A Roundtable with Alistair Begg, William Philip, and Richard Pratt

Bob Lepine: And we’re glad to have you joining us as we have a conversation together with the speakers who are a part of the Basics 2025 conference. Of course, Alistair Begg is here with us. We’re also going to be hearing from Willie Philip, who is a pastor in Glasgow, Scotland, and Richard Pratt, who serves as the president of Third Millennium Ministries. These are the speakers for the Basics 2025 conference, and we thought it would be good to sit down and interact together on some of the themes that have been addressed during the conference this year.

And can we pull back the curtain a bit and just have you share how you decide who you’re going to invite to Basics?

Alistair Begg: Yeah, if you wish.

Bob: And what you want them to talk about? So how did these guys wind up…

Willie Philip: Nobody else would come.

Alistair: Yeah, I mean, the first three fellows said no.

Richard: That has to be true for this gentile over here.

Alistair: Well, actually, I had invited Willie for—I think it was two years ago, or it could have been three. I don’t remember. But something got all fiddly in that, I think, in relationship to COVID or something like that. So I had in mind that that return invitation would come.

Bob: And you’ve known him for a long time?

Alistair: Yeah, I guess quite a long time. I’m not sure when we first met, in what context, but our paths have crossed in various ways—maybe first of all down at Cornhill with Dick.

Willie: I think probably, yeah.

Alistair: Yeah, down in London. But… And I had known that Richard had been in Scotland on at least one or two occasions at similar conferences, and I knew that he and Willie were compatible. And I thought it would be a happy thing if he would agree to come. And I thought I could use Willie as leverage. So when I invited Willie and he said yes, then I asked Richard, and he said yes.

And just sitting out and listening to them both, it’s a remarkable thing the way that God does actually weave things together: different personalities; different, even, approaches to the opening up of Scripture; and yet the unifying feature of it just being seeking to be servants of the Word.

Bob: And Willie, you are a local church pastor in Glasgow, right?

Willie: Yeah, that’s right. I’ve been there for almost twenty-one years.

Bob: And—let me back up—the spiritual condition of Scotland, as I’m observing it from this side of the pond: The past twenty-one years, it’s been on the downward trend.

Willie: Yeah, I think at least outwardly, to the observer, that’s how it seems to be. I mean, it’s always hard, isn’t it, to know? ’Cause only God knows these things truly. But the culture is certainly de-Christianized and rapidly de-Christianizing faster and faster. It’s hard to know exactly why that is. I mean, it’s part of the Western world, isn’t it? It’s happening everywhere.

Scotland, when it got its own Parliament—when we had devolution some twenty years ago—I think that sped things up, because politically, we don’t have nearly as many checks and balances. So, the UK Parliament has got historic checks and balances. We’ve got a House of Lords; we’ve got a two-chamber system—all of that kind of thing. Scotland has a single Parliament now. Things get through. It’s easier to get liberalizing legislation through quickly. So we have led the way on things like gay marriage, on a whole host of other things.

And so the culture has moved in a similar way to the south of Ireland, you know, having thrown off what many would see as the shackles of their religious past and pursued a very progressive liberalism. It’s really quite similar in Scotland. So that’s the culture that we’re living in. The national church—Church of Scotland, which we used to be part of but had to part company with back in 2012… That was, you know, because it has followed the culture. So what once was called “The Land of the Book”—I mean, nobody would even think of that these days.

And so, yeah, the Christian heritage has been thrown off, I think, really quite aggressively in the mainstream culture.

Bob: So does that affect how you contextualize what you’re doing in the pastorate? Are you preaching differently today than you would have been preaching twenty years ago?

Willie: That’s an interesting question. I don’t think so, really, in the sense that, you know, I believe that basically, the human heart hasn’t really changed. Sin hasn’t changed. The big issues aren’t really any different. There’s maybe a little bit of a different flavor. Okay, you know, you can’t ignore what’s going on, right? So the things that you are perhaps speaking about directly or interacting with obviously, you know, are maybe different.

But I personally don’t really buy into the idea that we’ve all got to be absolutely expert cultural apologists and analysts and all of that kind of stuff in order to be effective preachers of the gospel. I mean, I think you’ve got to have your eyes open and your ears open, and you’ve got to live and breathe in the real world. You can’t pretend you’re living in a culture you’re not living in and just assume that, you know, Scotland is the same as it was in the 1950s. But I think that just means you’re a normal human being who’s living in the world, and so you’re not ignoring the reality of what’s around you. But the fundamental message of the gospel is the same.

So, you can be outdated. Of course you can. You can be stuck in the trappings and the idioms and all of that of the past. But to me, that’s just being a bit foolish. It’s just not living in your own world; it’s trying to live in some other era. But I think if you’re just a normal person who interacts with other real people, you kind of know who it is you’re speaking to.

Bob: Yeah. My wife will pull me aside from time to time and say, “You know that illustration you used about Mr. Spock from Star Trek? Nobody knows who Mr. Spock from Star Trek is anymore. You have to update your illustrations if you’re going to use those.” So we do have to be aware of who it is we’re speaking to. But the fundamental message is the same message we’ve been declaring for two thousand years, right?

Willie: Yeah, I think if we are living in the real world, then we will be speaking to the real world. I don’t think it’s all that complicated. But maybe that’s naive.

Bob: Richard, you’re working with people on every continent in terms of ministry, really working to try to advance theological education and, I presume, out of that, church planting in parts of the world.

Richard: Well, they plant the churches, yes.

Bob: Right. You get them trained, and then the churches get planted from there. This whole issue of cultural awareness and how that affects your preaching and your pastorate: How do you help people in a variety of cultures know what is immovable and where there’s flexibility?

Richard: My goodness!

Bob: Yeah, let’s toss up an easy question.

Richard: Do we have six or seven hours?

It’s fascinating. We prepare curriculum for pastors and other kinds of church leaders around the world in twenty-seven different languages and, right now, I can say—and I’m not going to speak “evangelastically” about this, okay, so I’ll just tell you straight up—172 countries.

Bob: Wow.

Richard: So, at first, you know, people said that was not possible to do—to create a sort of common core of curriculum for such a vast and diverse audience. I thought it could be done, so we tried, and it seems to be working—at least in some cases, for quite a few. And so you have to just simply be aware of the fact that there are moments of what we call contextualizing that are all through the process of creating it. So it’s not an American curriculum that is then exported. It’s rather, from the get-go, it is a curriculum that is being written by and edited by people from a variety of cultures. And we have the team to do that, and it works.

Bob: I remember—again, this was years ago—I had a conversation with Rachel Saint, who had gone with Elisabeth Elliot back into the jungles—the Auca jungles—in South America after her brother and Elisabeth’s husband had been killed. And she was working on translation there, and she said, “When we got to, ‘Wash me, and I will be whiter than snow’”[1]—they recognized that the Aucas have no word in their language for snow. They’ve never seen snow. They don’t need a word for snow in the jungles in Ecuador. And so in translation you have to think, “Okay, what’s acceptable to do here?” She told us that they eventually made it “Wash me, and I will be whiter than the inside of a coconut,” was the way they tried to communicate that.

Now, we could talk about translation theory and how that all fits, but she had to be aware of the fact that if she had stuck with “snow” and tried to teach these people what snow was, she’d have had an upward hill to climb.

Richard: Take a few moments, yeah.

Bob: That’s right. So in international contexts, as you deal with those kinds of conundrums, is there a rule of thumb you follow?

Richard: Yes. It’s to have indigenous people edit and review the scripts. Our curriculum is all written out. There’s nothing done extemporaneously, or little done extemporaneously. And so we’re able to have them look at it—the various teams, different language teams—and make the adjustments that they feel are necessary. But when you’re doing a curriculum and you’re teaching people, you can actually explain what snow is—as opposed to translating the Bible, and you have to put a word in the text. Okay? And so it’s a little bit of a different process. Because, you know, when you’re teaching the Bible, you’re teaching a common culture to a variety of cultures, and that is an ancient common culture that’s foreign to all of us. So from the very beginning, you’re dealing with a Bible that was written long, long, long ago. And—because I like the Old Testament, probably, a whole lot—it’s a very ancient and obtuse world that you’re translating out of to begin with and orienting people toward from a variety of target cultures that you’re dealing with in the contemporary world.

Bob: All of this is kind of tied together with the thread of “How do we take the message that’s been entrusted to us, and how do we disseminate it as broadly as we can?” That’s the mandate, Alistair, in the message that you began the Basics Conference with. I don’t know if you were intending to rebuke us, but I was hit with a little bit of a rebuke about how we’ve become soft or lazy in the mandate that’s been given to us—that evangelism is something that we’ve kind of taken as an option and not as a requirement for us. Is that what you intended to say?

Alistair: Um, no.

Bob: Maybe that was just the Holy Spirit impressing it on my heart!

Richard: Never!

Alistair: No, I don’t remember mentioning anything along those lines at all. But maybe you just needed a little rebuke on your own or something. I don’t know.

Bob: Yeah, maybe!

Alistair: Yeah. I’d like to come back to the Scottish thing, because I’m immediately in defense of Scotland when I hear this. And I’m in defense of Scotland not because it’s Scotland, but I’m actually in defense of the gospel doing the work in Scotland, so that I always tell people, “Sure, I can move you around Scotland, and you will find closed churches, empty churches, reoriented buildings, and everything. But I can also take you through rural Scotland. I can take you to Stirling, to Glasgow, to Edinburgh, to Dundee, to Aberdeen, up to Inverness. I can take you all around the country. And the unifying feature will be that where you find families, parents with children, students if it’s a university town, without question, the issue is that the Word of God is being set forward in that context and that the Word of God is doing the work of God—uses a variety of kind of personalities, different people doing different things, but it’s alive and well.”

And the opportunity, actually, I think, in Scotland… When I go back there, you know, I do things like: I’m eating in a hotel, and the girl is serving me. She’s maybe a young person, and it’s Saturday. I say, “Well, you probably get wrapped up early this evening.”

And she’d say, “Why was that?”

I said, “Well, it’ll be, you know, church in the morning.”

It’s just a stony silence.

And I said, “You not going?”

She would say, “I have never gone to church.” Then she would say—and this is an actual conversation at the Turnberry Hotel—she said, “But my granny goes to church, and my granny goes to a prayer meeting, and my granny says she prays for me.” You know? And so somewhere, you know, as you delve into that material…

The same with taxi drivers of my age who have kicked the traces over, but they remember the thing that was called the Boys’ Brigade. And so there’s something there.

But the generation that has grown… You know, what do they say? You know: One generation rejects God, and the next generation learns to ignore him, and the next generation has got no concept of it at all. I think that that is true, except the arresting feature is the power of the gospel.

Willie: I think that’s absolutely right. And I would want to say, despite what I said about the culture as a whole—if you’re looking at the sort of Christianization of the country, undoubtedly, that’s ebbed away—but I would say in the twenty years I’ve been back in Scotland as a pastor, I would say I’m very encouraged, because I think there are far more real gospel, Bible-teaching churches doing that in an effective way than there was twenty years ago. And, you know, one of the great things has been to see numbers trained in biblical ministry, you know, through things like the Cornhill Training Course. And I do think that’s been a very significant and central part.

Alistair: Definitely. Definitely.

Willie: But, you know, when I was a student in Aberdeen, we were part of William Still’s ministry. I mean, the truth was, that was pretty much the only really serious expository ministry that there was in the city. There were others for a time. Today there are at least four—probably five, in fact—really great Bible ministries there, all of whom, their pastors have been trained as part of the Cornhill network and so on. I mean, you know, that’s extraordinary. That’s a big, big turnaround. And as you say, you can go to many, many places in the country.

So, looking at it from the casual eye of the casual observer, you’d say Scotland is far less Christian. Looking at it with the understanding of what real Christianity is and what real church actually means, I would say there are more, or at least more encouraging, real, growing churches than there were certainly twenty years ago. So I think that’s encouraging. And what it’s doing is what you’re saying: nothing fancy, no new methodology, but actually people going back to have the confidence in what Richard was speaking about this morning, the power of the gospel and the real reach of the gospel.

Bob: Is it that cultural darkness eliminates some of the nominal Christianity?

Willie: Undoubtedly. And also, the weakness of historic denominations and groupings has been a helpful thing to bring people together on the real essentials. You go to places where denominations are all quite strong; it’s very, very difficult to get people to work together on what the really important things are. But when you’re in absolute extremis, you don’t have any choice. And, you know, that’s been a helpful thing. So, yeah, I think there’s a lot to be encouraged about.

Richard: Yeah, I would dare to say that there’s value—I think it’s fairly obvious—in Christianity influencing cultures at large. There is value in it. But at the same time, the church grows complacent in those kinds of contexts. It does. It actually does. And it’s happened so many times, I don’t know how we could deny that. I mean, you just name the area. Turkey.

Alistair: Constantine.

Richard: That’s right. Exactly. I mean, think of Turkey today. Think of Italy today. Whatever you want. Pick the place. And United States today. But the church doesn’t disappear. Maybe there are still smoldering wicks. It has become a ring of fire as opposed to a bonfire consuming the world, for better or for worse. But they’re still the people of God. And they do tend to realign, don’t they? Which I like. I really like that, frankly. Because it’s one of the horrors, I think, of strong denominationalism, if you think of it as a vertical alignment, you know, that “we have nothing to do with you because we can afford to have nothing with you. Who cares? We’ve got our own thing.” But now we get these horizontal realignments that are going on right here—at least in the United States, and Scotland as well. (I guess we have to keep mentioning Scotland in this case, don’t we?) The two premier examples…

Willie: ’Cause we are the biggest country in the world. You know that.

Richard: But in all events, the realignment, I think, is very exciting, frankly. And I love the fact that we can—even a conference like this, there’s a variety of denominations here. And I think it’s magnificent.

Bob: You made the statement earlier today that you think your grandchildren may be led to faith in Christ by missionaries from Africa. Now, was that hyperbole?

Richard: No, no hyperbole at all. Someone doesn’t give up the easiest job in the world, which is being a theological professor in a seminary, to do what I’m doing now without a belief that there’s some payoff. And the payoff, I always say—my selfish reason for doing Third Millennium Ministries—is I firmly believe that my great-great-children are going to be evangelized by Africans in North America.

Bob: You think the decline of American Christianity is irreversible apart from an outpouring of God’s Spirit?

Richard: Well, you can always count on a world war to change things and a true pandemic, a true economic crisis. I was in Manhattan about, I guess, six weeks after 9/11, and even the cab drivers had Jesus on the dashboard.

Bob: Right.

Richard: Okay. So they were nice. They wouldn’t run over you then. Back in six months, and they’re running over you again in the street.

But yeah, I began with that in my heart, thinking that if things continue as they are—and the Lord can always intervene, and he can always turn things upside down, and I’m recognizing that—if things do continue as they are, I think it’s going to be likely—I should say it that way rather than “firmly believe”—likely that the Lord will use the parts of the world where Christianity is flourishing at this point. But then it raises the question: What kind of gospel will they bring to my great-great-grandchildren? And I know what kind of gospel I want them to bring. And so I’m trying to influence that.

Bob: Do you think he’s right that the trajectory of the United States is such that we’re going to be evangelized rather than evangelizing?

Alistair: Oh, well, I don’t know. But it seems like Richard should know, insofar as he is in these different places. I think the sort of preoccupation with the lingua franca of the English language is almost inevitably going to shift in some measure, especially as you take those materials to those places. Those folks get a grasp of it. They begin to write their own material. The material gets translated back into English so that we can understand it. Whether it’s only from Africa or Indonesia or wherever else it is, I think that the signs of that are definitely on the horizon.

Even with the state of the church at the present time, you know, who knows? I actually believe that, you know, we do need a great movement of the Spirit of God. I mean, if Whitefield could come back and ride his horse, I’d be glad.

Richard: Exactly.

Alistair: Yeah.

Richard: I mean, it requires repentance, doesn’t it?

Alistair: Yes. Yeah.

Richard: And that’s my biggest problem, is I’m just not sure that we’ve come to the point that we’re ready to do that.

Bob: Unpack that a little more. When you say it requires repentance, and you’re not sure…

Richard: Well, revival historically requires repentance, yes? Okay?

Bob: So, what kind of repentance? We have shallow repentance, and we need deeper repentance?

Richard: Well, I do.

Bob: Yeah.

Alistair: Godly repentance.

Richard: Yeah.

Bob: Instead of “worldly sorrow.”[2]

Alistair: Yeah.

Bob: Where are those spots in the world that you look at and go, “God is at work here in profound ways”? You mentioned Africa.

Richard: Well, you know, if you ask the people that count numbers—and, you know, I’m no expert in this. You know what an expert is: It’s somebody who says what you want them to say, and you keep quoting them. But there are people that devote themselves to this kind of thing. And if Holy Spirit keeps on doing basically what he has been doing the last twenty-five years, in the next twenty-five years—so, by 2050—the numbers of what my branch of the church calls the visible church—that is, people who profess Christ—are enormous in other parts of the world: first, Africa; second, Asia; third, Latin America. And North America registers on that kind of research… Again, Holy Spirit does what Holy Spirit wants to do. And I love it that people can make a good living out of predicting what he’s going to do. But he does what he wants to do. So he can reverse all of this. But the reality is, North America registers on the growing church, but because of immigration. So it’s an interesting problem.

And so, again, I believe that repentance is very important. And this is part of the problem, again. We were talking earlier about the Christianization of a culture. The distinction between church and the world around us tends to fade. And so it’s hard to extract yourself from it. The values of American culture are deep inside of me, and not all those values are good.

Willie: I think for one thing, it makes it very difficult, doesn’t it, for Christians to understand that suffering is actually a part of mission.

Bob: Yeah.

Richard: Yeah.

Willie: As you know, Alistair, I still go to India every year. And you’ve often been. I won’t say where or with who on the air. But two years ago, I was very convicted, because on the last day of the conference I was speaking at, the leader of that conference was giving the kind of final exhortation for people to go back. And they’d come from all over North India, which is one of the least evangelized parts of the world. And he was talking about the reality of persecution.

I was sitting in the front row, and he said at one point—he stopped and said, “How many of you here…” And there were about, I think, five or six hundred pastors, really, from all over the country. “How many of you here have actually been arrested or beaten or imprisoned because of your ministry in this last year?” I’m sitting in the front row, and I thought, “Wow! I wonder if anybody has.” And I turned around, and more than half of the men stood up.

And I had just resolved that I wasn’t going to come back next year because I hate the jet lag, it was a lot of hassle, the bed was uncomfortable, and my back was sore, and poor me! And when I turned around and saw all these men who in that year had been arrested or beaten or imprisoned for the gospel, I turned around and thought, “Shame on you.” And I booked my ticket to come back next year, ’cause I thought, “Well, I want to serve these guys. This is real ministry.”

And I come back every year having learned something very profound about what real mission is. And I hear the stories of what happens to these men. I hear about the multiple churches that they’re planting, the people who are being converted, the extraordinary things that are happening. And I come back, and I tell my church, and I’ve realized that I need to talk about this a lot, lot more. ’Cause this is the real world. We’re not living in the real world of mission in the West. And I fear—it’s not that I want this, but I fear—that until that reality begins to impinge upon us in the West, we’re not going to understand and really see what mission is, because we’re not going to be understanding the cost of that, the inevitable part of that.

So I… Yeah. When you see… And you will see this much more, Richard, because the… But this is the pattern, isn’t it, where the church really is growing?

Richard: Yes, it is. Too much comfort, too much prosperity—it’s not a happy thing for followers of Christ, because we share in his glory if we share in his sufferings.[3] And we run from it as fast as we can.

Bob: I remember… Go ahead.

Alistair: Well, I was just going to say that, Richard, this morning, though, when you began in laying things out—that the wind is, if it was ever at our backs, it’s certainly firmly in our faces, and that the measure of suffering that, let’s say, a sixteen-year-old boy who is still morally pure faces in his place is suffering…

Richard: Amen. I agree with that.

Alistair: That is suffering, if you’re going to take a stand for anything like that at all. And for families and for guys in business and on business trips who, to actually hold the line not in an arrogant way but just in a straightforward way… I mean it was like… I don’t think either of you… Well, you were here for Sunday, weren’t you? Yeah. Were you also here on Sunday? Yeah, so… But did you hear Terry in the morning on Daniel?

Richard: Yeah.

Alistair: I mean, yeah. I mean, there you have it.

Willie: It takes different forms, doesn’t it?

Alistair: That’s right. That’s right.

Richard: It does.

Willie: But seeing it in its starkest form helps us to realize that actually, the kind of suffering we’re facing is not “Oh, poor us,” unique. “It’s never been like this before. It’s so hard for us as Christians.” Actually, it’s just always been like that, and it is like that in different parts of the world. And we need to hold that line. You’re right.

Richard: And embracing it—embracing it as part of our mission—I think, is what we… I think we just need to be reminded that our Lord Jesus did that, and that we can, too—in the power of Holy Spirit, but nevertheless, we can embrace it. And I agree with you. The sixteen-year-old that stands up in public for the faith is phenomenal.

Willie: But with that comes the opportunities. Because I don’t know about here, but we have certainly seen in recent years an openness, also, to the gospel. Because many, many people are seeing the hollowed-out nature of our culture and are seeking something else. But there’s been a lot of people our age—fifties and sixties and older—who had some sort of Christianization in their schooling, rejected it all for decades, but are coming back to seeing, “Well, you know, this is not working out so well, and maybe there is something in this.”

And it’s quite interesting. I mean, there’s been quite a few public intellectuals, you know, have come to quite prominent faith. Now, you’ve got to be careful, obviously, with trumpeting these sort of guys. But I think it is at least a straw in the wind that says that, you know, thinking people are looking at where our culture’s come to and are seeing, “This is empty,” and they’re looking for truth. And I think that’s the challenge for the church, then. Because what they are seeking is the real thing.

And one of the things that has discouraged me… I was listening to a podcast with an intelligent British intellectual talking to somebody else about wanting to come back to faith and the search for the real Christianity. And they’re saying, “Well, you know, the Church of England is woke. There’s nothing there. Nothing there. The Roman Catholic Church, particularly with the recent pope—there’s nothing there. Evangelicals—well, that’s just all hallelujahs and nothing there, you know.” And they were being drawn to Orthodoxy.

Now, that’s—we’re seeing a big… Young men who are looking for the real deal, they see these guys with the black hats and the big, long beards and, you know, who aren’t interested in being modern, and they think, “Oh, that must be the real deal!” And I want to say, “Ah! We’ve got the real deal!” You know, what is it about the evangelical church? Why are we holding back and trying to be nicey-nicey and pandering, perhaps, to the very people who are not interested but putting off these people who are seeking?

So, I think it’s a real challenge to us to hang out the whole thing and say, “Look, don’t hold anything back. We’re the serious people here.” And there are people who are looking for that and who are biting on that. And to me, that’s a big challenge. And it should give us great confidence to give them the full beat of the gospel.

Bob: I think it was you, wasn’t it, in one of your messages, talking about changing our approach in terms of gospel conversations from trying to address felt needs and… Or was that…

Willie: It was Richard, I think.

Bob: Richard’s looking…

Richard: I think it was Alistair!

Willie: It was the Holy Spirit.

Bob: One of you—and I should have taken notes to know which one—but one of you was talking about as you initiate conversations with unbelievers, rather than trying to speak to what is their felt need…

Richard: Oh.

Willie: You were talking about your Buddhist friend.

Richard: Yeah. Yes. Perhaps I was saying that I made a commitment that in sharing the gospel with other people, I was not going to—it’s not like this is the right thing to do, but I just sort of said, “I’m going to try this and see if it works”—talk about the big picture of why Jesus came and lead to the personal after that rather than coming and simply meeting with people where they were.

You know, sometimes we have the impression that Jesus—and it’s fair to say this—that Jesus said the gospel in many different ways to people. But sometimes we don’t understand that he would make allusions and use phraseology that the people to whom he was speaking associated with the great world to come in Messiah. Okay? And, like, you know, to the woman at the well, you know: “I will give you water that you’ll never thirst again. You’ll never be thirsty again.”[4] Well, we hear that, and we think, “Well, isn’t he attending to her personal needs?” Well, yes. But this is language she would have understood to mean in the world to come, in the kingdom of God, when the fresh water’s plentiful and there is no sea,[5] there is no death, there’s nothing like that. And so there’s this magnificent portrait of the future.

And I think we are hesitant to be so bold as to let people know what we actually believe Jesus is going to do. Jesus can be your therapist. Jesus can help you in your relationships—maybe get over some of your personal addictions and hassles in your life. And maybe your marriage will even get better if you become a Christian. And you’ll die and float off and get a golden harp one day. That’s about as far as it goes for many of us—not all but many. And I think we need to just go ahead and say, “I know the man who’s going to fix it all. I know who he is.”

Alistair: Yeah. When I was just in Australia, the material that was coming out of the Sydney guys…

Bob: Matthias?

Alistair: Yeah. But the son of the archbishop—the previous archbishop of…

Willie: Dave Jensen.

Alistair: Yeah. Yeah. Big guy, tattoos everywhere.

Willie: Yeah, ex-army.

Alistair: Yeah, and obviously had come “through many dangers, toils, and snares.”[6] But he had put another thing together, a bit like his dad or his uncle. And he just said, “So here’s the deal: God made it. We broke it. Christ fixed it.”

Richard: Exactly.

Alistair: That’s it. That’s the story. The world that he made was a beautiful world. It’s a screwed-up world. And Jesus is the one who fixes that big world. And, yeah, just a framework like that I think is really, really helpful.

I think that, yeah, I agree with that: that the way we speak about it in sort of guarded and careful terms makes it easy for people to dismiss it.

Richard: Yeah, you don’t want to oversell.

Alistair: That’s right. Yeah.

Richard: Exactly. And I suggested in the message today, around that time—I don’t remember exactly what I said, but in the barbershop, a Muslim would say, “I know the one who’s going to fix it all.” Okay? But Christians are hesitant to do that, because that’s way over the top. “Do you really believe that?”

Alistair: Right.

Richard: And I think we need to begin to proclaim that and declare it with boldness and with… And I have seen it in my own personal life, just for me personally—and my family, too, I would say—that kind of eschatological hope breeds life today, when we… I mean, I hate to say this, but a lot of my very good friends and well-intending friends and so on and so forth, if you ask them, “Well, tell me what it’s going to be like in the future,” their answer is “I don’t know. I don’t even have a picture of this in my head. I have nothing that I’m dreaming of that the world’s going to be one day when Jesus returns.”

Alistair: Well, isn’t it interesting, though? Because, I mean, think about it in terms of hymnody. Think about it in terms of modern stuff—whether it’s the Gettys or CityAlight in Australia, whatever else it is. In my childhood and to my early youth, whether it was the right kind of expectation or not, nevertheless, that anticipation was always out there in front of us, even in a thing like a Christmas carol by the Irish lady, Cecil Frances Alexander, whose husband was the archbishop of Londonderry. When she wrote, you know, that “Once in Royal David’s City,” it ends up at

Not in that poor, lowly stable,
With the [shepherds] standing by,
We shall see him; but in [glory],
Set [on] God’s right hand on high.[7]

And she wrote that so that children could have an understanding of the nature of the incarnation and what it led to. Our stuff is very truncated now. We’re very… It sounds ridiculous, but we’re so focused on grace and what it means to me and what’s happening to me and “What’s that doing to me right now?” It’s very self-oriented. And then the congregations take on the flavor of that.

So, your word is a good word, Richard, because I think it’s a reminder to us to set the gaze a little higher.

Willie: And it’s that the gospel is not just a personal message. It’s a public proclamation of victory, isn’t it? That is gospel.

Richard: Yes, it is! Indeed!

Alistair: The kingdom. I mean, that’s where Goldsworthy’s stuff on the kingdom is really, really helpful.

Richard: I agree.

Bob: I just wrapped up Revelation—forty-four sermons through Revelation. And in that last…

Alistair: You’re crazy!

Bob: The congregation is faithful, yeah.

Richard: Did they wrap you up at the end of it?

Bob: But in that last section, it begins with Jesus saying, “I[’m] coming soon”; in the middle he says, “I[’m] coming soon”; at the end, he says, “I[’m] coming soon.”[8] And you think, “Well, that was 1,900 years ago.” But we should be living with that expectation and that in a forefront on our minds, because it will reshape what we talk about, what our priorities are. He is coming soon, and let’s live with that in our consciousness.

Alistair: Well, it’s interesting you say all that, because my Jewish friends—and I have a lot of Jewish friends—they’ve quit on the Messiah. You know, they’ve now—it’s all about now, and it’s all about what we’re doing. And actually, I think that spirit has infected large parts of evangelical Christianity.

Richard: In the Lord’s Supper, we do not proclaim the death of Christ until we die.

Alistair: “Until he comes.”[9]

Bob: “Comes,” yes.

Richard: It’s rather “until he comes.” And I just… I think part of the reticence for people like around this table to talk much about what’s going to happen when he comes is the speculation that’s out there and the sort of rampant things—crazy things, sometimes—that are out there. Okay? Raptures and tribulation periods and things. But we’ve got to have that utopian dream before us. It’s what the Bible offers us. We are utopian. God is going to fix it.

Alistair: Right.

Richard: Okay? Jesus is going to fix it. And it’s going to be magnificent. And we need to put feet on that and envision it for people—not speculate but just help them get glimpses of it. And if they can, it will give them hope for the suffering and the trials and the troubles that they face in their daily life. Because frankly, a lot of the things that we live with right now we have to live with the rest of our lives, and they’re never going to go away. But that doesn’t mean that Jesus has gone away.

Bob: The promise of a hope and a future.

Alistair: Well, that’s “born again to a living hope.”[10]

Willie: And one of the things that struck me very much in preaching through Genesis is just how that future hope is to the fore all the way—in the patriarchs!

Alistair: Right at the very beginning.

Willie: And some of have them have a far more developed eschatology than modern evangelical Christians.

Richard: Exactly.

Willie: I mean, Abraham is looking for “a better country,”[11] a city with firm foundations.[12] You know, it staggers me when you read scholars who talk this nonsense about, you know, “There’s no resurrection hope in the Old Testament.” I think, “What Bible are you reading here?” It’s crazy! Hebrews 11 tells us plainly: These guys were looking to the future. That’s what animated their life, was looking to the future—seeing the invisible and living for the promise.

And so, yeah, I think you’re right, Richard. I think a fear of eschatological controversy—it’s like a lot of things, isn’t it? It stops us preaching these things. And we probably want to start looking at “What are all the things we tend not to be preaching on?” And maybe the key to some of the church’s problems are that we need to start preaching on those very things.

Richard: It could be! It could be! You know, if we live out of what Jesus has done, in what he is doing now through Holy Spirit and the church, hoping and longing for the day when he returns and makes all things new… I don’t know how people… I mean, I know I’d lived as a Christian without much of that in my life, but I don’t know at this age, at the age I am now, I can continue to serve him without that dream, without that hope, without that vision. I mean, that’s how people die for Christ, is they have that kind of dream, that kind of vision.

Bob: I was very interested, Willie, hearing you preach on Sodom and Gomorrah from Genesis and talking about this being a gospel message. And I’m thinking, “This is about judgment coming on the wicked. That’s good news?” And in fact, it is good news, but we don’t think of it in that regard. Right?

Willie: But that is the New Testament gospel, isn’t it? When Cornelius says to Peter, “Tell us what Jesus told you to preach,” he said, “He told us to preach he’s the Judge.”[13] I mean, the New Testament gospel is “Jesus is the Judge, and he’s set a date for judgment.”[14] So… And that little passage there in Acts 10 where that’s happening is very striking. The New Testament gospel: Jesus is the Judge. The Old Testament gospel: The prophets say, “Everyone who believes in him will be saved.”[15] So it’s a turnaround, isn’t it? Or lots of people think. But that is the gospel: Judgment is coming. But the great news is: As promised, the Savior has come.

So there’s an urgency. If there’s no judgment in our gospel… There’s an urgency. We were on holiday because I’m on sabbatical, and I won’t tell you where, but we went to a local church on Easter Sunday. And the version of the creed that we said missed out the “com[ing] to judge.”[16]

Bob: Ah!

Willie: There was no judgment coming! Yeah. And this was supposed to be an evangelical Anglican church, so I was quite shocked. But it struck me. And I thought, “You know what? You’ve taken the gospel out of the gospel. Where’s the urgency now? Where’s the joy of the resurrection if it doesn’t tell you that this is the saving from judgment?”

So, the full gospel is the gospel that saves, isn’t it? You know, we… Jesus is the Judge, and Jesus is Lord. And we have to be unashamed of that, because that actually is the good news.

Alistair: Well, again, it’s the eschatological element, and it’s the same. Because, like, as you said from Acts 17: “He has set a day.”[17] The day is fixed, the day is going to be final, and it’s going to be fair. I mean, he won’t… Well, it’s what you were saying today: The judge of all the earth will do right,[18] but you need to know this. “And he’s given proof of it by raising Jesus from the dead.”[19] And it says not when they heard about the day but about the idea of a resurrection—that’s when they said, “Well, we’ll go home now. We can’t swallow that one.”[20]

Richard: As painful as it for me to say this—and it is painful, because I have people that I love that will not be in the new world that Jesus brings—but the world has to be cleansed for it to be made new. And that’s what judgment is. They’re eliminated. And that is the good news, is that he has victory over evil, and he grants the plunder of victory—his victory—to his people. And as hard as that is to preach—and boy, that is hard to preach today! Because it sounds like it’s all about you. It’s not about us. It’s about the fact that Jesus is so wondrous that he does rescue a new humanity to inherit the world. And that includes eliminating those that refuse to come under his kingship.

Bob: So the pastor who hears this and thinks, “I guess I need to start preaching hellfire and brimstone a little more”—what warnings would you give him and what counsel would you give him about how he proclaims coming judgment?

Alistair: Just do Psalm 1. Just do the First Psalm:

The wicked are not so,
 [they’re] like [the] chaff that the wind [blows] away.

Therefore the wicked will not stand in the judgment,
 nor sinners in the congregation of the righteous.[21]

Who are the “sinners”? We are all the “sinners.” Who saves? Jesus saves. You reject the salvation that he’s come to provide for you, you face a judgment. I mean, it’s what you said in passing, again. Were you quoting C. S. Lewis? You know: Eventually, God will give you what you want.[22] “I wanted nothing to do with you.” Okay. That’s what you’ll get.

Richard: That’s right. Jesus will inherit the earth. It will be his, and he will turn to those that follow him and say, “It’s now yours too.”

Willie: I think, you know, it’s a hard thing to preach about judgment, isn’t it? It’s a hard thing to, as a sinner. Because our instinctive heart is to feel some sort of superiority, isn’t it? And only somebody who understands that they stand only in the grace of God and the mercy of God can preach judgment. It’s like, you know, was it Andrew Bonar who said to—well, whoever it was. He said… You know, they were talking to each other: “What were you preaching on, on Sunday?” “I was preaching about hell.” “Did you preach it with tears?” You know, that’s important, isn’t it? That we are sinners sharing the hope of the gospel.

And, you know, when I was speaking last night on Genesis 19, that was a very hard thing to physically do. You can prepare your sermon. You can know what you’re going to say. But even dealing with these things—unless you’ve done that… You know, that is an emotionally difficult thing to do, because we’re dealing with ultimate things.

Alistair: Well, for your encouragement, then, I said to my wife last night as things ended up—I said, “You know, not only was that very, very strong, but,” I said, “it’s wonderful that it came out of Willie,” in the sense that if you had a style that was very stentorian, was very aggressive, was very sort of … in your delivery, it would be a lot harder for people to sit and take that, because… And in the goodness of God, none of that tone was in there. So, to the extent that you might have felt it was very difficult, it came across with a winsomeness that was wonderful. It was wonderful. And the way you finished it off was terrific.

Bob: I think often, when pastors step in to preach about judgment, it can often sound to the congregation like “You’re going to hell, and we’re not, ’cause we’re better, and you’re bad.” And until… As you said, Alistair, we all… Who are the evil? It’s all of us. We all stand deserving judgment, and it’s only by grace that any of us will escape it. And the congregation needs to hear that. The unbeliever needs to hear the believers saying that so that they understand we’re one beggar telling another beggar where to find bread.

Alistair: Well, that’s where this whole thing about church and suffering and eschatology… I mean, until a church like our church starts actually telling people how—without being, you know, weird about it but actually being prepared to say, “We are a community of the broken. We are a bunch of messed-up people. We have degrees. We have houses. We’ve got things. We’ve got children that don’t believe. We’ve got this going. We’ve got that going.” Then when the people come in from outside, they say, “Well, wait a minute, then: If that is all true of you, why are you still singing?” We say, “Well, because people have a hope.” Yeah, it’s not that we have transcended. It’s the new, but it isn’t yet the perfect. It’s been made new, but perfection’s down the road.

---

[1] Psalm 51:7 (NIV).

[2] 2 Corinthians 7:10 (NIV).

[3] See Romans 8:17.

[4] John 4:14 (paraphrased).

[5] See Revelation 21:1.

[6] John Newton, “Amazing Grace” (1779).

[7] Cecil Frances Alexander, “Once in Royal David’s City” (1848).

[8] Revelation 22:7, 12, 20 (ESV).

[9] 1 Corinthians 11:26 (ESV).

[10] 1 Peter 1:3 (ESV).

[11] Hebrews 11:16 (ESV).

[12] See Hebrews 11:10.

[13] Acts 10:33, 42 (paraphrased).

[14] Acts 17:31 (paraphrased).

[15] See, for example, Isaiah 45:22; Joel 2:32.

[16] The Apostles’ Creed.

[17] Acts 17:31 (NIV).

[18] See Genesis 18:25.

[19] Acts 17:31 (paraphrased).

[20] See Acts 17:32.

[21] Psalm 1:4–5 (ESV).

[22] C. S. Lewis, The Great Divorce (1946), chap. 9.