The Gospel Coalition

Alistair Begg, senior pastor of Parkside Church near Cleveland, plans to deliver a plenary address from Ruth at The Gospel Coalition's national conference in Chicago on the evening of Tuesday, April 12. Keeping with the conference theme, "They Testify About Me: Preaching Jesus and the Gospel from the Old Testament," Begg message is titled "From a Foreigner to King Jesus."

Begg's sermons can be downloaded online or heard regularly on the radio program Truth for Life. I sat down with Begg to learn from his experience preaching from more than 30 years of pastoral ministry. Here is a summary of our exchange.

How did you realize the importance of preaching the whole counsel of God in your ministry?

As a student, John Bright’s book The Kingdom of God was one of the primary resources that helped me to draw lines and make connections between various parts of Scripture. While having a different doctrine of Scripture than Bright, it was his book on the kingdom that really began to instill in me the importance of understanding the whole counsel of God. (Read a detailed review of this book by John Piper).

Then when I was an assistant at Charlotte Chapel, Bruce Milne came and did a series of messages on Jesus as prophet, priest, and king. He guided us through those various roles in the Old Testament and then showed how Jesus “out-prophets” all the prophets and “out-kings” all the kings.

Next, I would say Alec Motyer’s book Look to the Rock also helped to shape my understanding of preaching from all of Scripture.

Now, it’s Graeme Goldsworthy’s Gospel-Centered Hermeneutics. I am currently working through his footnotes and trying to get my hands on the books he interacts with and references. Vaughan Roberts's book, God’s Big Picture, is a distillation of Goldsworthy’s book that I highly recommend to others.

Why do you think some preachers struggle with preaching from the Old Testament?

First, I would say there has been an absence of good role models. Growing up, I primarily heard sermons from the Old Testament that were character studies that served as a platform for moralism. These kinds of sermon, for example, looked at Joshua and said, “You see, Joshua wasn’t afraid, so we shouldn’t be either"—without any connections made to the gospel. Moralism always shines the spotlight on human action, rather than on God’s grace.

Second, it’s hard work, and some of us shy away from it. Whether we lack a comprehensive framework to avoid getting lost in the trees, or we lack adequate study time due to demands in other areas of the church—if we are honest, it’s hard work that is too often neglected.

What advice would you give to young pastors about preaching from all of Scripture?

First of all, do it. Recognize that while all of Scripture is inspired, it’s not all equally inspiring. And go in at the shallow end. Before you preach a 30-part series in the book of Isaiah, test the waters with a psalm, a smaller book like Ruth or Jonah, or the life of Joseph (avoiding the trap of moralism). And commit to the hard work it will require. In addition to the books and names mentioned already, read Dale Ralph Davis’s various works on the Old Testament. The danger there is that you’ll be tempted to copy him and not interact with him. But with every book or person, you must be willing to learn from others while still being the unique person whom God has fashioned for your particular time and place.

Going along with that last point, what advice do you have for young pastors about also connecting Christ to contemporary culture? You comfortably weave quotes of Paul Simon, John Lennon, Christopher Hitchens, and Shakespeare into your sermons, connecting to your particular time and place.

It has to be something you do naturally. In other words, I don’t prepare sermons and then listen to music or read books to find illustrations. I listen to music because I appreciate music. I read Shakespeare because I appreciate quality literature. These are things I do naturally out of an appreciation for art and curiosity with the world.

There is a whole approach to homiletics that is leading people into the ditch because it gets people to think in such compartmentalized categories in relation to explanation, illustration, and application—that they buy books on sermon illustrations and research stories as hooks—spending more time on these things than looking closely at their Bibles or the world around them.

I am unlikely to draw upon resources from the world of engineering or the sciences, because my natural inclination is to the arts. I’ve just finished reading two books: Christopher Hitchens’s autobiography, Hitch 22, and All Things Shining by Dreyfus and Kelly. These flow out of my own curiosities that I would not expect anyone else to share in total or try to copy.

I would simply encourage other pastors to be curious and read widely about things of interest to them and develop a good personal filing system to keep track of the things you are learning. When done well, you’ll never look at a book of sermon illustrations again. To copy someone else’s contextualization is the surest way to fail at contextualization.

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For further reading by Begg on preaching, check out Preaching for God’s Glory and On Being A Pastor. For another opportunity to learn from Begg and others in person, considering attending Basics 2011, Parkside's annual pastors conference in May. The Gospel Coalition's new site on Preaching Christ in the Old Testament hosts many resources to help you teach and preach the whole counsel of God.

Petar Nenadov is an elder and serves on the staff of Lakeside Christian Church in Akron, Ohio.