Pastor’s Corner July 2011

The following was published in our monthly newsletter, the Redeemer Report.

I take time in July to study ahead and map out the sections of verses I will be preaching for the next six months. I am thoroughly enjoying our journey through the Gospel of Mark. As I study each week to preach, I am so grateful for elders and a congregation hungry for the exposition of the Word. One of my regular prayers for Christ’s Church in this country is for a renewed appetite for the exposition of the Word. Church History shows revival and reformation to be tied to faithful exposition of the Bible. The Reformation of the Sixteenth Century was a golden age of rediscovery. Not only was the Word of God rediscovered, it was preached with new zeal and accuracy. The Word of God, with it’s full authority, has always been the fuel for the fire of reformation and revival. The Reformers were very simple in their practice and strategy- preach the Word of God! I love what Philip Schaff says in describing the great Swiss Reformer, Ulrich Zwingli’s approach to preaching:

Zwingli began his duties in Zurich on his thirty-sixth birthday by a sermon on the genealogy of Christ, and announced that on the next day he would begin a series of expository discourses on the first Gospel. From Matthew he proceeded to the Acts, the Pauline and general epistles; so that in four years he completed the exposition of the whole New Testament except Revelation.

His sermons, as far as published, are characterized by spiritual sobriety and manly solidity. They were plain, practical, and impressive, and more ethical than doctrinal. He made it his chief object to preach Christ from the fountain and to insert the pure Christ into their hearts. He would preach nothing but what he could prove from the Scriptures, as the only rule of Christian Faith and practice.

This is a reformatory idea; for the aim of the Reformation was to reopen the fountain of the New Testament to the whole people, and to renew the life of the Church by the power of the primitive gospel. By his method of preaching on entire books he could give his congregation a more complete idea of the life of Christ and the way of salvation than by confining himself to detached sections. He did not at first attack the Roman Church, but only the sins of the human heart; he refuted errors by the statement of truth.

Wow, may it be said of me- “He made it his chief object to preach Christ from the fountain and to insert the pure Christ into their hearts!”

In the Lamb,
Tony Felich