Boldly Proclaiming God's Word
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This is the second Shabbat that I have opted to feature a sermon instead of a song. This week, I will be sharing this short sermon by John MacArthur on how and why we should confess our sins with an exposition of Psalm 51. So, if you have your Bible at hand, join me as we listen together to John MacArthur teach.
I pray that you’ll blessed by this sermon as much as I have.
Shabbat Shalom.
John MacArthur
This article originally appeared here at Grace to You.
We’re going to turn to a subject in the New Testament that as I think about it is largely ignored and overlooked. And I’ve been made aware of that in recent months. It was not too many months ago that I was flying on one of those jumbo jets from Los Angeles to London, in the process reading a book that dealt with the issue of slavery in the New Testament time and in the New Testament text. It set me thinking in all kinds of directions. I actually finished the book on the flight I was so rapt in my attention to this particular theme.
Being a slave of Christ may be the best way to define a Christian. We are, as believers, slaves of Christ. You would never suspect that, however, from the language of Christianity. In contemporary Christianity the language is anything but slave language. It is about freedom. It is about liberation. It is about health, wealth, prosperity, finding your own fulfillment, fulfilling your own dream, finding your own purpose. We often hear that God loves you unconditionally and wants you to be all you want to be. He wants to fulfill every ambition, every desire, every hope, every dream. In fact, there are books being written about dreams as if they are gifts from God which God then having given them is bound to fulfill. Personal fulfillment, personal liberation, personal satisfaction, all bound up in an old term in evangelical Christianity, a personal relationship. How many times have we heard that the gospel offers people a personal relationship with Jesus Christ?
What exactly does that mean? Satan has a personal relationship with Jesus Christ and it’s not a very good one. Every living being has a personal relationship with the living God of one kind or another, leading to one end or another.
But what exactly is our relationship to God? What is our relationship to Christ? How are we best to understand it?
John MacArthur
By John MacArthur.
In its simplest definition, discernment is nothing more than the ability to decide between truth and error, right and wrong. Discernment is the process of making careful distinctions in our thinking about truth. In other words, the ability to think with discernment is synonymous with an ability to think biblically.
1 Thessalonians 5:21-22 teaches that it is the responsibility of every Christian to be discerning: “But examine everything carefully; hold fast to that which is good; abstain from every form of evil.” The apostle John issues a similar warning when he says, “Do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God; because many false prophets have gone out into the world” (1 John 4:1).
Shai Linne
I have never had a thing for Christian rap — I just thought that such artistes were simply taking a secular musical format, mixing it up with some reference (no matter how minuscule) to the faith and trying to pass it off as “Christian” when in fact the lyrics still sounded very much secular to me.
For a while, I was quite convinced my observation held true, and I think I might have been right.
However, I recently came across a Christian rap artiste called Shai Linne and his creations gave me a totally new perspective on Christian rap. I am not saying that all that I disliked before have now become appealing, but that this brother has probably single-handedly redefined Christian rap for me.
His pieces are very Biblical, and you can even say that he’s a perfect rapping companion to preachers like Paul Washer, John Piper and John MacArthur in the sense that what he espouses in his music are along the same lines as what these good brothers teach. Moreover, if you like sermon jams, you won’t find his creations too difficult to like.
Might I even go as far to say that he’s a “Puritan rapper”?
This is one of my favorite pieces, The Gospel, from his new album The Atonement (which you can purchase from iTunes Store or directly from Lamp Mode Recordings) which talks about the book of Romans.
I’m going to see how I can get my hands on a copy here (iTunes Store is, unfortunately, not available for this part of the world)!
The law of the Lord is perfect,
reviving the soul;
the testimony of the Lord is sure,
making wise the simple;
the precepts of the Lord are right,
rejoicing the heart;
the commandment of the Lord is pure,
enlightening the eyes;
the fear of the Lord is clean,
enduring forever;
the rules of the Lord are true,
and righteous altogether.
John MacArthur expands on our understanding of these three verses about Scripture (emphasis added and slightly edited to make it easier to read):
… But more importantly and savingly, God has revealed Himself in Scripture. There is His unwritten revelation and His written revelation. And when you come to verse 7, the transition is made from God revealing Himself in nature to God revealing Himself in Scripture… in Scripture.
The structure of these verses from verse 7 through 9, notice it there, is a series of parallel statements, verses 7, 8 and 9. Here there are six titles for Scripture… the Law of the Lord, the testimony of the Lord in verse 7. In verse 8, the precepts of the Lord and the commandment of the Lord. In verse 9, the fear of the Lord and the judgments of the Lord.
Six titles for Scripture. Scripture is Law, testimony, precepts, commandment, fear and judgments.
There are also six characteristics of Scripture. Notice, it is perfect, sure, right, pure, clean and true.
And there are six benefits of Scripture. It restores the soul, makes wise the simple, rejoices the heart, enlightens the eyes, endures forever and a final one, produces comprehensive righteousness. That’s what it means when it says righteous all together. It converts, it makes wise, it brings joy, it enlightens, it purifies, it is relevant in every time, it endures forever and it produces comprehensive righteousness.
This is magnificent. Here you have God in His inimitable way speaking the vast glories of Scripture in brief sentences. In a few words He captures the magnitude of the full sufficiency of Scripture.
John MacArthur
God’s Own Defense of Scripture, Part 1
Amen!
You can read the entire transcript of the sermon, or purchase the DVD at Grace To You dot Org.
John MacArthur
John MacArthur expounds on how important doctrine is — a personal conviction of mine — and shows how, while we look for practical applications of the Word of God, it follows after getting a right understanding of doctrine in God’s Word, not the other way around.
If I may connect this view to a real-life scenario, it would be akin to learning how to write computer programs — you first have to understand what each function and call in that language does before you can even apply those to actually writing computer programs that work.
by John MacArthur.
First published at Pulpit Magazine.
That’s a fashionable concern, judging from the trends in devotional booklets, home Bible study discussions, Sunday-school literature, and most popular preaching.
The question of what Scripture means has taken a back seat to the issue of what it means “to me.”
The difference may seem insignificant at first. Nevertheless, our obsession with the Scripture’s applicability reflects a fundamental weakness. We have adopted practicality as the ultimate judge of the worth of God’s Word. We bury ourselves in passages that overtly relate to daily living, and ignore those that don’t.
The Vatican
To many who are not well acquainted with the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church, it might seem that I am nitpicking on non-essential issues and intentionally picking a fight with Roman Catholics.
I assure you that my issue is not with Roman Catholics per se, but with the institution that has installed herself as the “one true Church of Christ” that has, among other things, perverted the teachings of our Lord Jesus Christ so that she can have a stranglehold on believers and twisted Scripture such that doctrines not taught in the Bible have become a snare to those truly desiring to seek God.
Many Roman Catholics are nice people (I hesitate to say ‘good’ but no one is ‘good’ according to Scripture), and some of them do earnestly seek God from what I know. It therefore pains me that they are trapped by a man-made institution and her un-Biblical laws when God’s Truth has set us free.
In the minds of many, Roman Catholicism has become synonymous with Christianity, primarily because the most visible displays of Christianity have been linked to the Vatican, e.g. in movies, you usually see a Roman Catholic priest called in to perform exorcism or marry a couple, but seldom a Protestant minister.
“People who don’t want scrutiny, people who don’t want to be held accountable for what they teach or what they believe, people who don’t want to be told they’re wrong, they always throw that verse ‘Judge not lest you be judged!’”
John MacArthur
From Darkness to Light
Foreword: I thought I’d give a little background into how this testimony came about, because it simply demonstrates how often God works wonderfully in us and there’s only goodness when we submit to His will.
For some days now, my wife has told me that she hasn’t been able to sleep well because God has prompted her time and again to write her testimony down.
She asked me why, and I told her testimonies were a good way for us to glorify God through telling others what He has made anew in us. As to why God is telling her to do so I am not sure, yet we need trust that the Lord has need for her to do something that has not been revealed, but it’s all good.
And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose.
We had retired rather late to bed last night. Just 15 minutes later, she was out of bed, and the study light came on while her computer whirred to life. When I popped into the study to ask why she wasn’t in bed, she was quite in tears, telling me that God had admonished her for not submitting to His will, right after prayers.
She had been fighting the burden in her heart to write her testimony down, believing wrongly that it’s rather pointless.
It was the first time she had experienced such a prompting, so I gently told her that that’s what God does with me many, many times over — a feeling so heavy in one’s heart that you go on your knees and cry out saying, “Father, Lord, I’ll obey and do it!”
I made coffee for us and stayed up with her while she completed her testimony which we are now sharing with you. May it encourage and bless you as it has us.
Luke 21:1-4 is often cited from church pulpits to exhort us to give willingly and in some cases, all, to ministry, a church building fund or some other project that the church is undertaking.
Jesus looked up and saw the rich putting their gifts into the offering box, and he saw a poor widow put in two small copper coins. And he said, “Truly, I tell you, this poor widow has put in more than all of them. For they all contributed out of their abundance, but she out of her poverty put in all she had to live on.”
I was listening to John MacArthur just last night give his take on this four verses and he noted that the observation of our Lord Jesus Christ about the widow seems to suggest something else other than a teaching on giving.
Below is the transcript of the sermon. You can also view the broadcast of the sermon at Oneplace.com (part 1, part 2).
DefCon Recently Bookmarked
All Scripture quotations, unless otherwise indicated, are taken from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version. Copyright ©2001 by Crossway Bibles, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved. Text provided by the Crossway Bibles Web Service.
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