Kennystix's podcast
Brothers — Feel, Think, Preach God (Part 3)
So, we've talked about the centrality of God in the heart of the pastor making the assumption that for God to be central in our heart, He has to be central in our joy. He has to be the gladness of our joy. He has to be there permeating the joys in anything else so that they are all joys in Him. And that produces an overflow of love so that we become more caring and sacrificial shepherds. So in order to be a faithful loving, lay down your life kind of shepherd, you need to pursue your joy in God all the time and fight like heaven for this joy. And then the centrality of God in our minds and in our thinking, mainly I simply tackled the fact that the Bible encourages us to use our minds for His Word to inform our hearts, our hope, our joy so that true joy glorifies Him because if joy is based on something else then truth, then it won't magnify the true God. It won't glorify God. The only way our hearts can magnify God is for our hearts to be rooted in right doctrinal understanding of what God is like and what He does in the world. Therefore, I put a huge premium on getting our understanding of the Bible as right as we can and articulating what the Bible says about Christ, says about salvation, says about God accurately and building that into our people's lives so that they have solidity in their lives and when the waves break over them or the craftiness comes after them, they stand, they stand. So I find the dumbing down of the church and the absence of doctrine, you go to too many. I want to say typical but I'll just say too many church planting assessment centers and the like and it is standard operating procedure that doctrine divides and doesn't grow churches and other things do which I think is an assault on Scripture. I think the Bible is intended to be understood coherently and if you think you can preach to real, ordinary, down to earth, common sense people without connecting a verse in chapter five with the verse in chapter six with the verse in chapter seven, you're wrong. You will be training them to think badly about the Bible if you don't put the pieces together for them. They see the pieces that need to be put together. You can numb them, numb them over years. You can numb them to the possibility that it could be done which diminishes the Bible and you can numb them to the desire that it be done which makes them non-truth based people who base their joy and other things. So you set the example, you set the pattern and you can train them very badly in how they live their lives. We close on that note of do you not know, do you not know, do you not know which assumes in Paul's mind that if you knew rightly, you wouldn't be acting like you do. So knowledge for Paul is very powerful and I think what makes it powerful is when the first session and the second session come together the way they are supposed to do. So now what's left to do is to think a little bit together about preaching and how the centrality of God in our hearts and the use of the mind in promoting that kind of centrality will produce preaching that makes God central. But let me put in a parenthesis here that I'm concerned about. This is not a Christocentric theme is it? You can see on the documentation and in the way I'm talking, this is a Theocentric orientation. That concerns me about me. I did it intentionally but I need to say something about that because Paul said I decided to know nothing among you except Christ and him crucified and I talked about that. And you should, you have a right to ask, does that concern you? Where's Christ? Where's the cross? Where's the gospel? Gonna fit into this sequence of messages. It's fitting in right here. But the fact that I'm putting it in a parenthesis is warranted, I hope, like this. And you can decide that's not a good enough warrant and that will be understandable. When I look at what's happening to the gospel and how it's being distorted today, I've mentioned health, wealth and prosperity. I've alluded to those who diminish the substitutionary atonement one major evangelical so called in Britain in his book calls it cosmic child abuse, which I think is blasphemous and he's a nice guy, really nice, really nice. I mean that's the danger. He's on the television, he's on the radio, he represents evangelicals and he wrote on page I think 182 in that book the worst paragraph I've read in a long, long time calling God's wrath poured out on his son to avert it from me cosmic child abuse and scuffed at the doctrine. That concerns me. The aberrations on justification in our day concern me, new perspective influences that are undoing the historic understanding of the imputed righteousness of Christ deeply concern me. I've written one book. I'm going to write another one. It's almost done. I'm spending a lot of time on that. I don't like what's happening and many young guys and maybe some of you in this room are very enamored by these people can name the big three, but I won't. That concerns me. So the gospel, health, wealth, prosperity, substitution, atonement, justification and other pieces that are being I think undermining the gospel, you would ask you why didn't you come here and unpack that for us. I did a lot of that unpacking in that conference I did in the last couple of days, but here I'm thinking this way. What is it that is wrong in minds and hearts that cause them to read the same Bible I do with regard to the work of Christ on the cross and do such a different thing with it? They cancel out wrath and so of course you don't need a substitute then, right? If you don't have wrath, you don't need a substitute to bear the wrath to take it off of me, cancel out all kinds of radical suffering texts that can have health, wealth and prosperity. And then you do bizarre interpretations of 2 Corinthians 5, 21 in order to get rid of the pillar text for the imputation of sin to Christ and righteousness to us. What's wrong? What's going on? And one answer and you've got to decide yourself. I don't know the last answer. One answer is, they come to the gospel with wrong senses of God. God's not big enough, he's not weighty enough, he's not magnificent enough, he's not full enough in justice and truth and wisdom and power. Texts about his wrath just don't fit their sensibilities about God so you can see where I'm going. I think it's a theocentric problem that wrecks the Christocentric gospel. It works both ways. I mean, it's a circle. You can start anywhere in the Bible and get to truth. But my justification for doing with you, what I'm doing now, knowing that I love the Lord Jesus and I'm not talking much about his cross, which is my life, is that my hope is that if you could carry away a sense of the centrality of God in the affections of the heart and the mind of those created in his image and now hope in preaching, that new sense might spare you from misunderstandings of the gospel. That's my assumption. We're not as objective as we think we are. We come to text very wired by backgrounds and desires and people we like, some like piper, some like piper, some like piper, and if you like me, you tend to read a text sympathetically. If you don't like me, you tend not to. That's the way we are. All of us are like that. So one of the functions of a pastor is to so deal with God that the people, even without fully knowing what's happening, are picking up a sense of God, a weight of God, a magnitude of God, which amazingly removes more obstacles than they even know to the right understanding of texts. So close parenthesis. I acknowledge, admit, confess that this isn't as Christocentric as perhaps it should be and I do hope God will not let that damage you in any way, but will in fact send you home reading other texts that I'm not referring to in ways and with eyes that will make those texts live in ways that I didn't say anything about. There may be a few more things to say about that, but that is a burden off of my shoulders. So preaching, I have a wild prophecy to make, and I'm not a prophet. I've never had any word about the future that I had any confidence would come true, except what I read in the Bible. So don't put me in that category. But let's make a stab at it, okay? Looking back my assessment of the 20th century, and I'm not alone in this, I read things like this and I thought about it, I think that's probably right. I think the 20th century, at least the second half, will go down as the century of the self, or you could call it the therapeutic century, or the psychological century, the triumph of the therapeutic. It's a book titled by Philip Rief in 1966 already when I was a sophomore in college. Now, that's my sense, whole books, and you all grew up in this milieu where self-esteem was the gospel that solves virtually other problems, management problems at work, personnel problems at church, marriage problems are self-esteem problems, kid problems are self-esteem problems. This is the mantra of our religious, psycho-America, fix it with self-esteem. That's the air we breathe and I'm deeply thankful that it's not as thick as it used to be, not even in the secular world, because it's simply got us nowhere. What about the 21st century? What will this be? This is my little prophecy, and it's crazy, it's wild, it just helps me get at a point. I hope, I think, it may be the century of physics and astronomy. The century of physics and astronomy, here's the reason. The human soul was made for majesty, to see and savor and speak and celebrate majesty, namely God. It can only deal for so long with any degree of survival with a house of mirrors in which we keep trying to like what we see. That will only work for so long until the human soul cries out with all its might, "I need big, I need big, not me." Now, I know we've got the fall going against this prediction, because what happened in the garden was that the devil was able to persuade Adam and Eve that self was better than God. Do it your own way, you don't need to submit here, you can be one of these, you don't have to submit to one of these, be that, be big, be yourself. You take over, and they bought it, and we've bought it, of course, for 2,000 years, it's the nature of sin, but there are certain seasons of the insanity of sin where it becomes so ludicrous that the human soul created in the image of God can't take it anymore and tries righteousness. A little bit, you know, little forms, little external forms of righteousness, like astronomy or physics, like the Hubble telescope taking new pictures of Etta Karinai. Raise your hand if you have ever heard that star, a few buffs out here. It is probably the largest star in our galaxy, and it can be seen with the naked eye. And it is 4 to 5 million times brighter than the sun. It just happens to be 10,000 light years away so that it doesn't hurt your eyes at night. Now, there will come a day when human beings hear this sort of thing, and by some wonderful providence will fall on their faces with pleasurable awe at the thought of it. I walked out of Wayne Gruden's house the other night after we had a wonderful evening together, and my first thought was what does a Phoenix sky look like at 9 o'clock at night? I just wanted to know, because one of the most moving nights of my life was 1968, driving from Wheaton College to Fuller Seminary in Pasadena, Illinois to Pasadena, nonstop in my gold fastback Mustang, which if I'd kept, I'd be a millionaire. In a mountain in Utah, I was so tired, and I thought I'd get out and walk, and I wasn't going to stop. I was madly in love with Noel, had just left her behind for three months, we were married in three months, and I was in no mood to do anything but get where I was going. So I got out and it was, I don't know how it was, whatever goes through Utah, 80, 80, 5, or something, not 85, and I walked up on the hill so that there were no lights anywhere, and I looked up and I saw what I had never seen in my life. It was sheets, sheets of stars. With light, so bright they were at places indistinguishable from one another. I had never had majesty in nature come home to me with greater force. There were only one or two other times in my life when it was like that. I think, maybe, God willing, the century of the self, can I tell you how small that is, how small you are, and you're being told, salvation is to like you. You like you? Can you imagine a smaller, more destructive, more unsatisfying gospel except to insane people? And I'll put in another little prince here about insane people. We minister two blocks from Andrew home, 250 people with schizophrenia, all of them on heavy meds, all of them smoke, and all of them carry their hands a certain way. If you live in that kind of neighborhood, you know exactly what I mean. And you know what, they're all totally wrapped up in themselves. The mark of insanity is the inability for me to get out of myself and get in you and treat you in a way as if you had any significance to me at all. And when that ability ceases and I now have me alone, I go into an institution. It was a sad century and evangelicals baptizing it everywhere and using it in curriculum sermons. So I hope, I don't often pray it, I should, that this would be the century in which on the way to God, natural theology, providence, common grace would result in hearts, fallen hearts, having a new kind of sin, namely the temptation to idolize the galaxies and not self, that would be a step closer, I think, though not salvation, of course. So my burden with regard to preaching has increased tremendously over the years in that I don't see and admittedly, you know, pastors don't hear much preaching except their own. And therefore, it's hard to form judgments except with tapes and comments from people and television and television and just kind of random exposures, books. My sense is that the supremacy of God, the centrality of God, the majesty of God, the glory of God, the power of God, the wrath of God isn't the main thing in pulpits. I hope not yours. And therefore, we come under the condemnation of Albert Einstein who knew his galaxies well. Here's a quote from one who knew him and who wrote this, "I do see the design of the universe as an essentially religious question. That is, that is, one should have some kind of respect and awe for the whole business. It's very magnificent and shouldn't be taken for granted. In fact, I believe that is why Einstein had so little youth for organized religion, although he strikes me as a basically very religious man. He must have looked at what the preachers said about God and felt that they were blaspheming. When I read that, it really stopped me. I wanted to ask, would Einstein listen to my preaching and say, "You're blaspheming." He must have looked at what the preachers said about God and felt that they were blaspheming. He had seen much more majesty than they ever imagined. And they were just not talking about the real thing. My guess is that he simply felt that religions he'd run into across the land did not have a proper respect for the author of the universe. I think that comes close to what I sense is the problem in the state of preaching in many churches in America. He's listed off again. Preachers, he says, "Preachers don't seem to have a sense of majesty that he has seen more than they have in nature, and they've got not only nature, but this holy book that gives better glimpses into the nature of God than that. That plus. The heavens are telling the glory of God, and this is driving the glory of the cross. We sound like we're blaspheming to one who's only seen galaxies. Preachers just do not seem to be talking about the real thing," he said. Preachers do not seem to have a proper respect for the author of the universe. He said, "Preachers seem to be blaspheming," he said. God just doesn't seem to be coming through. For those who are stunned by the indescribable magnitude of what God has made, not to mention the infinite greatness of God himself, the steady diet of practical how-tos on Sunday morning, psychological soothing, relational therapy must seem dramatically out of touch with reality. They do to me, I hear some messages, and I say, "But brother, they can get that somewhere else better than they can get it from you." There's one thing they can't get anywhere else. Nobody is spending any time trying to build a passion for the supremacy of God into their lives. Would you just do that one thing that nobody else is trying to do? Everybody else can do what you're doing better than you. When people ask me, "What do you think of the entertainment orientation of some churches?" I say, "Well, I don't want to go there because I know that the world can do that better than I can, and I don't like coming up second." Why would I want to do every Sunday morning? Why would I be kind of a joking, welcoming pastor, joke, joke, joke, joke, joke? I heard a tape from a church that did a dialogue welcome, and it was exactly like a morning drive time radio. You always have two people, man or woman or two men, and they're just trying to make life funny. So sad, so sad. This is helping me get ready to meet God. I don't get it. I can't do that as well as the world can. These folks are watching plenty of TV, they're going to think, "I'm a real stupid idiot if I try to do what the world does so much better than I do." There are things that people desperately need, and if you would use your messages and your demeanor and your welcome and your songs to help them wake up to what they really need, then you would make a fool of yourself trying to scratch where they itch. They don't itch in the right place. Scientists know that light travels at the speed of 5.87 trillion miles a year called a light year, and they know that the galaxy of which our solar system is a part is about 100,000 light years across diameter, about 587,000 trillion miles across. It's one of the million such galaxies in our optical range of our most powerful telescopes. In our galaxy, there are about 100 billion stars in our galaxy, which is one of a million in our optical range, no telling what beyond. The sun, which is at the center of our solar system, is on its cooler surface, 6,000 degrees centigrade, and it's a modest star in the galaxy. Our sun is traveling at about 155 miles per second, which means that it will take about 200 million years to complete its first revolution around the galaxy. Now scientists know these things, and they say if there is a person behind that who spoke that into being with his word and holds it in being, there should be a certain respect for him, a certain reverence. It doesn't, that joking around, I don't get it. This is scientists. What's that? That's TV, that's radio, but aren't we here to meet this god? I hope we don't be incinerated about 3 trillion light years out from the approach. They know this. We don't seem to know it. Then you put with those statistics this text, this is Isaiah 40 verses 25 to 26. To whom then will you compare me that I should be like him, says the Holy One. Lift up your eyes on high and see, that is, become an astronomer in the 21st century. Lift up your eyes on high and see who created these stars. This is Isaiah talking for God. He who brings out their host by number, and here's a breathtaking phrase, calling them all by name, by the greatness of his might and because he is strong in power, not one of them is missing. Brothers, we need to use our minds to blow our minds. We need to use our minds to take a text like that, look up in Utah, not Pasadena where I live for three years and I don't think I saw a star. Look up, find them innumerable, read a book, find that innumerable, that's right, hundreds and hundreds of millions of galaxies in which there are millions of stars and then say, he not only made them, he not only holds them in being, every single one has a name. And his brain is not the least taxed by that, not the least. Einstein felt some of this and his response was, "Preachers are not talking about the real thing," that's the impression I get with psychological how-tos that keep people coming back to get their immediate felt needs scratched. If he is who he is just in nature, then he should be supreme in preaching. So the challenge, isn't it, is that we make him that? So let's talk for a few minutes about why God's glory should be supreme in preaching and then how? How? I'll give you a sample sermon from the New Testament that shows a stunning God-centeredness, but just a few more words about the why. I got a phone call years ago from CTE preaching today and I had been making a lot in those days about the supremacy of God in preaching. And so they said, we want to do an interview, I said, okay, we'll do an interview. First question, why do you think God should be supreme in preaching? And out of my mouth, just because of my Edwardian saturation and I hope biblical saturation, I said, God should be supreme in preaching because God is supreme to God. And they didn't know what I was talking about. Explain. What do you mean? I mean, in God's mind, he's supreme. In God's heart, he is supreme. He is the supreme value as far as he is concerned. Playing is more valuable to God than God. They didn't hear anybody talk like that. I mean, that's just plain. Is it plain? What do you value more, me? Above him. What century do you live in? Twenty. Of course, I forgot. The main reason we make God supreme in preaching is because he's supreme in his own affections. He's supreme in his own purposes, his own designs, his own mind. And so I've written over and over chapter after chapter, article after article, book after book saying one thing, the most God-centered person in the universe is God. It's all I've said for twenty-five years, almost, and then trying to figure out its implications for my life and my family and my church and evangelism and missions and fasting and prayer and on and on. Just what does it imply, God, that the end for which God created the world is God, is joy. Here's the sentence from Edward's book. The great end of God's works, which is so variously expressed in Scripture, is indeed but one. And this one end is most properly and comprehensively called the glory of God. So not only does he command you, whatever you do, whether you eat or drink, do all to the glory of God, to display the glory of God, everything he does, he does to the glory of God. And there are dozens and dozens and dozens of texts in the Bible that show that. Here's one. This text probably is the most God-centered text in the Bible. Goes like this. Isaiah 48 and 9 to 11. For my namesake, I defer my anger. For the sake of my praise, I restrain it for you, that I may not cut you off. Behold, I have refined you, but not like silver. I have tried you in the furnace of affliction. For my own sake, for my own sake, I do it. How should my name be proclaimed? My glory. I will not give to another. This text hammer blows of God's God exaltation. So the answer was a right answer, I believe, on the telephone. Why should preaching have God at the center and make him supreme? Always. Every sermon is because God is supreme to God, always, in every act and in all the books of the Bible. He puts himself at the center, we should put him at the center. If thanks to the Lord, call on his name, make known his deeds among the peoples, proclaim that his name is exalted. Isaiah 12, 4, or Romans 9, 22, desiring to show his wrath and to make known his power. He has endured with much long suffering the vessels prepared for destruction in order to make known the riches of his glory to the vessels of mercy. This can't miss the main point of that. The end for which God created the world is to display his wrath, display his power, display his glory to the vessels of mercy. God created the world to go public and to display himself in the world as great and glorious. This is Paul's passion. Listen to how Paul says it, Ephesians 3.8, "To me this grace was given to preach to the Gentiles the unsearchable riches of Christ." I just want to ask every secret sensitive person, as you look back over the years, I not feel indicted by this, and I don't feel myself in that category. I feel indicted by this. Have you done that? I preached the unsearchable riches of Christ. Have we even seen them? Have we spent long enough meditating on the law of the Lord day and night that riches after riches, innumerable riches emerge of Christ so that moving down into the self-esteem, therapeutic mode becomes impossible for us. We must constantly be lifting Christ, constantly be celebrating Christ, constantly be displaying the wonders of the cross. Let me keep reading, I stopped in the middle, it gets even better maybe. To me this grace was given to preach to the Gentiles the unsearchable riches of Christ, and to make all men see what is the plan of the mystery hidden for ages in God, who created all things that through the church, the manifold wisdom of God might now be made known to the principalities and powers. What a mandate! Display the unsearchable riches of Christ, unfold the plan of the mystery hidden for ages, display the manifold, many colored wisdom of God that is preaching with God at the center, God at the bottom, God at the top, informing our understanding of the cross and all of its glory, oh brothers what a calling, what a calling. You have some time left, stun your people, the unsearchable riches of the Son of God, you have not exhausted. Now that's enough on the why question, why think this way, plan this way, preach this way, I'm going to make God supreme, he's going to be the theme of my life, my preaching, my counseling, my sitting with the elders, I'm going to be a God supreme person. Prick me, I want to bleed God, I want to have the reputation as 30 elders sit around the room in my church, if they look piper word for his opinion, they get God. They don't get savvy, savvy, cool, whatever that I read in the latest book. They can read those books, they're better businessmen than I am anyway. They want God from this guy, you go live with God and smell like God. The aroma of Christ went that aroma you're into the table. You don't need any more of this stuff, we bring this stuff, we live with this stuff. We need God here, pastor, smell like Jesus tonight. Say something about the Bible and about God so that we have a perspective. We can figure out the measurement of parking places, but I want to know what parking has to do with God. Parking has to do with God. It's your job, it's parking have to do with God, not just savvy, but God. So now let's ask, and this is the only other question I have to ask, is how? How are you going to do this? Now what should I do at this point, huh? How can I help me and you do that better? So what I'm going to do is walk you through what probably is the most God-centered sermon in the Bible, and I would invite you to open your Bibles to Acts. The book of Acts chapter 13, Paul at Antioch of Pecidia, in the synagogue, it is an evangelistic message, but it's evangelism among Jewish people who know the story. So it's a little bit about, you know, it's a little bit of how you do unbelievers in preaching and a little bit about how you do people who know a lot of stuff about what you're talking about. So it's helpful in both areas because we preach most of the time to professing believers with unbelievers coming in amid them, we hope, and some of the time it's mainly unbelievers. I have this deep conviction that in worship we should be worshiping over the word and exulting in it for the sake of those who believe, and God saves a lot of people that way. Because I think 1 Corinthians 14 implies that if prophetic anointing falls on a pastor in its fullest sense, seeing God through his, being granted the capacity with function to pierce the heart with it, people fall down and say, "God is in this place." Sometimes they just start crying and say, "They walk in the room." Okay, let's walk through this sermon. Now here's what I want you to see. At least I hope happens to you what happened to me. I just read this sermon slowly a few years ago and was blown away at the godness of it. So I'm going to go verse by verse and point to that. It's going to point to that. Okay? It'll take us 10 minutes maybe. Verse 17, "It was God who chose Israel." Now you may see this in the word God or you may just see it in a pronoun. I'm just pointing to the subject of the verbs, who's God, God, God, God, God, God. It is amazing. And we'll talk about it for a few minutes when we're done walking through it. Verse 17, Acts 13, "It was God who chose Israel from all the people of the earth for his special purposes." Second half of verse 17, "God made the people great during their stay in Egypt." It was not natural fertility that made Jews have a lot of babies. God made them grow, he says. Third part of verse 17, "It was God who led them out of Egypt with an uplifted arm." In other words, God flexes muscles in Egypt. God made the unusual display of power. God meant to be seen as the mighty deliverer. Have you ever asked why there were ten plagues and not one? If you answer because they didn't respond to the first one, that's the wrong answer, because it says before he ever got down there, he's going to do a lot of them. That's a prophecy, God knows he's going to do ten before they say no to the first one. God is on a mission to show off his power. That's the point of the ten plagues with gnats and dust and frogs and locust and blood in the water. He's got this planned out. I'm lifting my right arm to make a name for myself in Egypt. So clear if you read the whole story together, and Paul calls attention to it. Verse 18, "God bore with Israel in the wilderness," or another old reading with one letter different in the Greek word, he carried them, not bore with, but bore, he bore them, he bore them in the wilderness. Like Father carries his child, God was the guide to staying her father in the wilderness. It was 19, first part of the verse. It was God who destroyed the seven nations in the land of Canaan. Of course, people swung the sword, right? But Paul wants to stress, God did it, because he knows Proverbs 21, 31. The horse is made ready for the day of battle, but victory belongs to the Lord. Of course, they were swinging swords, riding horses, but if they thought our sword got us the victory, they totally missed it. God did the conquest. That's the first part of verse 19. Second part of verse 19, "It was God who gave Israel the land of Canaan as an inheritance." He owned it, and he can give it to him ever he pleases. He gave it to them. The earth is the Lord's, and the fullness they're out, if you can do with it as he pleases. Verse 20, "It was God who gave Israel judges." These rulers didn't just rise up, the text says God gave them, God raised them up. Verse 21, "It was God who gave to Israel her first king," Saul. Verse 22, "It was God who removed Saul." Just like Daniel says in chapter 2, verse 21, "God changes times and seasons. He removes kings, he sets up kings." Paul's drawing attention to that, to that. Saul goes down, David goes up, that's God. Or Daniel 4, 32, "The most high rules the kingdom of men gives it to him ever he will." All one time, David another time, this is God. Verse 22, second half of the verse. God raised up David's son of Jesse, David, I'm sorry, David the son of Jesse. God chose him, a young nobody, slingshot, writing poems, singing songs. God took Saul down, God puts up this shepherd boy into the kingship. Verse 23, "It was God who brought to Israel a Savior," ah, now here we are. So he jumped from David to the son of David, got a redemptive historical thing going on here, big time as he moves to Jesus. God brought to Israel a Savior, Jesus, not as though there was some impersonal force behind the flow of history, because it says, notice it, notice the phrase, "as he promised." So he didn't just look at history and say, "Hmm, guess we better do this with a son." Rather it says, "He sent the son, the Savior came as he promised." Hey, a long time ago this was planned, this is no decision on the spur of the moment. God was promising and God was acting when Jesus came. He set things up like this. Verse 24 and 25, "Here we meet John the Baptist." Now what would you choose to say about John the Baptist if you were preaching to people who've never heard of him? He's in the synagogue, Antiochopecidia, he's moved into a part of the story they know nothing about. They knew the Old Testament, they don't know this. And he quotes John like this, "I am not he, no, but after me one is coming, the sandals of whose feet I am not worthy to untie." So what's the point? He picks the one thing, out of all the things he could have said about John, the one thing that deflects attention away from John to Jesus, to make Jesus central, the sent one, the son is still central here. Verse 26. And Paul says, "To us has been sent the message of salvation." It's a passive verb, who's the actor behind this passive verb, "To us has been sent the message of salvation." And the answer is, "God is." In other words, God didn't just plan the coming of the Savior. He also planned and sent the message of the gospel that flows from the work of the Savior. He's sending this message, he's sending this message, God's doing that. You didn't show up in your church on your own, get a hold of this. God put you there. The Greek word is, "Tith they me," in Acts 12, "Elders, the Holy Spirit, set you over this lock." Set you, says that about the elders. God set them there. He uses, of course, all kinds of means, but he's the actor. Verse 27, Paul goes out of his way now, and this is the most remarkable thing so far, I think, to show that he's on a mission in this text, this sermon. He goes out of his way to show that even people who don't know what they're doing are fulfilling prophecy. Verse 27, "For those who live in Jerusalem," and their rulers, "because they did not know or recognize Agna asentes," they were ignorant, they did not know what they were doing or who he was, did not recognize him, nor understand the utterances of the prophets. They didn't get the prophecies, they didn't understand them, which are read every day in the Sabbath, they fulfilled these by condemning him. Now you've got to stop, this is one of these meditation things, and you say, "Why did he point that out? Why did he point out the fact that many actors in and around the cross were fulfilling Old Testament prophecies about the cross and did not know they were?" Why would he say that? I mean, that's a complicated thought. What's he up to? Here's what he's up to. If all of them knew the prophecies, someone might say they're managing it. There's no divine word going on here because they read the script, and now they're doing the script, and thus God wouldn't get the credit for the crucifixion. They would, bad or good. And Paul says, "I'm pulling the plug on that one." God did this. That's amazing. You know, Peter had said the same thing, hadn't he, in chapter 4, 27, 28, in this city were gathered together against your anointed one, both Herod and Pontius Pilate and the Jews and the Gentiles to do whatever your hand and your plan had predestined to take place. I'll put in a parentheses here on the sovereignty of God and people's stumbling over it. This text that I just quoted, Acts 4, 27, 28, is a mouth stopper for many people when they're grappling with the issues of the sovereignty of God, because I say to them, you know, unless you have a category in your brain for God's willing that sin take place without himself being a sinner, you can't make sense of the Bible. In fact, you cannot make sense of the cross because either God did the cross and thus bore our wrath, provided our righteousness, carried our sins, purchased our heaven, or somebody else did. And if somebody else did, there is no salvation. And that's not a theological inference. That is a quotation of Acts 4, 27, Herod Pontius Pilate, the Jews and the Gentiles, picture them, Herod puts a purple robe on, wants to see a miracle and mocks him. God, expedient to the core, Gentiles, they drove the nails, the Roman soldiers, Jews, they cried crucified, and all of them did what your plan predestined to take place. And therefore you're saved, brothers. So this issue of the sovereignty of God over the fallen will of man is at the heart of your salvation. You deny it, you begin to attack the cross. Close that for instance. Verse 29, "When they had fulfilled all that was written of Him." So there you have God fulfilling all that was written of Him by the Actors, some of whom knew what they were doing and some didn't, Jesus certainly did. They took Him down from the tree and laid Him in tomb. And finally, verse 30, "God is the one who raises Jesus from the dead. God raised Him from the dead." So Jesus gave up His life freely and He said, "Nobody takes my life from me. I'll lay it down. If I lay it down, I can take it up again." Nevertheless, both Paul and this text here, Paul in Romans, and this text here says God raised him from the dead. So now, what do we make of this sermon? Have you ever narrated history that way? Somebody said, "What did you do last summer?" You say, "Well, God took some vacation and God gave us a cabin and God provided some bikes for the kids and God kept us healthy and God gave us some beautiful weather and it about 30 gods." You ever do that? That's what He did. I don't mean you have to preach that way. I don't mean that. I just mean you have to preach to get the point across. In a way that works, in your study of this scripture and this text, this sermon is a kind of illustration of what I mean anyway by God saturated, God exalting, God centered, God preaching. And that's what I would summon you to do. We live in an age where this is not believed that God is supreme in all things, and therefore it's a superficial age, and I'm so eager for you not to be superficial as we draw this part to a close. I'm so eager for you not to be superficial. What does it mean to be superficial? I think superficial means that you take an event or an object and you deal with it in all kinds of ways, some of them very academic and requiring much education, and you never deal with it in relationship to its most decisive origin or sustaining or purpose. Those are your things. What you come from, how's it held in being, what's it here for, he's never deal with that. I say everything that doesn't deal with those is superficial. That's my definition of superficial, which means that virtually all the communication media are superficial. The educational enterprises in our land are superficial, they don't deal with the most important aspects of the reality, we deal with math, we deal with the weather, we deal with physics, if you don't deal with God, you're superficial. You're on the surface of things, there's a little teeny description of what this universe is like, or what this atom is like, or what this song is like, or what this historical event is like, and here's this massive God underneath, and massive God above, and massive God holding that there, and he doesn't get mentioned. I call that superficial, that's just obvious to me, that is superficial. Virtually all the news reports on television are superficial, all history books almost are superficial, all public education is superficial, almost all editorial and news commentary is superficial. All of this because of the incredible, unspeakable, unimaginable, outrageous disregard for God, which we have been so enesthetized by, it does not seem strange, and you're sitting there thinking, this is an overstatement, I can't find words to describe the outrage of God's absence in America, this is his world, it's his, he owns everything, every media outlet, he owns it, every molecule in it is his existing for his glory. If you leave the infinite, all defining, all controlling, all pervasive God out of account, all understanding is superficial. When the main thing is missing, what's left is distorted and superficial, no matter how accurate at one level it may be. One may say, good grief, Piper, that's religion, you want everything to be religious, everything be religious, it's not religion, it's reality, to hell with the word religion. Could care less what you call it, God is God, he made you for himself, he made everything for himself, everything is from him and through him and to him, therefore to him be glory consciously, got to stick in another princess here, I'm almost done, I know we have a Q&A, I'm really excited about it, I love Q&A. A lot of believers, when I push on this with them, they say, oh we assume God, he's the foundation of our magazine or he's the foundation of our school or he's the foundation of our church and so we don't feel like we have to wear God on our sleeve. I say, you know what, I never think about the foundation of my house, ever. I love the kitchen, food, I like the bedroom a lot. I like my study, you know what, if you remind me I'm glad the house doesn't fall down. It is not why God created the world brothers to be taken for granted like that. I hate that argument. God went public with creation to be on the agenda as the main thing all the time. That's why he created the universe and so call it religion if you want, I'll just call it reality. And my burden for preaching is that preachers call people to this God-centeredness and you help them with it. You help lawyers with it and housewives with it and teachers with it and brick masons with you help them with it to give them some tips, what that would mean for God to be in their brick laying, their painting, you help them, you think with them, you get down there and you know it's hard, you don't leave them just stuck, feeling guilty, you help them. Where I ask you, are our people going to get this if not from you? That's my closing thought. The world and all kinds of institutions have agendas for our people and how to make their lives better. One thing they need from you above all and that is to spread into their lives a passion for the centrality and the supremacy of God. Nobody else is helping them with this. We get one hour, maybe a week. I was in Detroit, I don't have a television, some kind of out of it. You can use names of really famous TV stars and I don't know who you're talking about. So I get no problem with watching football on TV, I frankly borrow a TV sometimes. But I don't have one just because that's one of my weaknesses, you know. So I'm in Detroit Airport and you know the Detroit Airport if you've ever been there they've got these gigantic greens with the TV up there and it's Sunday and oh I forget who was playing. They looked like the Green Bay Packers. I was Green Bay. Like I knew something. It wasn't the Green Bay Packers, just yellow and green, some other team. And so they were playing and it's cool, got 10 minutes to watch this, I like good football. And probably out of those 10 minutes, six were advertisements. Now the quantity is not the problem, it's the crap that was in there. And then it hit me, my people are watching this, three hours worth. One hour of it or an hour and a half is junk. It's consumerism, it's materialism, it's sexual titillation. And I just have to think, I'm feeling dirty right now, I'm feeling tempted right now. I have thoughts going into my head right now with that neckline and that stuff. I didn't want that, I don't need that, I need God, I got to stay pure for my people. And our people are going there over and over again, saturating their minds. So my point is, who's going to help them? Who's going to help them see God? It's not television, it's not most of the books they're reading, it's not the newspaper. They had a little section in my newspaper called Faith and Values, I think it's gone now out of the Minneapolis Tribune and it was no good anyway because it was ever religion under the sun. But at least evangelicals showed up every now and then and a little bit of truth made its way. But there's this massive section called Sport, whole section of the newspaper, Sport in this world that God made and no section called God. What a parable. So brothers, our job is hard but we've got God on our side, we've got the Holy Spirit on our side. We've got an infallible mighty sword on our side. We don't have to be retreating in this but we do have to not try to imitate the world in titillating people and scratching where they itch. We need to help awaken in them their passion for what they were made. Maybe the 21st century might prove not only the century of the galaxies, astronomy, physics but maybe, wouldn't it be glorious if we were part of God's move to make it the century of God, an unprecedented move of the Holy Spirit in Phoenix. Starting in your little church, I talked to a brother who said we've got six believers on our reservation. I was hugged him, I was hugged him, I loved that ministry. It would be just like God to start there. It would be just like God to start it there and not one of our big mega churches. But it's going to be if it comes driven not by signs and wonders and I believe in signs and wonders. I have no problem with them showing up, I would like them to show up very often when I pray for sick people. It won't be driven that way. It'll be driven by truth. This is why I've devoted my life to writing and preaching the way I have. Jonathan Edwards said he was the main human instrument under God in the first great awakening which stunned this nation and he chalked it up to five sermons, humanly speaking, one of which was a long, complicated unfolding of justification by faith. It was doctrine and then the Holy Spirit fell on the tender. Some brothers, let's pray together that God might be pleased to do that. Let's just do our little part to read and cut a straight path in the Bible to inform our hearts but kindling on the fire and then say, Holy Spirit, come down, put your match here. I have put as much kindling on this soul as I can. Would you now fall? The Father, I ask that as we move into our break and then our Q&A time that you would do it, you would come and you would stir us up to expect that it wouldn't have to be a century of just mere galaxies but could become the century of your great exaltation. I ask this in Jesus' name, Amen. [BLANK_AUDIO]
Our churches don’t need better productions and more entertainment. We need pastors and leaders who give themselves completely to exalting the supremacy of God in absolutely everything.