware that you are utterly dependent upon
the work of the Holy Spirit. All you can do is deliver the
Word of God. You may deliver it faithfully
and it may fall on deaf ears and hard hearts. And only the
Spirit can put flesh on those bones and raise them to newness
of life. And so you'll have all of those
terms that John brought to your attention from Galatians about
Paul's attitude towards the church. Those are going to come to mind,
but it's good to remind ourselves of that over and over again.
Dr. MacArthur, you said that there's
not enough sermons being preached that call people to holiness.
What else isn't being preached? When I ask that question for
all of you, what do you think is a neglected avenue or area
or series of sermons that the men need to consider preaching
on? And maybe specifically, how would you go about preaching
the holiness of God, since that was the one that you brought
up to us? Well, I think if you're an expositor, you cover it all.
You cover it all. I think that's why it's dangerous
to be a topical preacher and move from place to place to place.
If you're just unpacking Scripture sequentially as it's revealed
in books, you're covering all of it. You're not going to leave
anything out. You're basically forced to do
that. And it's a powerful experience
for your own soul. This is what I was maybe hinting
at a little bit this morning. Learning to listen to the Word
of God with high impact is an acquired skill. When you are
sucked into a passage of Scripture and it begins to unfold and get
weight, and it keeps getting weightier and weightier and weightier,
and all of a sudden you feel the conviction, you feel the
glory of this. The Father has glory, the Son
has glory, the Spirit has glory, and the Word has glory. And when
Shekinah of the Word starts blazing into your face, this is the high
level of spiritual experience for a believer, but you have
to learn to listen like that. That's the genius of explaining
the Scripture, because every text is an argument. It's a cause. It's a divine argument
for truth that leads you to a literally exhilarating, spiritually exhilarating
conclusion. That's how preaching should be.
And in that process, people are caught up in the glory of the
Word of God, and they don't come here for anything else. That's
the same reason these men are here. They're here to hear you
preach because they know that the experience has no parallel.
It has no equal. I agree with you with the regular
practice of preaching, but I do have to say, brother, listening
to you this morning, that 40-minute introduction of yours to Galatians
4.19, well, I was a little bit, but I mean, I was loving it.
And I would say that was a very edifying, topical treatment of
a theme raised in Galatians 4.19, and there's nothing wrong with
it. Now, this was not Sunday morning at church. It was a passage.
It was very different. But honestly, it was a very edifying
concatenation of text of Scripture. Well, thank you, Mark. It means
a lot coming from you. It really does. But I would say
this. Sometimes when you do that, the
passage explains itself. You literally set it up, and
then when you read it, everybody says, oh, I get that. That's a Eureka moment. Oh, I get it. I see it. Sometimes
just creating the backdrop brings it to life. Also, I'd like to
see guys preaching on expositional preaching, explaining to the
congregations why it's so important that they do it. Preaching on
biblical theology, on a biblical understanding of the gospel,
of conversion, of church membership, of church leadership, of discipleship,
of church discipline. You ought to write a book about
that. Well, I'm just saying, there
are a few things that should mark our churches, and our churches
don't know what they're supposed to be if we won't teach them.
So part of what you have to do, brothers, I know it feels awkward,
you've got to teach your job description from the Bible. They need to
know what you're supposed to be doing, and they need to know
what they're supposed to be doing to be a church. There was nine of those if you
didn't catch them. A lot more than nine. What are you thinking about what
to preach? What is neglected? Dr. Mohler,
Dr. Duncan, what are you thinking? I want to affirm what Dr. MacArthur
said. Just consider one book in the New Testament, 1 Corinthians.
Just take that one letter from the Apostle Paul, and you've
got virtually every single doctrine laid out. You have every considerable
moral issue of the Christian church. It is likely to confront,
and you've got life and the spirit together. I mean, it's just all
there with about a thousand things I haven't mentioned by both implication
and explication. So expository preaching is, I
think, the way to hit not only all the issues, but in biblical
proportion. This is the Holy Spirit-inspired
order and sequence and proportion to these questions. But I think
it's fair to say, what are we afraid to preach in this generation? And this is where I would simply
say, you have to preach the text. And then I'm going to come back
to biblical theology. You have to put it in the context of other
texts. You can't preach the gospel without the word only. He gave
his only son. The exclusivity of the gospel
is something that isn't going to be caught by intuition. It's got to be made explicit
from Scripture. The solas of the Reformation.
Getting close to those will never get you into trouble. The reformers
did not get into trouble for their affirmation of Scripture,
of faith, of grace, of Christ. It was justification by faith
alone. It was grace alone. So I think we have to point the
arguments, the way Scripture points the arguments, and interpret
Scripture by Scripture in the analogy of faith, and help our
people to know how to read the Bible. But it's not enough just
to say, Jesus saves. When the text would have us to
make very clear, only Jesus saves. Just to make one point. And in
a day in which the church is rightly concerned not to preach
moralism rather than the gospel, Affirm that entirely, that does
not mean that we don't preach morality, even as Dr. MacArthur mentioned
this morning, and personal holiness. And so we need to make certain
that the gospel does not become an excuse for avoiding preaching
about sin, and, well, you can take it from there. Yeah, I would
add one thing that I'm going to get on this a little bit on
Friday. I think we have to identify false
teachers. And I think we have to identify
false doctrine. What we're going to see in Galatians,
if you want to get ready for Friday night's message, read
the first 12 verses of chapter 5. Paul's language is shocking
as he confronts false doctrine and false teachers. It's some
of the most stunning language that he ever put to a pen. I
don't think there's a willingness to do that. in this age of tolerance
and compromise. And Paul says, look, I ceased
not for the space of three years to warn you night and day with
tears. And I knew it was going to happen. After my departure,
evil, perverse men of your own selves would rise up among you
and from the outside wolves would come in, not sparing the flock.
If you do not, this is two sides of this thing. The pastor's purpose
we talked about this morning. Friday, we're going to talk about
the pastor's protection. protecting people is critical.
And that's what Paul was doing. He was concerned about their
sanctification, but he was also, he ends that emphasis in chapter
five, before he gets to walking in the spirit, the positive side,
with this amazing blast against all false doctrine and false
teachers. People can easily be bewitched. And that's why I said, maybe
most churches are bewitched. to some degree, and it's often
because we will not be straightforward. I'm not talking about, you know,
naming names all the time. I'm just saying giving them criteria
to be discerning about error and how devastating it is. And,
Dr. MacArthur, you have been faithful
to call out threats that you see to the church and to the
gospel over the years, and we're all grateful for that. You're
all students of church history. And the church has been preserved
and protected by men who've been willing to take on those threats
to those things most essential to the Christian faith. Today,
what do you see as looming threats? What else is out there? Without
spoiling Friday night, what do you see now that's a threat to
the church from the outside? You do recognize you asked me
to preach on that tonight. I'm ready to hear you. No, I
just don't want to preach my sermon before we get there, but
I'm happy for Dr. MacArthur to preach. He's made
me give mine away for Friday, so... Look, I can give a simple
answer to cover all of it. Anything raised up against the
knowledge of God, anything untrue, that's a threat. I'll name two
that I see right now. Gender issues, any number of
them. and addiction to signs, wonders, dreams, and visions. Without spoiling Dr. Mohler's
message, Dr. Duncan? I see we're preaching into a
generation, even in the churches, people that are at church, they're
in church, they're profoundly influenced by the culture and
the way the world evaluates things. And they are coming with a set
of moral arguments against historic Christianity and biblical truth
that many pastors are tempted to try to accommodate. rather
than to confront as a false way of understanding and actual affront
to biblical truth. And so we are going to have,
and gender, sexuality, marriage, et cetera, as Mark just mentioned,
is one of the areas where that happens. It's not the only one.
You have people bringing moral arguments against the God of
the Old Testament with them to church. So one of the things we want
to do is we want to be able to respond to that in a compelling
but faithful way, affirming the truthfulness of the faith once
delivered. And that means you have to know how they think and
what has attracted them to that manner of thinking. And then
you have to plant your feet in the scriptures and refuse to
budge from them refuse to accommodate your teaching to what's popular
right now. And I think I feel that right
now more than at any time in my life. And I'm talking about
in our circles. This is Bible-believing pastor
world here right now. And I'm talking about the kind
of people that show up in our circles. I feel that they are
more under the influence of, bewitching of, the way the world
thinks about a series of these things than in any time that
I can remember. Part of it probably is that evangelicalism
has suffered from a lack of Bible teaching for the last 40 years.
John hinted at it today. But really with the beginning
of the church growth movement, the idea was Bible exposition
will bore people. And so if you really want to
reach people and church the unchurch, you need to ditch Bible exposition
and do, you know, sort of superficial practical talks. And as a consequence,
we've ended up de-churching the church. so that people haven't
heard Bible exposition in a lot of places. And into that vacuum,
something else has come and it's not Bible. And so you now have
that, you know, that's now placed on your doorstep and you're speaking
into that world and you need to be ready to do that. You know,
one thing strikes me in this, I'm convinced that to be male,
is to have ADHD. And perhaps to be human in one
sense, but especially to be male. And it's sort of like you're
going, this is the most profound truth. I'm talking about human
dignity. I'm talking about the gospel. I'm talking about the
hypostatic union. Oh, there's a giraffe video.
You know, where does that come from? And yet that's what I'm
seeing writ large in some of our circles right now. I thought,
amazingly enough, that 10 years ago, Something remarkable is
happening because what I was hearing was just about every
preacher say, at least say, that what he was determined to do
was biblical exposition. Almost everyone was saying, uh,
I'm committed to expository preaching. But then the next thing you know
is, I'm committed to expository preaching. I'm committed to verse-by-verse
exposition. Oh, there's a giraffe video.
The signs and wonders thing is just amazing. How many people,
some of the same people, who were speaking about the necessity
of a Word-centered ministry, they are now being attracted
by what detracts from the ministry of the Word, at the very least,
what distracts from the ministry of the Word. And I am shocked
that it has happened so quickly. I think one of the things, picking
up on what a number of you said, particularly something you were
saying, is I certainly feel, and I wonder if you brothers
feel this too, that I'm tooled up against nominal Christianity.
If I want to give you a knock on nine marks, I think it's kind
of written in my mind, in the 90s, and my big concern is nominal
Christianity. And it is a big concern. But
I feel like the world we're living in right now, nominal Christianity
is a problem, but it's being replaced rapidly with a hostile
world to Christianity. Now, I know the world theology
has always been hostile. I got that. But I mean like America
in particular and the communities that we're in, there was a respect
15 and 20 years ago when I would go into a hospital that the nurses
would give me as a Christian pastor. That is gone now. Maybe that's just the DC area,
you know, maybe it's different where you are. But I think that
there is a Theologically, there's no change that's happening. We
know that ultimately. But in our experience, what do you think
about this? That 20 years ago, a lot of us
were necessarily more exercised about nominal Christianity, and
that that has just been replaced in America with open hostility,
the rise of the nuns that you talk about, the people with no
religious opinions. No, no, I think that's true.
I think we're living in a culture that if it had its way, sort
of at the elite level, would make Christianity a crime. That's how far it's come. I think
all these laws that are being passed all over the place are
really, in the end, the end game for all of this is to make Christianity,
biblical Christianity, illegal. That's what all the free speech
stuff is all about. You can't say that in my presence.
You know, that's offensive. I think there is a wholesale
move in that direction. And of course, If that is going
on in a time when the church is trying to be pragmatic, you've
got an absolute disaster on your hands. Yeah, and the way they
will do that is more sophisticated than making Christianity illegal.
They will make any public consequence of Christianity illegal. Baking
a cake. Right. So what you do, as New
York Times columnist Frank Bruni said, in the privacy of your
home, your heart, or your pews, then that's your business. But
you take it outside and you're out of bounds. And so I think
that's coming. And I think that's where we have
to make very clear that Christianity is a public truth claim. We're
not saying that Christianity is true for us. We're not saying
that Jesus Christ is Lord for us. We're saying that Jesus Christ
is Lord and that the gospel is true. That's what will get us
in trouble. You know, Al, your book, and
I recommend all of you guys read this book on conviction, leadership
by conviction. I mean, that is the issue in
leadership conviction. And what I see missing is courage,
just plain old courage, the courage to stand up and speak the truth.
in the face of all the trends going the other way. Speak the
truth in love, but where is the courage? Be a man. Act like men. Have some courage. Mentoring is, you mentioned it,
the Apostle Paul, he had no earthly mentor. It's the burden of all
of you men to mentor younger men, especially in ministry.
Talk to these pastors about how they can find a mentor. How can
they be discipled? How can the discipler be discipled? Let me just jump in and say,
I understand that if you're a pastor, everybody expects that of you,
and you don't necessarily have somebody in your little world
all the time to do that. I was with Steve Lawson last night,
really interesting. He has a study with no windows,
but he has four pictures hanging on the wall that are framed,
and they're huge. One is William Tyndale, who basically
was hanged by a chain and then burned to death and then gunpowder
blew his body to bits for the faithfulness of preaching the
Word and printing the Word when it was against the law. He has
Calvin looking over one other part of his desk. He has John
Rogers, the first Marian martyr in his Bible, to remind him of
the first man who was killed for the cause of the gospel under
Bloody Mary. And he mentioned somebody else,
but he said, when I walk into my study, I just have these looming
figures hanging over my head. We have the wrong heroes in this
culture, for sure. For sure. You would do well to
familiarize yourself with those great men who gave their lives
for the cause of the gospel. It'll humiliate you, hopefully,
to a point where you're broken. and the Lord can rebuild you
into a man of character and courage. You don't need a buddy-buddy
mentor. You just need to start familiarizing
yourself with the great heroes of the faith through history.
Though dead they speak. Yeah. Dr. Dever, your thoughts
on training men, on investing in men, having those kind of
relationships as a pastor? You mean who I look for to train
me or who I look to train? Let's talk about how you think
about mentoring. For me to find a mentor or for me to be a mentor?
Whichever you'd answer, I'd be happy with at this point. Well,
you start by finding a dude who has on some Dr. Seuss socks.
I just can't get that out of my mind, Austin. I'm sorry. We've
covered the socks already. Wow. I think you look for the hungry.
You know, you look for the people who want to grow, who find profit
in your ministry. You know, I'm a pastor of a church
in Washington, D.C., and most evangelical Christians in Washington,
D.C. are not members of my church. I'm not the pastor of every Christian
in Washington. I'm the pastor of just the people in this church.
And everybody doesn't have to benefit from my ministry. You
know, just these people are benefiting from my ministry. And it's the
same way when we disciple. It's just because, you know,
I'm a Christian, that doesn't mean every Christian has to be
able to learn from me or I have to be able to teach them. I just
trust the Lord will provide enough for what I can do to try to pour
myself into them. So I'm just looking for those
people who are available. So very practically for me, when
I'm standing at the door at the back on Sundays after preaching,
I will probably say to 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 people, hey, call me
up sometime. We'll have coffee or get lunch.
Almost never does anybody do that. You know, maybe one out
of every two weeks worth of people. And that's going to be the subgroup
out of which we'll develop some continuing ongoing relationships.
So I look for those people who are willing to, when I take a
little bit of initiative, they're willing to pick that up. That's
going to be a self-selecting group. So I think that's one thing that's
helpful. Well, you men are mentors to so many of us, and we're grateful
for that. Let's conclude with a quick lightning
round-slash-acknowledgement. What have you learned about the
church from someone on this panel? Well, I'll start with the obvious.
John's preaching the Word expositionally for 50 years is a huge encouragement
to me. Because my congregation will
probably do something sweet, I don't know, but you know, I've
got 25 years coming up next year. And I'm just thinking, like,
that's half of what John has done. Like, I could do that again,
and it would be... Now, you know, the Lord calls
people to different times and different places, and that's
fine. But it's really, brother, it's just a huge encouragement.
And I've had the privilege sitting here on a number of Sunday mornings
hearing you preach just your regular expositions, and it is
such an encouragement to watch your confidence, your joy, and
people being fed and growing from it. So that's an obvious
thing to say that I'm sure we would all agree with. So thank
you, brother. We all said, that is the necessary thing to
say. And so I'll say what I said to someone just an hour ago.
Before I ever knew I would ever know John MacArthur, he was teaching
me how to preach the scriptures when I was a skinny 16-year-old
across a continent, and I heard him by cassette tape. And so,
I mean, that's the one necessary thing that has to be said. The
other necessary thing I want to say is of the friend to my
right and the friend to my left, that we've been friends in the
gospel for each other, so close for so long, I no longer know
who I am without either of them. And I pray that for you in ministry. You need friends with whom you
can be, by God's grace, faithful together over time, such that
I really can't tell you exactly what either one of them has contributed
in my life other than so much I can't catalog. Your thinking
begins to be so mutually dependent and your encouragement for each
other and from one another is so pervasive that I wouldn't do anything important
in life nor would I think through any big question without talking
to Mark and Lake. It wouldn't happen. What exactly they contributed,
you be the judge. But I will say, when I talk to
young pastors and I say, please, please, please develop friendships
that you intend to maintain through life in ministry, in the gospel,
in the preaching of the word, in the service to Christ, I desperately
make that plea. You need someone who will not
be offended to hear from you at three in the morning. And
you need someone who will drop everything and come to you if
you need it. And you need someone with whom
you don't have to begin a conversation. Every conversation is picking
up on just where you left off last time. Quick example, I was
early in ministry at CHBC. I had a really kind of weird
job ministry opportunity. I called Al about it. I think
I was a little bit excited and really uncertain what to do.
Al lovingly, quickly thumped it. And he was right. You want friends like that. You know, I'm around a lot of
Presbyterian students that are excited about a theoretical high
ecclesiology. And I always say, if you want
to see a high ecclesiology, go to Capitol Hill Baptist Church.
That's where you'll see high ecclesiology. And so, it's just
wonderful see a brother that has tried to work out the Bible's
truth into the way a congregation lives together. And knowing Mark
and Al, it's like knowing Great Heart, an evangelist from Pilgrim's
Progress. Dr. MacArthur, the final word
is yours. Yeah, everything these guys have said that I've heard,
everything they've written that I've read, every time I'm with
them, my life is enriched. That's not quantifiable. That
doesn't come in measurable bits or gigabytes or any other thing.
I am what I am because of these men and the other people that
God has put in my life. I mean, I'm as much a Presbyterian
as I'll ever be. because of Ligon Duncan and Sinclair
Ferguson and R.C. Sproul. And I... That's just
because they're so nice. It's not their theology. No.
Because they're so nice. It's their godliness. Yes, yes. Right, okay. No, no, don't worry,
Mark. I'm not going there. I'm not
going there. But I'm only trying to make a
point that we are, I don't know, like Al said, we are what we
are because of these relationships. They're not quantifiable. There's
something in my heart jumps when I know you're going to be here
and when I'm going to be with you. To preach in Capitol, several
times that I've preached there have been highlights in my life
because it tells me that you trust me with your people and
I know how you feel about your church. You don't put it in the
hands of anybody, just anybody. I'm honored by that, even if
I have to sit in the upper room for two hours after Sunday night. We'll talk about that later.
That's an inside story. But it's a wonderful, delightful
thing to do because it's part of how he trains his men. Yeah,
every time I'm with these men, I am enriched. It's just another
deposit by the Spirit of God through them in my life. Christ
comes to me through you. We're so grateful for you men,
for your ministries, for your influence. On behalf of all of
these guys in attendance, thank you for spending this hour with
us talking through these things.