(GCNC being the Gospel Coalition 2009 National Conference, which I attended earlier this week, for those who might not know. For those not familiar with 7 Quick Takes Friday, it’s hosted by Jennifer F. over at Conversion Diary.)
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Of all the great preachers and all the great sermons I heard (including C. J. Mahaney’s, which was essentially a plenary session scheduled as a workshop), the one that—I don’t want to sayimpressed me most, because I don’t want to come across as a dispassionate observer doing some sort of ranking, and I don’t want to say moved or touched me most, because different messages did that differently—but the one that I keep coming back to the most was Mark Driscoll’s. As he himself noted (and many others commented that evening), it wasn’t a typical Mark Driscoll sermon, because of the text assigned; I don’t know who was responsible for breaking up 2 Timothy or by what logic he was given 2 Timothy 2:14-26, but it was clearly a God appointment of a most unexpected sort. If you want to look at the sermon outline, it’s up here.
What impressed me the most about this sermon wasn’t its homiletical brilliance or its practical usefulness, but rather that I do not believe I have ever in my life seen a preacher so completely submitted to—even conquered by—a biblical text. At one point, he described the passage as an anvil on which he’d been beating his head, and he was clearly preaching under a sense of deep, deep conviction, brokenness before God, and repentance—and preaching out of that sense, bringing that powerfully alive in the room. I’ve long respected Mark Driscoll, even though I’ve heard some harsh criticisms of him, for his devotion to the gospel, his vision for ministry, and his sheer guts (I grew up in Washington state, I know what Seattle is like); this week, I saw him model a defenseless openness to the word of God and the power of the Holy Spirit that I have never seen nor—to be completely honest—experienced before in preaching. He didn’t have to do that, on a worldly level; I suspect he felt the Spirit driving him to, but even so, the courage that it took to lay himself that bare before the Scripture, to let the word of God challenge and convict him that deeply, and then to preach that, inspired a holy awe in me. At some point, God is no doubt going to hit me that hard through his word; at some point, maybe he did, and I refused to stand to the mark. When that day comes (again?), I now have his example to try to live up to. It’s a great gift, if a daunting one.
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Speaking of courage, I should also express my deep appreciation for John Piper, who summarized the main point of 2 Timothy 1:1-12 (and by extension, he argued, of the whole letter; I can’t speak for anyone else, but he convinced me) as “Timothy, keep feeding the white-hot flame of God’s gift in you, namely, the gift of unashamed courage to speak openly of Christ and suffer for his gospel.” I appreciate him because he wasn’t just preaching about his topic, he was preaching it, and preaching through it. He declared,
If you ask Paul, “How do I feed the white-hot flame of God’s gift of unashamed courage to speak openly of Christ and to suffer for the gospel?” he answers, By the power of God (verse 8)—the supernatural power of the Holy Spirit. And if you ask, “How do I express the fullness of this power?” he answers in 2:1, Be empowered by the grace that is in Christ Jesus. And if you ask him, “How do I receive this ongoing grace?” he answers, Timothy, this grace is coming to you right now through the word of God. God’s grace is coming to you in my words. “I have not received the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, that I might understand the things freely given me by God. And I impart them in words not taught by human wisdom but taught by the Spirit” (adapted from 1 Corinthians 2:12-13).
These aren’t ordinary words, Timothy. They are God’s words. You were with me on the beach in Miletus. Do you remember what I said as I left? I said, “I commend you to God and to the word of his grace, which is powerful to build you up [in courage!] and to give you the inheritance among all those who are sanctified” (Acts 20:32).
The answer, Timothy, is that you feed the white-hot flame of unashamed courage to suffer for the gospel by preaching to yourself the foundational truths of this letter. And you feed the courage of your people the same way. God has ordained that his sovereign grace comes to you with power for unashamed courage through my God-given words.
(That, note, is from the posted text, not a transcript.) Now, it’s one thing to say those words, and there are other preachers who could do that. It’s something else again to preach them as if you believe them, not only in theory, not at some point in the future, not as a possibility, but for that moment, for that sermon, for the people to whom you’re preaching—and that’s what the Rev. Dr. Piper did, passionately, in the expectation that what he was preaching about, God would do in us. I don’t think I’ve ever felt so much in the crosshairs of a sermon in my life, and I’m not sure I ever will again.
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I’m very grateful to have been present for C. J. Mahaney’s talk, but I have both a confession and a small regret about that. I was there looking forward to his listed topic (he’d originally told the organizers that he would speak on “Trinitarian Pastoral Ministry”), but that’s not what he spoke on; he actually spoke on “The Pastor’s Charge,” from 1 Peter 5:1-4, and if I’d known that, I probably would have been in another workshop. I’m glad I wasn’t, though. I do regret the fact that I had too much blood in my caffeine stream—I’d only had one can of Pepsi and no tea all day, which just wasn’t enough caffeine at that point, and I would have known that if I’d thought about it—and so I had a hard time shifting gears mentally to catch up to the Rev. Mahaney; I even started to crash a bit early on. By the grace of God, though, he sent me a second wind, and I’m grateful for that gift, because it was a beautiful and encouraging message on shepherding God’s flock; I’ll definitely be meditating on this going forward, and I plan to watch the video so that I can catch things I missed in my initial mental sluggishness. Jared Wilson asked on Twitter, “Anyone else feel like Mahaney was preaching specifically to them?” and I think it’s safe to say that many of us there did—probably most of us, at one point or another.
I particularly appreciate this—he was quoting someone, but I didn’t get down whom: “The shepherd must know he is one of the Shepherd’s needy and loved sheep.” Amen.
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After Tim Keller’s address on Acts 19:21-41, which opened the conference, the thought crossed my mind that I could go home right then and the conference would have been worth the money. I had no intention of doing anything that silly, of course, but if I had, it would have been. I’ve done a bit of posting on some of the idols in our culture, and in the church in this country, but before Tuesday afternoon I’d never thought quite so starkly about the fact that Paul always challenged the idols of the people to whom he spoke, and that we cannot expect to see the transforming power of the gospel in our churches if we don’t do the same. As Ben Patterson likes to put it, we can’t just tell people what to say “yes” to, we have to tell them what that means they have to say “no” to.
The Rev. Dr. Keller did a brilliant job of laying out what it means to discern, expose, and destroy the idols we face—in our own lives, no less than in the church and the culture—and how we do that; and he was unsparing in warning us of the risk we take in so doing, making the point multiple times that idolatry in all its forms is violent at its core. As radical feminists would say of patriarchy, idolatry is founded on violence, and rests on violence for its legitimation. There was a lot of wonderful material in his message, but I think I most appreciated his prescription for dealing with idolatry: rather than trying to hack away at the loves that have become idols in people’s lives, help them to love Jesus more, and thus restore those other loves to their proper place and proportion.
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The pastoral application of his message made itself known that evening in one of the random conversations I had (and at any event like this, the random conversations are among the joys of being there); I wound up talking with a woman who was worried about a friend back home who I guess has been doing some heavy wrestling with despair. As we were talking about this woman’s concern for her friend and her efforts to be an agent of grace in this friend’s life—she was really struggling hard to find a way to pierce the armor of her friend’s despair—we remembered the Rev. Dr. Keller’s comment about people who say that they know God has forgiven them but that they can’t forgive themselves: he argued that people who talk that way do so because they’re in thrall to an idol, and the idol of course won’t forgive them because idols never do. What you need to do, he contended, is to identify the idol, expose it, and destroy it. When this came up in our conversation, this woman’s face lit with a joyful smile, because she knew what her friend’s idol was, and that word showed her what she needed to do to set her friend free to really hear the gospel of grace. I’m praying for her for the success of her ministry.
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I greatly appreciated the panel discussion Wednesday evening, for a lot of reasons. One rather odd one is that Ligon Duncan, one of the participants, has a massive pulpit presence—I don’t know that he’s actually that big a man, but the way he’s built, and with that deep, powerful Southern voice of his with his grand, grave cadences—which I think combined with his reputation to work against him with some of the folks there (judging by the semi-sotto voce conversation going on behind me through the first chunk of his message); he doesn’t exactly project humility in the pulpit, and it was good to see the humble side of him in the evening conversation before he rose to preach the next day.
More than that, though, there was a lot of experience, and a lot of humble wisdom, and a lot of hard-earned lessons up on that stage that evening, which the participants shared in a remarkably open fashion. It was comforting to hear from these successful veteran pastors that times of brokenness and failure aren’t necessarily disqualifying, but that brokenness and failure are among the things God uses to make us useful; coming just a few months after I heard Craig Barnes say much the same thing, and combined with their firm testimony that Jesus will never abandon us in such times—and that if we will rely utterly on him and his word, that will be enough—it came as a real word of grace. There was a note of rue in Crawford Loritts’ voice as he quoted an old proverb (one I’d never heard before) to the effect that “God never uses anything that comes to him together,” and went on to describe suffering as God’s marinade for our souls; but there was also a deep faith that had learned to trust God through suffering, and I greatly appreciated it.
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One of the real blessings of this conference was the way in which I felt, time and again, Paul’s heart for Timothy—not just indirectly, but coming from the speakers and directed toward us, and especially those of us who are younger in ministry. John Piper really set the tone on that, and it carried through the whole conference, in various ways. (In Mark Driscoll’s case, as a younger preacher who felt the challenge of his assigned text deeply, he really preached his text as Timothy, as the one receiving the message, rather than from Paul’s position.) Other than the Rev. Dr. Piper, I think I felt it the most strongly from Ligon Duncan, speaking on 2 Timothy 4:6-22, as he shared Paul’s appeal with us to do everything possible to be sure we cross the finish line. He didn’t soft-pedal the fact that that isn’t easy; as Paul did for Timothy, he made no bones of the truth that just because we’re faithful to God doesn’t mean we won’t be opposed, doesn’t mean we won’t be betrayed, doesn’t mean we won’t be abandoned and end up alone. After all, that’s what happened to Paul, and it’s what happened to Jesus, and if we’re following in their footsteps, why should we expect any different? But the saving grace is that Jesus has been there, and so he was with Paul in his suffering, and he will be with us as well when those times come; his Spirit will be with us, through whom he will give us what we need to run the race, to fight the good fight, to cross the finish line, if we will just rely on him.