Well, gentlemen, welcome to the
Friday afternoon. Yes, that's right, the Shepherds
Conference is drawing to a close. And in just a few days, you'll
be back in your churches. Hopefully, as Dr. MacArthur said,
when we opened, more encouraged, more refreshed, and that's definitely
due to the work the Lord has done through you men and the
other speakers. Thank you on behalf of all of
us for preaching the word of God to us. The sermons have been pristine,
like alabaster. You've amplified the Word of
God to us. Dr. MacArthur, you are complimenting
what you heard this week. I think it would be helpful for
the men to listen to you critique their sermons a little bit. Sure. No, I mean, this is how
you preach. That's how you preach. Take the
Word of God. You make it live. You put it in its context. You
set the scene historically. You set the scene spiritually.
You set the scene for application. You go into the text. You draw
what's out of the text. You enrich it from other texts.
That's how you preach. You've seen it. Tom Pennington
did it this morning, Matthew 23, Steve Lawson yesterday at
2, Nathan in 2 Timothy, that's preaching, preaching the Word
of God. Great. JOHN. So the power of the Word
of God has been demonstrated. These men affirm that this is
their ministry. Dr. MacArthur, you opened us
talking about the pastor as a theologian. How in your men's estimation
could we? Stay attuned theologically. How
could we improve theologically? How could we always be growing?
There's so many changes in academia with theological issues that
are at the forefront. How much of that is worth noticing?
What does the pastor as theologian look like in a practical way?
Dr. Duncan, why don't you start and
we'll move down. Dr. Duncan Well, the first thing is a pastor needs
to always be a learner. You know, you don't finish your
preparation for the ministry when you graduate from master's
or from Southern Seminary or RTS or some other Bible-based
preparation program for ministry. That's preparing you to learn
for the rest of your life. So, you're committing yourself
when you go into the pastoral ministry to be a lifelong learner.
And part of that, especially if you are a preacher of the
text, which you should be, it will be always good for you to
be studying the Bible topically as well as expositionally. I know that as a professor in
a seminary, I found it because I was having to teach topically
as a professor of systematic theology. When I went into the
pastorate out of seminary, I found it both delightful and challenging
to have my main reading that week be in commentaries in preparing
to preach a particular text. Then, as a pastor, I found it
harder to get back into more topically-oriented material,
but good for me. So I think it's important for
pastors who are thinking expositionally each week. I mean, if you're
like me, I'm thinking about that text weeks ahead, and then especially
in that week before I preach it. But I don't want to do that
to the exclusion of all of the connections that are there. You
just heard Dr. MacArthur say that bringing out
the connections with other texts is one of the key. What's one
of the keys to preaching? Well, that's one of the keys
to systematic theology because it's all about connections. It's
not only what the Bible says about a particular topic, But
how that topic relates to other topics the Bible talks about.
So, I would encourage pastors, for one, always be reading good,
biblical, faithful, orthodox, systematic theology. Just pick
something. Read Bobinck, read Calvin, read
Burkoff. It's not always the most scintillating
material. I'm serious. It's not always
the most scintillating material, but it is fruitful for connections. You know, a preaching commentary
will be more immediately edifying, but the fruits that will be yielded
from reading good systematic theology will enrich your preaching
in a profound way. Dr. Mohler? Yeah, you know, I
hear sometimes pastors say, well, I'm not a theologian, but...
But if you're not a theologian, you're not really a pastor. And
the truth is that the pastor is the only theologian most believers
in the Lord Jesus Christ will ever know. So if you're not a
theologian, they don't have one. And that means you're not fulfilling
the role of a pastor. Now, that doesn't mean that you
have to have a doctorate in systematic theology. It does mean that you
have to operate as a theologian. You have to think as a theologian.
You have to teach and preach as a theologian. Now, there are
different branches of theology, and I think the most neglected
when it comes to the pastorate is biblical theology. So, I want
to affirm everything Ligon just said. And by the way, one concrete
way to help to do that is to actually teach systematic theology.
And while you're panicking, let me tell you that some of the
most godly pastors I know will take a group of laymen, and they
will read through a systematic theology together, and he will
teach it to his laymen. And guess what? They're all staying
pretty current. And he has some really committed lay people who understand
theology. But that biblical theology is
what one builds and weaves together in the very experience of being
a pastor and preaching texts, text after text after text. How
does this relate to other texts? How does this relate to the big
theological questions? There isn't a text in Scripture that
doesn't lead you directly into huge theological issues because
God's the author of the text. So it's all theological, but
helping your people to connect the dots as a theologian is really
important, helping them to think theologically, because that's
the key to Christian faithfulness in the intellectual realm. And
as the Scripture makes clear, if we're not faithful in our
thought life, we won't be faithful in any other dimension of our
life. It's helping them to ask the question, well, if God is
God, And if he has revealed to us all he's given us in Scripture,
then how we read the headlines, how we think about everyday life,
how we raise our children, how we understand marriage, how we
understand the day, how we talk to someone in terms of the gospel,
how we talk to someone in terms of anything, the starting point
has to be Scripture, and then you're going to be functioning
as a theologian. Just make sure you're functioning
as a faithful one. That's key. Well, I certainly
agree with all that. I think it needs to be said just
for clarity, there's no difference in the truth yielded by biblical
theology and systematic theology. That's just two approaches. You
cannot be a systematic theologian until you've drawn the theology
out of the text. And that's how I backed into
becoming a theologian by just relentlessly day after day, week
after week, month after month. studying the text, and always
looking for how the text in all the truth that was in it connected
with everything else. And so you see the truth here,
you see it here, you see it there, and you start connecting the
dots. And eventually, if you're faithful in the diligent study
of those things, even to the degree that you're going far
beyond what you will preach. But you're enriching your own
soul. You will develop not only a biblical theology, but you'll
develop a systematic theology, because whatever the system is,
it has to be the fruit of what the Bible yields. Just to add
to what Al said, I came to Grace Church in 1969, and the pastor
prior to me, the two pastors had a theology. I wasn't sure what it was, and
neither was anybody else. So there was a lot of ground to cover.
I wanted to exposit the Scripture, but I knew we couldn't wait for
decades until we put our theology together. So the first thing
I did every Saturday morning for eight years, I pulled all
the men in the church who wanted to be a part of it together,
and I took them through systematic theology. It started with prolegomena,
theology proper. We went through all the categories
of systematic theology. Far afield from anything they
had ever conceived of. Now remember, way back then,
there was no Reformed movement. There was no particular interest
in theology. This would have been typical
Baptistic preaching in 1960, so you know what that would be
like. So, I knew they had to get it. They had to categorically
get it sooner than they would get it if I just drug it out
over the years. I honestly said, and somebody
said that this morning, I didn't feel like our leaders understood
what was going on doctrinally until about the year seven or
eight, because we were trying to undo so much. Just on a personal
level, adding for just a moment to that. Obviously, I've spent
all this time studying the text. In the early years of my study,
the commentator who was most helpful to me was William Hendrickson,
and the reason I say that is because he was such a clear-headed
theologian, right? Such a clear-headed theologian.
I mean, I could tolerate Linsky, but I didn't need the sacramentalism,
right? But Hendrickson, even though
we didn't necessarily agree on all the issues, he was theological
to the bone, and all of that. I used to say I read commentaries
to understand how theologians defend themselves in the text.
So, the two things that I've done through the years, expository
preaching, reading commentaries, and all through that whole era
of my life, reading theology. If I come across redemption,
the commentator's going to tell me something about it, give me
a few cross-references, but I'm not going to understand the depth
of redemption unless I grab a theology and start reading categorically.
So that's what I've done through all these years is read the text,
read commentaries on the text, and read related theological
themes so that I enrich my understanding, because at the end of the day,
Theology is just truth propositionally stated. Is that fair? Truth propositionally
stated that then becomes the basis of your belief. It's a
fixed, it's a comprehensible thing that I believe that becomes
a conviction, and that's the skeletal, that's the structure
for my life. In the last few weeks, several,
two in particular, theologians, one systematic, one very practical,
were promoted to heaven, Charles Ryrie and Jerry Bridges. And I know that both those men
influenced lots of men in this room. Talk about in the spirit
of Hebrews 13, 7, remember those who spoke the Word of God to
you. Who those theologians were that influenced you in those
years where you were growing theologically, developing theologically,
being formed theologically? Who are your big influences?
Just to give the men maybe some avenues where they can access.
You've mentioned some of those men. Let's talk about your most
profound influences. Because you mentioned Charles
Ryrie. Many years ago before Dallas Seminary knew what I believed
about Lordship salvation, I was invited there to lecture
for a week, and Dwayne Litvin was the preaching prof at that
time before he left to go to Nashville and then over to Wheaton.
Anyway, I came there. The kindest man I met in the
entire week I was there was Charles Ryrie. The first day I met him
and he said to me, John, do you have a car?" I said, no, I don't
have a car. I just kind of flew in. I'm staying
here at the school. He said, well, here's the keys
to my car. He gave me his Ford Pinto for
the week. This was Charles Ryrie. Twice
that week he had me at home in his house. His wife prepared
a meal. We sat down at his own table. After I gave the opening
message that week on Colossians chapter 1, where I was kind of
building around, Paul said, I was made a minister. He pulled me
aside and he said, you know, you showed me things in the text
today that I had never seen. Thank you. That was Charles Ryrie. Just a tender-hearted, compassionate
guy. He had some heartbreak toward
the end of his life with his kids and even in his own marriage
situation. I never knew a sweeter man. When
I wrote the gospel according to Jesus, we met because he wanted
to talk about it, and he wanted to be sure. that our friendship
wasn't diminished in any way by the fact that I didn't accept
it. We had a very private talk about
just exactly, Charles, what do you really believe? Do you believe
everything in Zane Hodge's book? I remember his answer was, no, but you know, there was really
nobody on his side. He is such a good friend. He
believed some of the things in that book, admittedly, but that
was Charles Ryrie, just a very kind guy. He easily deferred
to people. The Ryrie Study Bible was a product
of his students. His students wrote the notes,
and he worked those notes over. He was a very gracious, expansive
man, and he became a really good friend for two people on as extreme
opposite sides of an absolutely vital issue as we were on that
issue. Every time I met with him after
that, he wrote even a book in answer to the book that I wrote,
The Gospel According to Jesus. He was called So Great Salvation. So, we remained friends, and
I have great love and respect for him. I remember he told me
one day, I said, where did Hodges come up with this idea that you
could be an unbelieving believer, which is what he called it? He
said, well, he had a friend that he discipled for years, and the
guy had an accident and died in a condition of defecting from
the faith, and that was such a heartbreak. He said, I think
he tried to accommodate him with the theology. We had those kinds
of intimate discussions about it. So Charles Ryrie, special
place in my heart. Just a note about Jerry Bridges.
I remember the last time I was with Jerry Bridges, he said to
me, he said, John, he said, the only books published by navigators
that I would read are mine. There you have it. Dr. Mohler? Well, I was sinking
deep in sin, far from the fearful shore. Every systematic theology
I read as an MDiv student was horrifying. Every single one. I was given all these liberal
systematic theologies, and frankly, At their best, they were neither
systematic nor theological, but nonetheless, that's how they
were presented. So, I'm reading Pannenberg and
you name it, just all the way down the list, and I'm despairing. And in a used Christian bookstore,
I bought a copy of Louis Burkhoff's Systematic Theology, and it was
like all of a sudden I have landed on an island after drowning in
the sea. So, if I have to speak of my
indebtedness, I have to go to a man I never had the opportunity
to meet, but I'm looking forward to meeting in heaven, who did theology as
a believer, and who, as I now know, was distilling not only
the grand Christian tradition, but in particular, the Reformed
tradition, into a systematic theology that, you know, to use
Ligon's phrase, it's not always scintillating, but I was grabbing
a hold of every sentence for dear life. And I still think
most of my theological categories, truth be known, come from Louis
Burkhoff and from the thinking that happened in me as I had
the Bible open and Burkhoff and a Latin dictionary in order to
try to understand exactly what was going on here. And I think
probably more than anything else, that made me a systematic theologian. And since then, I've read many
fine systematic theologies, none of them perfect. Nor will there
be one till Jesus comes. But I just have to go...I could
talk about this far too long, but I will simply say that almost
every systematic theology I read for many years was horrifying. led me or would have led me away
from the truth, and I despaired that systematic theology could
actually be helpful to the church until I read Berkhoff, and then
after that, thankfully, a succession of others. But we also need to
recognize that many of the most important systematic theologies
written by evangelicals have only been written and probably
historically could only have been written in the last 50 or
60 years. And that is because we went through
a desert in which no systematic theology work was being done
amongst evangelicals. So even someone like Carl Henry,
who is in so many ways my mentor, never wrote a systematic theology,
never actually intended to write a systematic theology, because
he was writing in the necessity of defending the doctrine of
revelation, propositional truth, the very idea that theology could
be done. And so, in one sense, it's because
many warriors went before us and fought the battle before
us that now we are reaping a harvest of good, truly evangelical scholarship
and theology now that previous generations didn't know. Al,
can I ask you a question? Yes, sir. There was a little
abstract of Birkhoff. Is that still available? Do you
know? And in the latest edition of Birkhoff, it's in the beginning.
It's actually all in one volume. Really helpful. You got little
Berkhoff and big Berkhoff in one even bigger book. Yeah, there
are actually three. There was a middle-sized one
called The Manual of Christian Doctrine, and then there was
a little small one called A Summary of Christian Doctrine, and then
the Prolegomena section has been folded into the new edition with
an introduction by Richard Muller. So if you don't have Berkhoff,
and I agree exactly with what Al said, that's the addition
you want to get with the introduction to systematic theology, which
covers Scripture and those sort of prolegomenous issues to theology. That's an outstanding volume,
and his historical judgments are amazing. You know, since
he wrote it, we've had 70 really good years of study of historical
theology. I still go back to, you know,
you're looking at the doctrine of man or the doctrine of sin,
and he will summarize for you in two pages the progress of
the entire Christian church in the formulation of that doctrine.
And it is amazing how even 70 years ago, without the advantages
that we've had of deep evangelical study of these things, his estimations
are still incredibly accurate and insightful in bringing you
up to speed on what the Christian church has learned from the Bible
about that doctrine over the years of our study. So, I totally
agree with that suggestion. There are a few things that sit
behind my desk all the time. They're just a few books. And
Berkhoff's systematic theology is always in very easy reach
and it ought to be there. Absolutely. I'll give testimony
to some living theologians that I've had the privilege of benefiting
from, Dr. Robert L. Raymond was my professor of systematic
theology at Covenant Seminary. And one of the things that I
loved about Dr. Raymond is he was radically rooted
in the text. There was no abstract historical
approach. to doctrine. It was all drawn
out of the text. He was a wonderful exegete and
pastoral in the way he approached things. Palmer Robertson taught
me Old Testament biblical theology, and to amen the emphasis that
you've said about biblical theology, he's the one that got me excited
about biblical theology. and seeing how the whole story
of the Bible holds together, and that's so important for preachers. David Calhoun taught me church
history and historical theology, and David was just remarkable. He's written so many good things. You may have seen his wonderful
two-volume history of Old Princeton Seminary from 1812 to 1929, just
a tremendous work that the Banner of Truth has put into print. And to all
three of those men in seminary, I owe an enormous debt for their
formation of my ability to do theology as a pastor and as a
teacher. And then when I was in Scotland, while I was pursuing my PhD work,
I went and I essentially sat through the entire church history
and systematic theology curriculum of an MDiv again at what was
then called the Free Church of Scotland College. It's now called
Edinburgh Theological Seminary. And the professor of theology
there at that time was Donald MacLeod who was probably the
most prominent evangelical theologian in Scotland. Most of his career
had been spent in debate with Bardians. And Bardian theology,
already in the 1980s, was proving very attractive to many evangelicals. And so, to be able to have the
benefit of his long insight into and interaction with the Scottish
Bardians, like the Torrance brothers and such, was profoundly helpful
to me. So, all four of those living
people have been a great help to me. While theology is practical
and maybe you could help us think practically about theology when
it relates to the cultural shifts we've seen in the last few years.
Things like same-sex marriage, the implications on churches,
on seminaries, it's a rare opportunity we have to talk to three. seminary
presidents and three men with deep pastoral experience and
love for the church that theologically help us to think about how to
interact with this culture as the norms, the morals and ethics
of this age have become so flipped so quickly. James Orr was a theologian in
the U.K. in the last part of the nineteenth
century. He wrote a book, A Christian Understanding of God and Things,
and it was a Christian worldview. an attempt to explicate a Christian
worldview, before anyone used that terminology, you know, the
Veltalschung, bringing over from the Germans. That's when you
say, excuse me, or God bless you, but nonetheless. Orr said, look, and he was watching
the modern world come together. He said, between Christianity
and the modern world, there is a deep and radical antagonism. It's not a slight conflict. Our
worldview, compared with the secular worldview around us,
is not different. It's the opposite. And it gets
back to theology. Everything begins with whether
or not your worldview starts with, in the beginning, God created
the heavens and the earth. B.B. Warfield famously said,
if it's true that in the beginning God created the heavens and the
earth, then He sovereignly is over all things, He controls
over all things, He defines all things, and you can never make
reference to anything without God if that sentence be true. Now, fast forward to the 20th
century, Cornelius Van Til, said that one does not really understand
the thesis unless one is clear about the antithesis. And that's
absolutely true. And now you see it. So when you're
talking to somebody and they're not a Christian, or they're not
a biblical Christian truly following Christ, and they don't operate
of a biblical worldview, and you just drop words now, not
just like marriage, just try dropping a word like male or
female. And you see that radical antagonism
between Christianity and the modern world. You see that, the
necessity of thesis and antithesis, because you're not talking about
people, and this is what's different. Here's the great culture shift.
The culture shift is that most people in the United States continued
to operate out of the residue of a Christian worldview long
after they had abandoned a living faith in the Lord Jesus Christ.
So, around us, most people, at least in the United States, and
especially more rural, more in the Bible Belt, They were operating
out of a conventional morality and a conventional way of looking
at the world that only makes sense if Christianity is true.
They no longer believed Christianity is true, and so when these issues
came to a cultural crisis, well, they're not with the thesis,
they're with the antithesis. So just to explain this theologically,
we're dealing with that deep and radical antagonism in a way
that now shows up in every PTA meeting, it shows up in every
neighborhood barbecue, it shows up in every headline of every
newspaper every day, and it just might show up in your church.
And that's when we're gonna find out if you're a theologian and
if you're a pastor. because it just might show up
amongst people. I mentioned this just the other
day. This is the most chilling thing I've heard in a very long
time. I was talking to a man and his wife, and they were explaining
to me why they'd made a radical change in the education of their
children just in the last few days. And it is because they
were at dinner. And their 10-year-old son heard
the mother and father talking about issues related to a headline
event with the LGBT complex of issues. And the 10-year-old son
said, that's hate speech, dad. Wow. 10-year-old boy raised in
a Christian family, raised with all kinds of wonderful Christian
influences. I won't do the whole autopsy on what had taken place,
but just in the last few days, he had had his worldview reset
by the antithesis. in a way that his parents didn't
even recognize. So this is what's going to take due diligence on
the part of the preacher. I think Paul would put it, preaching
in season and out of season. And we've got to recognize this
is not a time in which we can afford the illusion of neutrality. It's the thesis or the antithesis
every second of our lives till Jesus comes. Let me add, just
in the last couple of days, I put together a little book called
Being a Dad Who Leads. Publisher says we're going to
have to change the title. Too much pushback from Christian
bookstores on Being a Dad Who Leads. Oh
my goodness. So you talk about thesis and
antithesis. This is Hegelian. You know, that's
what we're going to wind up with if we don't hold the line. JOHNSON
Being a parent who suggests. LARSON Yeah. You've got to get the authority
out and you've got to get the gender out. We're looking at not only seminary
presidents and pastors, we're looking at grandfathers in here
and you're thinking about the next generation when you're talking
about this. We're thinking about how do we stand propositionally
about what the Bible says about homosexuality in our churches
and yet still extend compassion to those in our church who such
were some of you. who come from this worldview,
come from this lifestyle, maybe still struggle with these desires. Help us minister to the people
that come to our churches, both visitors and members of our churches. How can we stand strong and speak
the truth to these people and extend compassion to them in
this coming age and for generations to come as kids think completely
differently? Can I say one thing about that?
And that is chances are if you encounter a same-sex attracted
individual in your congregations, they're there not in spite of
what you teach about the Bible and marriage and sexuality, but
because of what you're teaching. In my congregation, the same-sex
attracted people, were there because they wanted a place that
would be faithful to the Bible because they did not want to
follow out those desires in an unbiblical way. And so they were
not looking for a church or a pastor that would soft-pedal the Bible's
teaching. but would teach the truth firmly,
certainly in love, but firmly. They wanted certainty in that
area. And chances are, the same-sex
attracted people who will identify themselves to you in your congregation
will be people who want you to be faithful. So be encouraged
because the world's telling you. that if you don't give in on
this issue, you will be understood as a person that's speaking hate
speech. But there are thousands and thousands
and thousands of people that are looking for help, and the
help that they're looking for is clarity and fidelity on this. Please, nobody else out there
is telling you that. But I'm telling you that as a
pastor, and I'm sure that John has had that experience, I'm
sure that Al has had that experience. I have people who...I was stunned,
in fact, that they would be willing to bring me into their private
world and tell me what their particular struggles with sins
were there, but they said, I knew that I could trust you, pastor.
Because though I knew where you stood on this issue biblically,
I knew that you would love me and you would understand the
struggle and I knew you would help me in it. And so, don't
think that they're not those kinds of folks already. If you've
got a congregation of 100, you've probably got four or five. that
are wrestling with that issue in some measure, certainly in
their families. And so, your faithfulness will be one of the
big ways that you minister to them. So, the world won't tell
you that, but I'm telling you that now. Dr. Duncan, that's
really helpful. Dr. Mohler, Dr. MacArthur, both
of you have talked about this on national television with homosexuals
in the studio with you talking about this issue. John, I know
you had a really interesting interaction on Larry King once
with a young man. Why don't you talk about how
you've tried to speak about this publicly? Just backing up on
that, I just looked up Psalm 107. I remember preaching a message
here on a Sunday, and the message stuck in my mind. But what I
didn't look back to think about was that I had read Psalm 107. There were those who dwelled
in darkness in the shadow of death, prisoners in misery and
chains, because they had rebelled against the Word of the Lord
and spurned the counsel of the Most High. He humbled their heart
with labor. They stumbled. There was none
to help. They cried out to the Lord in their trouble. He saved
them out of their distresses. He brought them out of darkness,
the shadow of death, and broke their bands apart. Let them give
thanks to the Lord for His lovingkindness." It even says in that chapter
that He showed them a straight way. I got over to the prayer
room, and there was a guy in tears named Robert Lagerstrom
that I had never met who was one of the leaders of the LA
Gay Pride Parade who was dying of AIDS, and he asked somebody,
I'm afraid to die. Do you know where I should go?
They said, go to Grace Church. This was a homosexual, he asked.
He was baptized right where you're sitting. and confessed Christ
and witnessed to everybody in his hospital. And he said to
me, he said, you read that scripture and all I could think of is I
want to be free, I want to be free. And then he said, you got
up and you just kept talking and talking and talking and talking. And he said, I heard not a word
you said. All I could think about was I
could be set free. And he came, and I baptized him,
and I was with him in the hospital as he was dying. There is in this community of
homosexuality in LA a knowledge of this church that supports
exactly what you've said, and our church has such were some
of you in its congregation. They come because they want deliverance,
because they want help. I've visited many guys dying
of AIDS in the hospital, former Bible college students who followed
that path who knew they'd devastated their parents and now on the
brink of death with fear and had the privilege of seeing them
come to Christ. Yeah, if you coddle that. You have abandoned your calling
and you are no longer the place that God wants you to be. Ligon,
that's such a very, very significant point. LIGONS You mentioned being
a grandfather? My father died suddenly of an
aneurysm in 2013. And our first grandchild, Benjamin,
only grandchild at this point, four months old, was born in
November of 2015. So in the period of just a little
over a year, I went from being a son to being a grandfather.
And it feels, Austin, like all of a sudden you understand the
patriarchs, because I knew in advance how much I cared for
my grandchildren before they came, but not really. And now
I think of life in very different terms. My godly father is now
with Jesus, and now I've got a grandson four months old. What
world is he going to inherit? Let me tell you, it makes me
far more committed as a seminary president, even than ever before,
because I want to make sure he's got gospel, Bible-believing preachers
in his life. And that's not going to happen
unless we're faithful now. I appreciate so much what Ligon
and John have said about this. I just dedicated so much of my
life to this. I mean, I just published a major
book on this in November trying to deal specifically with some
of these questions, so I'm not going to take time to try to
walk through the questions. Now, I simply want to piggyback on
what Ligon and John have said, and it comes down to this. We
have to be ruthlessly, rigorously, redemptively biblical on the
LGBT issues. We've got to be constantly, consistently,
courageously clear on these issues. In my breakout session yesterday,
I cited J.I. Packer's article, Why I Walked,
why he left the Anglican Church in Canada. And that's in the
background to the dividing line when we separate from ministries.
And I talked about the division between Martin Lloyd-Jones and
J.I. Packer. In the 1960s in the 1970s and
thereafter and so it makes it all the more remarkable that
J.I. Packer finally did leave He left the Anglican Church of
Canada over this question and when he answered the question
why I walked Why he turned in his ordination in the Anglican
Church in Canada walked out with others He said it was because
that church's false teaching on homosexuality was defying
scripture defying the authority of God And then he said putting
the eternal salvation of so many at risk by lying to them about
their need for Jesus That's what's at stake, and I appreciated his
clarity at that point in his life where he said it comes down
to misleading people, putting their eternal salvation at risk
by lying to them, which is what exactly Paul makes clear in 1
Corinthians chapter 5 and especially in chapter 6. But here's the
other side of that. And here's where today I'm gonna
speak to this a little differently than I might have just a few
months ago because of several conversations and just observations
I've had to make. Guys, we've got to be ruthlessly,
rigorously, consistently, courageously, truth-telling, Bible-defending,
clear on the LGBT issues. But if that's where we start
being rigorously Christian, if that's where we start being courageously
convictional, then we've got a big problem. 1 Corinthians
6 does not say, listing only homosexual same-sex issues, and
such are some of you. It mentions drunkards. It mentions
all kinds of things. You can follow the swindlers,
and not to mention Romans 1. We're all on that list. We've
got to be relentlessly biblical, courageously convictional on
everything the Scripture teaches, We've got to deal with sin in
every dimension in which the Bible reveals it. We've got to
talk about our sins if we're going to have credibility talking
about someone else's sins. And when we talk about so great
a salvation, it's not that it's so remarkable that people with
same-sex attractions can be saved, it's because only the grace and
mercy of God explains how any one of us, disobedient to parents,
Someone who merely was involved in gossip, according to Paul
in Romans 1, the fact that any sinner is saved from his sin,
from her sin, is a miracle of God. And the church must, in
its discipline and in its teaching, apply the whole counsel of God
to all of us all the time. Only then will we have the necessary
credibility to speak to these issues. Dr. MacArthur, that was
your rationale. I was asked, Banner put out a
really interesting book, A Sad Departure, and it's an account
of some guys that recently left the Church of Scotland. I had
the opportunity to be given it in the pre-publication form and
to read through it, and I had the same reaction that you did,
maybe on a little different angle. I'm glad that homosexuality made
them leave the church of Scotland, but what about the deity of Christ?
What about the authority of Scripture? What about everything else? It
just seemed to me that this elevates the...this elevates This elevates
our moral concerns without considering our theological concerns. All
of a sudden, you're going to leave over homosexuality, but
when the authority of Scripture was assaulted, you stayed? So, anyway, that… SPROUL JR.:
: That's where Martin Lloyd-Jones was saying in the 1960s, I won't
do my breakout session again, where he was saying, you know,
you've got atheist bishops. You know, you've got open heretics,
but it is nonetheless interesting that you get to this point all
of a sudden, and there are all kinds of reasons why, but…and
by the way, that book, A Sad Departure, should be necessary
reading for every pastor. Let's just do an advertisement
for Better Truths. Get that book, A Sad Departure. It's really important. And they
just sold out, just so you know. I need to say one other thing,
and again, I don't know why I thought this way, but when I first came
to grace in my 20s, and for some reason I believed somehow the
Lord had delivered to my heart and mind a high view of Scripture.
And I believe that my primary responsibility as a pastor was
to bring the people under the authority of Scripture comprehensively
so that whatever Scripture said, they bowed. so that I wasn't
trying to convince them rationally about things and with illustrations
and whatever. I just wanted the Word of God
to speak with such power and clarity that they would just
automatically be drawn in under its authority and power, and
then whatever you said, they would respond to. I remember
I started a series back in the late 80s on the role of the man
and the woman. right here in this pulpit, and
the L.A. Times had an article on the front
page about a chauvinist is unleashed in the San Fernando Valley, and
it was crazy stuff. about that I was attacking women.
The feminist movement, it was pretty new at that time. This
church, people started pouring into this church. The latest
visitors ended up in the choir loft. We had the choir go out,
and so all the people who resented most what I was saying were sitting
behind me on Sunday morning making faces. and ABC, NBC, CBS, all
on the patio. They're interviewing women. Why
do you come? Why do you listen to this guy? And they get me
on the news, the local news, media, television. So I'm talking
25, 30 years ago they were intolerant of saying that a wife should
be a keeper at home, a lover of her husband, and a lover of
children. It exploded in the city of Los Angeles. I ended
up being on the nightly news on several local network affiliates
trying to defend that. So this is new. But the one question
that I remembered most dramatically was I think it was actually Tom
Brokaw when he was NBC out here, said to me, these women in your
church seem intelligent. How do you get them to believe
this? And I said, because they believe this. wherever it speaks,
they're happy to respond. I mean, that's what happens if
you're a biblical preacher and if you draw your theology out
of the Word of God. The primary reality in theology
is God is and God has spoken. And that's why you men have invested
your lives into the church and into these institutions to train
pastors. So let's talk a little bit about
the future of theological education. What's the horizons look like?
How can, to be practical, how can we pray for your seminaries? Well, I mean, you know, first
of all, it's very important that we do a good job of theological
education right now for the reasons that Al and John have already
mentioned, and it's not just for our grandchildren. The fact
of the matter is pastors today need to know more, not less.
And there are tremendous forces, economic and otherwise, in our
culture pressuring the training centers for ministry to lower
the standards that are involved in preparation for pastoral ministry.
And if we do that, we are not serving the future pastors of
the churches. We're not serving the churches. We're actually
undermining the call that God has given in His Word in places
like 1 Timothy, Chapter 3 where he spells out the qualifications
for the one thing that he says that ministers have to be is
apt to teach. And if we shortchange the preparation
for ministers in that area, we're undermining the one competency
they're required to have. And so, I think it's pray for
institutions, you always need to pray. that seminaries and
training schools would stay faithful to the supreme authority of the
Word of God. You know, here are three leaders of three institutions
all unwaveringly committed to biblical inerrancy. We are in
the minority in the evangelical world on that. Please understand
that. There are a lot of schools that
waive inerrancy and do not believe it. We believe it, every word,
but that's vitally important. Pray for institutions to stay
faithful to the inerrancy, authority, and fallibility of Scripture.
And then the next thing is to have institutions that are committed
to sound biblical confessional theology. I think it is good
for an institution to teach from a consistent confessional basis. It helps everybody. Even if you
have differences here or there, the clarity that that brings,
it's just like you were talking about with Berkhoff. You don't
agree with Berkhoff at every point, but he's clear and you
know where you do. And it helps all of us and you
know where he's wrong. And I think that's the case in
a theological seminary. You have so many places where
there is such a diversity of theological standpoints represented
in the faculty. that you come out confused, and
that is the last thing that a minister of the gospel needs to be theologically.
You need to come out clearer than when you went in with convictions
that you're able to convey in understandable ways to your people. So, pray that we're faithful
to the theological confessions to which we subscribe, and that
we're faithful to the inerrancy of Scripture, and that we teach
from that standpoint, and that we don't lower standards. How can we pray for Southern
Seminary and what you see on the theological training horizon?
I'm quite confident that all three of us as seminary presidents
will say we all need all the prayers that have been mentioned
for everybody else. So let's put them all together and pray
for all three of us in that way. I'm so thankful, by the way,
to be sitting here on a platform with two seminary president colleagues.
to whom I wouldn't trust anything. In other words, you just have
no idea how lonely this job can be, given our confessional, theologically
defined understanding of theological education, such to the extent
that I wouldn't do it any other way. In other words, I would
simply, I'd go do something else. This is the only way I believe
theological education can be done. So, I'm going to shift
gears just a little bit and say that here's one of my concerns,
and I didn't premeditate talking about this, but Austin, since
you asked, I'm going to tell you. The residential sitting in a
classroom with a professor model of theological education is far
more important than a lot of evangelicals think. Many of them
will say they're just in too much of a hurry for something
like that, or that that's just too intensive, it's just too
demanding. Let me tell you what's going
to happen. If we have the shortchanging of theological education amongst
Bible-believing evangelicals, we're going to end up with people
who are going to have to fight every single war we fought all over
again. We're going to have to have another Reformation. And
Lord knows, in institutional Christianity, that's true. But
in your churches, that's going to be necessary if you don't
ground the preacher, the pastor, in far more than he knows he
needs to know, and far more than some of your churches thinks
he needs to know. He's got to be far more grounded. When you consider the challenges
coming to us now, Pastors don't need to know less now than they
did 30 years ago. For crying out loud, they better
know a whole lot more. They don't need less conviction
and less biblical knowledge. And furthermore, they're coming
to us knowing less. No insult to seminary students, but they
are coming to us knowing a lot less. I not only went to vacation
Bible school every year, I grew up a Southern Baptist, I went
to everybody else's vacation Bible school. You know, I mean, I just can't
imagine, but the students I know today, and it's not their fault.
It's not their fault, they're the victims of a superficial
evangelical culture that just didn't teach them much before
they arrived to us. And God bless them, I love them,
I'm committing my life to them, but they need more, not less. The other thing is we are right
now at the precipice, we know this, let's just look each other
in the eye and say this, we're on the precipice of a chasm. Do you really have a firm, picture
in your mind of what your church is going to look like in 10 years? How many of your church members
are going to stay with you when being a member of your church
means they will lose their job? How many folks are going to be
with you when they're not going to make partner in the law firm
simply because they're a member in your church or an elder in
your church, it just becomes incomprehensible. They're coming
for you, friends. we got to raise up an army ready
for that kind of challenge. So pray that we'll have students,
and not only that, students really aren't the problem, it's sending
churches who understand how much students need and say, I want
that young preacher to get all of it, everything he can possibly
need in order to get him started on learning ever more for the
rest of his life. But theological education is not something you
can tear up in a packet and just add water. You want to see what
that looks like, just turn on your television. I'll leave it
at that. I think all of that is absolutely
critical. And just to piggyback on what
Al said, Some of our best trained men, most dedicated, most faithful,
most ready to go, get chewed up and spit back by the churches
they go to within a year, because the culture has taken over the
church. And they say, we want a Bible
teacher, we want a Bible teacher, we want a guy who preaches the
Word. He arrives, begins to do that, and chaos erupts. We not
only have to overcome the world, we have to overcome the church
because the world has infiltrated the church. It's going to take
guys with really a lot of spine. Not only do they have to know,
but they have to believe and they have to hold convictions.
They have to have courage and bravery. And then they've got
to be able to survive the church. So there are some issues. What
I would love to see happen, and that's why I love being with
my friends here, is I would just love for us to produce enough
altogether that we can overpower what's going on. AUDIENCE MEMBER
2 Well, if we keep growing and they keep dying, this might happen.
AUDIENCE MEMBER 1 That's the idea. That's, you know, grandpa's
near death's door. We're praying the Lord will pull him through. I like how that took time to
go across. We'll just say they were listening
by translation. You know, I was asked a great
question this morning on the plaza that you answered in part,
Dr. Mohler. A pastor of a church asked me,
how could we better prepare our men before we send them to seminary? So let's talk a little bit about
training men in the local church. What are some practical things
that these pastors and elders sitting here can do with their
young men who feel a call to the ministry? How can they get
them ready so that they're not showing up with a blank slate
but instead grounded? You know, one of the fascinating
things I find in the New Testament, in the book of Acts, and then
in the writings of Paul, is that he was just almost never alone.
Now, he was in a prison cell, but otherwise, he was almost
never alone. So, I just want to say, Pastor, you're really not
faithful if they're not young men around you. If you're not
inviting them into your life, I mean, had that young man that
you believe God may be calling to ministry, and that young man
could be 27, could be 22, could be 15, does he know how you prepare
a sermon? Has he ever been with you as
you prepared a sermon? I was with a pastor I really loved
the other day. He was a rebellious 13-year-old boy that got kicked
out of Vacation Bible School as a 13-year-old. It really takes
something to get kicked out of Vacation Bible School. They didn't
have anywhere to put them but the pastor's office, so they
just put them in the pastor's office. And the pastor walks
in and says, what did you do here? He said, I got kicked out
of Vacation Bible School. And he goes, oh, all right. And this
was 30 years ago, actually, that it happened. And the pastor got
an emergency call. He had to go to the hospital.
And he's got a 13-year-old kid in his office, can't just leave
him, so he says, you're going with me to the hospital, because your
mom couldn't pick you up, so you gotta go with me. So he takes
this 13-year-old, he got kicked out of Vacation Bible School,
with him at a hospital visit. He walks in and he prays and
he deals with this woman and he just ministers to her, and
then he realizes there are other people in the hospital, and he's
just got this 13-year-old, he's following along with him. And
about four patients in, and he's talking, and he just looks at
the 13-year-old and the lady, and he says, by the way, this
is, the boy's name who's with me, and he's going to pray for
you right now." And this 13-year-old simply goes
over, he doesn't know what else to do, but to do what he's been
told. And he just said, oh, dear Lord, we pray you'll be with
this sister. He prayed exactly what he'd heard that pastor do
in the previous three rooms. And they left. That man's a senior
minister of a thriving gospel church today because he said,
God made me a preacher in a hospital room the day I got kicked out
of Vacation Bible School. Deputized. He was deputized right
there on the spot. If you've got nobody with you,
you're probably not teaching anyone what you need to be teaching
them. I'll leave it at that. Yeah, I would just amend that
and say, look, you are the guys that need to be putting your
hands on the guys and sending them to the seminaries. They
shouldn't be wandering around out there on their own trying
to figure out if they want to do this. You need to recruit them. You
need to know them well enough to know what their giftedness
is. That is the best thing you could ever give us is somebody
that you believe in, that you're invested in, and that has accountability
back to you and you have expectations for. The training that you provide
in your weekly preaching is huge. I mean, my boyhood pastor and
my pastor when I was a teenager, the effect of their ministry
on me is incalculable. And I know for all of us, the
thing that we care about most is the pastoral reference we
receive on a student who is applying to our institution because we
want the judgment of the pastor who has been pastoring that young
person, because that pastor has insights into his heart, his
background, his situation, his knowledge that are crucial for
us. in making a determination to
invest in that person for pastoral ministry. And so there is no
question that your references are more determinative than anything
else at that stage in theological education. And your ministry,
just as Al said, you're the theologian in their life. I had never read
Martin Lloyd-Jones, but I had heard Martin Lloyd-Jones quoted
from the pulpit over and over and over again. I thought that
I had read Sermon on the Mount because I'd heard him quoted
so many times as my preacher preached Sermon on the Mount.
But I didn't know Martin Lloyd-Jones, but I did know Gordon K. Reed.
And so you're going to be the theologian in their life and
the investment is just as Al said. One reason that young people
come to seminary knowing less is 40 years ago, evangelicalism
decided that the best way to reach out to people with the
gospel was stop preaching the Bible. And so, for 40 years,
the evangelical church hadn't preached the Bible. And so, as
Al said, it's not the fault of our children that they grew up
in churches where people weren't preaching the Bible. We're reaping
the whirlwind of that horrible decision. And that's why people
come to this church and they say, wow, a church that preaches
the Bible. And you go, really? That's revolutionary
to you? But it is. And I'm not talking
about out of liberalism, I'm talking about out of evangelicalism.
So your investment in preaching the Bible, Lord's Day after Lord's
Day, is huge. in preparing people to truly
benefit from what we're going to try and do in an intensive,
compressed form in the context of life-on-life residential classroom
experience. You know, I think not only do
megachurches not teach the Bible typically, they don't produce
anybody who does either. So they're dead-end streets.
They're roads to nowhere. When the personality disappears,
the whole thing evaporates. You can tell a church where the
Word of God is lifted up and taught because all of a sudden
Bible teaching becomes the premier objective of those who are the
most devoted to Christ. And so you start seeing people
driven in the direction of wanting to handle the Word of God. You
can know by that response in your church that you're being
faithful to do that, and that's how you should assess your ministry
honestly enough to say, are there guys coming up in this church
who have a passion to teach and preach the Word of God? That's
the evidence that you're doing it the right way. Dr. Mohler, you gave the story of
a young man in a hospital room seeing what pastoral ministry
is really like. How can we help young men who
aspire to the ministry see the real side of pastoral ministry
and not the other side that's offered by so many young pastors
who are trying to be as culturally relevant and cool. The appeal
of that ministry is standing in front of the congregation
with a microphone and being as worldly and accessible as possible,
whereas this young man saw the reality, the ordinary part of
pastoral ministries. trying to help young men sort
through cool and substantive when they think about ministry.
Three guys with ties on, no Mohawks in here. I don't think Mohawks
are even cool anymore, so I just age dramatically. Yeah, I guess I figured at one
point I was never going to be cool, so that was... Was there
a time? So much for that project, you
know, I just gave up on that. It was never a possibility. No, I will simply say, look,
I understand the appeal of that, because here again it's the thesis
and the antithesis, because that's what seems to work, that's what
people seem to want everywhere else. I mean, every restaurant
is trying to be cool, Every television network's trying to find the
latest cool. Hollywood's just the essence of trying to keep
up with cool. Social media is so much driven
by, you know, what's cool. Politicians are trying to be
cool. Have you noticed how few of them actually wear grown-up clothes
anymore? They're running for President
of the United States. And so, you got to look like someone
who doesn't deserve the job in order to get elected to the job,
evidently. And you're looking at this, that's a massive cultural
shift. And so Kuhl's a moving target, and we can understand
everybody seems to be, that seems to be the recipe for success
everywhere. And so you get these guys who are pragmatist to the
core. And they're going to say, well, yeah, well, I mean, if
that's what it takes in the restaurants, if that's what it takes in the
mall, if that's what it takes anywhere else, surely that's what it takes in church.
Have you ever noticed how many times the stores turn over in
the mall? Oh, by the mall. Most people don't go to them
anymore, by the way. That's another thing. You see, the problem with
cool is it's sell-by date is so fast. And so I just want to
ask, you know, why do you need to do what everybody else is
doing anyway? What's the one thing you're doing they're not
doing? How about talking about ancient eternal truths they're
not talking about? How about taking a 2,000-year-old
book in its newest parts? and saying, this is what we understand
to bind us now as much as Torah bound the children of Israel.
The one thing you can do that really matters is be profoundly
uncool. Because if you're cool, we don't
really need you. Because cool is gonna change
tomorrow anyway. So give up being cool. It's probably
not working for you anyway. Just preach the word in season
and out of season. Amen. With regard to ministry
to young people with a view to raising up gospel ministers for
the next generation, can I make a plea to shift from a mindset
that we want to entertain our youth to we want to disciple
our youth? And their parents. But you generally
get to do that if you're actually discipling the youth. I mean,
I do a speech with every entering class into our high school youth
ministry to the parents, and the speech goes this way. The
young people that are going to be working with your young people
are not taking your place. Nobody can take your place as
parents. We're coming alongside of you. And we are going to be
reinforcing what is coming from the pulpit of the church in their
lives. Now, when we do that, one of
two things will happen. If you are not living and teaching
these ways and leading in your home, they will either believe
that none of this is real because you don't believe it's real,
or they'll believe that you're not a believer. Neither of those
things is what we want to happen. But they will happen because
these people are going to be faithfully ministering the word.
They can't take your place as parents, but their young people
can look at you and say, well, you're not like that. And if
they do, there's going to be an issue in the home. And, of
course, that's a backdoor way of getting into ministry, the
parents. But let me say, I understand the enormous pressure. It's not
unlike the cool pressure, the pressure to entertain. When you
have a megachurch down the street that has clowns and otters, it's
very, very difficult for you to maintain a discipleship-based
approach to the ministry of young people. So how can you trump
that? Let me give it to you. relationships. The way you trump
entertainment ministry is with relationships. And I don't mean
between really cool 22-year-olds and your 15-year-olds. There
may be some really great 22-year-olds that you want involved, but I
mean married couples and single people and grandparents and others
in your church. You have a generation of young
people that are relationally starved. And sometimes they don't
even know it. And when you start giving them
gospel, biblically-rooted relationships, they've never experienced that
anywhere else because they haven't experienced relationships anywhere
else. So that's the way you trump entertainment ministry. Ligon,
have you seen the work, I think, Christian Smith and his associates
did saying that the greatest indicator as to whether or not
a teenager remained active in church was whether or not they
had a significant relationship with a non-parent who was an
adult. in their lives in the church.
They saw just one role model in the church who cared about
them, had a relationship with them, they were far more likely to
continue in the church. There's not a youth ministry
in our culture that's as immature as some of the presidential debates
that we've seen. So, it's a transition. And Dr. Mohler brought up politics,
so it's not my fault. But I know that these guys are
going back to churches and a lot of the dear folks in their church
want to know how to sort through what we see happening in our
society politically. Dr. MacArthur, help us. You know, you guys have probably
read, there's some interesting articles in the last couple of
days on the relationship between Mark Driscoll and Donald Trump.
Have you seen those? Yeah. And that the evangelical
interest in Donald Trump and his crassness and rudeness and
brashness and profanity, the way has been prepared by Mark
Driscoll for that among evangelicals. One of these articles talked
about remember the moral majority when moral meant something, and
now we have a guy running for president being advocated by
Christian university presidents and pastors who is a public adulterer. multiple marriage. Does family
mean anything? Does anybody care about family? When you've lived
with women that weren't your wife while you were married to
other ones and had paraded your sexual exploits in a book and
So what happened to the moral majority? Evangelicalism used
to kind of be equated with the moral majority. Morality doesn't
define us anymore. This is what makes what you're
talking about so deadly serious. We aren't defined by morality
anymore. It doesn't seem to matter. It certainly doesn't matter.
to, I guess you could say, non-evangelicals, which, you know, take the democratic
side, that isn't even a discussion over there. But it doesn't seem
to matter to evangelicals anymore that literally this is a man
being elevated who is a model of everything, everything that
is destructive in morality in our culture. What roles and cautions
should pastors have in talking about this with their people?
Well, you just shifted gears there. I'm sorry, I take it back.
No, I just I appreciate so much what John just said. No, I appreciate
that so much. I ended up talking from here
to the Associated Press yesterday about this. Look, here's our
humiliation. Multiple levels of humiliation. E.J. Dionne of the Washington Post,
a liberal, is looking at cultural conservatives in this country
saying, well, who's ruining the culture now? You guys ran against
the cultural left for the kind of coarseness and crude language
that's now being celebrated by many supposed cultural conservatives.
I will simply say they're not true conservatives, but nonetheless,
there it is. We deserve every word of that rebuke when we see
what's going on here. Let me just give you some good
news and bad news. Here's the humiliation. A significant number of evangelicals
are being deluded, maybe deluded themselves. Anyway, they are
demonstrating a lack of discernment that is staggering just in terms
of this presidential election. That's the bad news. There's
even worse news behind that. Look, part of this is because,
and this is why I have to break it down in the media, and they're
as stunned as we are, and they're looking at us, but here's the
deal. The social scientists, the political scientists, the
media, they have very few religious categories. They have now secular
people, the nuns as they call them, and then they have Jews
and Roman Catholics and evangelicals. So basically, if you're not Jewish
or Catholic, then so far as the political scientists are concerned,
you're an evangelical. Mainline Protestants are now
so thin on the ground, they really don't even count anymore. And
so we've taken refuge in that because we believe that our numbers
were massive. And so Christianity today and
the whole evangelical mega-complex has said, look, we represent
millions and millions and millions of Americans because just look
at election cycle after election cycle. Well, guess what? Evidently,
they were not biblically and theologically defined, but we
knew that. John has been pointing that out
for years. I mean, the gospel according
to Jesus just by itself, you know, demonstrated the fact.
This is not all what it looks like. We've counted on cultural
Christianity as giving us kind of a buffer. We never really
thought it was defined by the gospel. We never really believed
it was defined by the scripture. And guess what? Now it's showing
up with a vengeance. So even the liberals, a liberal
website ran an article trying to explain this phenomenon to
fellow liberals, not to us, but to fellow liberals. And so they
asked the question, who are the evangelicals who are voting for
Donald Trump? And the subtitle of the article
was, the evangelicals who don't go to church. And so, let's hope that you're
preaching...let's hope that you're preaching the Word in such a
way consistently your people would not be confused and would
not reflect this kind of coarseness and crude language and would
be repelled by it. Let's hope for that. But what
does this tell us? This tells us that the believing
church was a lot smaller than the numbers. that many of us
have been citing for a long time, for decades, as representing
the strength of evangelicalism in America. We are now seeing
the humbling of evangelicalism in America. Let's assume that
God's doing this in order that we're to learn from it. And like
always, we've lost another word. Yes. Absolutely. He means the word evangelical. And in a sense, we've known we've
lost it for a long time, but we still have a replacement for
it. Sproul suggests the new word for us should be imputationists.
There you go. And I'm glad to say that the
people, the men in this room are going to know what we're
talking about. That's right. As we draw things to a close,
let's go back to the purpose of this conference. We want to
encourage these pastors as they head back to their churches and
to their responsibilities that the Lord has put before them
as they shepherds God's people and care for souls and evangelize
and lead their churches. What's a word of encouragement
that you would give to these men to be faithful this year
and to continue to press on in their duties as pastors? Well,
I think in light of the cultural conversations that we've had,
where we're looking at very significant discouragements in the culture,
and the churchly conversations that we've had, where we've talked
about some very serious generational discouragements, I think we need
to take encouragement from the fact that our hope is not circumstantially
rooted. Christ will and is building His
church and the gates of hell will not prevail against it.
And it really...yeah, absolutely. And John has said this, Al has
said it, that it's good to get together with the 7,000 that
haven't bowed the knee to Baal every once in a while. Because
when you're out there, you can feel very alone and you can feel
crazy for believing this. And it's good to get together
with other people that still believe this. Because this is
where your hope comes from. Not from the circumstances, not
from how well we're polling today. Not from how well our ideas are
being received in the culture as a whole. That's where our
hope comes from. And that book is written with
your hope in view. God wants you to have hope as
a pastor. But what pastors very often are
looking for is short-term hope and a quick report card. And
we won't get our report card until we're standing before the
throne. And so, we have to watch out
for the temptation to find our hope located somewhere between
here and that point rather than at that point because our job's
not done until then. It's not done until he calls
us home. And so, I just constantly remind yourself that your hope
is not situated in immediate results. Some of the most faithful
men in the history of the church have had to encounter awful,
awful responses to spectacular faithfulness. Their hope should
not be diminished because of those awful responses. So, they've
got to find their hope somewhere else other than the immediate.
And so, I think all of us need to think more long-term like
the final judgment for the place where our report card finally
comes in and realize that our hope is not situated circumstantially. I'm fascinated when I go to visit
in a church and I see the pastor's office, the pastor's study, and
I see what title's on the door. Because it's getting really weird
out there, guys. You got lead pastor, senior pastor, just pastor. You got lead teacher, pastor
teacher, preacher teacher. We're about to celebrate the
500th anniversary of the Reformation next year. So let me just give
my word of encouragement in a Lutheran moment. Luther described the
task of the pastor as the one who stands in Christ between
God and the devil for his people. Put that on your door. You want
a word of encouragement? This is what you're going home
to do, to stand in Christ between God and the devil for your people. When you get in the pulpit, what
are you doing? You're standing before your people in order to
show them God and to fight the devil. And you can only do so
in Christ. So go home, stand in Christ between
God and the devil for your people. Preach the gospel. Preach the
Word. And consider what an honor that is. And don't overestimate your importance. Amen. Dr. MacArthur, would you pray
for these men? Father, we thank You for the
richness, the blessedness of this conversation. We just praise You. This is a
rare and even historic moment that we've all shared together.
To hear from the hearts of these men, we have been greatly blessed. We're so glad to be on this team,
and we always triumph in Christ. We always triumph in Christ.
so thrilling to be the ones who will be there at the final triumph. And then will every man have
praise from God when You reveal the secrets of
the heart. We wait for that day with hope
and anticipation, grateful that though we are utterly unworthy
You have given us a place in Your kingdom. It is enough for
us. It is enough for us to just march
in the army with Christ. What a high and holy privilege.
May we be fulfilled in that realization no matter what goes on around
us with gratitude and joy. Bless these men, Lord. Give them
joy in the privilege of their task. May their focus always
be toward honoring You, we pray, for the sake of our Savior. Amen.