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Leicester Ministers’ Conference

Author
Category Articles
Date May 3, 2005

The Banner of Truth Conference was as faith enhancing and encouraging an event as I remember. I attended my first conference in 1963 and there have been few that I have had to miss since that year.

Ted Donnelly opened the conference with a sermon on the will of God from Ephesians 1. This theme, he showed, brings majesty to our preaching, vitality to our pastoring and tranquility to our perspective. The will of God, he said, is truly the whole raison d’etre for the Christian religion; he pleaded that our preaching and living be commensurate with God’s will for the universe which is itself going to be transformed through Christ. The vast ‘folly’ of this concept is our message to the world; madness on the grandest scale. “Let’s not be little men; let’s talk about the biggest issues,” he said. Apostolic proclamation had none of that folksy pragmatic advice that today is often called ‘preaching.’ A belief in God’s total control of ourselves, the church, and the world will produce tranquility, strength, and serenity. Why are we worrying? Christ’s church is continually benefiting from Christ’s rule. So the Conference began with this question, what would be God’s will and purpose in these next days at this conference?

Sinclair Ferguson spoke three times on the themes of the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit. When the New Testament speaks of grace it is not describing a kind of substance, something which is dispensed from heaven to mankind so that someone might say, “I received ‘grace.'” There is nothing of that kind intended in the New Testament. Grace is not a reality that can be abstracted from the Lord Christ and given to us. Grace is the empowering redeeming love of Christ for us and in us. The law came through Moses but all grace – back at the time of Moses and on until today – comes to men by Jesus Christ. The incarnation did not make the Son of God gracious. It was his grace that made him incarnate. Sinclair’s favourite verse in John’s gospel is the words of Christ that his Father loves him because he lays down his life (John 10:17).

When Sinclair spoke on the love of God he chose to root it in Luke 15 and the parable of the prodigal son. How crucial it is for a Christian to know that God loves him. Ministers sometimes fear that they are slipping up or growing weak in urging men to believe that God loves them, but the gospel ministry is about the love of God, so beware of the older brother spirit which cannot enter into the love of the Father. Such mistrust is a distortion of the character of God. What would you think of a Father who showed his children one wonderful gift after another and then, with a hellish cackle, said to them, “But these are not for you!” To the older brother the father said, “Everything I have is yours.” The older brother felt that his father was against him, and that is the idea sinners have of God – “He’s always against us.”

We are never so large as when we are preaching; our emotions and feelings are enlarged, and any other spirit will distort the gospel. Kierkegaard once said that the worst thing was not having a freethinker as your father but a man who was orthodox but who did not trust in God. Beware when we find it easier to spend time and energy on the theme of the cause of the fall and not the divine cure of sin. Let us expose the Lord Jesus Christ to men and women rather than major in exposing sin.

The most natural response is to close our hearts to those who have closed their hearts to us. When the Lord Jesus pronounced his seven woes against the Pharisees he was warning religious men such as those who shut the kingdom and did not open it, men whose converts became a double exaggeration of themselves, men of duplicity, men who majored in the minors, men who could not deal with people’s sins, men who were orthodox but without any life, men who looked back to the past and demeaned the present. A remedy for all this was to observe the prodigal’s Father, running and meeting his son. Nicholas Wolsteroff’s son died in a climbing accident. This Princeton philosopher said that henceforth if anyone wanted to know him then they had to know that he was a man who had lost his son. If anyone wants to know God then he is the God who gave his Son.

In the third address Sinclair Ferguson spoke on the fellowship of the Holy Spirit, describing the Spirit as the executive of God. What he does is to bring us to new life and one day he will bring us to consecrated life. Speaking from Romans 8 he outlined the privileges that the Spirit brings into our lives, adoption, mortification, assurance and leading. The deepest privileges are given to us at the lowest points of our ministry, when we are shrieking out with unutterable groanings. An unbeliever never ever cries out like that. Sinclair closed in giving the moving testimony of the late Alison Large who was converted in her teens and then had widespread cancer which resulted in total blindness and an early death. “I want them to see how rich life is,” she said.

At the first ten minute talk David Magowan of Whitby spoke with authority on Pastoring the Minister’s Family. Our calling was to preside over the family, provide for them, protect them and pray for them that our families might fear the Lord, Christ dwell in their hearts and that they grow in the knowledge of God.

John Benton of Guildford spoke on Public Ministry and its Private Pressures beginning with a survey of the modern world, the therapy culture in which we live. ‘Good’ is what makes men feel good. We live in an age of victims and angry people and complainers. Then John looked at this from a biblical perspective (from various parts of Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians) speaking of our need for pastoral ability, ministerial authenticity, eternal glory, practical humility, and evangelical reality.

The second mini-message was given by Malcolm Peters on the theme of “Who Pastors the Pastor?” He commended to us biographies and diaries of preachers as helpful, attending conferences, or a visit to a Lewis Communion season in the Hebrides. “Seek soul-nourishing ministry”, he said. Where does the Chief Shepherd feed his flock? That is where we need to be. He spoke also of interaction with other ministers in mutual exhortation. He himself used to meet with Peter Brumby on four occasions each year to serve that end. In the New Testament you meet Barnabas who was a son of encouragement, and John Mark who became Paul’s companion and spent time with him in prison at Paul’s request. The apostle Peter was exhorted to strengthen his brethren.

Iain D. Campbell of Back Free Church on the island of Lewis spoke on John MacDonald of Ferintosh (1779- 1849). We were all given outlines of his life and were told that he was one of the most blessed preachers of Scotland who has received a bad press in the past century as responsible for killing the culture, gaiety, dance and song on the island of St Kilda which he visited four times over eight years bringing them the gospel of Jesus Christ. There he noticed the slowness of the work, commenting that the speed of vegetation in the plants that brought forth a hundred fold was far slower than in the seed which fell in stony ground and immediately sprang up. MacDonald has also left a legacy of Gaelic verse which often used to be read on a Sabbath afternoon in Highland and island homes. In this he popularised deep theology especially in describing the work of the Holy Spirit in the life of the believer. He also went to Dublin and mastered the differences between Irish and Scottish Gaelic so that he could preach effectively to them. He had ten children, one of whom became a missionary in Calcutta. He wrote to him saying, “I find that the best preparation for preaching is not only to collect and arrange ideas, which by no means is to be despised or overlooked, but a holy frame of mind, consistent walk, and constant practice of duty of some kind or other, and along with this, love to the Redeemer, a devotion of heart to him, commiseration for immortal souls, and intimacy with God in the life of prayer. O my dear John I wish you may possess much of these requisites, and the Lord prosper your labours more and more.” Three lessons from his life are,
1. His high view of the ministerial office. In a letter written to his son on his ordination he observes how certain pastorates and ministries have been singularly blessed.
2. His sheer joy and humility in preaching. The day in which he was wearied most was the day he did not preach. “I never went to the pulpit without fear and never left it without shame.”
3. In all of his evangelising his best friend was his calvinism, all that energised him came out of the doctrines of grace – what massive appeals came from his theology.

Dick Lucas the retired minister of St Helen’s Bishopsgate, London, spoke on Psalms 42 and 43, especially the repeated themes, “Why then art thou cast down O my soul . . . hope thou in God.” “I doubt whether depression is the theme of this psalm, certainly there is no clinical depression here. Being downcast and disturbed is the theme,” Dick said, and so verse by verse we went through the psalm and it came alive. Dick’s counsel to this man after hearing this testimony would be “There is nothing wrong with you at all.” The psalmist’s relationship with God is very personal, to the one he calls “The God of my life.” The structure of the psalms are revelation and response, and that means a relationship; he is a God who listens and answers.

To live with this psalm is to live with a believer who is real and astonishingly open with God. “I met a woman missionary when I was a student who told me that she had not sinned at all during the past 6 months, and I was full of it and I told other students about it, that this was possible. ‘It is not for you,’ they told me firmly, and they were right.”

Iain Murray closed the conference with a study of 2 Corinthians 2:11, with the concern of Paul that Christians be outwitted by Satan. How important for us not to ignore our adversary. He is seeking to achieve a whole harvest of evil. Paul was concerned that the congregation in Corinth should not overdo their discipline of the repentant church member who had been put out of the church. “Reaffirm your love for him,” urged the apostle.

There was another Satanic device here too. There is no relationship closer than that between a pastor and his people. Satan wants to undermine that love, to drive a wedge between them by disaffection, ruin the reputation of God’s servant and so weaken and destroy the bond. ‘Divide and conquer’ is the device of Satan. Thus the whole work of the church will suffer. In response to this activity of Satan we are urged to build a stronger unity with the people and make their joy our own. Sometimes we have to defend our character. There are times we make sure that Satan doesn’t put a weapon in our hands to use against a fellow believer. We must beware of any emotional disengagement from fellow Christians

I also gave two addresses on the triumph of grace in the prophet Hosea and these are beginning to appear on the Banner of Truth website.

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