An ART Lesson

Paul, who wrote in Colossians 1:21:

“Once you were alienated from God and were enemies in your minds because of your evil behavior. But now he has reconciled you by Christ’s physical body through death to present you holy in his sight, without blemish and free from accusation—if you continue in your faith, established and firm, not moved from the hope held out in the gospel. This is the gospel that you heard and that has been proclaimed to every creature under heaven, and of which I, Paul, have become a servant.”[1]

Amen.

A brief prayer:

We stand, Lord, on the shoulders of those who, when the battle raged, were brave enough to take on the fight. And this morning we thank you for the heritage that is ours, both ancient and modern. And we pray that as we think on the things of your Word now, that you will conduct that divine dialogue whereby the Spirit of God engages with us in a way that actually transcends our ability to fully comprehend, that you would deign to use the voice of a mere man in the development and progress of the faith of others. But it is because of this that we cry out to you for your help and pray that you will give us grace both to speak and to listen in a way that brings honor and glory to you. For we pray in Jesus’ name. Amen.

I’m not sure that many of you will follow the work of a columnist by the name of Henry Allen, but last year, in the Wall Street Journal, he wrote a piece that was entitled “The Disquiet of Ziggy Zeitgeist.” I wasn’t quite sure what that meant, but it intrigued me—but even more so his opening sentence. And this is what he wrote: “For the first time in my 72 years, I have no idea what’s going on.” And he then goes on to tell us that he has made his career as a columnist about being able to make a comment on the nature of culture and the development of history and so on. But at this point, now, in his life, he says the deconstruction of history and of language has left him fairly clueless. And he makes these kind of semihumorous observations. He says,

We have individualism but we have no privacy. We[’re] all outsiders with no inside to be outside of. …

I don’t know what’s going on. I doubt that anyone does.

There seems to be

no arc, no through-line, no destiny. As the British [soldiers] sang in the trenches of World War I, to the tune of “Auld Lang Syne,” “We’re here because we’re here because we’re here because we’re here.” …

I worry that reality itself is fading like the Cheshire cat, leaving behind only a smile that grows ever more alarming.

What a strange time it is to be alive in America. It can’t stay this way, can it? Or can it?[2]

He’s not alone. In an introduction to a book, a German fellow writes as follows: The world in which we live, he says,

is a world that … has lost its story: a world in which the progress promised by the humanisms of the past three centuries is now gravely threatened by understandings of the human person that reduce our humanity to a congeries of [chemical cosmic] accidents: a humanity with no intentional origin, no noble destiny, and thus no path to take through history.[3]

Gauguin, who died in his fifties as a result of his profligate lifestyle, in his most famous canvas as a Postimpressionist painter (a canvas that you’ll find in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts), he wrote on the canvas—something that he didn’t do ordinarily, apart from the signing of his name. And he wrote three questions that are up on the left-hand corner as you look at it:

D‘où Venons Nous
Que Sommes Nous
Où Allons Nous

“Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?”

Now, the fascinating thing and the wonderful thing about the kind of context in which you find yourselves this morning as students is this: that God’s Word—God’s Word—must interpret history and culture and not the other way around. We read our newspapers, we watch the news in light of the inerrant truth of the Word of God. And I want this morning, if I may, in the time that falls to me, to give you what I’m referring to as an “ART” lesson—a lesson in ART. Don’t be alarmed by this; it’s just three words, and they make up the word ART. So that’s to try and fasten it in your mind and also to help me to remember my notes.

Alienation

The first word is the word alienation. Why is it—why is it—that Allen doesn’t know what’s going on? Why is it that Gauguin speaks for so many when he says, “I don’t understand my origin, and I have no explanation for my destiny, and I don’t really know what I am”? Why is it that many young people of the same age as yourselves believe—if they’re really going to believe what they’ve been told—that they’re just really a cosmic chemical accident, that they’re a bunch of molecules held in suspension for a little while? And what is it that the Christian is able to say concerning the reason for all those kinds of questions?

Well, the answer is in the opening sentence of Colossians [1]:21, where Paul is describing the preconverted condition of the believers in Colossae. And he says, “This is what you once were: You were alienated from God, and you were enemies of God in your minds, and you were so because of your evil behavior.” So here, then, is this picture: alienated, hostility towards God, evil deeds which speak to that fact—and this is not unique to Paul in Colossians but runs throughout his letters. In Ephesians he says the same thing. In Ephesians 2, he describes the Christians in Ephesus as having been separated from God, alienated, being “without hope and without God in the world.”[4] Aliens and strangers, he says.

Now, when the Bible speaks to this and describes it in this way, we ought, then, to be able to look around us and see the evidences of that alienation. It’s not difficult to find in contemporary music and in art—and, indeed, in the sciences—the evidences of the fact that things are broken, that they need to be fixed, that somehow or another, they are dreadfully in need of repair.

God’s Word must interpret history and culture and not the other way around.

And again, many of your peers will, when they are filling out the preanesthetic questionnaire which you get before you have an anesthetic, and they ask you, amongst other things, “Do you know who you are?” and so on, and “What’s your date of birth?” and then they ask you, “What is your ‘religion of choice’?”—at this point in history, one out of three young people under the age of thirty answers, “None.” “None.” That is not nun, n-u-n—especially not on Reformation weekend. It is none, n-o-n-e: “I don’t have any”—young people who are so secular, they don’t even know how secular they are; for whom the word sin just makes no sense at all, because it demands a theological construct which itself makes no sense at all. For them, guilt is an unnecessary emotion, and truth is a strange idea. And at the heart of it all is not simply naivety but, as the Bible says, hostility, and not simply a hostility that is born of intellectual perception but a hostility at the level of morality—or, if you like, at the level of immorality, which is why you will hear people saying, “Nobody is going to tell me how to define my gender. Nobody is going to tell me what I’m supposed to do with my body.”

And so, at the level of our world this morning—and we read our Bibles, and the Bible says the nature of man outside of Christ is alienated from God, “without hope and without God in the world”—then that helps us to understand why things are as they are, on the macro level, as nations war against nations, and on the micro level, when people, in the angst of their own lives—and not least of all a student generation such as your own—will speak to the issue of all kinds of alienation: “I feel alienated from my parents.” “I feel alienated from my peers.” “I feel psychologically alienated from myself,” perhaps. Why? Well, all those alienations are on account of this great alienation: that man by nature is alienated from God.

And the ultimate explanation for it is that our “foolish hearts” are “darkened” and that we have chosen to worship “created things rather than the Creator.”[5] And it is revealed symptomatically at the moment nowhere more so than in the issues of sexuality. I don’t have to go and look for this; I just read the paper every morning.

Yesterday morning in the Wall Street, there were two issues that struck me in relationship to this. I wonder: Did you see them? One was an article on the way in which young people have decided that they don’t want to call their mom and dad “Mom and Dad” anymore; they just want to call them “Joe” or “Mary.” And the article said, you know, “Is this a significant thing?” and various wise people have pontificated on it, and so forth.[6] At one level, you say, “It’s a fairly casual thing,” but at a fundamental level, it is a vital thing, because it undermines the very notion of the structure of family itself.

And when you finish that article, you can turn over and look at the nonsense concerning Elton John and the fundraiser for AIDS and the horrible, sorry picture of him and “his husband” David and their two little boys.[7] At a fundamental level, particularly in the realm of sexuality, our culture crumbles because of alienation from God.

Do you know that when you read the historians, they will tell you that this is the case? When the core structure of society—namely, the family—is dismantled and when sexual incontinence of all and every kind breaks out through the bonds of heterosexual, marital monogamy, then it is only a matter of time before that culture will eventually collapse. Some of you do history, and you can verify this simply by reading. The historian J. D. Unwin studied eighty-six different societies spanning five thousand years, and he found what for him was an unexpected and direct correlation between sexual continence and the ability of a society to grow and remain healthy. This is what he observed: “In human records there is no instance of a society retaining its energy after a complete new generation has inherited a tradition which does not insist on pre-nuptial and post-nuptial continence.”[8] “Of the twenty-two civilizations that have appeared in history, nineteen of them collapsed when they reached the moral state the United States is in [right] now.”[9]

So it’s no surprise to discover that the poets, as I say—and it’s no purpose for me to talk about science, ’cause I know very little about it. Don’t know a great deal about poetry either, but I do listen and make notes of things. And as I was thinking this morning, as I was preparing to come here, I suddenly thought of an Annie Lennox song that I remembered. It goes back to 2003. Annie Lennox is an old Scottish lady, for those of you who are younger, and she’s like a grandmother now. But she sang a song that begins,

Oh God,
Where are you now?
And what are you gonna do
About the mess I’ve made?
If there was ever a soul to save,
It must be me. …

Dear God,
… How can I survive?
Will I make this drop, this dive?
When it all comes to this,
I’m looking down at the abyss
Where you don’t exist,
You don’t exist.[10]

But the God who doesn’t exist she cries out to in the hope that somewhere out there, there might be an answer.

Well, of course, the human assumption is that we can look for God in creation. Contemporary spiritualities are largely pantheistic. Radical environmentalism, Kabbalah, Hinduism—all the things that are now embraced in our culture—suggest consistently that if you’re looking for God, you can find him inside of yourself. David Wells aptly observes, God “is outside the range of our intuitive radar. … We cannot access him on our own [time] or [in] our own [terms]. … It is he who must cross the boundary if we are to know him.”[11]

Reconciliation

And cross the boundary he has in the person of Jesus, which brings me to my second word, which—you will be not surprised by—is reconciliation. Because the only need for reconciliation is on account of our alienation. And what Paul says here to the Colossians: “Once you were alienated from God …. But now he has reconciled you by Christ’s physical body through death to present you holy in his sight”—through Christ’s literal physical body. It’s the same thing that he says masterfully when he writes in 2 Corinthians 5, isn’t it, when he says the very same thing? After he’s given instruction concerning death for the Christian and the putting away of the tent, he says, “[And] all this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ.”[12]

You see, we are alienated from God on two counts: from his side on account of his wrath and from our side on account of our rebellion. Therefore, it is fundamentally important that God reconciles us to himself. And the Father gives the Son and the Son gives himself in order that we who are by nature separated from him, without God and without hope, might be restored to a relationship with him—and all of this at the cross of the Lord Jesus Christ.

The wonder of reconciliation is that all of my dirtiness is borne in Christ and all of the cleanness that is his by his sacrifice of atonement is reckoned to me.

Can I just say in passing how important it is for us to think about the cross of the Lord Jesus Christ, how important it is to sing about the cross of the Lord Jesus Christ, how easy it is for us to be diverted from the very heart of what it means for God to reconcile men and women to himself, so that we might understand that the cross is where this reconciliation is provided, that Christ pardons those who believe, although we have sinned and although we deserve his condemnation? Without this, we would be excluded from God’s presence forever. And in the cross, he displays and he satisfies his perfect justice by executing the punishment that sinners deserve upon his only beloved Son. And without that, God would not be true to himself.

One of my friends in Scotland—a younger fellow—said something not so long ago that struck me as being very, very helpful. It’s simplistic, but it was helpful. He said in passing, he said to me, he says, “You know, Alistair, for something to get clean, something else has to get dirty.” “For something to get clean, something else has to get dirty.” You take a piece of Scott towel… In fact, I’m just remembering—I’m having a flashback here—driving in Scotland with your president. And all of a sudden he says, “Stop the car!” So I stopped the car. I said, “What’s the problem?” He says, “Look at your windshield!” he said. “It is filthy! Filthy!” And he then proceeded to find the mechanism necessary to clean it up. I can’t remember what he used—maybe an old sock from the trunk or something. But in order for the windscreen to be clean, the Scott towel had to get dirty. And the wonder of reconciliation is that all of my dirtiness is borne in Christ and all of the cleanness that is his by his sacrifice of atonement is reckoned to me.

Again, simple helps me. Cecil Frances Alexander, the wife of a Presbyterian minister, who wrote hymns in order to teach young people theology… So she wrote for the incarnation, “Once in royal David’s city stood a lowly cattle shed,”[13] you know. And she wrote for the doctrine of creation, “All things bright and beautiful, all creatures great and small.”[14] And she wrote for the doctrine of the atonement, “There is a green hill far away, outside a city wall,” with amazing verse for boys and girls to understand:

There was [none] other good enough
To pay the price of sin;
He only could unlock the gate
Of heaven and let us in.[15]

No, the cross is where reconciliation is provided, and the church is where reconciliation is to be proclaimed. Actually, the church is where reconciliation is to be displayed—but we’ll leave that for another time. It is where it is to be proclaimed. It is to be declared.

Aye, there’s the rub, isn’t it? Because the message of reconciliation which—again, 2 Corinthians 5—is entrusted to us as ambassadors of Christ[16] is a muted declaration whenever the church in any generation loses a deep-seated conviction concerning the truth and the power and the relevance of the gospel. And I say to you as a young person: Unless you are convinced in your heart of hearts concerning the truth and the power and the relevance of the gospel, there will be no reason for you, there will be no propulsion for you, to go out and make much of that in your life and in your lifestyle. If you lose confidence in the very truths that are fundamental here, then it will matter little how long you study here. And the church bears testimony to that.

William Booth, who was the founder of the Salvation Army a long time ago, back in the nineteenth century, as he was nearing the end of his life and proceeding towards his death, they came and asked him, they said, “Mr. Booth, what do you consider are the great dangers confronting the church in the twentieth century?” And this is what he said: “In answering your inquiry, I consider that the chief dangers which confront the coming century will be religion without the Holy Spirit, Christianity without Christ, forgiveness without repentance, salvation without regeneration, politics without God, and heaven without hell.” Well, that was kind of prescient, wasn’t it? The very things he warned about are the things that essentially led to the collapse of the “Salvation” Army. Oh, there are some bright lights around in the midst of it all, but by and large, it’s become a social agency. By and large, it doesn’t do anything that any other kind of social agency is unprepared to do or unwilling to do. But no, that’s exactly what is to happen.

So therefore, when Paul is concerned for these believers in Ephesus or Colossae—when through the Scriptures he speaks into our lives today, the Spirit of God brings it home—it’s a reminder to us that when this gripped Paul, he says, “The love of Christ constrains us, that one died for all, and therefore all died,”[17] and he says, “and so we must get this message out there.” And that’s why he says, “We beseech you, we implore you, by the mercies of God. We beseech you, we implore you: be reconciled to God. Receive your reconciliation.”[18]

You see, when you teach the Bible—and some of you do teach the Bible, and you’re going to do it some more—let me tell you what your primary aim is. Well, let me tell you what it isn’t. Your primary aim is not to provide information about a passage of Scripture with two or three practical pointers at the end of it so that you might know what you’re supposed to do with the talk you just heard. No, our primary aim when we teach the Bible is in order that we might have a life-changing encounter with God. Because the Scriptures, as we saw on the screen, have been “breathed out by God.”[19] When God’s Word is properly proclaimed, God’s voice is really heard. And it is that conviction which underlies Paul’s emphasis here.

Transformation

In other words, we want to go at it in such a way that lives are then transformed—which is my third word. A-R-T: alienation, reconciliation, transformation. Actually, we could have said conversion; that would have been fine too. Or regeneration, or justification, or a number of synonyms! But I needed a t; otherwise, it wouldn’t be ART. I could have gone with ARC, but some of you would have spelled that wrongly later on and tried to remember what it was that began with k, and it didn’t; it began with c.

But let me spend the balance of my time on this: the absolute, vital importance of seeing men and women confronted, challenged, spoken to by the gospel in order that they might be converted. Converted. It’s a sort of old-fashioned word, isn’t it?

Let me give you a quote from an old Scotsman from the nineteenth century called George Smeaton, in a wonderful book that he wrote called The Atonement. Here’s the quote. If we had time for Q and A, I would be happy to dialogue over this. I often think about it when I have the occasion to speak to groups such as yourselves. I’m not sure what the immediate reaction of people is to this quote. Here it is: “To convert one sinner from the error of his way, is an event of greater [significance], than the deliverance of [an entire] kingdom from temporal evil.”[20] Let me say it to you again: “To convert one sinner”—we understand God converts—“to convert one sinner from the error of his way, is an event of greater importance,” significance, “than the deliverance of [an entire] kingdom from temporal evil.”

Now, was Smeaton suggesting that temporal evil should not be addressed? No. Was he suggesting that there is no engagement that flows from the gospel in relationship to these issues of life? No. But what he was making perfectly clear was simply this—and let me quote William Booth to you again. ’Cause William Booth is the soup kitchen man. He’s the champion of soup kitchens. He’s the champion of bottles of water. He’s the champion of “Can I give you a few new clothes?” and so on. So what did he have to say? Would Booth have agreed with Smeaton? Yes. Here’s Booth: “To get a man soundly saved it is not enough to put on him a [new] pair of … breeches, to give him regular work, or even to give him a University education. These things are all outside a man, and if the inside remains unchanged you have wasted your labour.”[21]

Our primary aim when we teach the Bible is in order that we might have a life-changing encounter with God.

Now, young people, I know how trendy it is to go on short-term missions trips. I haven’t kept up to date with the trips that go from here. I’m sure they’re very good and not like this at all. But I don’t want to be a crotchety old guy like one of the two up on The Muppets. I don’t want to grow old like that—whatever that guy was called, Waldorf or whoever he was. He just sat up there and moaned about everything. I don’t want to become that man. But I do want to tell you that it really alarms me to see all these young people taking tons of money to go halfway around the world to drill wells or to do all kinds of nice things that Muslims are doing and others are doing—at the expense of the gospel!

You say, “Well, I think maybe you’re overemphasizing that.” Well, that’s for you to consider. But the issue that we are given is that we would “go into all the world,”[22] and we would proclaim the gospel, and that Jesus would be with his apostles[23] “to the ends of the earth.”[24] But they never went into all the world. How could they? They didn’t even know where the end of the world was. And he wasn’t with them “to the … end of the age,”[25] because they didn’t live to the end of the age. It’s not the end of the age yet. So what does that mean? It means that the apostles’ words, which were inscripturated for us, are now ours to take to the ends of the earth. And the promise of God to every succeeding generation is that he will be with those who take his message to the ends of the earth. But it is his message that we’re taking to the ends of the earth, and the message is that God reconciles sinners to himself.[26]

Now, just so you understand and that you don’t think that I’ve got some kind of hobby horse on this, I thought about it in relationship to our own church. You know, we have these things where you go out in the community and you try and prove to people that you’re really nice—you know, like, “Oh, we’re nice people.” And so what do we do? We sit there, and we give them bottles of water: “It’s a hot day in Ohio. Would you like a bottle of water?” Okay, well, that was very nice. But what did that actually do for the cause of the gospel? Nothing. I mean, there’s nothing in the water. There’s nothing… We don’t have like John 3:16 round the bottle or anything like that. It’s nothing… It’s like, “Would you like a bottle of water?”

And I realized after I’d been in England on a mission where we were walking up to people in the high street in suburban London and saying to them, “Excuse me, would you like to hear about a bad man that went to heaven?” or “Excuse me, have you ever read the Bible?” or “Excuse me, have you ever considered the claims of Jesus Christ?”—and I said to myself when I came back, “And we’re just offering people bottles of water. We haven’t even got our warm-ups off yet in relationship to evangelism, and we’re satisfying ourselves with this. We need to see men and women converted.” That’s what Paul is declaring: “You were once alienated; you’ve been reconciled. Now this message of reconciliation is yours to take, so that men and women might be converted.” If your mom and dad don’t believe, they don’t just need to know you’re going to a Christian college. They need to know Jesus! They need to be converted. The people that you travel with on a daily basis to sports events and so on are by nature without God and without hope in the world.

You see, the evangel is quenched when you lose confidence in the truth and the power and the relevance of the gospel. And the reason that Paul is so clear on this is because Paul himself was radically converted, wasn’t he? “Well,” you say, “his conversion was very—it was unique.” (Incidentally, you can’t say “very unique,” because it’s either unique or isn’t unique, but it can’t be “very unique.”) So his conversion was unique; there were unique elements to his conversion: the shining light, the blindness, the visit of Ananias, and various things. But that was also true in relationship to the Ethiopian eunuch. I mean, I don’t think you were converted riding around in a chariot coming out of Jerusalem reading Isaiah 53 on a scroll, were you? No, that’s not the issue. Or what about the woman at the well? Were you converted as a result of somebody asking you if you’d like a drink of water? (Ironically!) And the answer is no. No.

I don’t know how the Spirit moves,
Convincing men of sin,
Revealing Jesus through the Word,
Creating faith in him.

But I know whom I have believed.[27]

Now, let me just say to you that when a person is converted—and you see this in the life of Paul—when a person is truly converted, they will come to firm, strong, settled convictions. Firm, strong, settled convictions. About what? About all kinds of things, but definitely about this—and you can do this for your homework and read Acts 9 and so on. Paul came to an immediately settled conviction about God’s Son. About God’s Son. When you read in Acts [9:19–20], it says, “[And after he had] spent several days with the disciples in Damascus[, at] once,” or immediately, “he began to preach in the synagogues that Jesus is the Son of God.” Immediately, his view of Jesus was changed. Immediately, his view of Jesus was changed.

Up until this point in his life, Jesus was a fraud, and the followers of Jesus were crazys, and they were deserving of death and imprisonment and so on. What in the world has happened to this fellow? What is this dramatic change that has taken place? Well, he’s been converted, for goodness’ sake! It wasn’t that he just banged his head somewhere and decided to become religious, or he had some kind of quasi-spiritual experience that changed his “outlook on life,” or he had a “new purpose,” or whatever you want to describe. No, no, no, no, no. He had been living his life upside down, and he got turned upside down, which means that he then got turned the right way up. And that’s what the Bible says: that we live our lives upside down, and the work of grace is to turn us upside down, therefore to turn us the right way up, and an entirely different view of Jesus. The people were astonished that he was declaring these things. And that was the astonishment of the wonder of grace.

And he saw a light that was brighter than the noonday sun.[28] And he fell to the ground. And, you remember, he looked up, and he said, “Who are you?” “Who are you, Lord?”[29] Of course, the punctuation is interesting, isn’t it? I’m not sure that it shouldn’t be “Who are you? Lord!” That would seem to make more sense to me: “Who are you? Lord! You are Lord? You are Messiah God?” Yes. An entirely different understanding of the person of Jesus.

Because a person converted “is a new creation.”[30] “A new creation.” If you don’t have a firm and settled conviction this morning, young person, that Jesus is the Christ, that he’s going to judge the world,[31] that every knee will bow to him,[32] then you might really want to take a good, hard look at what your profession of faith really means. When a converted person declares Jesus, they declare Jesus as he is: the Son of God.

A new view of God’s Son; a new view of God’s mercy. Of God’s mercy! Again, that’s Paul, isn’t it? You have to wait until you get into his letters, and in his letters, he’s explaining to Timothy in his first letter—he says, you know, “[I have to tell you that] I thank Christ Jesus our Lord, who has given me strength, that he considered me faithful, appointing me to his service.” Here we go: “Even though I was once a blasphemer and a persecutor and a violent man, I was shown mercy.”[33] Mercy.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t like having my photograph taken. When they try it, it never works. Well, I guess it works; it’s lousy, and I think I look better than I actually do when they take the photograph. But they go, “One, two, three!” You’re just like, “Frozen, more frozen, completely frozen.” And so, every so often they say, “We need a photograph for this,” and they bring some poor soul into my room, and it’s always a disaster. It’s always the same thing. ’Cause I always tell them, I say, “You know, I haven’t had very many good photographs, and you could help me out, because I’d like this photograph to do me justice.” And inevitably the person says, “It’s not justice you require; it’s mercy. With a face like yours, it’s mercy that you require.”

You see, by nature, Paul was a proud Jew, wasn’t he? He was able to rehearse all of that. “I got a great background,” he said. “I had the best teachers. I went to the university. I’m really smart. I kept the law. I was pretty well faultless on this stuff.” And then he says, “But all of that I no longer regard as of significance anymore, because all I once held dear, all the things I built my life upon, all the things the world reveres and wars to own[34] fall away in relationship to a new view of Jesus.”[35]

You see, by nature, unaided by the Holy Spirit, our friends, our loved ones rely on themselves, on their decency, on their good works. Where I work in suburban Cleveland, the sort of prevailing view is that a good God, if he exists, will reward nice people if they just do their best. And it is quite a radical thing when someone is converted, and they say, “You know, I used to think that God looked upon me with favor until he opened my eyes to see what a mess I was. And now, ‘Oh, the love that drew salvation’s plan! … Mercy there was great, and grace was free.’”[36]

A new view of Jesus, a new view of mercy, and a new view of God’s people. The people to whom he went—that is, Paul—were completely freaked out. They were afraid of him; they weren’t sure about him, but he was sure about them. They said to one another, “Isn’t this the fellow who just came from Jerusalem with the letters to deal with us in Damascus?” And they said, “Yeah, but he’s a new person. He’s been made new. Jesus has changed his life.”

Now, let me finish in this way: Professor Murray of Westminster Seminary on one occasion was riding in the car in the north of Scotland with a book publisher that is well-known around here called Willie MacKenzie. And Murray, who liked to play with the minds of people, said to Willie MacKenzie, he said, “What do you think the difference is between a lecture and the preaching of the Bible? What do you think the difference is between a lecture and the preaching of the Bible?” And MacKenzie tried his best; he gave various suggestions. And Murray said, “No, no, you didn’t get it right at all.” So eventually he gave up, and Murray said, “This is what it is.” He says, “Preaching is a personal, passionate plea.” And MacKenzie said, “In what sense?” And Murray said, “In the Pauline sense: ‘We beseech you, by the mercies of God: Be reconciled to God.’”

When the queen spoke to Polonius in Hamlet—you remember, when he does that big long thing where he runs off his mouth—and she eventually gets fed up with him, and she says, “[Polonius,] more matter with less art.”[37] “More matter with less art.” And I want to say to you today: more ART. More ART with less vague, accommodating, useless, unhelpful nonsense. We are not anthropologists. We are not pragmatists. “We are … ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us.”[38] What a wonder! What a responsibility! What an immense privilege! And you folks, with all your future in front of you!

Father, thank you that “your word is … fixed in the heavens.”[39] Thank you that you accomplish the purposes that you ordain for it.[40] Thank you for the privilege of casting our bread upon the waters,[41] resting in the assurance that as we take our stand upon the very rock of Christ himself, as we rest confidently in the wonder of his work of reconciliation, so, then, that we in turn may have the immense privilege of taking all that we learn here and bringing it to bear upon the places to which you are going to send us so that unbelieving people may become the committed followers of the Lord Jesus Christ, in whose name we pray. Amen.

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[1] Colossians 1:21 (NIV 1984). Scripture quotations in this transcript are from the 1984 edition of the NIV unless otherwise indicated.

[2] Henry Allen, “The Disquiet of Ziggy Zeitgeist,” Wall Street Journal, August 1, 2013, https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424127887324110404578626314130514522.

[3] George Weigel, foreword to Light of the World: The Pope, the Church, and the Signs of the Times; A Conversation with Peter Seewald, by Benedict XVI, trans. Michael J. Miller and Adrian J. Walker (San Francisco: Ignatius, 2010), x.

[4] Ephesians 2:12 (NIV 1984).

[5] Romans 1:21, 25 (NIV 1984).

[6] Dianna Kapp, “Children Put ‘Mom’ and ‘Dad’ on a First Name Basis,” Wall Street Journal, October 29, 2014, https://www.wsj.com/articles/children-put-mom-and-dad-on-a-first-name-basis-1414609230.

[7] Corinne Ramey, “Elton John Hopes to Let Sun Go Down on AIDS,” Wall Street Journal, October 29, 2014, https://www.wsj.com/articles/elton-john-hopes-to-let-sun-go-down-on-aids-1414615188.

[8] J. D. Unwin, Hopousia, or The Sexual and Economic Foundations of a New Society (London: Allen and Unwin, 1940), 84–85, quoted in Christopher Ash, Remaking a Broken World: The Heart of the Bible Story (The Good Book Company, 2010), 48.

[9] Arnold Toynbee, quoted in Ash, 48.

[10] Annie Lennox, “Oh God (Prayer)” (2003).

[11] David F. Wells, What Is the Trinity? (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R, 2012), 11.

[12] 2 Corinthians 5:18 (NIV 1984).

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

[14] Cecil Frances Alexander, “All Things Bright and Beautiful” (1848).

[15] Cecil Frances Alexander, “There Is a Green Hill Far Away” (1848).

[16] See 2 Corinthians 5:20.

[17] 2 Corinthians 5:14 (paraphrased).

[18] 2 Corinthians 5:20 (paraphrased).

[19] 2 Timothy 3:16 (ESV).

[20] John Newton, “Messiah Suffering and Wounded for Us,” in The Works of the Rev. John Newton ( Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1985), 4:228.

[21] General Booth, In Darkest England and the Way Out (New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1890), 45.

[22] Mark 16:15 (NIV 1984).

[23] See Matthew 28:20.

[24] Acts 1:8 (NIV 1984).

[25] Matthew 28:20 (NIV 1984).

[26] See 2 Corinthians 5:19.

[27] Daniel Webster Whittle, “I Know Whom I Have Believed” (1883).

[28] See Acts 26:13.

[29] Acts 9:5; 22:8; 26:15 (NIV 1984).

[30] 2 Corinthians 5:17 (NIV 1984).

[31] See Acts 17:31.

[32] See Philippians 2:10.

[33] 1 Timothy 1:12–13 (NIV 1984).

[34] Graham Kendrick, “Knowing You (All I Once Held Dear)” (1993).

[35] Philippians 3:4–11 (paraphrased).

[36] William Reed Newell, “At Calvary” (1895).

[37] William Shakespeare, Hamlet, 2.2.

[38] 2 Corinthians 5:20 (NIV 1984).

[39] Psalm 119:89 (ESV).

[40] See Isaiah 55:11.

[41] See Ecclesiastes 11:1.