I thank God every day for the opportunity to write these posts. I'm nothing but a messenger....a postman if you will....delivering messages from....men from the past....and men today who preach like men from the past....a term that I use all the time. I literally pray for the person behind every visit to these posts.
After Martin Luther and John Calvin and others had done their work in the 16th century Reformation....the generation of pastors came....known as the Puritans....a perjorative description that God turned into a blessing of monumental proportions for the church.
There were so many of them whose works remain with us today....and God had gifted them in varying ways....all of them in that they exalted the glory of God....but they were for the most part pastors.
There has always been....and will always be.....a remnant in the church....of teachers....and martyrs....and pastors. Baptist Charles Haddon Spurgeon....and a contemporary of his....Anglican J. C. Ryle....held the church together in England during the latter half of the 1900s. Martyn Lloyd-Jones picked up their banner a few decades later. Billy Graham went into all the world....and beginning in the 1970s God sent men out primarily through the modern means of communication that we have...."What has God wrought?'.
These men have various gifts just as did the Puritans....R. C. Sproul had an area of extreme expertise.....as did John MacArthur.....and I could add dozens of names....most of which you would know.....and just as with those Puritans....he gave an extraordianry gift to some.....in declaring His glory....and the majesty of His countenance....and the awesome and wonderful fear of the Lord through His blinding holiness. Ryle was used here....as was Sproul.....as was the pentecostal David Wilkerson....but there is one today who preaches with every bit the power of the most saintly Puritan....and that is John Piper.
Piper is like a Jeremiah....not in the warnings he gives as to God's judgments.....but in that what he says can tend to anger those who do not want to learn or be challenged or grow in any way. He is as the Psalmist in his pleading...."As the deer pants for flowing streams, so pants my soul for you, O God"....a phrase that should daily be on our lips....but have we ever even experienced what it means?
I'm posting on this today because of Piper's Sermon of the Day....a message that you will either take joy in hearing what you know to be true.....or be challenged to search for that which your conscience convicts.
You can listen to this sermon in one of two ways.....either go to desiringgod.org....and navigate your way to the Sermons of the Day....or Google....John Piper....All Things For Good, Part One.
Afterthought: I have for years....pleaded with Christians to listen to these men from the past....and men who preach like men from the past....and begged love ones....for they have to have some outside input. Our pulpits are not going to give us this.....as even the best of them are but the best of a very weak age for preaching. I have implored pastors to regularly listen to these men....so as to glean what the glory of God is all about....but their eyes appear blank....as if they think that they already know all of this....and they are surely not going to listen to someone like me....for I am not one of their peers....as if to say....who am I to enter their realm of the educated and ordained. In a way they are right....but they have forgotten that God often chooses the most unlikely....to lay bare the pride of the shepherd who no longer....if ever....feeds the sheep....for he himself has no food to give.
