Tom Steller: I want to welcome you back to this final session of our pastor’s conference. The ground rules are that we want you to use the mics to ask the question. There’s one on either side and then Greg Berger in the center aisle has a roving mic. So feel free just to wave your hand or stand up and he’ll find you. Secondly, we just encourage you to direct your question to the person you want to answer, or if it’s a general question, that’s fine as well. A lot of people have been asking for the tune to “Jesus, Lover of My Soul” that we’ve been singing and Greg has made about 40 copies of this. So whoever would like a tune and the lyrics to “Jesus, Lover of My Soul” that we’ve been singing you can have one.

Iain Murray: I was asked a question concerning modern biography and the questioner said to me that most Christian biographies at the moment seem to be about great Christian athletes or Christian beauty queens, but we don’t seem to have biographies of outstanding missionaries or outstanding preachers today. What’s happened? The man concerned had a real interest in perhaps writing a biography and it was something he could do. How could you begin? Well, I think it is a good question. It often astonishes me that men who’ve had great influence in the United States in this century have almost disappeared because there’s no real biography of them. You think of people like Clarence Macartney at Pittsburgh, who had tremendous influence. His name perhaps is hardly known by the modern generation. He has no biography. Harold J. Ockenga had a great influence, but he really has no biography, just a short thing that was done when he was alive.

So it does seem to be a characteristic that we are lacking and I’m sure there are many reasons and I mustn’t go into them. But I just say this on the practical side, it seems to me that if some of you younger men have an interest in writing biography and you know older men who you admire and believe are having a real influence, I’m all in favor of you keeping records and asking questions and jotting it down because you don’t know, in 10 or 20 years time that your notes may be invaluable for a really important book. I really believe that. I’m sure that when biographies are written, they need to depend on information that occurred as events occurred. Memories are very, very fallible. I’ve proved many times that people who remember something if you compare their memory with something actually written at the time can be an extraordinary difference.

So I would say that. Keep notes of things and men who you really believe God is using, think about that. And well, the writing is a strange thing, isn’t it? If a man’s got writing in him, I think it’s going to come out. The questioner then asked, “Who are some of the names that one could take up today?” I don’t know if I can answer that question. I tend to think it’s much better that men have gone to glory before their biographies appear. There may be some exceptions, but generally I think it’s better. But I couldn’t really comment on the United States scene. I think I’ve said what I wanted to say.

Steller: Maybe Kent, you could take your question. Feel free to line up at the mics and we only have about two or three questions on paper, so we’ll take your questions as well.

Kent Hughes: My question says, “How can we convince our people that study is of great importance to the life of preaching in the life of the church?” In other words, we need time, time, time, time in the study. That’s not an easy thing to do. But I would say first of all, you’ve got to value it yourself and it sounds like this individual does. What I’ve noticed in churches today is they’ll say they want biblical exposition but they don’t know what biblical exposition is. They’ll tell you they wanted to give you time in the study, but they really don’t mean that. I also have made a couple of other observations and I hate to make this distinction, but it’s the quickest way shorthand. My white collar people in the congregation, my business people, the people that are high-powered, understand about the study.

It’s the people that are in other areas of life that do not understand about a study. New Christians don’t understand the study. And so you simply have to say, “These are my study hours.” You have to have your leadership understand that and support you. And I might also say, if you have a secretary or the church secretary, you have to have a person that believes in that. I’ve been in situations in the past where I would have a woman working for me who didn’t think study was important and wasn’t necessarily loyal. So you’ve got to have that and it takes time to build it up. But I’d say if you’re going into a new situation, you need to spell it out. You need to say, “Do you understand what it means?” And you need to say, “Do you understand what it means?” again because you will not be able to give them. The way I look at it is, if you’ve got 100 people in your congregation, you have a 100 hours of time sitting in front of you on Sunday morning. Well then it ought to be worth then 20 hours of your time to give their 100 hours something that’s worthwhile.

Murray: May I ask Kent a question? Is it impossible for the average American pastor to do what John Piper has done and study at home? Is that quite impossible?

Hughes: No, I don’t think it’s impossible. In fact, I know of a number of pastors that have studies in their home. I don’t at this point, although it seems to get more that way. As tough as I am about it, when I’m in the office, there’s always a staff member that has to see me about something and interrupt my flow of thought. So I think that’d be a great thing. I know W. A. Criswell had a study at home, and I know some local pastors that have had their study in the home and it seems to work out great. Maybe John could say something about that.

Piper: That’s the way I’ve always done it after about six months trying it the other way here. I thought I would come here in 1980 and as a young pastor who’d never been a pastor anywhere else, it would be presumptuous to spend most of my time at home. Well, that lasted about six months and I said, “This will never ever work. I could never ever prepare sermons in this building.” So I never have. And when I taught at Bethel, I always studied at home and when I’ve been here, my computer and my books are at home.

I’m in my office here probably six hours a week, maybe, to meet with people. The other thing I would add is, the proof is in the pudding on Sunday morning. If you feed the people and they like it, they don’t care what you do during the week, I don’t think. They don’t know what you do during the week anyway. All they know is what they get on Sunday morning and evening. And if it’s good and people are coming and they’re growing and people are being converted, nobody’s ever asked me what I do in 16 years.

I also have a question here: “Could you please comment on how you view the present men’s movement called ‘Promise Keepers?’ They have received criticism. Is the movement making the church stronger? Are there any dangers on the horizon regarding this movement?” I’m aware. I’ve listened to one critical tape and I’ve read one article that’s been circulated very critical of the Promise Keepers. I’m not at all on the bandwagon to criticize Promise Keepers. I am supportive of it and encourage our men to go. The reason is not that I think it is doctrinally exhaustive. It’s generic, it’s really generic evangelicalism, very broad. But I see no heretical signs in it. The criticisms are some of the books they endorse about masculinity, which are books written from a very therapeutic psychoanalytic perspective, which don’t scratch me where I itch and I don’t care for them.

But when you start boycotting a movement because of a book or two that they endorse, you’re going to become so isolated that you will miss out on many good things. So my approach is to say, bless it, as long as it’s got the core values right. And as I see these seven promises that they call people to make, and as I listen to the Lordship of Christ being exalted, and as I hear the local church being lifted up and pastors being blessed, I consider myself a great beneficiary of this movement. And until I see it taking any worse turns than it has, I say go for it.

Questioner: I’d like to take us back to Monday night to something you said, Reverend Murray. Specifically when we talked about priorities of reading, you had two rules for saving time and you talked about books which claim to have a key to the Bible from outside Scripture, and you said they are generally a waste of time. As I thought about that, my mind immediately went to Bible atlases and books that would give me the context of what went on. You did mention a bit about archeology, but I think back to the Old Testament and my woeful deficiency in understanding where things took place. Could you comment on that?

Murray: The definition of the word “key” is the difference between us. I really meant key. A key opens something we couldn’t open without a key, but you are talking about information and the information from all sorts of places that is very useful and helpful to us. So I’m glad you asked that. It’s a misunderstanding. I really meant books that say, “You can’t understand unless you have this key.” They mean a key to some truth that is in Scripture and it’s going to unlock the truth. So that’s a different area to atlases and diction reasons.

Questioner: My question goes back to the talk you did on the preacher and wisdom, and it’s a practical question of one of priority. Early in your talk you said that zeal was the way that all the graces, the characters of the Christian life were to be expressed. So the way you express love is through zeal. Later on you said that love begets zeal, and that lodged in my mind because then I said, “Well, do I pray, ‘Lord give me zeal so that I can be a loving person in the right way so that zeal is the stream and love is one of the boats in the stream,’ or do I pray, ‘Lord, make me a loving person so I can be more zealous, so that love is the spring of the flow of zeal.’ The practical matter is you’re probably going to say both/and. Is there a priority and how do we pursue those things in those two analogies?

Murray: My first point was that zeal isn’t one particular fruit of the Spirit, but it’s the tone, the temperature of our whole spiritual life so that it affects every other fruit. If zeal is operative, then our love will be more fervent, our prayer will be more urgent and so on. But when it comes to the source, then I was emphatic that love has the priority. It’s through the shedding abroad of love in our hearts that zeal is increased. That’s the point I was wanting to make and I really do believe that.

Questioner: This summer, Billy Graham will be doing a crusade here at the Metrodome and throughout Minnesota and Wisconsin. People are very excited and our churches are planning to come, planning to participate in training seminars. Personally, I have great admiration for Billy Graham as a man and awe how God has used his ministry. But I guess there are a number of theological differences and especially the whole issue of decisionism, which is so central to his crusades. I realize this is a very hard question, but I guess I would appreciate honest answers as far as just personally how you feel about that particular ministry in general. Perhaps Reverend Murray you could speak from a historical perspective and Kent as a pastor, and John, you can tell us what Martin Luther would’ve said. And Rick, I guess I really would appreciate how you feel it’s good for pastors to encourage churches to participate, to what degree?

Murray: Well, we certainly should be thankful wherever Christ is preached. So anyone who was set up as an opponent of Billy Graham, I think we should be sorry for that. That certainly shouldn’t be our attitude. Billy Graham tried repeatedly to get Dr. Lloyd-Jones to give support to his crusades in Britain. Dr. Lloyd-Jones reply was that he’d be very glad to do it on only two conditions. One was that Billy would drop the universal seeking of support from all churches and the second that he would drop calling people to the front for a decision.

Well, Billy couldn’t do either of those things. Let me try and explain why I think both those things weren’t political things but really important things. When Billy Graham first came to Harringay, London in 1954, he had no support apart from evangelicals. Numbers came and people were converted. The liberal churches all wanted to join in. They were losing members, they wanted numbers. Now that became rather a turning point because up until that time, evangelicals had stood apart when it came to preaching and witnessing to Christ. They said, “This is the gospel in which we believe,” and they did not cooperate with liberals. The liberal said, “Please, can we come and join you?” Now Billy of course didn’t know the British situation, but the fact is that that became a watershed. From that point. People said, “Well, perhaps after all we have been too narrow.” These days the word evangelical has become blurred.

Now that’s all connected with what Dr. Piper was saying yesterday. The problem now is not a particular doctrine, but the whole ethos, the whole idea of truth that we’re sure of and is certain. That has been eroded. I’m sorry to say it’s connected with the view that after all our differences with liberals — people who don’t believe in substitution — perhaps they’re not so big after all, something has happened to change the atmosphere. I’m sure it was the last thing Billy Graham intended, but I’m afraid he’s contributed to it.

As far as the altar call is concerned, Dr. Lloyd’s Jones view was that it’s misleading, it’s ambiguous. Certainly let’s help people, certainly let’s be available for counseling. But if we say anything that gives the impression that some physical action is going to lead to conversion or hasten conversion, we’re going against Scripture. And if we then treat the people who’ve made that decision as converts, we’re going to start filling our churches with worldly people. I believe that is true. I believe it can’t be justified scripturally and historically it can be shown to have brought a great deal of worldliness into the church. So he was friendly with Billy Graham. On one occasion he took Billy to see a doctor in London. He was cordial, no hostility.

I’m sure he pleaded with Billy to see that these two issues are really important issues and that if they were dropped, nothing would be lost. It honors the Holy Spirit. We stand firm on scripture, souls will be saved if the gospel is truly and powerfully preached. We don’t need additions, we don’t need to make impressions, visual and so on. So briefly, that’s it. So your attitude to supporting a crusade, to me that’s a matter of individual conscience. I have good friends who would support a Billy Graham crusade. I’m thankful they’re my friends. I couldn’t do it myself, but I think this is an area where we should be very sensitive and I wouldn’t make it a matter of controversy. But I would stand up for those two points that I think Dr. Lloyd-Jones made. I think they are true and very important points.

Hughes: I will say a little something about that. I’m concerned about evangelicals today and I’ve got a book out there called, Are Evangelicals Born Again?. It asks the question and puts it strongly I think. So I’m ambivalent on this because I think I agree that there’s been a lot of that the truth has been lost. But being down in Sydney, I met Peter and Phillip Jensen. Phillip is one of the great pastors in Sydney, a preacher of the word of God, and Peter is the head of their theological college down there and talk about a Reformed bunch of Anglicans. This is an amazing group down in Sydney.

Both those men were saved when Billy Graham was there when Marcus Lone invited him in and they preached. The woman that was our landlord was saved at that time. It was just a whole harvest of people out of the church. In fact, the Anglican church was harvested down there and other churches during that time. The interesting thing about Graham is that it has largely been a harvesting of people within the church. It’s nominal Christians, but it hasn’t necessarily been the pagans out there. It’s been a harvesting of the churches. So if Graham came to the Chicago area, I think I would be supportive, but that’s within the context of a church that preaches the word of God is concerned about decisionistic Christianity. But I think I would probably generally be supportive more along the lines of Promise Keepers. But you’ve got to be eyes wide open on this if you do that.

Questioner: I have two questions. John, you mentioned the Toronto Blessing and you mentioned about Luther and then you said, “But I wouldn’t necessarily say that.” So we’d love some more follow up from you on your personal view of the Toronto Blessing and would love to hear from each of you men on that issue. And then the other is, Could you give us three of your top books for your personal development and three that have been taught in terms of your ministry?

Piper: My approach towards the third wave, even though now The Vineyard has disassociated itself from Toronto, has been what I have called all the way along a critical openness. That is, I don’t rule out in principle that God is in the signs and wonders movement or any other particular manifestation. There’s nothing biblical that I can see that would hinder God from using healing or prophetic utterances (properly understood), or tongues, or laughter, or falling down to manifest outwardly something’s happen inwardly. But having said that, once you say what Iain Murray said — which I agree with — what Edwards would say is that, these outward things prove nothing and are therefore in a very low level of significance as far as what the Holy Spirit is really about in the world, namely holiness and salvation. Once you say that, it seems like you pull the plug for a lot of people because you’re not manifesting the proper enthusiasm for what is viewed to be such a great blessing.

The reason I’m soft on this is because not only do I not see a biblical condemnation of it, but I assess movements doctrinally on the one hand, and then what is being produced as far as holiness goes on the other hand. I simply know of too many people whose lives have been profoundly helped for good by lying on the ground for 45 minutes in a laughter or peace. I never have. I went over to the Apache Plaza here when the Toronto Blessing came to town, willing to expose myself to everything under the sun just about, and I had about five high-powered guys around me praying like crazy.

I’m sure some of them wished that this guy would go down because if he went down then it would be all right. A whole bunch of my staff went down and some of you in this room were on the floor and there is a tribute right now, a sweet fellowship with the Lord that is continuing and an enrichment of your own ministry because of what God did spiritually at that moment. And I enjoyed that 25 minutes of prayer that they did over me and I felt great peace, but I didn’t get dizzy. I don’t know. And I really, really was not saying, “I’m not going down under any costs.” I frankly wanted to try it. What is this carpet time that they do?

So I am very excessively open, some would say. My son Abraham is 16 and he read me yesterday’s “Tribune” or the day before and I said, “Is this dealing with Toronto thing?” He’s reading me out of the newspaper. He said, “There’s not any religious to it at all.” It was a psychological study on laughter movements in history. It was nothing religious. They talked about this laughter movement in Indonesia or something that lasted for six months. It has nothing to do with religion whatsoever. These little girls started laughing and there were these laughing fits that lasted in this community for six months and it had no religious connection at all. So I just really find it hard to get excited about falling down or laughing. I get excited about the Lordship of Christ and taking risks for Jesus and bringing people to Christ and exalting the sovereignty of God.

So the other thing besides holiness in people’s lives — which I’ve seen come of this — is preaching and the exaltation of the word, and I find it not very high. I’ve heard stories, “Oh, the preaching was good,” but the thing that thrills people is the external manifestations. I’ve watched it happen. So the word does seem to drift more into the background and the effort it takes to produce a good message from the Book, the external word, is minimized.

So those would be my concerns. I’m open and yet critically open. So I don’t really make anybody happy. I got invited to Wales a few years ago to speak at the place where Martyn Lloyd Jones spoke often, and when they found out I had these kinds of attitudes, they withdrew the invitation. It’s been really painful to have those experiences happen. And on the other side, the people that prophesied over me over Apache said, “The Lord’s hand is upon me to do this and that.” I’m sure my lack of full bore engagement in the Pentecostal society is leaving them thinking I must be hardhearted or something. And so I just walk my own way and nobody knows quite whether they can trust me or not.

Murray: I do think the brethren in Wales were confused because this is more or less virtually Dr. Lloyd-Jones’s own position. I think they were really confused about it.

Piper: That’s somewhat comforting. Even the criticism I got from Iain when I spoke on Lloyd-Jones here that I had not been completely just to him was a grief to me because for the news to go out from this conference that Martyn Lloyd-Jones is anything other than almost a god, would make me very sad because I don’t have many heroes in the world, especially not many in this century. So for me to have my reputation go to ails and elsewhere that I am mainly critical of Martyn Lloyd-Jones was sad. The other half was books, right? So we’re going to go down the line here quickly with books. I would recommend Jonathan Edwards’s Freedom of the Will, Religious Affections, and The End for Which God Created the World.

Murray: Somebody asked me for 10 books, so I’ll give you 10 quickly. I can’t do it slowly. It’s on tape. Archibald Alexander, Religious Experience; J.C. Ryle, Holiness; John Calvin, Institutes; Jonathan Edwards’s works, the whole lot; Dr. Lloyd-Jones, Preaching & Preachers. Robert Murray M’Cheyne, Memoir and Remains; The Life of Archibald Alexander, published by Sprinkle by his son, J.W. Alexander; Cotton Mather, Great Works of Christ in America. John Owen, “Volume 6” of his Works.

Hughes: I think I mentioned some of them in substance the other day, and I would say Martyn Lloyd-Jones’ Sermon on the Mount. If you haven’t read that through, it would be a great thing to do. Talk about congealed theology compacted. I would include J.I. Packer’s Knowing God. And really as a young man, The Life of David Brainerd by Jonathan Edwards.

Rick Love: I guess I am very eclectic and thus I can’t just rattle off a number of books. Many of these books have had a profound impact on me. I would encourage some of you pastors to read Eternity in Their Hearts by Don Richardson, which is a missions perspective. Hopefully you can, like John, read things critically. Be Berean and still be impacted by it. So I think Eternity in Their Hearts is good. I enjoyed Master Plan of Evangelism by Coleman. And in terms of impact, Lord, Make My Life a Miracle by Ray Ortlund dealing with priorities of the Christian life was good.

I think we can work better at the theology of priorities. But in terms of articulating, it was very helpful to me in my early pilgrimage. By the way, I do want to comment on The Vineyard and the Toronto Blessing. Some of you might need to know that I’m really a Vineyard guy in disguise. I was sent out by The Vineyard to be a missionary and because I have a couple degrees from Westminster, I’m all things to all men. I just want to point out that there are some Vineyard people that have a high view of the Scripture and can minister accordingly. But I think John’s words are very apropos and that’s why I find myself in the fringe because they’re not really strong in this last part, joy for all peoples, and they’re not as strong as they need to be in this part but there is a lot of good fruit in the midst of it.

Questioner: My question would be for Kent regarding yesterday’s message on the study, and it’s just a practical question that would be your practice for planning, for your preaching schedule, and the criteria that you use for making those decisions.

Hughes: Well, I generally don’t preach through short sections of Scripture. The Sermon on the Mount would be a short section of Scripture for me, but largely my preaching has just been through books of the Bible because I want to get the argument of the author and I want to come back to that argument and be carried along with the argument. So it is really to pray, talk to my wife, and talk to my staff about what the next series ought to be. That’s generally what we do. I think since I’ve been at College Church, I preached through The Gospel of John about 60 sermons, about 40 sermons on Acts, about 35 sermons on Romans, and about 50 sermons on Hebrews. I’m in the midst of about 120 sermons on Luke right now.

I’ve preached the Sermon on the Mount, the Book of Genesis, about 20 sermons on Colossians, and about 20 sermons on James. That starts to sum it up. So I’ve reveled in taking the text and going at it and it’s just been a matter of what I think subjectively with some counsel is the next book I should undertake. What’s the great thing is I never expect the great surprises that I get in preaching a book. And the other thing is I preached on texts I would never preach on. I’d never choose to preach on some of them if I was just saying like Spurgeon maybe did to his wife, “Mother, I don’t know what I’m going to preach on tomorrow.” On Saturday night he would say that. Well, he’s a genius. Spurgeon was a genius. The rest of us drudges better figure it out way ahead of time what we’re going to be doing. So that’s really how my agenda comes. Once in a while we have a topical series, like the myths that we all live under, or something like that.

Questioner: Some have just spoken on an individual text of the Bible and some have taken a whole book of the Bible like you mentioned, and how does this fit in with your different ministries and what you’ve experienced yourselves or what you’ve read about and heard from others?

Hughes: I think that would be better answered by a couple of gentlemen to my right. So maybe one of them could speak to that.

Murray: I’ve got a question. I think it’s related to it. Can I put a question there? Here’s one thing I find quite puzzling. If you go back 50 years or less, I think it was a common pattern in America and in Britain that one of the services on the Lord’s Day would be teaching ministry primarily for God’s people. The other service would be distinctly evangelistic. Now that pattern has all but disappeared around the world. And I’m inclined to think that one of the reasons is connected with your question. In most of our circles, the idea of preaching being in serial expository form has become dominant. I greatly appreciated Kent’s address yesterday differed on one point and that was, I do think that evangelistic preaching is distinct. There are texts that are more awakening and alarming to unconverted people that are more pointed to the unconverted.

Moody and these men would take a text like “What shall it profit a man” and they would preach it Sunday evening. And all around our countries, Britain and the States, Sunday evening services were well attended. Now, I may be wrong here, but my impression is that Sunday evening services too in the states were evangelistic. People were brought in and so on. Now why is all that gone? Why are Sunday evening services so pathetic? Palmer Robertson said to me that he thought evangelistic preaching had almost died out in the United States. Now I don’t know, but I do know in Britain we’ve got the same syndrome. To me it is a bit of a question, why is it happening? Is it true? Is it fair?

Piper: It’s fair, it’s true. And it may have explanations far more mundane than that namely number one, television and number two, electric lights. There was a time probably 30 plus years ago when the best thing going on Sunday night was church in town. It’s not the best thing going for most unbelievers. So the fact is, I could preach to unbelievers until I was blue in the face on Sunday night, but there wouldn’t be anybody there to hear.

Murray: But why can’t your people bring any?

Piper: There would be no incentive for them to come.

Murray: If they knew you were preaching, there would be.

Piper: They don’t know me from Adam, these unbelievers.

Murray: They know your people and they admire your people.

Piper: Well, I should not write it off so quickly because maybe I have sold us short. But I’m just assuming that inviting pagan Americans who don’t go to church to come to church on Sunday night, they would look at them and say, “Why would I want to go there? The Super Bowl is on.” I don’t watch TV Sunday night so I don’t know what’s on. But I think whether that’s an adequate explanation. This is the third thing. We tried to do what we call the gate here two years ago on Sunday night, and we turned it into a totally evangelistic thing. I did the preaching and we went out on Sunday afternoons and got people from the parks to bring them in. That lasted for the summer. And I lost what I was going to say about that.

There was a very modest response. We had food for people and we dressed down because of where we are here. And it was small so that the energy that went into it, from an evangelistic perspective, just seemed like gathering the people to hear. But what you’re putting your finger on is when you talk about absence of evangelistic preaching is where do you get a hearing? Where do you get an audience to hear today in America? How do you gather a Mars Hill type group who will give you 60 minutes of their life? I’m not sure what the answer to that is.

Questioner: What is the Holy Spirit’s role in giving a text to a preacher?

Piper: I hope and trust that the Holy Spirit is doing that for me, whether I make my decision three months ahead of time or the week before because I ask him to do it and I have a large warrant from Scripture that if I ask him, he won’t give me a stone. So if I ask that he lead me in the choice of my texts and that he lead me in the breaking down of the texts and he lead me in the approach to the text, I believe that he’s doing it.

I want to stay very sensitive that if I plan three months ahead, I might now have a situation before me. When the earthquake happened in San Francisco and the freeway went down, I changed my sermon that week and preached from the text, “We have a kingdom that cannot be shaken.” So I try to stay alert to things like that. But as a rule, I try to prepare ahead like Kent does.

Questioner: I have two questions. I’ll try to keep them brief and I think they tie in with the need for pastors to study the word, the Book. I serve in two churches where infant baptism is primarily the tradition but I graduated from a Baptist seminary and have been baptizing in both modes since serving there. It amazes me that we can get people equally convicted to the word of God and studying it and dividing it rightly, but still come down on different sides of the fence on an issue like baptism. Without a debate just any advice from you as to books that I might read or some of us might read the key things to study to clarify my understanding of baptism.

Then secondly, how should we strike a balance between study with pastoral visitation? I’m wanting to be an Ephesians 4 type pastor, equipping the saints to do the ministry, but on the other hand, I don’t want to just selfishly do what I like to do more. I’m trying to have a balance and relieve myself of the guilt but still devote enough time to study when people don’t always understand the need for it.

Piper: Just one word on a book. Paul Jewett on Infant Baptism and the Covenant of Grace is the best thing I’ve ever read in defense of the believer baptism. That’s his phrase. So as far as the best thing I know on coming to terms with the Reformed understanding of the children of the covenant, Jewett is persuasive to me.

Murray: And have a look at John Calvin’s Institutes on baptism.

Hughes: I don’t think I have anything to say about that.

Steller: How about the question of balancing pastoral care and study time?

Hughes: If you’ve got a church of 100 people or 150 people, you’ve generally got a couple of people that are ill, quite ill, you’ve got a number of new people to visit. If you have a church of a 1,000 or 2,000, you have scores of people that are ill and a lot of people to visit.

I’ve always been involved in visitation. I’ve always been involved in hospital visits too. And when I had a smaller church, we did evangelism explosion, and I was leading the evangelism explosion doing that, training people and always involved. I’ve been involved in that at college church for some time and actually in past years. If I visited all the people in the hospital every day, I would spend half of my day in the hospital. I mean, that’s a fact. So what I’ve done with my staff — because I don’t want to be away from people that are ill, I don’t want to be involved in a larger church — is that when it is very serious, I plan to be there. Obviously, I’m involved in almost every funeral and at the hospital when hard things happen. I’m involved that way. So I’ll always have the people that are doing visitation get me involved. But I also have my specific day, which is Wednesday, which is my hospital day. Last Wednesday, I probably spent four hours with the ill or visiting people at home.

I feel that my heart would die in a large church if I isolated myself from those kinds of things. I choose to be involved in that way. So I always have been and always keep it that way in the ministry.

Questioner: Yesterday, John, you really challenged us with Luther’s example of study. I think he kept using the phrase pounding on the book. I was raised Lutheran, then I got saved and went to North Park Seminary. Now consider myself charismatic and so forth and still love the word with all my heart. How do you account for the fact that someone like Luther with that passion for the word can believe in infant baptism in contrast to say during his day the Anabaptists would die (and did die) for what they believed from the scriptures concerning baptism? Is there a lesson today for us that on the one hand we can be very strong on certain truths of God and yet either blind or weak in other truths? The amazing thing to me is that Luther could be in my estimation blind on something so foundational. So I’d like your comment on that if you would. And then if I could address Brother Iain afterwards.

Piper: The two things that come to my mind from my study are these. One will be negative and one will be positive. The negative one is that you just can only fight so many battles. And if you’re carrying on the kind of warfare that Luther was, for him to go back and also do what Anabaptists were doing and try to fight at that level too and cause more upheaval about infant baptism and whether all these babies out here should be baptized, I think there was a tremendous disincentive given his place in history to do everything that could be done. That’s on his behalf.

I mean, that’s my negative one, even though it may sound positive. The positive one is that Luther loved the sovereign grace of God and saw infant baptism as a protection of it, as many reformers do. I remember it when I was at Fuller Seminary, an Anglican spoke to me about this and his one word to me was, “We will lose our grasp on the sovereignty of God if we don’t baptize infants.” So I think Luther believed that. I think Luther believed that if you tried to insert conditions, even faith, between the baptismal event and human heart, you would then call into question the absolute freedom of grace. And infant baptism was the most pure and powerful outward demonstration of the absolute helplessness of man and the absolute sovereignty of God. So positively he said, “Why would I want to even temper with this? It is such a clear statement about what I believe.”

Questioner: I read your book, Dr. Murray, called Revival and Revivalism. I thought it was excellent. In fact of what’s happening today in terms of Toronto and moves of the spirit, I would encourage everyone to read that book because I think it’s very valuable. And it was clear to me that you were really questioning the whole issue of the altar call decision. In contrast to say fruit will ultimately show if real grace has taken root, I think you had a quote there that said, “The only grace that cannot be copied by the devil is the grace of perseverance.” You said that by one of the men in that second Great Awakening. I believe that. But on the other hand, how do you reconcile your views on decision with the fact in Acts 2:41 it says, “And they were that day added 3,000 souls.” Now the Bible doesn’t say how they were added, but it does say in a moment of time they were added to the church, in particular that day.

Would you agree or disagree that we should be able to tell people, “Yes, I believe you’re a Christian, granted over the period of time it will be proven through perseverance and ultimate fruit”? Might we not keep people hanging by saying, “Well, you got to really walk this thing out before we can look back and say, your conversion was real”? Can’t we say that in a moment of time, on a particular day, someone has truly been born again, has been saved, and that can be a foundation of comfort and rest to spur them onto mature in the Lord? So how do you reconcile Acts 2:41 with a decision or an altar call?

Murray: Well, it’s quite a big question, isn’t it? I don’t want to oversimplify it. If we took the Acts passage as directly logically relevant to our practice today, then we would instantly bring people into church membership. That has sometimes been done. Now, there have been evangelistic crusades where people have been instantly taken from the altar and been baptized and made church members and the defense of that was Acts 2. That’s what they did. I believe that the way we approach it is to say we do have the assurance in Acts 2 that these all continued in the apostles’ doctrine and fellowship and breaking of bread. We also have the sad assurance from history that whenever profess converts have instantly been taken into church membership, they have not continued in the apostles’ doctrine and fellowship and breaking of bread. It has been done in history. Augustine of Canterbury did it on a big scale. It’s been done in Germany too. It’s disastrous.

So the common judgment of history has been that although it doesn’t take time for the spirit of God to regenerate a man — in an instant the work is done — it does take some time for others to have sufficient assurance that this isn’t a stony-ground hearer who’s rejoicing in the word and when something arises is going to fall back. The churches have found that to be important, including the old Arminian Methodists who always held a professed convert back for a year. They wanted evidence because they believed that the primary role of the church was evangelistic, as our brother was saying this morning. And that the evangelistic witness of the church would be altogether undermined if it was overloaded with worldly people who had just been temporarily moved. So they wanted to keep the church holy. At the same time, they didn’t believe they had any infallible tests. I’m sorry, it’s a very brief answer. But that’s the general line I would take on it.

Can I just take a word on a different subject? Somebody asked me to say something in case somebody misunderstood and there’s real room for misunderstanding. Some of us have been commending Pink on The Sovereignty of God. You’ve heard it commended this week. I have to remind those of you who don’t know that there are two additions of Pink on The Sovereignty of God. One put out by Baker, one put out for Banner of Truth. The Baker edition is the complete text as Pink originally wrote it. The Banner of Truth edition is abridged and slightly edited. So it’s a bad thing for publishers to do with an author, isn’t it? Generally we should let a book stand as it is.

But the problem is that Pink wrote The Sovereignty of God before he ever met Hyper-Calvinism. When he went to Australia in 1925, he found himself in Arminian churches. He had a very uncomfortable time. Then he found Calvinists and it was wonderful briefly because he then found they were Hyper-Calvinists. They did not believe that it was the duty of men savingly to trust in Christ. And he was silenced because they brought out their articles of faith. Pink, when he wrote The Sovereignty of God, had never met real Hyper-Calvinism.

I may be slightly overstating that. I don’t know if he knew Primitive Baptists. But in Australia he certainly did discover it. And so in his later writings, you will find things that are quite contrary to what is in the full text of The Sovereignty of God. So if men here take the Baker edition of The Sovereignty of God and say, “Well, this is the book that I heard recommended,” I have to tell you that in that book, there are passages that I don’t believe any of us here would endorse. I do think it’s actually a pity that Baker reprinted that. If Fred is listening anywhere, I think it’s a pity that it’s sold because it is in danger of misleading people. Pink’s views underwent some change.

Questioner: This is a question about the problem of books and missions and missionaries. I think there’s a general conception that missionaries don’t need to be fed as much through books as, for example, pastors. Here the climate is more suited for investing yourselves in books and investing your money in books. But I would say it’s all the more necessary on the mission field since you can’t take your brother with you and so you have to take them in print so that you’re protected from air and encouraged and your zeal is maintained.

And what’s more, if you’re doing pioneer missions, what happens is you could be setting the theological tone for generations and it’s a very severe problem. So books are important. The problem comes in that many of the most unreached peoples are in places where illiteracy is very common, where the poor are in great need, and where preaching the gospel for a missionary means incarnational ministry really. So how do you model for the next generation of Christians that are nationals what it means to be fed from the word and yet fed from books? Do you see the main problem I’m addressing?

Murray: I am not quite sure I’ve got the question, but I think instantly of the South Pacific, the cannibal islands of the New Hebrides and so on. That whole pattern of missionary endeavor is very interesting. One thing stood out too that the missionary wives were all students. They had to be. They were told, “You won’t understand what your husband’s doing unless you also have the books.” The women were quite as strong as the men.

They got printing presses very early. They’d hardly been there less than 10 years. Then they would start with catechism and start with a little perhaps John Bunyan. And they would make the natives buy the books by produce or something to make them value it. Very early they came in with literature. So to me, it’s very illuminating what was done well over a 100 years ago on pioneer mission fields and it’s a pity that literature isn’t better known. They had a lot of methods, they had a lot of know-how.

Love: Well, of course, Oscar, you need to bring as many books as you can for your own walk and study. That’s a given. I think though, when you’re involved in pioneer missions and you’re trying to reconcile that with what’s going on here today and you’re working among the poor, you are challenged very deeply because they don’t study and they don’t necessarily read. I think first of all, we need to have a long-term perspective. We are moving a whole people group into a biblical worldview. Some of us are having a hard time here in America. Penetrating new people and getting them to wrestle with the text, that does take a long time.

Secondly, when I think of ministry to the poor and they don’t read and they’re not going to study naturally, I can’t help but think of the Psalms. My understanding of the Old Testament is that there were men who could write, of course like Moses, but the majority of people couldn’t. They didn’t have their Bibles. And thus, they had to sing their theology. And that’s why the Psalms are what they are. There’s redemptive history within the Psalms and in their hymnody. So I think that’s a model. We have a model right in Scripture. It’s not only our message book, but our method book. And thus we have a model in Scripture of how to deal with the poor, with the illiterate. And I would begin by teaching them theology through song. You can do bible memory. We used to memorize through just reading it out loud because they do not have the discipline generally to do that on their own, I mean, at least at this stage of their pilgrimage. I’d say, “All right, let’s begin. ‘For God so loved.’” And they would say, “For God so loved . . .” And we would just go over scriptures together. So I think we need to work within that context to bring them along.

Questioner: I hear what you’re saying, Rick. So Reverend Murray, what you’re saying then is part of the foundation that we lay as missionaries is to teach literacy in order for a whole nation to come to Christ. That’s an absolutely essential part of preaching the gospel to teach literacy. Is that what you’re saying? Is that the natural implication?

Piper: Can I add a word? I was just blown away as I thought about Luther that the word of God, according to his sovereign and eternal plan, has come to us in a book. I just think the implications of that are staggering that they have come to us in a book. I think there are anthropological tendencies in my mind picked up from my education that it is culturally chauvinistic to push my Western word orientation onto pre-literate people. As I have reflected on that in view of Luther, I think that is baloney because God willed that it come in a book and what’s chauvinistic is to keep the book out of their hands. My heart cry right now is the humblest most incarnational thing you can do is to create literacy and reading skills in a people group. What puzzles me tremendously is why the church has been in Cameroon for 150 years and there’s no literature? What’s going on? What have we done? What kind of missionary strategy is that? We took the gospel, but we kept the book? That’s what I’m feeling right now.

Questioner: My question doesn’t have to do with Dr. Piper’s last comments, but I grew up in Liberia, West Africa. In the Bassa peoples — my mothers of the Bassa tribe — the gospel went into the Bassa tribe. They heard the spoken word, people got saved, and these people were subsistence farmers. Their income and their way of life was established. They had no need to learn to read in order to continue to subsist. But having understood that the gospel, that God’s word was in the book, most of those people began to learn to read English. But now the Bible has been translated into the Bassa language. I wholeheartedly agree with what Dr. Piper was saying that it would be chauvinistic to keep the book out of people’s hands.

The question I wanted to ask has to do with Dr. Piper was speaking yesterday. My heart was pricked as I thought about Luther and how he really worked. But then I reflected on the whole thing when I went back to the hotel last night, and I thought that when I was a young man before I got married, that I really did a lot of Bible study, a lot of reading. I think if you’re going to accomplish certain kinds of things, then perhaps you need to be like Paul. I think if you get married and you have young children, there is a responsibility to them. I don’t know what the climate and the cultural conditions were when Luther’s kids were growing up. But in this society in which we live, you have to really be on the ball with your children. That’s all I can say.

I don’t see how I could do that, other than my personal meditation, while ensuring that my wife was in the word day and night and I was fulfilling my responsibilities to my children. The only time I have left is to prepare my Sunday morning and evening messages. And hopefully after they’ve grown up, I can begin to work a Luther-like schedule. I dread that men here with families might begin to deprive their families of the time due in order to be like Luther. I don’t think that was Dr. Piper’s intention, but I just had to share that.

Piper: Everybody is different. Everybody has a different wife. The wife makes a huge difference. Sarah Edwards was different and Katie Luther was different I suppose. I’ve got five kids now and four pretty well along. It’s starting over again with my daughter, whom we just adopted. But I’ve kept a pretty rigorous schedule through all those years, carving out a slot called “playtime” after supper, which was all theirs for an hour, and then I went back to study. When they were little was when it was easy for me. Teenagers are hard because they have soccer games and band concerts and dramas to go to. So I’ve loosened up a lot in the last so many years to try to go to all these things. That’s a good warning not to shortchange your kids. Nothing will break a pastor’s heart more than to have raised his kids and then they get divorced because they never learn how to express their feelings or something like that. So that’s well taken.

Questioner: I was reading Martin Luther recently on free will and he sounded like he was explaining a semi-Pelagian view and he said, “Be aware of this poison. It is nothing but the doctrine of the devils.” And I wanted you to respond to that. But before you did, because we’re talking about Martin Luther being extreme and he had his extremes. All of you know that sprinkled liberally throughout the Puritans and Jonathan Edwards and even Spurgeon, the phrase “the heresy of arminianism” is prevalent. It exists there. And I wanted you to comment on that. Are we being soft today in being so tolerant? I mean Spurgeon was not so far as to say that they weren’t believers. I don’t even think Edwards went that far. But nevertheless, they were very firm against this. Owen has a treatise on heresy and Arminianism is in there. Would you respond to that from history and from Luther?

Piper: I suspect we are soft. In an age like ours where there is so little theology, so little understanding of anything among lay people, so little interest in theology, reading such fluff, if reading anything, to go on a crusade to demand that they cross their T’s and dot their I’s on the issue of the nature of the will would require first about 30 years of education to know what we’re talking about.

I think in this milieu — if you serve in a denomination like mine where this is generic broad evangelicalism — you have to ask about your strategy. Do I want to jump over to a denomination, say a little group of Reformed Baptist churches, who dot all their I’s and cross all their T’s exactly right and they’re all little? The first thing they say to you when you come on Sunday mornings is, “Are you willing to believe in predestination?” So they don’t ever grow. Do you want to be a part of that group so you can feel doctrinally at home? Or do you want to risk the fuzziness of belonging to a group like ours and sow seeds of truth everywhere you can? That’s the choice I’ve made.

This may be a good place to insert this thing about Billy Graham and altar calls and whatnot. The alternatives that you have to look at are not really encouraging of people having a passion for getting people saved and seeing fruit come to Christ. The Reformed evangelists are few and far between. And Reformed pastors who are winning people to Christ are few and far between. When I choose which side I want to err on whether to rub shoulders too closely with an unbeliever or to give a wrong impression about the altar call, I tend to err that way probably because I grew up in an evangelist’s home, in a Southern Baptist church and so on.

But here’s just one thing. This might be interesting to talk about. Iain Murray would say, and I would say that you invite people to Christ, every sermon, every Sunday. You’re constantly inviting people to Christ, not to the front of the church, but you’re inviting people to Christ. And you’re looking out on a 100 people or a 1000 people inviting to Christ. But you know that’s really different than having one person eyeball to eyeball and saying, “Please believe. I love you. Don’t be lost. Yield to the Lord.”

The Holy Spirit can come down and make an individual feel like you’re talking to them directly, but Jesus pursued the one sheep. He went after him — believe, believe. There is a way to interpret what happens at the end of a service like that. We can say, “I want to talk to you. Don’t go out of here please. I want to talk to you.” Here’s one illustration. I preached for years to an unbeliever in the old sanctuary. He’d sit right up there where you’re sitting and he never took communion. He was a confessed unbeliever. He heard me preach for five years or so. And finally I wrote him a letter. I said, “I’m concerned about you. I’ve been preaching to you for five years. We’ve never talked seriously about belief. I’ve invited you to Christ many times. I would like to do that sometime personally.” Next Sunday at the back of the door, he took my hand. He said, “We should do that.”

That Wednesday night he came. I said, “Let’s do it Wednesday night after the prayer meeting.” He came to the prayer meeting. Providentially, he heard six testimonies and walked into my office and after two hours of my looking in face-to-face and saying, “This is the time. Don’t walk out of here. This is the day of salvation. Believe,” he did. I baptized him and he died of a heart attack two years later. Whether you do it with an invitation or something, something more needs to happen I think without betraying the importance of preaching. Jesus eyeballed people. He went after people one-to-one. They felt like they mattered, like their soul mattered to him. Now, how did that relate to the question that was just asked?

That question was about Luther and Arminianism. We live in a soft mushy age. You can harden up and become so isolated that nobody ever comes to your church and nobody listens to you because you always talk in a language they don’t get and you want to risk so much not being misunderstood that you can accomplish very little or you can make risks of using different language and different strategies. And frankly, I don’t know. Maybe Iain Murray’s tight view on the altar call historically will be the most wise, fruitful protection for the church. The historical view is something I have a tremendous respect for and I tend not to know it well enough. So you have to decide.

Murray: I was just going to say a word again on labels. You see, the names can be misleading. Dutch Arminianism of the 1650s was a very different thing to John Wesley’s Arminianism of the 1750s. It’s the same name. And even the name Calvinist can be misleading. I was saying to a brother yesterday, “A person can be a Calvinist and not even be a Christian.” So the names are very secondary, I would never put them up front.

Questioner: John, with regard to your remarks on signs about things and swell things such as falling down and whatnot of being of relatively low importance, I have a question. I hear people use, for example, the text on the council of Jerusalem in Acts where Paul addresses the Jerusalem church and there’s a hush over the crowd as he talks about the signs and miracles that were done among the Gentiles. I hear people looking at that and saying something is wrong in our time, or at least something very, very significant is missing when we have a situation where we’re proclaiming the gospel and these things are not happening. John or Iain, I wonder if you could help me out there.

Piper: I do not accept the cessationist position or Warfieldian argument that there are points in history at which time only there is a great flareup of signs and wonders. However, I do think there are seasons for which there are great flareups. In other words, God is not limited to the apostolic era or Elijah or some other time like the crossing of the Red Sea at which we have a little flare up of miraculous things. But I think that, while there’s nothing that I can see in the New Testament that would limit signs and wonders to the apostles, there’s good reason to believe that they had something extraordinary going on upon them. The drawing near of the incarnation and the foundation of the church was unique, and therefore it doesn’t trouble me as much as it does some that the quality and prevalence of miracles in the hands of the apostles should be greater than what we have seen typically throughout church history. I would expect that, frankly. I would expect that from what I see biblically.

However, on the other side, I think that probably our low expectation of signs and wonders in the evangelistic enterprise is a self-fulfilling prophecy. It’s a self-fulfilling low expectation. If you don’t expect God to do a thing, he probably won’t do it. Therefore, I would think that we probably could expect more, that we could expect some remarkable turns of events and dreams like we’re hearing about among Muslims. I read this morning that the Lord bore witness with signs and wonders to the word of his grace (Acts 14:3). The Lord witnesses to the word. And you had the word right there being preached by an authoritative eyewitness. You don’t need anything else. You don’t need signs and wonders in Acts. That’s the last place in history where you need signs and wonders is when you’ve got eyewitnesses to the resurrection, and yet the Lord gave them. We are a generation who don’t have eyewitnesses and you’d think logically we need them.

Well, God just thinks his own way and if he wants to win Muslims through dreams or if he wants to do something here through healing, he can. What I’m saying is if somebody says to me, “We should be seeing lots of these things, we should see the book of Acts,” I say, “Well, wait, wait, wait, wait. You don’t know that you should see the book of Acts. The apostolic age was unique and the signs and wonders that were done through the hands of the apostles may not be what gifts of healings is all about in 1 Corinthians 12. Gifts of healings and miracles there in 1 Corinthians 12 may be of a lower order and less powerful and less frequent.” So yes, probably we could see more but don’t set up an ideal in Acts that your demand has to be or else the church is carnal and unbelieving.