Welcome to the 2007 Shepherds
Conference General Session Number 5 Questions and Answers with
John MacArthur Our Father, we pray that You'll give us a wonderful
time as we share together in this hour. Thank You for the
rich feast in Your Word and we grow to love You more, to love
Your truth more every time it is open for us. Bless us now
as we share in this fellowship and think through some of the
things that are on our hearts together. We pray in Your Son's
name. Amen. Just a little bit of time
for question and answer, and I'm not under any illusion that
I can give long answers to the very large stack of questions
that came in, or even maybe effective short answers, but I think the
exposure is good for all of us, and I really appreciate the questions
very much, and I will go through those questions because I want
to know what it is that's on your heart and the things that
we need to help you with. I know that I raise questions
when I preach. I try to do that. I try to answer
some, but raise some as well. And that's, I think, very natural.
Even when you're doing the exposition, I was enjoying, just deeply enjoying
the ministry that Ligon was having with us last hour. And with all
the things that he answered, when it was all over, one Lasting
determination reigns supreme in my mind, I must go home and
read numbers. And I must dig out all of the
elements that I've missed there. That's part of what stimulating
biblical exposition does for us. It sucks us in to the bottomless
treasures of Scripture. And so I understand that and
that's part of it and I hope that you are stimulated to learn
what you learn and to be motivated to find out what you didn't find
out but is in your mind. Now with regard to some of these
questions, they came in in a number of categories and I'll do my
best to jump around a little bit. They've summarized them
for me, so let me kind of move through these categories, maybe
drawing one from each category and then kind of working our
way back through a little bit. Regarding hermeneutics, could you explain
more what you meant about the consistent literal hermeneutic
that undergirds premillennialism? Why is it not valid to follow
the New Testament usage of the Old Testament as an interpretive
principle? Well just simply let me answer
the first statement that is there. What did I mean about a consistent
literal hermeneutic that undergirds premillennialism? Everyone agrees
that if you interpret the Old Testament in a normal fashion,
if you let the words mean what they mean, on the surface in
any normal sense of interpretation, if you allow them to mean precisely
what they would have been understood to mean by the people who read
them at that time, everybody seems to agree that you end up
with free millennialism because clearly the Old Testament writers
were not millennial. That was the simple point that
I was making. Amillennialism does not come
from the Old Testament. If on the other hand you say
that the Old Testament is dependent for its normal meaning on the
New Testament, then you have denied the perspicuity of the
Old Testament and that You have said essentially that the people
who were reading the Old Testament had no idea what they were reading
and wouldn't have any idea until the New Testament came along
to explain not the historical things but the meaning of those
things. Now remember that Peter said
that the prophets who wrote looked into what they wrote and what
they were looking for was what person and what time. They were
looking for the specific person at the specific time. It wasn't
that the whole Old Testament was an impossible muddle that
could only be interpreted from a New Testament vantage point.
That is what Walt Kaiser meant when he said, you then have a
canon inside a canon. Again, the Old Testament becomes
incomprehensible. That's all I was trying to say.
And when I talk about a literal hermeneutic, I'm not talking
about a wooden kind of literalism. They understood figures of speech.
They understood symbolism. They understood all of the things
that are part of normal language. If I say something is as big
as an elephant, you understand that. We understand language
has all kinds of figures of speech. It does in its normal usage. And all we're saying is that
there is no mandate anywhere in the Old Testament, no divine
mandate anywhere in the Old Testament that says you have to change
the rules of interpretation when you come to any futuristic prophecy. What I didn't get into was if
you just take non-eschatological prophecies, just take historical
prophecies in the Old Testament, the fulfillment of which is also
recorded in the Old Testament and you will find they were very,
very literally fulfilled, leading all the way down to those prophecies
fulfilled in the first coming of Jesus, very, very specifically. So, all we're asking for is that
in an interpretation of the Old Testament, you take the Old Testament
at face value, that it was a book given by God so that people would
understand what God wanted them to know. It has clarity. It has
perspicuity. It can be understood on its own. And even what Ligon was saying
this morning, the value of the Old Testament to the New Testament
believer comes from its literal interpretation. If you do some
kind of allegory or some kind of spiritualization of the Old
Testament, then you haven't left us the historical document that
we need in the New Testament to understand that kind of information
and application that God intends us to draw from it. A second
category of questions came in on the subject of legalism. How
would you approach a congregation trapped in years of legalistic
tradition? I would not attack legalism.
I would not preach on Christian liberty. I would not assault
their consciences either by flaunting liberty on a personal level.
I think there is a very important principle that comes at the end
of 1 Corinthians chapter 10 where the Apostle Paul says, if you
go to the house of a weaker brother as a guest, with a weaker brother
as a guest and meet offer to idols as served, by the host
who is a non-believer. You know the scenario. The non-believer
is going to serve you and you're there with a weaker brother believer
and he serves you meat offered to idols, what do you do? Evangelistic
strategy would say, eat it because that's how you will show kindness
and favor to your host who doesn't know any better. However, if
you do that, you will offend your weaker brother. So who do
you offend? Do you offend the non-believer
or do you offend your weaker brother? And the answer in that
text is you offend the non-believer. And the message that the non-believer
gets is that you love one another and by this all men will know
that you are My disciples. So you defer always to the weaker
brother. And in many cases you're talking...when
you're talking about legalism, you're not talking really about You're talking, I assume, about
an approach to the Christian life that is needlessly restrictive
and narrow and artificially constructed around certain behaviors that
aren't even biblical issues. And what you need to do is understand
that's where they are. And you want to demonstrate love
to them because that's how people know that Christ has changed
your life because you were demonstrably sacrificial and loving to those
people who maybe think differently than you do. The unbeliever at
the dinner might conclude if this Christian offended his brother
and wouldn't offend him, it's better to be a non-believer than
to be a believer. You also have to understand that
the conscience is a mechanism given by God to everyone. It is a device. It is a mechanism by which we
are excused or accused, right? Romans 2. It is informed by our
convictions. Conscience is informed by conviction. I suppose no one has a more highly
informed and aggressive conscience than a Muslim terrorist, right? They do what they do with passion
to the point of their own suicide, believing that they're going
to end up with 72 virgins on pillows in the next life. Their conscience frees them to
do what they do because it is informed by a set of convictions
that have been drummed into them. So you have to understand, and
you have to understand that when it comes into the Christian realm,
you have a dilemma between re-informing them at the same time that you
don't train them to ignore their conscience. Or after they're
re-informed, then their conscience...they're going to be used to not doing
what their conscience tells them. That's why Paul is so clear on
that at the end of Romans where he talks about, you know, you've
got to understand, some people consider the day one way, some
consider it another way, some consider dietary things this
way and that way. You can't train people to ignore
conscience. You have to take the long-term
approach to re-inform the conscience. And I would suggest that the
first way to do that is to move people off the rules they live
by on to the person of Jesus Christ. and just preach the glories
of Christ, get in a gospel and stay there until those people
have been liberated from rules to love for Christ, until they
have been literally swept away in awe and wonder over their
affections for Jesus Christ, rather than try to instruct them
on the biblical disciplines which again is just another set of
rules. Let them be lost in wonder, love
and praise over the person of Christ. And you watch those things
begin to disappear. A third category of questions,
personal interest, your schedule. Describe a typical week in your
life. I don't think I've ever had a
typical week in my life. My life is really crazy. I long
ago stopped deciding anything about my life. What my grandchildren
don't decide, my kids decide. What my kids don't decide, my
wife decides. What my wife doesn't decide,
all these guys around here decide. You know, I used to say when
I started out in ministry, I was an initiator. Now I'm absolutely
and completely a responder. And I was an initiator, then
I became a responder and I sort of worked through what I needed
to respond to. Now I don't even know what I need to respond to,
I just show up every day and they hand it to me. So I'm at
the far extreme of responding to life. And people say, well
how can you do all these things, all these ministries? I don't
do all these ministries at all. I'm surrounded by so many gifted,
talented, wonderful, devout people that I just love and cherish
as my friends and partners in ministry. They do all of that.
I basically show up here Sunday morning, Sunday night, preach
on Sunday morning twice here on one book, preach again another
book or a... doctrinal series I'm doing now
on Sunday night, preach a few other times during the week.
It takes me three to four days a week to prepare, to preach
everything I've ever said. They've heard, they've taped,
put on the radio. I can't repeat it, so I just keep going and
going. I'm like the Energizer Bunny,
just...nothing really changes for me at all. I really in a
sense am not the leader, you know, I'm just the servant of
the congregation. And I show up and do the same
thing that I've been doing for nearly 40 years, teaching and
preaching. And there's no magic to that.
You've got to prepare. You've got to dig in and go down
and go down deep and stay down a long time. Expectation is high
around here and everything that has been said has been placed
in the can and you've got to keep moving. And that's the wonderful
thing about doing Bible exposition. It's inexhaustible. It is absolutely
inexhaustible. There's never a Sunday when I
don't preach on a passage and say to myself, I wish I could
do that again because I never got to this and I never got to
that and I never got to that. And so I never run out of material.
I will run out of time before I run out of material. Somebody
asked me yesterday, what would you wish that God would give
to you at this point in your life? And I said, ten years,
more. I sound like an Old Testament king, don't I? I could get in
trouble for doing that. But I'm going to run out of time
before I run out of things to say. And one dear lady said to
me, Pastor, when you're finished doing commentaries and preaching
through the New Testament, are you going to do the same in the
Old Testament? Dear lady, think about what you
just said. There is no chance at all. But I'll give you a little idea
what happens. My preaching basically becomes a commentary. All the
messages that I preach are typed up by a lovely lady who has done
this for years and years and years. They go to very helpful
guys who paragraph that for me so I don't just get like, you
know, a pre-Masoretic text without punctuation or spacing or anything. So I get basically a manuscript
of that cleaned up and paragraphed and triple or quadruple spaced.
I take that material and it's very helpful to have that cleaning
process and kind of, you know, taking out the redundancies that
you normally do in preaching. And I work through that and I
write in the cracks and the margins and the sides and the back. And
if you've ever seen...anybody ever seen Spurgeon's sermon stuff
or any of that? It basically is what those guys
all did. Calvin had five people sitting
on the front row and five different guys writing down and collectively
they would get it all. One of them pulled it all together,
gave it back to him and he edited that for his commentaries and
that's essentially what Spurgeon did. And that's pretty typically
what a lot do. With taping, we can do it another
way. And I work through that and out of that comes a commentary
and basically just to stay on schedule, I have to do about
two chapters a week. not two Bible chapters, not two
book chapters, but two commentary chapters which means two sermons,
essentially, or units that I have to do. When I do a major book
and the new one is out, The Truth War, did you see that available?
It's a book that deals with the issue of the emerging church.
Thomas Nelson put a rattlesnake head on the cover. John Piper's
comment was, John, you don't need that. The world needs to
know the kinder, gentler John. Who put that on your cover? You're being wounded in the house
of your friends. And then I heard from the publishers
that they've done a special couple copies for me to keep as souvenirs
covered in actual snake skin. When a book comes out like that,
I lean hard on Phil Johnson, pull together the material from
all my sermon series, get that boiled down. Phil works through
that and edits it. And then it comes to me and I
work through it and soften all the really harsh things that
Phil has put in there. See, he hides behind me and he
says all these outrageous things. That just ruined my reputation. Out of that comes a book. And
I have a loving, faithful and adorable wife who understands
me. I have precious children, all
involved in the church and their kids and all the fourteen grandchildren.
I'm just supported by a gift from God, this loving family
that is a delight and a joy, every single one to my heart
and guys around me at the church, and grace to you in the ministries,
and they are gifted and capable and they carry...they carry the
load, that's for sure, and free me to do what I do. And I have
the privilege of just trying to...trying to partner with them
and try to encourage them and stimulate them and we work together
and think things through together and I'm content to let them make
the decisions, I trust them, God's brought them to me and
I don't think you ever can grow leaders if you don't let them
make decisions. They'll learn not to make bad
decisions, it's very painful. And that's how you grow leadership.
Back to the other category, I'll just keep rolling here. Millennial
sacrifices, Ezekiel 44 to 46 explains that there will be sacrifices
during the Millennial Kingdom. How does this relate to the fact
that Christ's sacrifice is the once for all final sacrifice?
The answer to that question is how does the Lord's Table relate
to the fact that Christ's sacrifice is a once for all sacrifice?
The Old Testament sacrifices were not a substitute for Christ,
they were a depiction, they were a picture, they were a picture,
a type prior to the cross, pointing to the cross. The Lord's Table
is a picture of the cross, past the cross, pointing back. And
the best understanding that I have of the Millennial Temple in Ezekiel
40 to 48 and the Millennial sacrifices is that in the Kingdom which
is for Israel in fulfillment of the Abrahamic covenant and
Davidic covenant and New Covenant promise of Jeremiah 31, Ezekiel
36 and 37. Israel is featured. The Apostles,
Jesus said from His own lips, will sit on twelve thrones ruling
the twelve tribes of Israel. And so it is uniquely Jewish
and it is uniquely for them and I think the Lord will reinstitute
the Old Testament symbols that pointed to the cross and they
will carry out some of those symbols which will then be infused
with a full understanding of what they meant in the light
of the cross and they will by then have come to look on Him
whom they have pierced and mourn for Him as an only Son, have
had the fountain of cleansing open to them, they will be in
the Kingdom, Christ will be present and it will all become clear
to them." It will be a complete unveiling of all of those sacrifices
which were so richly symbolic to Israel in the past. The New
Covenant, can you comment on passages like Hebrews 8 where
it seems to imply that the church is part of the New Israel as
recipients of the New Covenant? We're making a distinction between
the church and Israel, but having made that distinction, and I
only tried to stimulate you and get you going, so these are the
kind of questions I wanted to raise. And you need to work hard
on those covenants and, you know, we've got a tremendous brain
trust right here. This is a really formidable group of men. I would
say we've got the devout and the best right here, faithful
to the Word of God, diligent, concerned, passionate about the
truth. I just want you to go after the
Word of God with all the intensity you've gone after, soteriology,
theology proper, bibliology, just do it with eschatology and
ecclesiology and all those areas. I can't contend to feel comfortable
being wrong about anything or being incomplete or being indifferent
to anything that God has said. So I...having said that, the
Abrahamic Covenant, the Davidic Covenant and the New Covenant
all encompass the church. We will, by faith, inherit the
promises to Abraham. We will be a part of millennial
glory. We will inherit all the promises that came to David of
the Davidic Kingdom. We will be there in the reign
of the Lord Jesus Christ. And we also receive all the benefits
of the New Covenant. God didn't give all of these
covenants to Israel as an end, but as a means to the world, A practical question, being called
to ministry, how do you know if you're called to full-time
ministry? If you believe you're called, what do you need to do
to prepare? And what can you do if you're
not able to go to seminary? Well let me start at the end.
Seminary is a wonderful blessing if you can do it. It is not necessary
for effective ministry. It's great if you can do it,
it's not necessary. What is necessary is that you
master an understanding of the Word of God. Seminary is designed
to help you do that. That's the kind of seminary you
should go to. Don't go to a seminary that's going to attack your faith.
What point in that? There's no value in that. There's no virtue in that. Why
give those people the right to assault your pure mind? You go
to a place where they can help you master the knowledge of the
Word of God. Look, all we do in ministry,
we just take this one book and we dispense its truth. That's
it. That's it. It's not about psychology. It's
not about marketing strategy. It's not about style of ministry. It's not about being culturally
sensitive. I could care less about that.
It doesn't matter. And I worry about these guys
that are getting too culturally aware. I wrote a little deal.
I think you call it a blog. I don't know. I just wrote it
and somebody put it on a computer. And I said, these guys that are
getting too culturally sensitive are getting blasted with toxicity. Where is separation in this?
That thing concerns me about this emerging church movement
and about this friendliness with the world when you know every
R-rated movie, you know every raunchy television program, you
know every episode of South Park which is blasphemous toward the
Lord Jesus, you know all that, you know all this trashy music,
you can spin all that stuff and you think that's culturally cool.
You may have the doctrine of justification right, but you
can't get from that doctrine of justification to a biblical
doctrine of sanctification living like that. And you can't lead
your people there either. Anyway, how do you know if you're
called to full-time ministry? I just needed somewhere to put
that in there. So how do you know if you're
called to full-time ministry? I would say if you go to what
Paul said to Timothy, if a man desires the office of an overseer,
desires a noble work, I think it starts with a heart desire.
I just think it becomes an overwhelming desire that God plants in your
heart. That's the start of it. People have said to me, if you
weren't a preacher, what would you be? There is absolutely no answer
to that question. There is no answer to that question.
Nothing interests me. Absolutely nothing. That's why
when people say, when are you going to retire? What is that? Nothing interests me. Nothing. I don't want to give my life
to anything but this. And my only rule around here
is as long as I make sense, leave me alone. When I don't make sense...it's
a simple deal, guys. When I stop making sense, get
me out of here. But until then, leave me alone. I can't do anything
else. And my wife has reminded me of
how useless I am if I'm not preaching. I think that's part of it, and
then I think you have to add to that those qualifications
which I think really rest in the hands of the church to affirm. It's one thing to say, this is
what you want to do and you have a passion. It's something else
for the church to come along and say, this is the character
of the man and he is didaktikos, he is skilled in teaching. It's
that combination. I've often said to young men,
if you can do anything else, do it because there will be many
days when you wish you had. And the only thing that's going
to keep you here is that you can't do anything else. What practical advice, on a personal
note, would you give a young pastor who is just beginning
his ministry? What can we do to be successful in ministry?
I think it's pretty simple. Just know this, God will bless
your virtuous life and your preaching of His Word. Simple enough. Take heed to yourself and to
your doctrine and just go do ministry. Don't think there's
some smart, clever trick that you can pull off. And don't measure
your ministry by how many people show up. That's a really serious
head trip. Just take heed to your life,
your own personal godliness and to your teaching, your doctrine. Just pour your life into the
Word of God so that it sanctifies you and so that you come to understand
what the Bible teaches and God will use you. I've said this
through the years. At the very beginning, I told
this church, I believe that if I concentrate on the depth of
my ministry, God will take care of the breadth of it. I don't
ever want to come to a place in my life and say, Did I build
this church? Is this me? How did we do this? What's the
strategy to do this? I never wanted to ask the question,
Is this mine or is this God's work? And I only know one way
to do God's work and that is to be a vessel useful to Him
and to proclaim the Word which He always promises to bless.
The more faithful I am in my personal life and the more careful
I am and deep and wide and high and long in my understanding
of Scripture, the more God is going to bless that ministry. Well, we have time for maybe
a couple other questions. How would you define your brand
of dispensationalism? I don't know that I have my own
brand of dispensationalism, but I don't believe in superimposing
a system on the Bible. I don't believe there is any
legitimate way to do that. So I think you have to let the
Bible speak. And significantly for our discussion,
I think the Bible promises a future salvation for ethnic Israel. That's what I was saying yesterday.
I think that's what the Old Testament says and I think it defines it
in very, very careful language. In the Abrahamic Covenant reiterated
repeatedly through Genesis, expanded, the Davidic Covenant is really
an expansion of the Abrahamic Covenant. But the only way that
Abrahamic covenant promises and Davidic covenant promises would
ever come true to the nation would be on New Covenant terms. And that's why the New Covenant
is also given to Israel, Ezekiel and Jeremiah. I think the details
of the Kingdom are laid out again and again and again and again
all over the writings of the prophets, unmistakably so. That's all I'm saying. So that
what the Lord is doing in the church now is not a de facto
cancellation of those promises. I don't think Jesus said anything
that canceled them. I don't think the Apostles said
anything that canceled them. All the way to the end of the
book of Revelation, you still have the Messiah in His coming
glory called the Son of David. So that's my dispensationalism. And when I say that word, I know
you have all kinds of ideas of what it all means. I know there
are dispensational ideas that there was one way of salvation
in the Old Testament, another in the New. that there are two
new covenants, one for the church, one for Israel, that the Kingdom
of God and the Kingdom of Heaven are different, that the Sermon
on the Mount does not apply to today but it's some kind of a
millennial law or rule or practice, those kinds of things I don't
think come out of the text. I think those are imposed upon
the text. So I just think that the bottom line is you let the
text say what it says, and I believe that And as I said yesterday,
we're all dispensational to some degree. That is, we all understand
that God operates in a certain way at a certain time that's
distinct. For example, in the Old Testament there were certain
things that God overlooked. Isn't that what it says in Acts?
That God overlooked, but now commands all men everywhere to
repent. There were certain tolerances in the progress of dogma going
not from error to truth but incompleteness to completeness that God was
patient and patiently endured certain things that are no longer
endured. And so, I think God works in
unique ways. Before the law, there was a law
written in the heart and it was clear that God had revealed Himself
as to His character and His requirements, but the law is much more sophisticated
in laying down what God expects and therefore the standard of
sin is raised higher. before the cross there's one
perception of God's redemptive purpose, after the cross another.
If in no other way than that before the cross the Spirit was
with you, but after the cross the Spirit shall be in you."
And what is that talking about? I don't think it means they didn't
have the Holy Spirit. They did have the Holy Spirit.
I think the Holy Spirit regenerated the people in the Old Testament.
I don't think there would be any regenerated people in the
Old Testament without the work of the Holy Spirit. I think the
Holy Spirit in the Old Testament convicted of sin. That's why
it says in Genesis, my spirit will not always strive with man. I don't think it's a question
of whether the Spirit was there, it's simply in some larger, grander
capacity the Spirit works after the cross. We see those distinctions
there in the text. And I just see that there's a
future Kingdom coming for Israel. I think the existence of Israel
today is the great apologetic that not only supports God's
future for Israel, but supports the inviolability and the irrevocable
nature of the doctrine of sovereign election. Israel, my elect. Whatever I find in the text would
be my brand of seeing those distinctions. Okay? What does your sermon preparation
process look like? Well, I'll run you through this
just really briefly and probably it's nothing worth shaking. First
thing I do is read the text, just read it and read it and
read it, just trying to get my mind around it and in it and
under it and over it. And, you know, it's amazing how
much just comes out of that. And then the second step is I
take an 8 1�2 by 14 kind of legal pad. If I'm doing five verses,
I'd write verse 1 and then I'd flip the next page, verse 2,
verse 3, verse 4. or verse 5, so I'd have five big sheets front
and back that I could put down all my ideas on those verses.
And the first thing I want to do is look at my Greek text so
that I know I'm dealing with the right text and I'm understanding
what the vocabulary is and I'll write down various Greek words
and chase around a little bit whatever I need to do to make
sure I'm getting at the right stuff. And so I've got the text in mind.
I know what it says. I know what the original text
says. I've worked out whatever relationships
of words I need to do. And then it begins to take shape.
It begins to take its form. And by the time I've gone through
that, I've pretty well thought it out and I start reading commentaries.
I've...over on the left margin I'm writing ideas that are going
to show up in the sermon of how I'm going to take this and take
that. Then I start reading commentaries and I would typically read probably
20 plus commentaries. There's a level of desperation
in preaching. You have to understand that. And if it takes me an hour
to get one good thing, right, Le? If it takes me an hour wading
through and in Luke, you know, the agony of I, Howard Marshall,
I guess you could call it. You say, why do you even read
that guy? Because every once in a while the light just goes
on and you've got to wade through all the parentheses and all the...I
don't know what. But...so I read at least twenty,
maybe more commentaries. And what am I doing in those
commentaries? For one, I'm educating myself theologically as to how
certain theological systems handle every passage. If I read Linsky,
I know how the Lutherans handled it. So I read through all that
and I just take notes, ideas, thoughts, interpretations, cross-references. That's really big for me because
I think the Bible explains the Bible. So I just write down whatever
I need to draw out of all of that. And then I've got this
pile of stuff. That's probably...that's probably
a day, or pretty well a day, maybe six, seven, eight hours
sometimes. And I study at home because I
can't study here. Because if I'm here, everybody
thinks I need to weigh in on everything. It's amazing how
well they do without me. Great blessing to be able to
be at home and maximize my time there. So then I've got this
and I need to then think it through. And typically I would wait a
day so I can just meditate. It's always running around in
my mind all the time, all the time. And the next day I write
out that rough draft. That's when I find an outline,
a main point, and I always build it around a main theme because
I think that's the point of a paragraph. And so I get an idea of what
I'm driving at, get an outline that works. I don't spend a lot
of time on outlines, I'm not trying to be cute and clever,
just some hooks to hang things on. And then when that's done,
I'm ready to write an introduction. And then the last thing I do
is get a conclusion. And along the way, I look for biblical
illustrations, first of all. I'm a real fanatic on using the
Bible to illustrate because a biblical illustration not only has interest,
it has authority. So it's double-barreled. It comes
with real weight. If I tell you a heart-moving,
tear-jerking story, that may have interest, it has no authority.
And that's what Ligon was saying about the Old Testament examples.
That's an endless resource. to make the New Testament live
and it was written, as we learned this morning. It happened for
that very reason. So that's where I go. By the
time I get all that done, I'm ready to think about writing
a final draft. I write it on little half-sheets,
probably about ten, eleven, twelve little half-sheets. I do all
my own work. No one ever sees a sermon of mine. It's all handwritten.
Everything is by hand. I don't have a computer. It's
all just written out and, you know, that's how it is. So I
bring it into the pulpit and see what happens. Sometimes I get through three
pages of the ten, and a really good, well-crafted sermon with
a great beginning and end and middle ends up as a lousy three-part
series with no end in sight. You know, it's just...but that's
how it goes. I'm not a sermonizer. I'm really
a teacher. I'm not trying to sermonize and
I will never skip a salient critical portion of a text to get to the
end. And I also have in the back of
my mind, I'm going to have to write a commentary on this in the future, and if
I don't cover it now, I'm going to have to go back and redo all
this. So that plays in as well.