The role of the church in influencing and shaping contemporary American culture is a topic generating much interest, discussion, and disagreement. Gauging from the many books on the subject, there is a lot that can be said, but I especially appreciate what my friend Mark Dever has said.  

Today I want to draw off another excerpt from my 2007 interview with Mark. Mark lives, works, and pastors a church four blocks from the U.S. Capitol and three blocks from the U.S. Supreme Court. Mark is geographically—and in his thinking—on one of the front lines where the church and contemporary culture meet.

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C.J. Mahaney: Elaborate more on the priorities of 9Marks.

Mark Dever: Well, what we want to see are communities of people that reflect the character of God, and by doing so are distinct from the world around them. As I travel around I see so many evangelical churches trying to “break the code” of how to look as much like the culture as possible and yet keep the gospel, assuming this will maximize the evangelistic impulse.

I’m not sure that’s true.

I think there is a lot of peril in this. And it seems to be that even from the very earliest chapters of Acts, what strikes people are not thoughts of, “Hey, they speak Hebrew too,” but rather, “Hey, look at how they love one another in a way that is different from the way we are loving or being loved.”

So I think that God’s character, as it is reproduced in a community of people, must be one of the most powerful witnesses to the truth of the gospel, both for evangelism and the edification of those already converted. So I would like to see evangelical churches— while not becoming unsophisticated in how they interact with culture—keep cultural interaction in perspective, and realize that the life-blood of your church continuing is not your contextualization (your similarity to the culture), but how you are blessedly distinct from the culture. The church is full of people who are born again.

So our distinctives are what we want to hold out, and trust that God will make them attractive and will commend the gospel to other people.

So sometimes I feel like I am being called to tar the ark before the flood. Our world is increasingly secular. And churches that are trying to be as much like the world as possible, I fear, are very leaky arks. And churches that are trying to be like the world are often unselfconsciously nothing more than part of their culture. I fear they are just going to sink and become spiritually worthless spiritual tombs.

So I think the rise of secularism will itself cut down on nominal Christianity. It will actually encourage the clarity of what truly is the gospel and the effects that it has, because the cache, the worth, the value of nominal Christianity will just continue to decline in the culture broadly, so that you won’t want to be known as an evangelical Christian because that means you hate various groups of people or you believe these weird things. (As opposed to in the 50s it meant you were a respectable, upstanding citizen.) So as the general cultural perception turns on evangelical Christianity, I think we are just seeing all the more clearly our need to have a positive vision for the church as distinct from the culture.

CJM: And so what would you say to a pastor who is attracted to models of the church that aren’t distinct from the culture and aren’t distinctly proclaiming the gospel?

MD: Well, when you are not distinctly proclaiming the gospel, then you are not talking about a healthy church in any way whatsoever.

I want to be careful here. Not every church is going to be exactly alike. For example, there are churches that deliberately dress differently, or have a different kind of music, or different order of their services. But as long as they are preaching the gospel, preaching the Word, the things they are saying are true, they are reading Scripture, they are praising—as long as they are doing the things we are commanded to in Scripture, I am prepared to believe there are a number of different ways, and that in different settings one can be better than another.

But I would be very careful if these things are what a church begins majoring on. If the adverbs overtake the verbs, the adjectives overtake the nouns, the how you do it becomes more important than what you are doing, well then I think you have surely lost your way.

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For more on this topic, consult Mark’s T4G’08 message (“Improving the Gospel: Exercises in Unbiblical Theology”), The Courage to Be Protestant: Truth-lovers, Marketers, and Emergents in the Postmodern World by David Wells (Eerdmans, 2008) and Christ and Culture Revisited by D.A. Carson (Eerdmans, 2008).

 

If you step out the doors of Capitol Hill Baptist Church, walk across the parking lot, and hike up a long hallway of stairs, you’ll arrive in the office of my good friend Mark Dever. There his massive study claims the entire second story of his home, the walls hidden by bookshelves.

But Mark’s study is more unusual than you think.

Entering Mark’s office, you immediately become aware of people. Mark is rarely alone in his study, and it appears he likes it that way. His sermon preparation is unlike anything I’ve seen as he enjoys interacting with the flurry of staff and interns buzzing around his desk. And on more than one occasion, Mark has prepared entire sermons in the church parking lot—not to avoid people, but to better tap into the stream of staff, interns, and church members cutting between the church and his study! But when the parking lot is not ideal for sermon prep, Mark moves back into the study, where the stream of staff and interns continues. Mark’s (quite unusual) study arrangement makes a loud statement about his care for people, his desire to train others, and his love of friendship.

The second thing you notice about his study is the books. Books are everywhere, floor to ceiling. Though his study is large and his walls are hidden by bookshelves, I would guess Mark’s collection of books exceeded the shelf space in the mid-1990s. When the shelf space was exhausted, the books kept coming, the horizontal arrangement stopped, and vertical piles of books began to accumulate. Though there must be some organization to the maze of books, I cannot tell you what system it follows (probably only Mark knows).

Third, you will notice his love of music. There is always some form of music playing in his study, which is not unusual for a study. But his eclectic musical interests are bizarre and distracting. You could hear classical music followed by a Maranatha! worship chorus from the early ’70s, then a singing nun (no joke!), Keith Green, opera, and jazz. Often when I’m in his study I ask him to turn the music down or to change it to something, well, less annoying and distracting.

On June 6, 2007, I joined the staff and interns at 9Marks in Mark’s study. We sat among the books and silenced the music, and I turned the microphone on Mark to hear about his life and ministry. We were scheduled to talk for one hour but extended it to another hour (and could have gone a third without any problem). The full interview recording can be downloaded from the 9Marks website here and here.

Although I had explored many of the topics in the interview with Mark before, the Q&A uncovered a stream of information I had never heard before. I commend the entire interview, but I especially wanted to highlight a few excerpts here for pastors.

The god of Options

This first excerpt reminds me of the many pastors I have met who are distracted from serving joyfully in the present by thinking continuously about future options. These pastors are often unaware of how their consideration of the future affects their souls each day.

In answering a question about his future at Capitol Hill Baptist Church, Mark’s response included the phrase “the god of options,” which I found wise, and have since used (when appropriate) to care for other pastors. I think as pastors read the rest of his response, this phrase will remind them that, regardless of God’s will for your future, and without eliminating the real possibility of future transition, you can be certain that God’s will for you this day (and in the foreseeable future) is to serve him with gladness right where you are.

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C.J. Mahaney: Do you plan on staying at Capitol Hill Baptist Church?

Mark Dever: Lord willing.  

CJM: Lord willing what?  

MD: The rest of my life.  

CJM: As a member of the pulpit committee, Matt Schmucker remembers a particular statement you made in that regard. You said to Connie, “The next place we go, we’re buying...

MD: …cemetery plots.” Because we had been moving around and wherever we lived my heart got entangled with the people. I just hated moving and it was just horrendous for me. I had been studying the Puritans and realized that the basic model was to just stay someplace—like a marriage to a congregation. It is not exactly the same, it is not sin to leave it necessarily, but you don’t assume churches are a career ladder you are climbing. You are at one church for two years to work on some skills and when you run out of your bag of tricks you move to another church for three years, they hear all six of your sermons and then you move someplace else. No, I would like to know their children and their grandchildren. So I made clear when we were talking to the pulpit search committee that if I came I was intending, Lord willing, to stay. I had no further plans and actually planned to have no further plans.…

I remember, during a Wednesday night church potluck very early during my time here, I got my food and sat down. An older woman (probably in her mid-70s, late 70s at the time) who had been at the church for decades gets her meal and sits down right next to me. She looks at me and says, “I don’t like young preachers.”

CJM: And you are probably 33 years old?

MD: Thirty-two or 33. And I just looked at her. I said, “Really?” She said, “Yep. Of course I’ll make an exception in your case.”

CJM: Did you ask for an explanation why?  

MD: I just started eating my food and then I said, “I guess you expect to outlast him at the church, don’t you?” She said, “Yep. Always have.”  

And then I took some more food and then said, “Well, I think you may have met your match.”

CJM: Oh, outstanding.…Thank you for the compelling example you provide of a commitment to this church, and provoking other pastors to follow that similar attitude and approach. You introduced me to the description of Puritan pastors, that they were “looking for a place to settle.”

MD: A great example of that is when John Cotton, I think it was when John Cotton died, their church needed a pastor and began negotiating with the First Congregational Church up in Ipswich. Both churches entered a season of prayer for their pastor, John Norton, coming down to Boston. So it was not at all a kind of cloak-and-dagger secret committee goes and attends, tries to scout out the talent, and then steals them away. It’s two families, two congregations, praying about where would this brother be best used—which is a great way to approach it.

CJM: What are the unique joys of pastoring?  

MD: Well, for me, that would include that specific decision to stay here. It was a great opportunity to destroy the “god of options,” which I think young men and women who are successful in our culture tend to be addicted to.

I watch young people in this church when they are 25 and they don’t want to do anything that closes any options. At 27, 31, 33, the same thing. At some point life begins forcing itself on you and you have a wife and kids and some options just close. But I think the young folks in our culture who are doing OK by the world’s standards are enslaved to worshiping at the altar of this god of options.

So by saying I wasn’t interested in going anyplace else, I meant to send out a wide signal to say, “Please don’t tempt me by asking me about other options, because this is going to be slow, hard work and it’s worthy of a life.”

Dr. J. Ligon Duncan III recently traveled to Sovereign Grace to teach on covenant theology at the Pastors College. Dr. Duncan currently serves as senior minister of First Presbyterian Church (Jackson, MS) and as an adjunct professor at Reformed Theological Seminary (Jackson, MS). In late March, Dr. Duncan generously opened his schedule for me to ask a handful of questions on the value of the early church fathers, especially for busy pastors. Patrology, or the study of the early church fathers, was the topic of Dr. Duncan’s PhD thesis from the University of Edinburgh.

The interview answers questions like Why should a busy pastor invest time in reading the patristic authors? How will a pastor benefit? Where should he start? What cautions should he be alerted to?

Download the full interview MP3 (14.4 MB).

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Outline of interview questions [with time markers]

[00:00] – Intro

[01:30] – Define for us patristics or patrology.

[04:28] – Why should busy pastors read patristic literature in the first place?

[09:29] – What hurdles do pastors face in reading and benefiting from patristic writings?

[14:13] – For the busy pastor, recommend a few specific patristic titles covering history, biography, and primary sources.

[26:52] – What contemporary debates reflect controversies addressed by the patristic authors?

[32:00] – Our culture appears to be growing increasingly secular. If it's true that secularism is on the rise, what can we learn from the church fathers on engaging a “pagan” culture?

[36:06] – In patristic literature, a reader will be faced with thoughts or practices of the early church fathers that were incorrect. What concerns do you have for a pastor getting his feet wet in the patristic writings?

[41:46] – Would you agree that in patristic writings we see a stress on ethics over and above the gospel?

[45:08] – Dr. Duncan, you are a gifted patristic scholar and have been pastoring at First Presbyterian in Jackson for over twelve years now, preaching on a regular basis. How do your preaching and pastoral ministry reflect the impact of patristic authors?

Over the past week we have been posting small excerpts from C.J.’s rich interview with pastor and author Dr. Sinclair Ferguson. Here is a complete index of those blog posts. Also, we’ve included the full audio recording from the two-hour interview.

Blog Post Index

1: Intro to Sinclair Ferguson interview
2: An Awkward Intro
3: Looking Outward
4: Legalism in Eden
5: Jesus Grows in Favor with God
6: God’s Love for Us Displayed in the Cross
7: More Full of Grace than I of Sin

Audio Recordings

The interview was recorded on location and is, in my opinion, of poor audio quality. However, others have given a listen and say the recordings are intelligible and worth offering. So if you are interested in taking in the orchestra of sounds—Scottish accents, boisterous laughing, echoes, the clanking silverware of a restaurant, and background music—pull your chair up to the interview table and have a listen for yourself. The full two-hour audio recording, from which the above blog posts originate, is broken into four bite-sized episodes.

Episode 1 of 4 (43:22; 10 MB) download or listen …


Episode 2 of 4 (31:39; 7.3 MB) download or listen …


Episode 3 of 4 (11:44; 2.7 MB) download or listen …


Episode 4 of 4 (30:44; 7.1 MB) download or listen …

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Photo © 2008, Lukas VanDyke

(The final selection from C.J.’s interview with pastor and author Dr. Sinclair Ferguson)

C.J. Mahaney: Let me move on to the fourth and final quote. This is my most recent favorite quote, because one of the great things about having access to your quotes is not only the difference they make in my private life, in my understanding of pastoral ministry and preaching, but also the difference they make in individual sermons. So if I really don’t have much else to say—and often I don’t—the “go to” quotes make all the difference.

So this particular quote is for pastors, although any and all readers will benefit from the content of this quote. You write,

Only by seeing our sin do we come to see the need for and wonder of grace. But exposing sin is not the same thing as unveiling and applying grace. We must be familiar with and exponents of its multifaceted power, and know how to apply it to a variety of spiritual conditions. Truth to tell, exposing sin is easier than applying grace; for, alas, we are more intimate with the former than we sometimes are with the latter. Therein lies our weakness.

This line is just filled with discernment for pastors and filled with discernment for everyone.

So without in any way minimizing the doctrine of sin—because you opened by saying it’s only by seeing our sin we come to see the need and the wonder of grace—how can we effectively expose sin and yet ultimately unveil and apply grace?

Sinclair Ferguson: At least for myself it’s returning to a principle with me: Make sure you have gone back to basics. Make sure that you think back from first principles.

Part of the first principles of the gospel are these categories, sin and grace. I think the thing that I am trying to get at here is the correlation between my ability to grasp the grace, grace of grace and my grasping the sin, sin of sin (what Ralph Venning calls the “exceeding sinfulness of sin”). The sin is mine and therefore natural for me to see. It’s grace that isn’t natural to me and therefore difficult to see. Therefore I am going to struggle to bring the sin I am so familiar with to the grace I am unfamiliar with. And therefore I need to find ways given to me in Scripture of discovering the graciousness of God.

And I find a couple of paradoxes here. On the one hand, it’s almost easier for me to explore the vocabulary for sin in the Bible than the vocabulary for grace. And I notice this in the literature, too. As a preacher it is wonderful to be able to say to people, “Sin is a multi-headed monster. One of the richest areas of vocabulary in the Hebrew language is for sin. There is transgression, there is iniquity...” And in the addressing the substitutionary atonement of Christ, it would be right for me to speak about that.

But on the other hand I find that, because I am a sinner, I have got to work harder intellectually and mentally to see there is an even richer vocabulary for grace. Under the principle of Romans 5:20—“where sin abounds, grace super-abounds”—has got to be a principle on which I will live my Christian life. I’m reminded of the hymn,

O Jesus! full of pardoning grace,—
More full of grace than I of sin.

And if somebody quibbles by saying surely the work of Christ is equivalent grace to sin, I think, “No. Paul is saying there really is more grace in Christ than sin in me.”

Here is an illustration. Because American houses are bigger, we have a washing machine and a tumble dryer in the house. Because houses tend to be smaller in the United Kingdom, many families have a washing machine and spin dryer all in one machine. It takes longer because the thing goes through the washing cycle and then it goes through the spin-drying cycle.

I often think, “That’s my life as a Christian. I am in the machinery of the exposure of my sin. Then I get thrown around to discover grace. But the thing about grace is that grace is Christ, it’s not substance. It’s not washing powder that’s thrown in.

Grace is Christ. When I am in Christ I am going to become more conscious of my other sins and the same sins at deeper levels. I realize what I thought was the sin was actually only the manifestation of the real sin.

I am constantly being turned in this sin/grace, sin/grace, sin/grace cycle all my days.

I still hold the, kind of the classical Augustinian view of Romans 7:14–25 that Paul is actually speaking about himself. I don’t think he is speaking wholesale about himself; I think he is speaking about himself from a particular perspective. But I think Paul understood this sin/grace cycle. And it’s not like now it’s grace, now it’s sin, but it’s both at the same time. It’s in this that you realize why looking at yourself in a certain light, this tension is expressed in a deep-seated contradiction of being—is bound to make you cry out, “Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?” (Romans 7:24).

But that is exactly the point where, as Christians, we need to learn that we are in Christ, but we are not yet in heaven. The dominion of sin has been broken, but the presence of sin has not been abolished.

And I think it is R.L. Dabney who says that surely there is no more extraordinary contradiction in the universe than that sin continues to dwell where Christ indwells. Or, sometimes I put it this way: Once you have got a lodger in your house he may be extremely difficult to dislocate from the house. And sin is like that. Sin used to be the owner of the house. Sin is now a lodger in the house, but lodgers can be very, very difficult to get out.

By God’s grace, the great thing has been done and sin’s dominion has been broken. But we are, in an ongoing way, discovering how sin is not a commodity that can be abstracted. It is in our bones. And it is battle all the way to the end.…

CJM: You have been exceedingly generous with your time, Dr. Ferguson. And actually, we must get you to lunch. But before we conclude: You have made different references to preachers and others who have had this profound effect on you. I want you to know you have had that same profound effect on me. And if anyone is perceptive when I am preaching, they will hear your influence in and through my preaching. And so one of the highlights for me has been just to sit here and not only learn from you, but now be able to say, “Thank you.”

Thank you for example, your teaching, your writing, your preaching. It has made, not a minor difference, and not even a significant difference. I would say it has made a profound difference, and for that I am profoundly grateful to God.

Thank you, Sinclair.

SF: Thank you, C.J.

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The above quote from Dr. Ferguson was published on the Reformation21 blog here.

Photo © 2008, Lukas VanDyke

(A continuation of C.J.’s interview with pastor and author Dr. Sinclair Ferguson)

C.J. Mahaney: This quote I have used numerous times in preaching. I don’t think I have ever used this quote without it affecting me. And I would anticipate this would happen even this moment. I think once readers hear the contents of this quote they will understand why:

When we think of Christ dying on the cross we are shown the lengths to which God’s love goes in order to win us back to himself. We would almost think that God loved us more than he loves his Son! We cannot measure such love by any other standard. He is saying to us: I love you this much. The cross is the heart of the gospel. It makes the gospel good news: Christ died for us. He has stood in our place before God’s judgment seat. He has borne our sins. God has done something on the cross we could never do for ourselves. But God does something to us as well as for us through the cross. He persuades us that he loves us.

And this is the phrase that I find just affects me every time: “We would almost think that God loved us more than he loves his Son.” Please, the origin of that quote. And please elaborate for us.

Sinclair Ferguson: Well, there are probably several origins when I begin to think about the different parts of that quote. I think actually the statement that most affects you was stimulated by something that Spurgeon says somewhere—“We would almost think that God loved us more than he loves his Son.” I can’t remember exactly where the quote originates, but I do remember Spurgeon is somewhere there in the stimulus. And that was because he had such a tremendous sense in his preaching about the love of God in Christ.

It is one thing to say love, isn’t it? It is another thing to exude that in preaching. We were talking about Dr. Lloyd-Jones earlier, and I think he says somewhere in his book on preaching that looking back, the one thing that he feels was missing was pathos. I don’t know that it was more missing in him than others. I think I can understand why he felt it was missing, because he was so committed to this notion of preaching being logic on fire. I can see, knowing what he knew about preachers in the past, he realized that there was something that they would have called an “affecting character” that maybe was more than just logic on fire. And Spurgeon certainly had this pathos in his preaching.

When you do look at the cross, there is something full of pathos, not because of sentiment (the poor man is dying on the cross), but because of theology. God so loved the world that he gave his only Son. And the connectedness between John 3 and Romans 8:32: If he who did not spare his own Son but delivered him up for us all how shall he not also with him freely give us all things?

Capturing that truth in a world of the unloved—I can’t work myself up to that truth. That truth has got to break into my heart with its pathos: that he has given his own Son. And that is not just a theological construction. Therefore the heart of the atonement actually takes place not wholly outside of God but within. This is his own Son who is our Savior.

And then the logic we now have is that “if I have given my Son for you, I will stop short of nothing else for you.” Couple that with what Paul said earlier in Romans 5:8--"But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us" (NASB).

The cross should never be expounded simply as a demonstration of the love of God in a sense of being overwhelmed with his love, like it doesn’t matter if anything else was accomplished on the cross as long as we are overwhelmed by his love and swept along into fellowship with him, and that is the atonement. No. But while wrath is satisfied and Christ dies for our sins, it would be erroneous for us to reduce this to the kind of mathematical formulation of “this is how God has merely dealt with our sins.” No, this is also how God actually proves to us he really loves us!

So it is both the effecting of the atonement and the persuading of his love. And that really takes us back to what we were talking about earlier on, in Eden. The situation with the fall of Adam, it seems to me—among the dimensions that need to be dealt with, there is the satanic dimension: the one who has now taken over the universe needs to be crushed, and in Genesis 3:15 his head will be crushed. But in that there also needs to be an atonement for guilt, but with that atonement for guilt we need to be persuaded of what was originally true, that Satan sought to destroy. This issue of being persuaded of God’s love, not in a facile way, but through the work of the cross, goes very much along with how is it that God is going to deal with the natural legalism of my heart that says, “He will only begin to love me when I do things to please him.”

Also, I think this is a powerful reality in difficult providences. There are times when I bump into somebody unexpectedly that I will say, “This is a happy providence.” And then I will stop and think, “Would it have been an unhappy providence if I hadn’t bumped into you?” We have this tendency—especially if you are inclined to this legalism—to measure how God’s love is doing for you these days by the providences that surround your life. Our ability to read providences are a very inaccurate measure of God’s love for us.

So again, it’s back to the cross. This is where God demonstrates his love. I don’t know that Christ loves me because I am in the boat with him and the seas are calm. And therefore I don’t know that Christ doesn’t love me because I am in the boat with him and the seas are not calm. I know my heart will say to him, “Don’t you care that we are perishing?”

But with the cross I know he is saying to me, “The reason I am in the boat and the reason I am going to the cross is because I care. So my love is demonstrated towards you in this way.”

CJM: Well, I only wish everyone could be here in this room right now. I hope that what is taking place in this room is transferred to people’s hearts and that God’s love, as so eloquently just expressed by Sinclair, in and through the cross, would transform people’s hearts and make an immediate and dramatic difference. I pray that everyone reading would be persuaded that he loves us because of what took place upon the cross.

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The Ferguson quote at the top is taken from Grow in Grace (Banner of Truth, 1989), pp. 56, 58.

Photo © 2008, Lukas VanDyke

(A continuation of C.J.’s interview with pastor and author Dr. Sinclair Ferguson)

C.J. Mahaney: We are continuing this wonderful, memorable time with Sinclair Ferguson. And here is the second quote and we eagerly anticipate, Sinclair, your response.

The glory of the gospel is that God has declared Christians to be rightly related to him in spite of their sin. But our greatest temptation and mistake is to try to smuggle character into his work of grace. How easily we fall into the trap of assuming that we can only remain justified so long as there are grounds in our character for justification. But Paul’s teaching is that nothing we do ever contributes to our justification.

So if you would comment in particular on that great temptation and mistake, which is, I think, a daily tendency and temptation: to try to “smuggle character into his work of grace.”

Sinclair Ferguson: I guess, C.J., what lies behind this, the thought is that at the end of the day what Satan did in the Garden of Eden was to introduce the notion of legalism into the nature of the relationship that Adam and Eve had with God. And although there is a dialogue in which Eve is defensive in Genesis 3, what Satan asks is, “Has God put you in this garden and said, ‘You are not to eat of any of the trees of this garden?’”

And I think you can see in the narrative from that point onward she struggles with the answer. “Well, now there is this one tree.” But there is no recognition that he has showered upon us these great things, these other trees.

I was reared in the notion that what Satan was doing there was questioning the authority of God’s word (which he does). But more important, in that context, he was really questioning the character of the God by saying, “Don’t you see he really isn’t generous?”

Satan is saying God is like a father who takes his child into some phenomenally wonderful children’s department store the week before Christmas, shows him everything, and says to him with a cynical laugh, “And none of this is going to be yours this Christmas.”

It is the distortion. I am no psychiatrist, but I think at the human level that inevitably produces a child who will either willfully rebel or find himself always feeling he has got to do something to earn his father’s love.

It may be speculative to ask what it is the deepest thing in Satan’s heart against God. But I think there clearly is that jealously to demean his character. And the demeaning of the character of God, I think, injects into all that lies behind what we call legalism.

Geerhardus Vos has some amazing one-liners in the midst of all that kind of very dense language...

CJM: Is he known for his one-liners? I have not heard him characterized as a one-line kind of guy.

SF: There is a great book produced by P&R of quotes from Geerhardus Vos [A Geerhardus Vos Anthology]. It’s great because Vos is so heavy and thick that sometimes it’s difficult to read and you lose the good things.

Anyway, Vos says that the heart of legalism is when we separate the law of God from the person of God. And what we have got then are bare imperatives that don’t have an indicative that will sustain them.

God himself in his grace, love, kindness, and generosity was the indicative that would have sustained the imperative of “Don’t eat the fruit of this tree.” And I see that distortion of God’s character, and the notion of legalism that seeks to earn what now as fallen creatures we can never earn, and blinds us to his a priori love for us in Christ.

Satan is cast out in terms of his dominion over our lives from the beginning of our Christian lives, yet we are still living in a world and with a memory and as a being for whom, I think, that battle against legalism is a lifelong reality.

And this gets back to the quiet time. I have met a lot of very fervent Christians who, if they haven’t had their quiet time, feel things will go wrong in the day. They turn the gospel on its head.

There are imperatives that flow out of the indicatives of God’s grace, but it is so easy for us, I think, to just fall back into that old trap—as Owen would have said—mix the rubbish of our own qualifications into the foundation of our Christian life, which is absolutely, purely, completely, totally the unmerited (and de-merited) favor of God.

And I think it’s interesting in the history of the Christian church. One of my areas of special concentration has been in the seventeenth century and the antinomian controversies in the seventeenth century. Reading the men who were involved on the antinomian side, I was fascinated by the fact that they all said basically they had been legalists. One of the things I began to notice was that everybody who I ever read who was known as antinomian in the technical sense, this had become their way of dealing with legalism.

They were godly men and their theology could be a bit slippery. But reading what they wrote, it really kind of impressed upon me that Paul does not deal with legalism by saying, “Now what you need is three grains of antinomianism, and that will dissolve your legalism.” No. He always said, “It is the grace of God in Jesus Christ that will dissolve both legalism and antinomianism.” I saw the way Paul keeps dragging people back to the same basic principles in the gospel.

It kind of underlined to me: If he is doing that, then actually whatever spiritual sickness may be presented—if I can use like a medical analogy—the good spiritual diagnostician is going to see that the fact that you are hurting here doesn’t mean that the source of the problem is here.

And that, of course, was a helpful thing for me to think about both theologically and pastorally.

One thing that dawned on me was I had met people, as you do in certain branches of the Reformed church, for whom assurance is a great problem. And they get fixated on assurance and they want to talk about assurance. And I realize: Well, but, the resolution of assurance doesn’t lie in the doctrine of assurance. It lies in the doctrine of justification by grace through faith. And so, you know, we have got to struggle with this person who is becoming obsessed with the pain of not having assurance. You have got to drag them out of that and say, “No, really, the source of this is to be found in something even more fundamental than that.”

And so that takes us back to our golf conversation. I have noticed listening to others (and in a minor way) from my own experience that when you hit your best golf shots, you are not actually thinking. It flows out of an instinct. And you are “in the zone” as they say. And that is true of all sports, isn’t it? You see a basketball player in slow motion. When you see what they are actually doing, you realize there is no way they could think through all that’s going on.

I sometimes say you have got to be “thunked” about the Christian life. It has got to get into you, to be part of you. Otherwise you are saying, “Oh, there goes a little antinomianism. I’ve got to balance there. There goes my legalism, got to balance that.” No, it’s more and more the penetration of the gospel of grace and the person of Christ.

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The Ferguson quote at the top originates from Know Your Christian Life (IVP, 1981), p. 73.

Photo © 2008, Lukas VanDyke

 

(A continuation of C.J.’s interview with pastor and author Dr. Sinclair Ferguson)

C.J. Mahaney: Sinclair, I am going to ask you to elaborate on four quotes. I have chosen four quotes among so many that I have benefited from personally in my study and used consistently in messages and books. I want to read them and then simply want you to comment on them, noting anything about their origin, or anything from them that you want to elaborate on. I would be most grateful.

The first quote states as follows:

The evangelical orientation is inward and subjective. We are far better at looking inward than we are looking outward. We need to expend our energies admiring, exploring, expositing, and extolling Jesus Christ.

What’s the origin of this statement? You obviously were observing this evangelical orientation as being inward and subjective and then drew attention to that orientation, exhorting us to expend our energies admiring, exploring, expositing, and extolling Jesus Christ. Why?

Sinclair Ferguson: This comes from a course on the doctrine of the church and the sacraments, and therefore since I am not saying anything here about the church or the sacraments, it is probably an off the top of my head comment in passing and I am not able to contextualize it.

CJM: By the way, I find that a little discouraging. This is off the top of your head?

SF: Well, come on, now. C.J., you say things off the top of your head.

CJM: Oh, yes, but they never make their way into print.

SF: I think it has arisen from a variety of things I have noticed over the years in the evangelical world. If I were to explain in a technical sense, I would say that I think one of the places where the impact of the Enlightenment has come home to roost is in the way in which I see the impact of a man called Friedrich Schleiermacher on the church. He was reacting to the intelligentsia of his day who were demeaning the gospel. And he really, in a way, turned the gospel on its head by saying it’s what happens internally that’s important.

And I think over my Christian life I have seen more and more how that has become true of evangelicalism. I mean, evangelical Christianity has a very broad subculture that now, probably since the 1960s, has been the kind of “born again” generation, where the really important thing was that you had been “born again” and you had an “experience.”

I began to notice that often being “born again” in the teaching of John 3 was dislocated from the rest of John 3, which had to do with believing in the Lord Jesus Christ and, through him, having salvation. And so sometimes when you had people interviewed who had been “born again,” there was no connectedness to the person of Christ at all.

And so I think I saw the pervasiveness of that and also in my own subculture—the Reformed subculture (if that is the best way to put it). I have been in that subculture all my life. I am a Presbyterian. I have never been anything but a Presbyterian, and that’s been my world.

I noticed in the revival of Reformed theology a glorious worldwide phenomenon. The revival of Calvinism brought much of the interest in terms of literature. The books that people read and were encouraged to read (and rightly encouraged to read) tended to be the ones that dealt with subjective experience.

And so in my subculture we were somewhat critical of the rest of the subculture of evangelicalism, and maybe particularly critical of the charismatic subculture that was all taken up with experience. We didn’t notice that actually, in some ways, we were just using a different mathematics for our experience. One of the books to which many people referred was John Owen’s The Death of Death in the Death of Christ, a hammer on the top of an Arminian’s head. And I observed that people, as I would put it, changed their mathematics about the atonement. But perhaps hadn’t really grasped what this was saying about the Lord Jesus himself and his glory.

And I guess, too, many people became Calvinists through their understanding of the application of redemption (sometimes called the ordo salutis). I began to see and hear people speaking about this almost without reference to the Lord Jesus, saying things like, “Regeneration causes faith, faith brings repentance, faith leads to sanctification.”

You remember those Find Waldo books? In the midst of all this I was saying, “But where is Jesus here?”

CJM: Excellent!

SF: I remember on one occasion listening to a series of sermons through one of the Gospels. Here was the basic motif of the sermons: Where are you in this Gospel story?

Now, there is an authenticity about that, but the real question is: Who is Jesus in this Gospel story?

And so, watching all this, I realized by looking at the literature that was being produced (including the literature I was producing), that it had more about how to live the Christian life....And so I think that is what lies behind this quote.

Curiously, I think it was C.S. Lewis that gave me the clue to this. When an undergraduate, I remember reading his book A Preface to Paradise Lost (on Milton’s book). And that wee book is not a well-known book of Lewis’s, but it is a great wee book with some stunning quotes.

In that book Lewis discusses what I had noticed in the kind of discussions as a student: Why is it that in Paradise Lost, if you ask who the hero is, just in terms of the literary power, Satan turns out to be the hero? And the literary critics had discussed this a good deal. But Lewis said it very simply. He said it’s far easier to portray evil than it is to portray perfect good.

And the more I thought about that, the more I realized: For preachers it’s much easier to seek to bring about conviction of sin and expose sin than to magnify and glory in the Lord Jesus.

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Photo © 2008, Lukas VanDyke 

C.J. Mahaney: I am sitting here at Grand Bohemian Hotel in Orlando, Florida, with one of my heroes in the faith, Dr. Sinclair Ferguson, a man who has had a profound effect on my life through his example, through his teaching, and through his writing. He is one of my favorite authors, someone whose books I promote and could easily sell door-to-door.

We have this privilege to spend a few minutes with Sinclair.

Thank you, Sinclair, for agreeing to meet with us and answer a few questions. We have just finished a lengthy discussion about golf, which I think should have been included in this interview and might be as much of interest to anybody listening than what we are about to say because—

Sinclair Ferguson: No, no, don’t say anything, C.J.

CJM: —you’re still a great golfer.  

SF: No, I’m not.

CJM: Yes, you are.

SF: I repudiate that.

CJM: No. You were a scratch golfer.

SF: I was a good golfer.  

CJM: And you played in college.

SF: I played for Scotland and for Great Britain when I was a youngster.  

CJM: You played for your country in international competition. Oh, my. See, I know this is awkward for you, but you were a great golfer.

SF: It is very awkward.

CJM: I’m sorry.

SF: It’s extremely awkward.

CJM: Well, you get used to it when you hang around me. And you were lamenting a few minutes ago that now your game is in decline.

SF: Oh, please don’t. Please don’t tell anybody about this.

CJM: Yes, I want to tell everybody about this because this is how good you were. You are lamenting that your game is in decline because you don’t regularly shoot in the 70s anymore! But you still are shooting regularly in the 80s, even though you play only occasionally. And what I was seeking to remind you and comfort you with was that most golfers (99%) stink, so you are still in the 1% elite, and for that I commend you.

SF: Oh, it’s a fallen world.  

It’s not often you get to hang with one of your heroes in the faith, but this was my experience at the recent Ligonier conference. Actually, I was able to spend time with and learn from not one but two of my heroes in the faith, R.C. Sproul and Sinclair Ferguson. And, because I am always looking out for you, the blog reader, I interviewed Sinclair Ferguson.

Sinclair was kind enough to spend a few hours with Tony and me in our hotel and respond to a few questions. From my perspective it was quite the interview. I think you’ll agree. What a wealth of grace and wisdom one encounters in this interview with Sinclair Ferguson!

Pastors, you will benefit big-time. The content of this interview will make a difference in your soul, your pastoral ministry, and your preaching.
 
So for the next week we’ll be featuring select portions of this extraordinary time. If it isn’t already obvious to you, I am really jazzed about this because Sinclair has had a profound effect on my life through his example, writing, and teaching. I think I have read every book he has written and I would encourage you to do the same.

I will always be indebted to this man because he introduced me to John Owen. I first met Owen in the pages of Sinclair’s book John Owen on the Christian Life. Owen has been teaching me ever since.

I have read Sinclair’s books and listened to his preaching, finding myself regularly quoting the man when I preach, and for good reason. You will discover why as you read and listen to this interview. Tony suggested that I choose a few of the quotes from Sinclair that I have appreciated the most and ask him to elaborate on these quotes. So in this interview you will discover the wealth of insight that lies behind these choice quotes. And most important, as you read you will be reminded of the Savior’s substitutionary sacrifice on the cross for your sins, and I think you will marvel afresh at the love of God for sinners like us.