Listen or read the following transcript as D. A. Carson speaks on the topic of Preaching and Teaching from the Epistles in this address from The Gospel Coalition Sermon Library
I shall not focus on the now-lengthy discussions about the nature and forms of first-century letters except where they bear directly on the preacher’s task (there’s already now a vast literature on the subject), and I shall not spend much time now on internal structures and genres, the thanksgivings, the praescriptio, and so on, except where they have some bearing on the preacher’s task.
If you want to know all about thanksgivings, read Peter O’Brien’s dissertation in the Supplements to Novum Testamentum series. In other words, in all of these there is a definitive book somewhere out there, plus a vast secondary literature that isn’t worth nearly as much. Most of these things you either have or should read up on, at least a little bit, as part of your theological training.
I would like to think that any decent theological education will expose you to some of these matters, but they can be vastly overdone, and some of the things that are put out as brilliant scholarship, in fact, are just plain wrong headed. H.D. Betz’s commentary on Galatians, for example, which depends entirely for its interpretation on parallels in the ancient literature. Though it is a model of erudition and wonderful learning from the primary sources, it’s just plain wrong.
There’s a recent dissertation by Philip Kern. I mention him in particular simply because he’s now in Australia. He’s an American by birth. He went to Trinity, did his PhD at Sheffield, and he’s now teaching at Emmaus Bible College in Sydney. His dissertation on this point is stellar. It’s in the press. It will come out in due course.
It is a form of what Samuel Sandmel, a learned Jewish scholar at University of Chicago, used to call parallelomania. That is, you don’t listen to text. You find all of the parallels, and then you let all of the parallels dictate as to what’s in the text. But let the text speak in the first instance. Now all of that is preliminary. In this brief time allotment, I would like to focus on the following points.
Most of the New Testament letters (to some extent, I suppose, all of them) clearly are occasional. That’s the language that is regularly used in the literature. They are occasional letters. That doesn’t mean they occur infrequently. It means they have been written with specific occasions in mind. In other words, to use the terminology that is now used, they are not tractate letters; they are occasional letters.
In the ancient world, people sometimes published what we would call letters to the editor, or even books cast in the form of letters to speak to a wider audience about something or other, a tract for the times but cast as a letter. Nowadays, those things are called, by those who are interested in forms, tractate letters.
The closest thing to a tractate letter in the Pauline corpus is Romans. On the other hand, by the time you get to chapters 15–16, it’s hard to believe it’s merely a tractate letter. You know, “Greet so-and-so. Then I want to tell you about my travels, and please arrange a little bit of money and hospitality on my way to Spain,” which isn’t exactly what you put in a tractate letter.
Hebrews is close as well. There’s no praescriptio at the beginning, no introduction at the beginning, but at the end, again, there are some private references that show that although clearly the letter is general in the sense that it’s to cover quite a lot of people in quite a lot of areas, yet, in the first instance, it’s addressed to a specific situation and there are individuals the author has in mind when he’s writing.
So the New Testament letters are, in the first instance, occasional letters. Nor are they simply in the form of a letter as a kind of device for communication. A few years ago, John Woodbridge and I wrote a volume called Letters Along the Way. It’s really a series of about 43 or 44 letters that are ostensibly from a senior Christian to a junior Christian.
The senior Christian is, in the mythology of this book (it is really cast as a novel), a senior professor in systematic theology at Trinity, and he writes to a young man who has just lost his father and is not yet a Christian and tracks him over 15 years. The letters thus become a way in which the older man communicates with the younger man.
There’s a whole story. There’s love and marriage, and eventually the fellow goes off and gets some theological training. There are the things he reads and what’s going on in society and culture at the time, and he goes to study in Europe for a while, and what he finds there. He eventually ends up as a Presbyterian minister. (I had to give something to John Woodbridge.)
In any case, these are not real letters. Despite the fact that it says on the front in small print somewhere that it’s a novel, we had letters addressed to Professor Woodson at Trinity. The reason is that this artificial construction made up of Woodbridge and Carson (I mean, it could have been “Carbridge,” but it was “Woodson”) has so become engaged in people’s minds here and there that they want to address him and engage him and get some of his wisdom. It shows they haven’t read the end of the book, but that’s another matter. We bump him off at the end.
The point is the New Testament letters are not like that. They’re not just artificial forms. They’re addressed to real people, concrete situations. They deal with real history and real addresses and real circumstances. They’re not tractate letters, and they’re not merely formal letters. They’re letter letters. They’re occasional letters. Yet even private occasional letters can have wider import. They can have this wider import along with private immediacy, even in the mind and intentionality of the sender.
To take an easy example today, a missionary comes home on what used to be called furlough. I think they now call it home assignment. They come home on furlough, and they spend two months in your church. You treat them royally. You encourage them. You let them have a lot of rest. You don’t give them too many meetings, and you play with their children. You’re doing all of the godly things you ought to do.
Especially they spend time with the pastor and his family, and then they go off to Pago Pago. They write back, “Dear Pastor” or “Dear Reverend Sir …” (Not likely in Australia. “Dear Charlie” or “Dear Peter.”) They write a nice note of thanksgiving and gratitude. “We had a wonderful time. Thank you for being so understanding. Thank you for babysitting our children. We sure loved that food. We’re back to rice,” or whatever.
The letter is so good and helpful and enjoyable that although the pastor has enjoyed it, he realizes that the whole church would enjoy it. They’ve all participated. So he puts it on the notice board, and the whole church reads it. Thus, although it’s a private occasional letter, it clearly has a broader audience. If the missionary has any smarts at all, he knows that’s what’s going to happen too.
So also Paul. He writes to the Colossians, and then he says at the end of the last chapter, “By the way, after you finish with this one, you make sure that the people in Laodicea read it, and you make sure that you read the one I sent to Laodicea.” After all, they couldn’t print out a duplicate copy from the printer.
So even though the Colossian letter is directly addressed to handle some specific problems, either because Paul perceives that the problems are more extended than just in Colossae or because he sees there’s a lot of good stuff in there that others need to read, he is aware in his own authority, in his own security, that although it’s a Colossian letter, he expects it to have a kind of occasion-transcending significance.
Nevertheless, because these letters are occasional and deal with real people, that means there is a kind of overhearing-ness to them. If you’re writing a novel, you make sure all of the pieces fit together, but when you simply open somebody’s letter … Supposing you don’t know the people, and the letter reads like this. You are automatically doing what is now called mirror reading.
In other words, a letter you pick up on a shelf somewhere might run like this. Supposing I went into Peter’s home and there was an open letter, and instead of having the good manners to look the other way, I picked it up and opened it, and it said, “Dear Peter, we had a wonderful time in Tenerife this week. As we’ve been basking in the sunlight, we remembered your counsel on our marriage.
It really was going through tough times, but you helped us to reorient to the centrality of the gospel, and we’re grateful for your advice. We picked up a tea towel that has some funny pictures from Tenerife on it. We can hardly wait to give it to you. Perhaps sometime you might even use it when you come to our place, because you certainly didn’t help us with dishes last time, did you? (Joke) Charlie sends his love.”
Now what do you know about these people besides the fact they don’t like to do dishes? There’s a whole overhearing-ness to that. You only have one side of the thing. You don’t have all that Peter said to them. You can’t construct the whole relationship. If you’re not careful, you might do some wrong inferences. But there are some certain things you can say about that. You need to be careful.
Now in letters, that’s the kind of thing you’re getting. You have to take the pains to reconstruct. In fact, you’re doing it automatically. But you mustn’t reconstruct too much. You mustn’t infer too much. You mustn’t stretch too far. It’s the letter that is the text. You’re not preaching the reconstruction. You’re not preaching what their marriage problem was. You’re preaching, rather, that the gospel does sort out that problem, whatever it was.
So in letters there is a kind of overhearing-ness, and a responsible mirror reading is part of what makes the whole letter come alive. An irresponsible mirror reading may domesticate the letter and, at the end of the day, the letter is not allowed to speak for itself. It’s a bit like overhearing one side of a telephone conversation.
This question of occasion, then, plus a certain amount of postmodern bias, is what is making many people relativize material in letters as if it were only for the first culture and not for ours. We need to think that one through very carefully. There’s a lecture I sometimes give (it takes about an hour and a half, so I’m not going to dump it on you now) on how to distinguish between those two things.
There is a sense in which all of the New Testament is culture bound. If it’s in a language it’s culture bound. Language is culture bound. And there is a sense in which none of the New Testament is culture bound. After all, it’s the Word of God. Then within those boundaries, there is also a sense in which some formulations you’d surely want to say are culture bound, and some are not.
For example, “Greet one another with a holy kiss.” Well, my Arab friends would be pleased. It’s not going to go down too well in England. That’s why J.B Phillips’ paraphrase has it, “Give a hearty handshake all around,” which is not what the apostle had in mind. Now tell me, is this thus despising the Word of God?
Let’s take another example. “You have seen how I washed your feet. So you also ought to wash one another’s feet.” That’s what the text says. Have you washed anybody else’s feet recently (besides your kids’)? “I don’t like washing my own feet. I certainly don’t want to wash yours.” So are you domesticating the Word of God?
“Wives, submit to your husbands for Christ’s sake.” “Now you’ve gone to meddling, Carson. You were all right on the kissing bit, but this is a bit much.” But you see what the issue is, don’t you? It’s a toughie. So let me take a few moments at least to isolate one or two principles that are involved. My hour-and-a-half lecture on this has about 25 of them. Let me just dump two or three on you. This won’t sort it all out, but it’ll sort a few of them out.
It has always been in the Christian church, wisely, a cardinal principle that we do not dump on the consciences of men and women what is found in Scripture only once. Not because it is less authoritative (it’s true, whether it’s there once or 150 times), but because there is more possibility of misunderstanding it if it’s there only once.
Thus, for example, in only one passage in Paul, in 1 Corinthians 15, do you find the expression “To be baptized for the dead.” Ask any friendly Mormon what baptism for the dead is, and he’ll tell you. On the other hand, if you read three very interesting articles in Catholic Biblical Quarterly for 1950 to 1951, the writer there traces out 42 different interpretations of that phrase in the history of the church.
Now if the expression had occurred 100 times always the same way, he wouldn’t be able to do that, because the many, many times would have begun to narrow down the possibilities. Now I think myself I can get that 100, with reasonable plausibility, down to two or three. Beyond that I’m not quite sure. Therefore, the church has always been reluctant, wisely, to mandate in its creeds or in its performance things that crop up only once in Scripture.
“Greet one another with a holy kiss.” How often does that come up in Scripture? Even with respect to the “Wash one another’s feet …” Although the Lord’s Supper crops up many times, except in some denominations in Eastern Bloc countries and the like, the church has by and large not taken that on as another sacrament or the like, precisely because it shows up in only one passage.
So most Christians (wisely, in my view) have understood that to be exemplary and, in the context of Johannine theology, also a colorful picture of what Christ is doing by washing us in his own death (that’s part of Johannine theology), but not as a sacrament that is to be repeated in the church. It seems to me that that is wise. That is understanding the passage wisely. It’s a good principle.
Here’s another principle. Observe carefully whether you are dealing with something external, not itself tied to the very structure of Scripture, or, conversely, something that’s tied to the structure of Scripture. For example, when Paul says, “Greet one another with a holy kiss,” is he passionate about this form of kissing? Is that what’s tied to Scripture?
“It has to be a kiss. It can’t be a handshake. It can’t be a salaam. It can’t be a salute. It can’t be a bow. None of that. It has to be a kiss.” Is that what he’s concerned about? Is there a theology of kissing? Even to put it that way, you’ve answered your own questions, haven’t you? What there is in Paul is a theology of mutual acceptance, of loving one another, cherishing one another, accepting one another warmly, and greeting one another warmly. I would want to argue that in Paul’s own mind, he phrases it that way because that’s the way it works in his culture.
We are dealing with a God who has disclosed himself in real space/time history. We’re back to what I said the first day: the scandal of historical particularity. But the theology, what’s tied to the very structure of all of Paul’s thought, is not kissing. It’s how Christians respond to one another.
That means on this front, when you start talking about wives submitting to husbands, regardless of which side you come down on on that issue … I’m not trying to prejudge that issue. Regardless, you must ask yourself these questions. “Does it come up often in Scripture, and is it tied to the structure of biblical thought? Or is it a once-off or a twice-off and it’s not tied to anything?” Regardless of which side you come down, you must ask yourself those questions. The same is true for many, many other issues.
What I am saying, therefore, is the fact that material in the Epistles is occasional must not be permitted, because of our postmodern bias, to be relativized endlessly so that there is nothing we cannot wipe out from necessity simply because our culture does things differently. There are principles involved in how you incorporate this sort of material into Christian thinking and understanding and the like.
Secondly, much of letter material is discourse; that is, it is discursive. That means that discourse analysis, sometimes called text linguistics, can be a useful tool to unpacking it, provided you don’t get swamped in all the new jargon. What this basically means, when you get rid of all the jargon, is that you’re interested in things like the flow of an argument, priorities, recurrent words and themes, the weight something is given.
Thus, in the sermon I just preached, is this love for which we’re praying merely bound up with love between Jew and Gentile? Now clearly, if we receive the love of God, it is going to affect how Jew and Gentile get on. So undoubtedly, Paul in that concretized situation understands that if those Christians, together with all the saints, Jews and Gentiles, know more of the love of God in the Ephesian situation, undoubtedly they will improve the Jew/Gentile relationships.
But in the context of the flow and the theology of the passage (Ephesians 3:14–21), is Paul saying no more than, “I pray that you’ll get on, or love each other,” or does the text actually provide a foundation, which may have its application in chapter 2 but a foundation which is universal in the church everywhere? I would argue strongly for the latter. For here, in discourse material, if anywhere, close grammatical exegesis is essential.
Now I didn’t tell you when I went through that sermon, but the breakdown I gave you in terms of two petitions is disputed by a fair number of commentators. It happens to follow the NIV, but I followed the NIV not because I was using the NIV, but because I had worked it through in Greek, and I think the NIV is right. But if you read some translations, they break it down into three or even four petitions. It depends on how you understand the syntax there.
Now when I come to preaching that, I do not spend any time in the sermon saying, “Now there are preachers here who think there are three petitions, but because of the peculiar arrangement of hina clauses and this instance …” On the other hand, I have to have done enough homework that I’ve made a decision, and if there are Ridley College or BCV College students in the congregation who are expert in Greek and think I may have gotten it wrong, I have to be able to answer them at the door.
That doesn’t mean everybody is going be expert in Greek, but you ought to get enough that you can at least read the best commentaries, make sense, understand what the arguments are, and make at least plausible judgment. Anyone who’s in the ministry ought to be able to do that in the Western world.
So here, although there is a place for observing the large structures and being concerned with what’s now called text linguistics, discourse analysis, here, if anywhere, arguments are so tight, decisions are so often bound up with syntax and grammar and words, that here, above all, you really are going to use the primary languages.
You see, when you have a lot more narrative, although a whole argument can occasionally turn on the particular choice of a word or something like that, you have broad themes going, and you can back off and see the dramatization, the characterization, and the plot in larger terms. Although learning the original language is good and useful and helps, it’s not quite as essential. You get into tight discourse, and it is extraordinarily important that you work, if at all possible, with the original languages.
May I venture an aside there? When I was in pastoral ministry, as the church began to grow and we were understaffed, I had five preparations a week for one reason or another. A very stupid way to live, but it’s the way I did. Occasionally the weeks would get really busy because of fledgling works and growing Bible studies, and I was trying to train some people into things.
I remember one dreadful week when I had 13 fresh preparations in a week. During that time I was single. I was putting in 80- to 90-hour weeks, but I made a decision. Within the first three months of full-time ministry, I made a decision that I thank God for to this day. Nobody told me to do it at seminary. It’s something I fell into, but it was a good choice.
I resolved that I would block out major time for one message each week and that all of the other preparation times would be squeezed into equal divides of what I had left. So if I had five preparations, let us say, and supposing I was going to reserve 40 hours that week, I would reserve 20 or 24 of them for one message, and all the rest would get squeezed into the others.
Now why? The reason was that for that message, I read the commentaries. I looked up the Greek or Hebrew, as the case might be. I did all the detail work, and I wrote most of the message out. I was very fussy, very particular. It didn’t mean necessarily that that sermon was better than other sermons. What it meant was I was keeping my tools sharp.
In addition, I reserved 20 minutes a day for reading the Greek New Testament. By the end of two years, I had not only read through the whole Greek New Testament more than once, but I looked up every single word that was used 10 times or less in a concordance. I had a wide-margin New Testament, and the first time it occurred anywhere in the New Testament, I put in all of the references, and then all of the rest of the times it occurred, I put a mark back to the first reference.
Now this is extremely inefficient. The concordance already has it. My computer has it. But I have a feel for New Testament use that you cannot get any other way. Twenty minutes a day. That’s all it took. Now I know people don’t all have the same gifts, and you’re called to different ministries, and all the rest. I understand. I don’t want to fit everybody into a box. God has raised up some very powerful preachers who will never have a scrap of Greek in their lives. I know all of that too.
But for most of us, we could do a little more with the primary tools if we just budgeted a little time. I learned to budget time by 20 minutes a day of reading Greek and in my sermon preparation time allotting major time to one preparation, and then all the rest got squeezed. The result was after some years in the ministry, my tools were still all sharp.
I have files and files of pages of detailed exegetical notes on Genesis and parts of Ezekiel. I had hundreds of pages of notes on Matthew before another 10 years went by and I was asked to write a commentary on the book. I had 300 to 500 pages on notes on Galatians, and so on, that was part of sermon preparation, just exegetical work, donkey work, long before I started preparing sermons.
Again, I’m not trying to put everybody into a mold. I am saying that wherever you are in the spectrum of intellectual ability and training and all the rest, with a little discipline you can do more. By a little bit of prioritizing your time, choosing along these lines, you can do more about keeping your tools sharp and having them available for the next thing you tackle.
Now believe me, I do not want to threaten you if you’ve never had any Greek. I’m not saying you cannot preach if you can’t sight-read Thucydides, but I am saying if you take the Word of God seriously, there are a few choices of priorities you can make that may help you on the long haul to keep your tools sharp.
Thirdly, keep the author’s movements and circumstances clear, but don’t preach such background; merely use it to flesh out the historical vitality and reality in the text. Keep the author’s movements and circumstances clear in your own mind. That might include the background of cities, for example, and which missionary journey Paul is on, where he’s heading next, where he has come from, where he’s going, at what point he is in his ministry at this juncture, and where he’s writing from.
But don’t preach such material. Just feed it into the text as part of the vitality of the historical reality. When I teach the Pauline Epistles at seminary, I require that my students learn perfectly, so they can draw them on a map, all of the missionary journeys in Acts, and I always ask nasty geographical map questions on final exams. I know they’re picky. Students come back to me and say, “How is this going to help us be more godly? You’re just interested in facts. No real concern for spirituality.”
Depending on my mood, I sometimes simply say to them, “That may be, but you still have to learn it to get out of this course, so go and learn it.” Somewhere along the line I’ll try and explain why. The why is bound up with the fact that Paul is a real person. This is real history. When Paul writes to X, he’s writing from Y. That affects the way he thinks and looks at things. Things feed into things.
It’s very interesting that when Paul writes 2 Corinthians, chapter 11, and speaks of three shipwrecks, he still hasn’t had the one in Acts 27. That’s number four. What on earth has Paul been doing with his life? He writes 2 Corinthians mid-50s, not more than six and a half years or so after the first canonical epistle that comes from his pen. From what we know of his movements, there’s no way he could have suffered all of the things in that seven-year span that he says he suffered. No way.
So when did he suffer them? I’ll tell you when he suffered them. He suffered them between his Damascus Road experience and when he started writing letters. What was he doing with all his time? He was getting shipwrecked, beaten up, five times flogged, three times beaten by rods. In other words, by the time he was asked by Barnabas to go and help him in Antioch, he had a track record of suffering and church planting and abuse that made him not only a good Bible teacher because of his pharisaic training, but mature, wise, a sufferer, knowing how to take it.
Now you’re not going to find that out by simply reading the Bible, because there’s no place that says, “2 Corinthians 11:22 footnote: This took place before Paul started writing his first epistle, which I think is Galatians and not 1 Thessalonians.” There’s nothing that says that. On the other hand, it’s plain as a pikestaff if you simply put the bits and pieces together that are there. It does shape how you interpret a whole lot of other events. You may misunderstand just why Barnabas would be interested in calling Paul if you don’t see some of these movements.
So also when Paul writes to the Philippians, he’s writing from prison. There are three major theories about which prison he’s writing from. Does it make any difference to the text? Not huge differences. Here and there it makes a difference. It makes a difference with what you do with the Praetorian Guard. It makes a difference with how long it has been since Paul founded the church, what the references mean to Caesar’s household, and a couple of other things. It makes a number of little differences.
Unless you know something of the background of Corinth, for example, you’re going to misunderstand some of the circumstances of 2 Corinthians, chapters 10–12, the references to boasting and refusing money in payment for preaching and teaching and that sort of thing. It’s bound up with sophist experience in Corinth and other Greek cities in the Peloponnesus.
Likewise, unless you know something of proto-Gnosticism, you’re going to have a whale of a time putting together 1 John 1 with 1 John 3. On the one hand, “If anyone says that he doesn’t sin, he’s a liar, and he’s calling God a liar, and the truth isn’t in him.” On the other hand, “If anyone is born of God, he cannot sin.” What are you going to do with those two passages? I think the resolution is fairly simple against a background of poor proto-Gnosticism. It’s certainly not simple against any other background that I know about.
In other words, precisely in the light of my first two points, it becomes important to understand the author’s movements and circumstances, the background and the culture in the city, but you don’t preach those things. They get filtered in for the fleshing out of preaching the text, but it’s the text you preach.
Fourthly, because so much of popular contemporary evangelical religious vocabulary is, in fact, Pauline vocabulary, it is more important to try here than anywhere else to be both accurate and fresh. You see, we use Pauline words all the time. Sanctification is not a big word outside of Paul. What does sanctification mean?
Well, because of our history since the Reformation, we are inclined to think that sanctification is primarily what follows justification. That is to say, first you’re justified. That’s a once-for-all act. Then sanctification is the process of growth and holiness after that. That’s the way it’s used in most standard systematic theologies. Whether you’re Arminian or Calvinist or Dispensational, that’s the way it works. That’s the way standard Protestant systematics work.
Now usually there’s a little footnote in such works to the effect that Paul also sometimes uses the sanctification word group to refer to what is sometimes called positional sanctification or definitional sanctification. That is, you are immediately sanctified. You’ve been made holy by Christ’s cross work. You have been brought into the orb of God’s holiness, and not to talk about growth in holiness.
Then you back off and start reading all of the Pauline material very carefully all over again, and you discover that the overwhelming majority of instances are definitional and positional, not growth images. There was recently a book written on that subject by David Peterson, Possessed by God. It’s worth reading. Now it’s not that there’s no place in our theology, therefore, for growth, for maturation. It’s that by and large it’s not tied to the sanctification word group.
I don’t mind if you use sanctification not in the Pauline sense, in the systematic sense, so long as you don’t think you have the right, then, to read our systematics definition back into Paul and misinterpret Paul. Thus, precisely because so much of our popular vocabulary is, in fact, Pauline vocabulary, it is extraordinarily important to work hard at accuracy, because we sometimes start using words differently from the way Paul does.
What on earth does fellowship mean? I sometimes say that having a cup of tea with a pagan is friendship; having a cup of tea with a Christian is fellowship. That’s not the way it works in Paul. It’s an economic term in the first place. It’s more like partnership. Holy Spirit, grace, cross, hope … What’s hope in Paul’s terms? The same background is also that which mandates that we not only be accurate, but that we strive to be fresh. Because so many people have picked up Paul’s vocabulary, you have to work harder at being fresh in your preaching.
Fifthly, keep your eyes on the large biblical themes: the structure of eschatology, expectation of Christ at the end, the dawning now. Christ has already transferred us out of the kingdom of darkness and into the kingdom of the Son he loves (Colossians 1:13). The expectation of Christ’s coming (1 Thessalonians 4). Again and again and again, these massive themes. Resurrection body in 1 Corinthians 15, and what the gospel truly is, what the church is, Holy Spirit, grace. Look for these massive themes, and see how they control things in Paul.
That’s one of the great strengths in John Stott’s preaching. Somebody said of Alexander MacLaren in the last century that he had a golden hammer, and he took his golden hammer, and every time he came to a text, he tapped it with his golden hammer, and the text divided into the obvious divisions that no one could possibly improve upon. Stott has a golden hammer. After you’ve heard Stott preach on a text, it’s very hard to choose any other division than Stott’s division.
With all that, Stott not only has this golden Alexander MacLaren hammer, but he has an ability to tie what is going on in that particular passage to the massive themes in Paul’s structure. That’s a great ability. That’s a great vision. Now we’ve talked about that in other corpora. It’s very important to do it likewise now in Paul. Especially is this true with respect to Christology. I have a lot I would like to say about that, and I’m going to drop it all.
Lastly, stress the passion of the epistolary authors to encourage what Paul calls a pattern of life. In other words, the epistolary authors really aren’t concerned only with abstract doctrine. They’re very concerned for how you live, and they’re concerned for how you live not only by teaching ethics, but by teaching people who teach people.
Thus, Timothy will remind you of “my way of life in Christ.” Isn’t that a wonderful term? We’ve been working at Saint Jude’s in the evening through Philippians, and the last part of Philippians 2 and all of Philippians 3 is really bound up with this whole question of imitation. As Paul says in 1 Corinthians 11, “Be imitators of me, even as I also am of Christ.”
So likewise, when Paul spends time praising Timothy and Epaphroditus and telling his readers about what his pant is, what he’s after (“I long to know him,” and so on), he’s not just boasting and passing out laurels. He comes to the whole point. Philippians 3:17: “Join with these others, then, in following my example, brothers, and take note of those who live according to the pattern we gave you.”
That means part of our Christian discipleship in the church is not just getting them to cite a creed, no matter how orthodox, or even learn ethics, but to learn how to live, how to bring up a child, how to get on with an employer, how to hold your tongue, how to pray, how to have family devotions, how to drive a car to the glory of God, how to use your money, how to have a sense of humor that doesn’t put people down, and on and on.
Isn’t that part of the pattern of life, to the glory of God? Once you start looking for it in the Epistles, brothers and sisters in Christ, it is everywhere. So preach the whole counsel of God. Tell people how to live.
