Now preachers have no more innate knowledge of the outline of the body of Christ or the needs and functions of any particular cell at any particular moment than I do.\u00a0 So I hope that when they enter their quiet inner rooms to study, they are in deep communion with the Lord Jesus.\u00a0 For only direct revelation\u2014through the Bible, of course, the spiritual DNA, if you will\u2014can give them that accurate timely sermon apart from the aforementioned knowledge that they lack.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s not too hard to imagine that a preacher\u2014who goes through this intense process of preparation, delivers the sermon the Lord has given him, and then sees actual obedient results in his congregation\u2014might mistake the content of that particular sermon for a universal truth of the Bible.\u00a0 So if I return to my three hypothetical preachers, studying the laundry list of Solomon\u2019s wealth and power from three different perspectives, and I imagine that each of them has received his sermon with its application from the Lord who is able to make him stand, and that each has delivered those sermons and each has seen obedient results in his own congregation, and each has mistaken the content of his particular sermon for a universal truth of the Bible; and then I imagine that these three meet in public and eagerly discuss this wonderful thing the Lord has done for them and through them, I\u00a0begin to get a taste of what I will call the preachers\u2019 dilemma<\/em>.<\/p>\n I make my living recording educational sessions at conferences.\u00a0 In the old days that meant audio cassette recorders.\u00a0 I ran hundreds of feet of cable from a table in the hallway into the various rooms where sessions were to be presented.\u00a0 Then I sat at that table of cassette recorders monitoring when sessions began and ended, that record levels were good, that the cassettes kept turning and recording audio (not a given with this particular method of recording), and I flipped the tapes over before they ran out on one side or replaced them with new tapes when full.\u00a0 To stave off boredom I would leave the volume control of a session that sounded interesting up louder than the rest and listen, as I monitored the others with my eyes roving over meters and tape mechanisms.<\/p>\n Recording the Evangelical Theological Society meeting one year I came upon two simultaneous sessions that sounded interesting.\u00a0 One was positioned to the left on the table in front of me, the other to the right.\u00a0 I decided to listen to both, since both speakers were presenting on the same passage of scripture.\u00a0 Both speakers presented the universal truth<\/em> of the passage in question, two different, diametrically opposed universal truths<\/em>.\u00a0 I was troubled.\u00a0 So troubled, in fact, that when conference attendees passed by between sessions and started up a conversation with the \u201cCIA operative bugging all their conversations\u201d or \u201cthe guy getting really smart really fast listening to all those Bible lessons at once,\u201d I shared my troubled thoughts.\u00a0 And every passerby who heard my troubled thoughts was saddened and troubled by them, too.<\/p>\n None of this is particularly troubling to one who has encountered these things but has little interest in Jesus or the Bible.\u00a0 Such a one scoffs at my naivet\u00e9, \u201cCome on? \u00a0It\u2019s the Bible, it can mean whatever you want it to mean.\u201d\u00a0 But none of us, not me, not the passersby who heard my troubled thoughts, not the speaker in the session on the left side of my recording table, nor the speaker in the session on the right side of my recording table, set out to make the Bible say whatever he wanted it to say.<\/p>\n Our interest, the mutual desire that binds us together\u2014the tape guy and the passersby and speakers at the conference, Bible students and teachers, pastors, preachers and professional theologians\u2014was to understand the Bible, what it really says, what God intends to communicate to us, and through that study and understanding come to know God and share in the eternal life Jesus defined for, and promised to, his disciples.\u00a0 Now this is eternal life<\/em>, Jesus prayed for his disciples, that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ,whom you sent<\/em>.\u201d1<\/sup><\/a> \u00a0What is troubling is how such good intentions pursued in such good faith can turn out so badly so often that people with little or no interest in the outcome and only a casual acquaintance with the phenomena can conclude so easily that the Bible means whatever the preacher wants it to mean.<\/p>\n So I\u2019ll return to my three hypothetical preachers<\/a> and imagine them sitting at lunch together.\u00a0 Each is bursting to tell the wonderful thing the Lord has done for him and through him.\u00a0 Each is convinced he should find more understanding and comradeship with the other two men dining with him than with any other human beings on the planet.\u00a0 And each is sorely disappointed.\u00a0 Each tries reasoning with the other, but to no avail.\u00a0 At that point each has two basic options:\u00a0 1) to part company, troubled, disappointed and confused, agreeing to disagree; or, 2) if one has particularly strong commitments to the universal applicability of the absolute truth of his individual experience, he curses the others and their congregations with condemnation to fiery destruction.<\/p>\n <\/a>Application two of my would-be sermon is that I should forgive<\/a> preachers this minor fault, like a speck of dirt in the eye, and beg their forgiveness as well as the forgiveness of every person on this planet for the plank in my own.\u00a0 You see, I cause these problems.\u00a0 Not alone; I am a member, the least member perhaps, of a class of people with a philosophical bent of mind.\u00a0 I am the true believer in universal absolutes.\u00a0 And I and those like me are they who goad preachers into intellectual straightjackets of our own devising by holding them up to public ridicule if they don\u2019t jump through our hoops and pay homage to our intellectual prowess, our systems of theology, our autopsy reports<\/a> and our post-mortems of autopsy reports.<\/p>\n So do I mean to say that all systems of theology are wrong?\u00a0 Yes\u2026and no.<\/p>\n 1<\/sup><\/a> John 17:3 (NET)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Now preachers have no more innate knowledge of the outline of the body of Christ or the needs and functions of any particular cell at any particular moment than I do.\u00a0 So I hope that when they enter their quiet … Continue reading
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