The new 40th anniversary edition of Preaching and Preachers contains essays from several contemporary preachers, including a piece from Ligon Duncan entitled “Some Things to Look For and Wrestle With.” Zondervan has given me permission to reprint that essay below. Ligon’s comments serve as a good introduction to the book and are full of wisdom in their own right.

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I received my first copy of D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones’ Preaching and Preachers as a gift from a family in my home church as I was just beginning my studies in seminary. My copy was from the fourteenth printing of the first edition. I had been introduced to Lloyd-Jones as a teenager through his Studies in the Sermon on the Mount (my mother had worn bare a copy of the original two-volume edition) and through the preaching ministry of my boyhood pastor who had been deeply edified by Lloyd-Jones’ sermons. Indeed, many of the “Gospel men” in the old Southern Presbyterian Church and in the nascent reforming movements of the early 1970s were profoundly affected by Lloyd-Jones through his preaching at the Pensacola Theological Institute at the McIlwain Presbyterian Church in August of 1969 (as Hurricane Camille was crashing ashore in Mississippi).

I read Lloyd-Jones’ preaching in written form before I read Preaching and Preachers. From the first, I was greatly impacted by the power of his sermons, even in printed form. Sentences and paragraphs from these sermons still grip me, utterly. I only heard audio recordings of his messages later, and the medium of his voice added a layer of effect that I had not been able to appreciate before.

Preaching and Preachers is a very different book from his books of sermons. It was given as a series of lectures, and it bears those marks. But it also bears the marks of a man who spent a lifetime preaching and thinking about preaching. Truly, Lloyd-Jones was one of the great preachers of his age. Even in these talks, the fire breaks through. Over and over again. The lecturer on preaching often becomes the preacher.

I encourage you to be on the lookout for some special aspects of this book. The following still arrest my attention when I reread it. I think that when you read this book, several (at least sixteen!) things will strike you.

1. How much the landscape of the church has changed since Lloyd-Jones mused on the background to the decline of preaching in our time. Nevertheless, his discussion is helpful and thought-provoking.

2. His crystal clear and emphatic definition of the work of church and pastor. “The primary task of the Church and of the Christian minister is the preaching of the Word of God.” He gives an overview and summary of his biblical case for this. His position is widely denied today but deserves reconsideration.

3. His assertion that great preaching always characterizes the great movements in the history of the Church. Reformation and revival, he says, are always attended by great preachers and great preaching.

4. His reflections on the social application of the gospel in relation to the primacy of preaching. Needless to say, this is a timely discussion for evangelicals again today. In connection with this subject, his argument that “the ultimate justification for asserting the primacy of preaching is theological” will supply you ample food for thought.

5. His emphasis on the importance of gathered, corporate, public worship. “Now the Church is a missionary body,” Lloyd-Jones says, “and we must recapture this notion that the whole Church is part of this witness to the Gospel and its truth and its message. It is therefore important that people should come together and listen in companies in the realm of the Church. That has an impact in and of itself.” “The very presence of a body of people in itself is a part of the preaching, and these influences begin to act immediately upon anyone who comes into a service.”

6. His rejection of what he calls “modern substitutes for preaching” (whether debates or discussion groups or conversation). Preaching, he says, “may be slow work; it often is; it is a long-term policy. But my whole contention is that it works, that it pays, and that it is honoured, and must be, because it is God’s own method.”

7. His taxonomy of three types of preaching: (1) evangelistic, (2) instructional-experimental (or experiential), and (3) didactic-instructional. Lloyd-Jones believed all three types were necessary, and all three should be explicitly theological. He fruitfully challenges us in this discussion to be theological in our preaching without turning our preaching into lecturing on theology, and he urges that we preach the Gospel, not preach about the Gospel.

8. His proposition that “a sermon should always be expository.” Lloyd-Jones defines the term “expository” and gives wise counsel on how to go about preparing such a message. This whole section bears thoughtful engagement.

9. His treatment of the preacher’s personality, authority, freedom, exchange, seriousness, liveliness, zeal, concern, warmth, rapport, urgency, persuasiveness, pathos, and power in the act of preaching. This section is solid gold. It is here that he says: “preaching is theology coming through a man who is on fire” and that the chief end of preaching is “to give men and women a sense of God and His presence.”

10. His negative assessment of “lay-preaching” and his counsel on what constitutes a call to ministry. Accompanying this section are useful remarks on the training and preparation of preachers and what they need to know to do their work. Along the way, homiletics classes come in for a pounding!

11. His discussion of “the pew” wrongly controlling “the pulpit” is fascinating. We can make all sorts of mistakes when we try too hard to read the congregation. But Lloyd-Jones is remarkably balanced in this: “I would lay it down as being axiomatic that the pew is never to dictate to, or control, the pulpit. This needs to be emphasized at the present time. But having said that, I would emphasize equally that the preacher nevertheless has to assess the condition of those in the pew and to bear that in mind in the preparation and delivery of his message.”

12. His warning to preachers not to “assume that all who claim to be Christians, and who think they are Christians, and who are members of the Church, are therefore of necessity Christians” is timely. This warning may be controversial to some, but Lloyd-Jones needs to be heard here.

13. His urging that the need for more than one service on Sunday, for “all the people who attend a church need to be brought under the power of the Gospel.” Lloyd-Jones believed the congregational attitude should be, “I want as much of the Word of God, the presence of the Lord, the worship of God as I can get.” Surely this bears contemplation in our “one hour a week” era of Christian worship.

14. His wise counsel. “Keep the music in its place. It is handmaiden, a servant, and it must not be allowed to dominate or to control in any sense.” This is guidance more needed today than ever before.

15. His encouraging words about “the romance of preaching” may well provide a new hope and spark a new flame in tired preachers’ hearts. He reflects on the incomparable feeling of preaching the Word of God to your own people, never knowing when the message is going to unfold in ways you didn’t expect even as you preach it, and never knowing when God is going to change someone’s life using words that you are privileged to speak for him.

16. His emphasis on the unction or anointing of the Spirit. “What is this? It is the Holy Spirit falling upon the preacher in a special manner. It is an access of power. It is God giving power, and enabling, through the Spirit, to the preacher in order that he may do this work in a manner that lifts it up beyond the efforts and endeavours of man to a position in which the preacher is being used by the Spirit and becomes the channel through whom the Spirit works.”

You may argue with Lloyd-Jones from time to time as you read (I do!), but you will always find him a worthy and rewarding conversation partner. More than that, he is a wise mentor. If you are new to the task of preaching, simply engaging with Lloyd-Jones will be a good, shaping, directing exercise in the formation of your practice of preaching. And if you have been long at the task and are now weary in the work of preaching, you may remember some things that you thought you’d long forgotten and feel a renewed passion to proclaim the Gospel and preach the cross and minister the Word.

I’ve been a Bulls fan my whole life and this is very funny.

In the spring of 1969, Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones gave a series of lectures at Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia that explored the nature of preaching and made a stirring defense for the centrality of preaching. These lectures were published in March 1972 as Preaching and Preachers. This fortieth anniversary edition is being released both to honor the legacy of Lloyd-Jones and to introduce a new generation to his wisdom and passion. When it came to preaching, the Doctor was unusually gifted, unusually insightful, and unusually opinionated. You’ll find that the message of this book is just as timely and lively today as it was four decades ago.

This new edition, which I edited, contains the original text of the 1972 edition. The content of the original messages has not been altered. But a few other elements have been added that should make this popular book even more accessible.

• Subheadings have been added to aid in reading.
• There are now questions at the close of each chapter for use in group discussion or personal reflection.
• In addition, several contemporary preachers have written essays discussing the impact of this book and the influence Lloyd-Jones has had on their own lives. You’ll find new essays from Bryan Chapell, Mark Dever, Ligon Duncan, Timothy Keller, John Piper, and myself. Our aim is to serve the church by directing a new generation of preachers to this deserving classic.

I know of no other book on preaching that will motivate you to preach like this one will. Pastors will rediscover the romance of preaching. Christians in general will be better equipped to understand the preaching task and why it must have pride of place in the church’s ministry. I love this book because I believe God can use it to make better preachers and encourage better preaching. There is no more vital task. For as the pulpit goes, so goes the church.

This post is adapted from my “Note from the Editor.”

My attitude toward technology is pretty simple. Like almost anything else humans create, technology can be a blessing or a curse. Some Christians harbor an immediate suspicion toward technology, assuming that anything new must be bad, especially new things they don’t understand. But many others are too quick to accept technology as an unmitigated good without considering the ways every new advance can also set us back.

If you tend to be a technophile, a little Neil Postman (1931-2003) might be good for you. I don’t agree with all of his critiques, but he is relentlessly insightful and provocative.

A case in point is Postman’s statement of faith (as it were) regarding our unbridled acceptance of technology and all that it promises to achieve. He lists several characteristics of the noble freedom fighter who resists “the American Technopoly” (which is different than resisting all technology). The list is worth reading and coming back to from time to time.

Those who resist the American Technopoly, Postman argues, are people:

• who pay no attention to a poll unless they know what questions were asked, and why;

• who refuse to accept efficiency as the pre-eminent goal of human relations;

• who have freed themselves from the belief in the magical powers of numbers, do not regard calculation as an adequate substitute for judgment, or precision as a synonym for truth;

• who refuse to allow psychology or any “social science” to pre-empt the language and thought of common sense;

• who are, at least, suspicious of the idea of progress, and who do not confuse information with understanding;

• who do not regard the aged as irrelevant;

• who take seriously the meaning of family loyalty and honor, and who, when they “reach out and touch someone,” expect that person to be in the same room;

• who take the great narratives of religion seriously and who do not believe that science is the only system of thought capable of producing truth;

• who know the difference between the sacred and the profane, and who do not wink at tradition for modernity’s sake;

• who admire technological ingenuity but do not think it represents the highest possible form of human achievement. (Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology, 183-184)

Makes a lot of sense to me. Might even be worth laminating.

In recent years, several self-proclaimed evangelicals, or those associated with evangelical institutions, have called into question the historicity of Adam and Eve. It is said that because of genomic research we can no longer believe in a first man called Adam from whom the entire human race has descended.

I’ll point to some books at the end which deal with the science end of the question, but the most important question is what does the Bible teach. Without detailing a complete answer to that question, let me suggest ten reasons why we should believe that Adam was a true historical person and the first human being.

1. The Bible does not put an artificial wedge between history and theology. Of course, Genesis is not a history textbook or a science textbook, but that is far from saying we ought to separate the theological wheat from the historical chaff. Such a division owes to the Enlightenment more than the Bible.

2. The biblical story of creation is meant to supplant other ancient creation stories more than imitate them. Moses wants to show God’s people “this is how things really happened.” The Pentateuch is full of warnings against compromise with the pagan culture. It would be surprising, then, for Genesis to start with one more mythical account of creation like the rest of the ANE.

3. The opening chapters of Genesis are stylized, but they show no signs of being poetry. Compare Genesis 1 with Psalm 104, for example, and you’ll see how different these texts are. It’s simply not accurate to call Genesis poetry. And even if it were, who says poetry has to be less historically accurate?

4. There is a seamless strand of history from Adam in Genesis 2 to Abraham in Genesis 12. You can’t set Genesis 1-11 aside as prehistory, not in the sense of being less than historically true as we normally understand those terms. Moses deliberately connects Abram with all the history that comes before him, all the way back to Adam and Eve in the garden.

5. The genealogies in 1 Chronicles 1 and Luke 3 treat Adam as historical.

6. Paul believed in a historical Adam (Rom. 5:12-21; 1 Cor. 15:21-22, 45-49). Even some revisionists are honest enough to admit this; they simply maintain that Paul (and Luke) were wrong.

7. The weight of the history of interpretation points to the historicity of Adam. The literature of second temple Judaism affirmed an historical Adam. The history of the church’s interpretation also assumes it.

8. Without a common descent we lose any firm basis for believing that all people regardless of race or ethnicity have the same nature, the same inherent dignity, the same image of God, the same sin problem, and that despite our divisions we are all part of the same family coming from the same parents.

9. Without a historical Adam, Paul’s doctrine of original sin and guilt does not hold together.

10. Without a historical Adam, Paul’s doctrine of the second Adam does not hold together.

Christians may disagree on the age of the earth, but whether Adam ever existed is a gospel issue. Tim Keller is right:

[Paul] most definitely wanted to teach us that Adam and Eve were real historical figures. When you refuse to take a biblical author literally when he clearly wants you to do so, you have moved away from the traditional understanding of the biblical authority. . . .If Adam doesn’t exist, Paul’s whole argument—that both sin and grace work ‘covenantally’—falls apart. You can’t say that ‘Paul was a man of his time’ but we can accept his basic teaching about Adam. If you don’t believe what he believes about Adam, you are denying the core of Paul’s teaching. (Christianity Today June 2011)

If you want to read more about the historical Adam debate, check out Did Adam and Eve Really Exist? by C. John Collins.

For more on the relationship between faith and science, you may want to look at one of the following:

• John C. Lennox, God’s Undertake: Has Science Buried God?
• Should Christians Embrace Evolution: Biblical and Scientific Responses, edited by Norman C. Nevin
• God and Evolution, edited by Jay Richards
• Vern S. Poythress, Redeeming Science: A God-Centered Approach
• C. John Collins, Science and Faith: Friend or Foes

Some good car commercials from the Super Bowl.

I love this one for the Twinkies.

This extended cut of Jerry Seinfeld with the omelet guy is better than the original commercial.

Last Sunday I preached on Ezra 2, which is no one’s favorite chapter in the Bible. It’s a long list of the exiles who returned from Babylon. But I’m preaching through Ezra, so I read the second chapter and preached from it. I admit there were times I stared at the text and prayed, “Lord what do you want to say to me and these people through these names and numbers.”

In my prayers and in my study, I was not helped by this assessment from the WBC volume on Ezra:

Chapters like Ezra 2 are among the most uninviting portions of the Bible to the modern reader both because of their tedious nature and because of their overtones of racial exclusivism and pride. However fascinating the chapter may be to the antiquarian, it is unlikely that his enthusiasm will ever be shared by more than a few (38-39).

Yikes, I thought. If you have a Ph.D. in this stuff and are passionate enough about Ezra to write a book on it, and yet this is what you think of chapter 2, what hope do the rest of us have?

Thankfully, I found inspiration from another source. I was greatly helped by a different author’s commentary on Ezra, actually his commentary on the whole Old Testament: “All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be competent, equipped for every good work” (2 Tim. 3:16-17). That’s what Paul, inspired by the Holy Spirit, said about Ezra 2 and every other chapter in our Bibles.

And sure enough, there were some powerful lessons to be learned in that boring list of exiles. I found three: we learn something about God, something about courage, and something about the church. Go here for the rest of the story.

The Susan G. Komen Foundation, the nation’s largest breast cancer charity, has  cut its funding for Planned Parenthood, the nation’s largest provider of abortions. The move by Komen has enraged pro-abortion advocates and sparked a renewed debate about what Planned Parenthood actually does.

Setting aside the undercover operations and insider testimonies which have revealed that Planned Parenthood at its worst is an aggressive promoter of abortion that turns a blind eye to sex trafficking and abuse, let’s simply examine the oft repeated claim that abortions only account for 3% of Planned Parenthood services. The chart reproduced by the Washington Post’s Ezra Klein seems to settle the matter. Abortion is only a tiny sliver of Planned Parenthood’s overall  program. Most of what they do focuses on testing, contraception, and prevention. Right?

As if often the case with statistics, the devil is in the details. Klein’s chart comes directly from numbers furnished by Planned Parenthood itself. You’ll notice that Planned Parenthood lists 11 million total services, of which more than 300,000 were abortions, roughly 3 percent. But earlier in the report we read that these 11 million services were performed for not quite 3 million people. That means most people coming to Planned Parenthood received multiple services. A woman might come in for a pregnancy test, get tested for an STD, have abortion, and leave with contraceptives. Four services, one abortion.  A closer look at the numbers, then, reveals that 1 in 9 people serviced by Planned Parenthood received an abortion. And no doubt the number is much higher if you were to look simply at those women who came in pregnant looking for help.

Just looking at their own numbers, there are more reasons to take the 3 percent claim with a generous grain of salt.

• Planned Parentood provided almost 1.5 million “emergency contraceptive kits.” This is a euphemism for the morning after pill, which works, in part, by preventing a fertilized egg from implanting in the uterus.
• With more than 300,000 abortions in 2010, Planned Parenthood accounted for 25% of abortions in the U.S., hardly a minor player in the abortion industry.
• In 2010 Planned Parenthood reported performing 329,445 abortions. Only 3% of total services, as everyone seems to know. But compare that number with the other options one might offer pregnant women. In that same year Planned Parenthood listed only 31,098 “prenatal services” and a meager 841 “adoption referals to other agencies.” Which means that if you walk into Planned Parenthood with an unborn baby you are 10 times more likely to get an abortion than prenatal screening and almost 400 times more likely to be offered an abortion than given an adoption referral. So a different pie chart might look like this.

So for whatever useful purposes they may serve on ocassion, I’m not ashamed to admit that of all the things I don’t trust in the world two of them at the top of the list are statistics and Planned Parenthood.

I like the new Brady Bunch format for these T4G video shoots.

Also, the new approach to the panels should be great.

Panels: The New T4G Format from Together for the Gospel (T4G) on Vimeo.

Richard Swenson:

The best thing to remember about time-saving technologies is that they don’t. Instead, they consume, compress, and devour time. All the countries with the most time-saving technologies are the most stressed-out countries–an assertion that is easy to prove.

One Christian executive reports that he receives 1800 e-mails each day, while a Pentagon leader told me he had to do sixteen hours of e-mails every Saturday from home.

While standing at the hospital bed of a dying man, a pastor interrupted his prayer to answer his cell phone.

A youth pastor reported that he loved his job and tolerated long hours well–until he got home and routinely saw the answering machine blinking 9 messages. The escalating use of accessible technologies MUST be controlled, for the sake of your spirit and your sanity. (Margin, 124).

I know, easier said than done. But just reading about a pastor answering his cell phone at the death bed is enough to scare me straight. We need it.