How Much of Preaching Should Be Interpretation and How Much Application? pt 2

Since the Bible is practical, when you preach what it means, you get application.  However, it’s obvious that a lot of what the Bible says requires making application to every day life.  We could even call this “wisdom,” that is, the proper application of Scripture.  Not all of the Bible tells you exactly how to apply it.  A lot of it assumes that you are going to have to apply it.  This is where the guidance of the Holy Spirit comes in, in addition to the text of Scripture.

For example, in 2 Timothy 2:22, Paul commanded Timothy, “Flee youthful lusts.”  Preaching should include ‘what it is to flee’ or ‘how to flee.’  That is partly where application comes into the right kind of preaching.  After Paul told Timothy to “preach the Word” (2 Timothy 4:2), he also said to “reprove, rebuke, exhort.”  The goal would be to have actual fleeing youthful lusts to take place.  When that’s the goal, you want to give the audience some ways that fleeing should occur.  You could go to parallel passages to expand upon what it is to flee, but explaining that is a means by which someone would apply God’s Word.  It might take very little time to describe what “flee youthful lusts” means and a lot of time to explain how to do it.  In those cases, the application would last longer than the interpretation.

The inclusion of more of this kind of application with interpretation is a major way that fundamentalist or separatist preaching differentiates itself from evangelical preaching.  It is possible, even probable, that the popularity of many evangelical preachers comes because they do not apply the Bible with proper authority.  And then they may do very little reproving and rebuking that Paul told Timothy was required in preaching.

For instance, Paul instructs Timothy in 1 Timothy 2:9 concerning the proper dress “that women adorn themselves in modest apparel, with shamefacedness and sobriety.”  What is adorning with shamefacedness?  A preacher should show that the term “modest” relates to extravagance.  “Shamefacedness” is what corresponds to our modern term “modesty.”  Is there a scriptural standard for modesty?  Are certain lines drawn in the Bible?  This is where a separatist or fundamentalist has historically given specifics to the audience, while the evangelical often has not.  And you’ll see far more immodesty in evangelical churches.  That kind of evangelical preaching, however, is creeping into fundamentalist churches and so now their practice looks more and more the same as evangelicals.

So what does the evangelical say in response to a criticism for the lack of application?  He would say that the preacher should allow the Holy Spirit to “guide them in the application of that truth to their individual lives and circumstances.”  This is exactly what John MacArthur has said is the role he strives to take in preaching as it relates to application of a passage.  He has said that “it is the work of the Holy Spirit to make the most personal, individual applications of the truth of Scripture in the heart of the hearer, and He does that infallibly, in a way [that] a preacher cannot.”

But what passage of Scripture itself says that the preacher should allow the Holy Spirit to make the application to the hearer?  Shouldn’t the preacher be making the application to the hearer?  Isn’t that part of the responsibility of the preacher?  I think so.  Again, I think it is part of the role of reproving, rebuking, and exhorting.  The Apostle Paul told the Corinthians to imitate Him (1 Cor 11:1), and I think especially in the application of the principles of Christian liberty.  As the man of God, you have wisdom from God that He wants you to use in your preaching.

In a sense, the ‘fallibility of the preacher,’ as a reason for not applying Scripture, is just an excuse.  It is a cop-out.  The passages left unapplied are often the ones most difficult to keep because their application is the most offensive to the world.   This is  one major reason, I believe, for the larger size of many evangelical churches.  Their pastors offend fewer people with their preaching, because they don’t make pointed applications.  What they say is “waiting on the Holy Spirit” is actually just fear of man.

When MacArthur says he doesn’t apply because of his fallibility, this sounds humble.  Uncertainty is quite in fashion today.  The emergents can’t even interpret because of fallibility.  They think they’re even more humble.  I say that all this is “voluntary humility” (Col 2:18).  We can interpret and apply.  God wants us to do that.  This doubt about application is akin to the doubt about truth found in the world.  Truth is relative.  Application is relative.  None of this is good.

The preacher leaves the people ignorant of the application and then uses the Holy Spirit as his excuse for doing so.  If the people don’t make the application, ‘I guess the Holy Spirit must not have wanted them to do that.’  I believe this is what Paul had in mind with Titus when he called on him to “speak, and exhort, and rebuke with all authority” (Titus 2:15).   Sure the younger women were to love their husbands (Titus 2:5), but what does that look like as it is fleshed out in the life of a younger woman?  Preachers should exhort and rebuke in the particular shortcomings of love in the life of those women.  The “aged men” were to be “temperate” (Titus 2:5), so certainly application is called for.

Preachers can be prey to fallibility in interpretation just as well as application, so if fallibility is the “reason” for not applying, then perhaps nobody should preach.  After all, they might make a mistake in preaching due to their fallibility.   This is why the preacher is not the “pillar and ground of the truth” (1 Timothy 3:15).  “The spirits of the prophets are subject to the prophets” (1 Cor 14:32) and the congregation, though not to despise prophesying (1 Thess 5:20), is to “prove all things” (1 Thess 5:21).  The church is the pillar and ground of the truth.  The protection against fallibility is the Holy Spirit and the church, which is the temple of the Holy Spirit.

I’ve heard many evangelicals say that they “don’t want to get in the way of the Holy Spirit.”  I contend that they are getting in the way of the Holy Spirit by not making the application for the hearer.  The Holy Spirit works in the heart of the preacher, but he quenches the Spirit by not applying the verse as the Holy Spirit would have him.   The Holy Spirit wants the preacher to make application.  When he doesn’t obey the Holy Spirit, why would He think that those to whom He is preaching will obey the Holy Spirit?  Can individuals take the application a little further?  Yes.  Should they?  Yes.  But that doesn’t alleviate the responsibility of the preacher to apply.

When the preacher doesn’t apply, and leaves that to the hearer, and then the hearer doesn’t apply, the preacher doesn’t have to be responsible for that.  After all, it’s the Holy Spirit’s job, right?  And so he doesn’t have to confront anyone about not applying the Bible either.   And how can he?  He’s fallible, isn’t he?  This type of thinking is very normal in evangelicalism.  Evangelicalism mocks and criticizes fundamentalist preaching because of their overemphasis on application.  In several cases, they might be right.  However, the evangelicals are wrong in their lack of application.

In the end, God wants us to do what He says.  Without application of Scripture, we won’t do what He says.  If you have fundamentalist churches that do what God says, even though they are not quite as instructed in what Scripture means, they still are doing more of what God says if they are doing more of what God says.  And then when someone in a fundamentalist church is confronted for not doing what God says, so starts doing what God says, while a person in the evangelical church continues not doing what God says because everyone is waiting for the Holy Spirit to do the job of making an application, the fundamentalist person is doing what God says and the evangelical is not.  The evangelical might say that telling someone to do what God says is actually replacing the Holy Spirit.  That whole “replacing the Holy Spirit” doctrine is not in Scripture anywhere, either interpreted or applied.   Whoever tells someone to do what God says is doing something that someone ought to do.  It results in more people doing what God wants them to do, and we do want that.  Don’t we?

How Much of Preaching Should Be Interpretation and How Much Application?

We know we’re supposed to “preach the Word.”  However, I believe one of the major problems for fundamentalists through the years has been preaching an application that is detached from the Word.  As a result, the folks in the fundamentalist pews have found a lot to be doing without knowing what the Bible says.  They’re doing a lot that they think the Bible teaches without connecting it to what the Bible teaches.  That’s not all.  In the rush to application, a lot of fundamentalist preaching has given the hearers the wrong meaning of Scripture.  In certain revivalist circles of fundamentalism, that’s been fine, because “the Holy Spirit told them to preach that.”  So these “preachers” have perverted and added to the Bible and then blamed it on the Holy Spirit.  This common practice has shattered the discernment of a sizable chunk of fundamentalism and also created a generation of mind-numbed ignoramuses.   This has dawned on some of the victims, so they have gone looking for something more.  They’re converted and really do want God’s Word, so they go looking for it and find it with evangelical expositors and Calvinists.  Granted these don’t use the King James Version, but they also often preach more actual Words of Scripture than those who defend the King James.

Often fundamentalists have attacked biblical preaching that emphasizes the interpretation of scripture by calling it “word only” preaching.   Then eisegetic extrapolations can count as demonstrations of power and the Holy Ghost and short term effects will stand as evidence for the latter without proving the former.  Jack Hyles used to scare his adherents away from exposition by calling this ‘treating the Bible like a math book.’  I heard someone else call it “worse by worse.”  Clever.

Scripture is its meaning. You aren’t preaching the Bible when you don’t preach what it means.  The words can’t somehow circumvent the missed interpretation to find their right way in someone’s heart.   If preaching is the Bible, which it is, then telling people what it says is the only necessity in a sermon.  If you miss that, you haven’t even preached.

The primary term for “preach,” kerusso,  means “to herald.”  The New Testament audience understood the kerux to be a representative of the king who did nothing other than proclaim the king’s message.  He spoke for the king in the king’s words.  I compare his job to a waiter.  The waiter just serves the food.  He won’t add or take away from the food or rearrange it to his liking.  Within the analogy, God is the chef.  He wants the meal to get to the table as He intended it.  Often what is called “application” or “practical sermons” is nothing more than playing with the food on the way to the table or perhaps even better, eating it and then regurgitating it back onto the plate before it gets to its recipient.

Unless someone understands what Scripture means, he can’t even make an application of it.   It’s not practical not to know what the Bible is saying because you can’t practice what you don’t know.  And if you know it, then it’s already practical.  That’s what 1 Timothy 3:16-17 say, that all Scripture is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, and for righteousness.

The primacy of interpretation in preaching  exalts God’s authorship of Scripture.  It says, “He did a good job.” And, “This is fine like it is.”  Or, “If people know this, they’re going to be OK.”  Or even, “I like what He said better than what I think.”  God is the actual authority.  If what comes out of our mouths isn’t what He said, then we replace God in this.  We, of course, can’t replace God as an authority, but if we don’t care if we do or not, we’re verging on, if not committing, a kind of idolatrous practice.

One irony in this is that the “word only” preaching is the preaching that is our words, not His.  His Words do come with power and the Holy Ghost.  They can’t but do that.  Someone may say, “But I seem to get more results and I’ve found that people seem to like it more when I’m more practical, you know.”  It might be true that you might arouse more of the passions of your hearers with preaching that majors on personal application.  However, this is where what we do in this regard must be a matter of faith.  Faith is what pleases God.  And glorifying Him must be our purpose.

The preeminence of application also causes a lot of wrenching of passages from their original intention.  Texts of scripture get shoehorned into a “good sermon.”   When the audience becomes sovereign, the actual teaching of the Bible often becomes mangled beyond recognition.  The hearers might leave with an appreciated bump to their self-esteem or an incentive for more good Christian activity or a clue for an improved personal relationship, but the path to achievement doesn’t honor God nor likely will the performance itself.  God wants and deserves all the credit for the right outcome.  He’ll only get it when that right outcome springs from the divine source, the words that He inspired.

The license men give themselves with their preaching proceeds from their own doubts about the effectiveness of Scripture.   Preaching has taken on the nature of a sales pitch.  However, it isn’t so much that the Bible doesn’t “work.”  It’s just that most people don’t like what it says.  You really don’t have the option of changing Scripture, and yet that’s still what occurs.   You could call it “outcome based preaching.”  You find a message within acceptable parameters that will still meet your desired outcome.  In this way, you adjust your pitch to your target audience to produce the preferred result.  What happens here is that when the Bible doesn’t succeed like the speaker wants, he just changes the Bible.   It’s called “application of the Bible” though.

In John 21 Jesus told Peter to feed His sheep.  That’s what Jesus wants His shepherds to do.  Later in 2 Peter 3:2 we see that Peter understood this to be the “words which were spoken before by the holy prophets” and “the commandment of . . . the apostles of the Lord.”  Let’s make sure that’s what we’re doing, you know, that thing we say we’re doing.

The New Refusal to Put Off the Old Man (Colossians 3:6-10)

Read this First Part even though It Is Exegesis

Christ is our life—physical, spiritual, and eternal.  At some point in the future, we will appear with Him in heaven.  We have the heavenly citizenship now, but then we will appear with Him, so we should live like that, and not like who we once were, children of disobedience, objects of God’s wrath, who lived according to their own desires and ambitions.  While we are on earth, we need to die to the things that will not be in heaven.

Before we became in Christ by grace through faith, we lived earthly lives heading toward our natural destination.  But now we have put off the old man, the one walking his own direction to his own drumbeat.  We’re no longer motivated by idolatry and covetousness nor by anger and wrath.  We’ve put off that lifestyle and we’re no longer that person, and we will live like it, so we should live like it.

Our minds have stopped suppressing the truth and believing the lie.  They are renewed in the knowledge after the image of God to what we’ve been restored at our conversion.  We’re not natural men thinking natural thoughts, but spiritual men with the tendency to think spiritual thoughts.  We will and can live like what God created us for.

For everything that we now are, and for the position in which we now live in Christ, we put off those things incompatible with our appearance with Him in glory.  V. 5 has a sample list of some of those and v. 8 presents another sampling.   We will not and cannot continue in anger, wrath, malice, blasphemy (slander), filthy communication, and lying as a lifestyle.

Now For the Interesting, Controversial Application (Don’t Just Skip to This)

I want to take several moments to focus on one of these:  filthy communication.  What is “filthy communication?”  To apply Scripture to present-day situations, we must know something about present-day situations.  Even believing in the sufficiency of Scripture, we do not believe that every scriptural answer is explicitly found on the pages of Scripture.  To apply Scripture, Scripture assumes we have some extra-scriptural knowledge, that there are truths that we can with certainty discern in the real world.  The Bible itself is meaningless unless it is applicable to human questions and needs.  Applying the Word of God requires a scriptural perspective on human experience.

Colossians 3:8 assumes we can know what “filthy communication” is.  And yet there is no “chapter and verse” for filthy communication.  None.  So any four letter word is acceptable, correct?  And if I make an application, I’m a Pharisee, right?  Isn’t it true that I’m just adding to Scripture?  So I’m a legalist that is attempting to be overly restrictive, by making the commandments of men to be equal with the Bible, right?  If evangelicals and now even fundamentalists are going to be consistent, they’re going to have to say this, aren’t they?  We are not told what the bad words are.

Or are we to assume that we can apply Scripture with certainty?  Do we believe that we can get guidance from the Holy Spirit on applying what the Bible says?  In this case, it is putting off filthy communication.  The one Greek word translated into the English “filthy communication” is aischrologia.  That Greek word is found only here in the New Testament.   Friberg says it is “dirty talk, filthy or obscene language or speech.”  BDAG says it is “speech of a kind that is generally considered in poor taste, obscene speech, dirty talk.”  Liddell and Scott say, “foul language.”  Thayer writes, “foul speaking. . . low and obscene speech.”

OK, can we know what obscene, foul, dirty, tastless speech is?  I believe that Scripture assumes that we can.  And Paul commands the Colossian church to put off this kind of speech.  The saved person’s mouth shouldn’t be saying it.  Let’s go one step further.  It especially shouldn’t be said during preaching, as a part of an even more sacred kind of speech, a sermon from God’s Word.

The world likes to use filthy talk and this is one way that we Christians are different than the world.  But let me speak as a fool for a moment to make a point.  A way that professing believers can fit into the world is to use the salty speech that unbelievers use.  Some might even say it is “contextual” or “missiological,” if we do.  Unbelievers might be able to relate to us Christians better if we talked like they did.   We wouldn’t seem perhaps so sanctimonious to them.  They wouldn’t have to feel so cramped and that would spur some relationship that could work out in evangelism some down the road.  And if we used it in preaching, we could attract unbelievers.  They would really be able to identify with us and feel more close and then maybe get saved.  In that sense, we are kind of being all things to all men.  You get my drift, don’t you?

Of course, all of this violates Colossians 3:5-10.  It’s not scriptural. It offends God.  It manifests a kind of Christianity that isn’t even Christian, so it couldn’t be Christianity.

This very point is what often separates professing Christianity today.  Evangelicals and even some fundamentalists today speak as though as they are on some higher spiritual plane because they don’t expect people to live what Scripture does not say.  And it does not say what filthy communication is.  Most of them apply this selectively, even as they will not apply this with regards to standards of modesty, designed distinctions in dress, separateness in music and dress, and appropriate entertainment.  And then if there’s any question beyond that, they say, “Hey, yer majoring on minors!”

For instance, right now John MacArthur and the guys in his evangelical camp are against the Mark Driscoll people for using filthy communication even in the pulpit.  They are very specific about this.   Based on their own standard of application of scripture, they are being ascetic, overly restrictive, and Pharisaical themselves.   That’s what the Mark Driscoll side thinks.  And then the MacArthur group isn’t happy about the Pipers and the Carsons and those evangelicals.  They haven’t come out strong enough against Driscoll—they still rub shoulders with him.  And to them MacArthur is way too sure of himself.  Way too certain.  Driscoll is part of the quasi-emergent variety that is more nuanced in these things.  He would say, let’s just love Jesus.  C’mon guys.  Of course, that’s how the John MacArthur guys would treat any of us that would apply this consistently all the way through.  And the John MacArthur people call someone like me and others, “fire-breathing fundamentalists.”  Hmmmm.  Good point.

In other words, we can know what fleshly lusts are, what worldly lusts are, what the garment that pertains to the man is, what the attire of a harlot is, what an uncertain sound is, and more.  We also can apply filthy communication to filthy television and movies.  Evangelicals and now fundamentalists treat that like it’s off base.  They have a different standard there now.  And I mean now.  Because Christians have historically taken a stand in these areas.  This truly is a new kind of Christianity that can’t apply the Bible any more to the actual areas of our life, so that we really are different than the world.  You can hardly tell the difference between a Christian and an unsaved person.  They listen to the same kind of music, use similar speech, dress about the same, and have about the same kind of entertainment.  It’s really an interesting deal for Christians.  They are forgiven and in Christ and all that, plus just like the world.  God isn’t glorified, but it really isn’t about God, is it?  Somehow they’ve made what is about us to be about Him, but He isn’t fooled by that at all.

For instance, John Piper is Desiring God.  Is he?  Maybe John Piper himself does.  I’ve read that he doesn’t have a TV.  He has said a few things about a certain kind of questioning about whether rock music can represent God.  He wants people to know that they can have their greatest pleasure in God.  That’s all true, but it still shouldn’t be about our pleasure.  It’s about God’s pleasure.  And if we do desire God, we desire the God of the Bible and He hates filthy communication, filthy music, filthy dress, all of that.  So if you desire that God, you also will hate what He hates.  And the Piper people don’t seem like they do hate those things, so I question whether they do Desire God.  They make a good point with their Desiring God.  David panted after God like a hart after the waterbrooks (Ps 42:1).  But it doesn’t do any good at all if the God you are desiring is the god of Hedonism.

Now there’s a kind of club that is self-authenticating that says this is all Christianity.  They point at each other and say, “Yer right.”  So they must be right.  And so many people couldn’t be wrong.  And look how it’s all working.  It’s being so missiological and so many are being brought into the church.  This is producing a great lack of discernment.  God’s Word is being disobeyed.  God is being dishonored.

I’m saying that this is a new refusal to put off the old man.  Is there an acronym there?  NRPOOM.  Maybe not.  It isn’t Christianity.  That’s what Paul says in Colossians.