A minister of the gospel is a man who has been called by God to a unique and important work. His main task in life is to understand and explain God's word to God's people so that they hear, through the preacher, the voice of God speaking to them. A man cannot do that unless he devotes his life to being in the scriptures and spends his time and energy in seeking to understand God's word.

Lord, I thank you for this brother. I pray that you would open our ears, that you would open our hearts to receive wisdom from heaven. Lord, we thank you for this brother and we pray that you would bless him. Amen. I left my water.

Can you get me some water? Oh, there's some water. I'll just grab some. I got it right here. Thank you.

All right, before I begin this afternoon, I just want to tell you something that's very exciting to me and I hope exciting to you. I believe the most important thing I've done in my lifetime and it just came out yesterday. Most important book project I've worked on my lifetime. It's called the Reformation Heritage KJV Study Bible. And what it does, it's a family worship study Bible, the first ever printed, in which at the end of each chapter, you have two or three guidelines for family worship to help fathers lead their families.

Even as pastors, if you read Ezekiel 44, you don't know what to say to your kids afterwards. Well, we'll give you some helps. The Bible also has the first set of reformed notes that accompany a KJV Bible that's ever been written. It's a travesty, but all KJV study Bibles, either Arminian or dispensational notes. So it's the first one that has reform notes.

It's got the three forms of unity, three Westminster standards in the back. It's got a section of 20 pages, one page per century, summarizing church history. It's the fruit of Sinclair Ferguson's work. And we also have 36 pages that talk about how to live the Christian life, different aspects of the Christian life. So our goal was to launch it here at NCFIC.

And we didn't think we'd make it even a week ago. The printer said we're behind schedule. We won't have any for you. And then he surprised us two days ago and said I'll have one skid for you. So we only could bring 562 and we expect to sell them all because we're launching a very special here, 50% off and for those of you who buy five or more for your family.

Hopefully everyone in your family will have one. And you'll find Dr. Barrett's notes. He's the general editor of the Old Testament, Dr. Bilkis of the New Testament, both great men of God.

I'm the general editor. And I think you'll find that this Bible will really edify your family. So take a look at it. It's in the book room. And the hardback is $30.

And if you buy five or more, though, you can get five for $100. And then there's three leather-like volumes, one in black, tan, or charcoal, $15 more. And a genuine leather is another $15 more. And then there's Montana cowhide, which is very expensive, $140 in case you don't know what to do with all your money. All right, so I just wanted to recommend that.

And then we also have here 100 copies in the bookroom of this Reformation Heritage KGV Study Bible documentary. This is documentary. This is where Dr. Barrett and I and Dr. Bilka just speak for four minutes about the value of this Bible.

And we'd love to hand, our goal is to hand these out to pastors. If you could show them to your congregation before or after you do a teaching type class. And then get your whole congregation to buy the Bible. We just did a very small print run of 20, 000, the first one. We're expecting hundreds of thousands of these to sell around the world.

Even if your church doesn't use KJV, the notes will still go with the ESV or whatever version you're using and the family worship section will be invaluable to you. So try to get your congregation involved and get your people reading reform notes and get them into family worship with helps that will really seriously help them. Thank you so much. Let's turn now to Ezekiel. Ezekiel chapter 2.

I'm going to read the whole chapter, 10 verses, and I've been asked by Scott Brown to speak to you about life in the Word on the part of pastors, the need to live in the Word, but also picking up a bit on their wives and their need to see that their husbands are living in the Word and they themselves. And then he also asked me to sprinkle throughout my talk a number of hermeneutical principles that pastors should maintain as they live their life in the word. So that's a tall order, but I'm going to try to give you the seven hermeneutical principles in the midst of my exposition of Ezekiel 2 verse 8. So let's read this chapter and then I'll expound verse 8 to you. And he said unto me, Son of man, stand upon thy feet and I will speak unto thee.

And the Spirit entered into me when he spake to me and sent me upon my feet that I heard him that spake unto me. And he said unto me, Son of man, I send thee to the children of Israel to a rebellious nation that has rebelled against me. They and their fathers have transgressed against me even to this very day. For they are impotent children and stiff-hearted. I do send thee unto them, and thou shalt say unto them, Thus saith the Lord God.

And they, whether they shall hear or whether they shall forbear, for they are a rebellious house, yet shall know that there hath been a prophet among them. And thou son of man be not afraid of them, neither be afraid of their words, though briars and thorns be with thee, and thou dost dwell among scorpions. Be not afraid of their words, nor be dismayed at their looks, though they be a rebellious house. Thou shall speak my words unto them, whether they will hear or whether they will forbear, for they are most rebellious." Then verse 8, our text, But Thou son of man, hear what I say unto thee. Be not thou rebellious like that rebellious house.

Open thy mouth and eat that I give thee. And when I looked, behold, a hand was sent unto me, and lo, a roll of a book was therein, and he spread it before me, and it was written within and without, and it was written therein, lamentations and mourning and woe." That's far the reading of scripture. If you were to draw a picture of an ideal pastor, what would it look like? That's what John Bunyan asked himself and in Pilgrim's Progress, he describes it this way. A person who has his eyes lifted up to heaven, the best of books in his hand, the law of truth written upon his lips, the world behind his back, standing as if he were pleading with men with a crown of gold hanging over his head." You see, in Bunyan's picture, there is glory.

There is glory in being called to preach the Word. We are messengers, brethren, of the Lord of hosts. We speak of heavenly, eternal realities. We proclaim the truth as ambassadors of the King of Kings. It's a glorious thing to be a minister of the Gospel.

My dad used to always say to me, to be a minister of the Gospel is more important than being in the White House. At the same time, a preacher is a man who bears an incredible cross. He follows the Lord Jesus and takes up his cross. Part of our crosses is that we are not called to tickle men's ears with entertainment or doctrines that tolerate their lusts. We are glorious evangelists, but we are ministering in the city of destruction.

And we're calling sinners to love the very God whom they by nature hate and to hate the very sins that they love. And that inescapable conflict causes us to suffer inwardly and outwardly. And it can wear us down. It can tear us apart. And you women, you're witnesses of that in your husband's lives and ministries, no doubt.

The glory and the cross meet together in the ministry of the word, in the proclamation of that word. That's particularly evident here in the book of Ezekiel. Ezekiel opens with a majestic vision of God. God appears as a man-like figure, a burning fire, riding a heavenly chariot, attended by mysterious cherubim resembling men and lions and oxen and eagles all mixed together. This is a picture of the glorious calling of Ezekiel.

Then God turns and tells him, but you're going to minister to an impudent and stiff-hearted and rebellious people. And the opposition to your ministry is going to be frightening. Your ministry is going to be fraught with briars and thorns, and you're going to dwell among scorpions. Have you ever felt that way in the ministry? Briders, thorns, scorpions, all around.

So how is Ezekiel going to survive? A glorious calling, tremendous opposition is going to survive by feeding upon God's word and living his life in that word. And So my text, Ezekiel 2 verse 8, but thou, but thou son of man, he's saying this just after he hears about the scorpions and the briars and the thorns, Hear what I say unto you. Be not you rebellious like that rebellious house, but open your mouth and eat what I will give you. God gives Ezekiel a triple charge.

That's my charge to you this hour. Charge number one, hear. Charge number two, be not rebellious. Charge number three, eat. I want to look at all three of these in the light of life in the Word.

Hear, hear what I will say unto you. Be not rebellious. Be not rebellious like that rebellious house and eat, open thy mouth and eat what I will give you. So first of all, if we're going to live life in the Word. My first point is that we've got to hear.

We've got to hear the Word. We got to hear what God the Lord will say to us. We truly have to be Samuels. Speak Lord, for thy servant heareth. We need to listen.

Listen to God. Listen with understanding. Interpreting the Bible according to sound, hermeneutical principles, listening with reverence, with fear, with love, with delight. Now hearing the word in a sinful culture with sinful hearts is no easy task for sinful people in a fallen world, regardless of whether you're a minister or not. So God tells Ezekiel how to hear the word of God in this simple short text this afternoon.

He says first of all, hear the word as a son of Adam. Did you notice that? He addresses Ezekiel as son of man or in the original Hebrew, son of Adam, more than 90 times in this book. Now usually it's what God called Ezekiel. Once in a while It's what Ezekiel called himself.

That's a good thing when Ezekiel has that kind of humility and that kind of recognition of who he is in himself. But we tend to think of son of man in terms of Daniel's vision of this glorious figure. But Son of Man, as God calls Ezekiel, is a term of humility. And so that's my first hermeneutical principle to you as ministers and as ministers' wives. When you come to interpret Scripture, when you come to live your life in light of the Word, our fundamental hermeneutic must be one of humility.

We must bow under the Word. We must sit at Jesus' feet and wait on Him as Mary waited upon him at his feet and be teachable from the word. Show me thy word, O Lord. Teach me thy past. Lead me in thy truth and teach me.

On thee do I wait all the day, O God of my salvation." So when we open the Bible, we need to say, Lord, I need you to teach me. Humility moves us to pray, open thou mine eyes that I may behold wondrous things out of thy law. So humility is essential. We need humility to avoid the spiritual hubris that is an occupational hazard in the ministry. You know we're great talkers that we get paid to talk.

We preach, we teach, we lead in prayer, we lead meetings, we counsel, people wait to hear what we're going to say. But the only way to be an effective long-term minister is to be a hearing man, a humble hearing man. But thou, son of man, son of Adam, sinner, hear. Puritan William Greenhill said, those who are to teach others must first hear and be taught themselves. They must hear Christ and learn of Him.

So as has often been said, we are not to read the Bible and deal with the Bible as some professional minister or some Bible technician and using various tools to manipulate verses into place so they serve our agenda, but we're to hear what God the Lord would say to us. The old Puritans used to say, let the Word master you so that you may master it. That brings me to a second hermeneutical principle. We're to interpret scripture plainly according to its literal sense. If we're going to be good listeners, we have to pay attention to the words and the sentences in their redemptive historical context.

We are sons of Adam, after all. And God speaks to us in human language that follows the ordinary rules of grammar and communication. Bibles isn't written in some kind of mysterious code that we have to break. One of the great advances of the Reformation in the Puritan age over medieval Roman Catholicism was that the Reformers rejected the so-called fourfold sense of scripture. The Bible just has a literal meaning.

These other layers of spiritual meanings are often man-made. Yes, they're spiritual truth, but that truth is conveyed through the very words of scripture. We must not dispense them with the hard work of exegeting the text in order to fit an application we have already selected. We may ridicule the medieval fourfold sense of interpretation. But sometimes it's tempting to add to scripture.

We must absolutely regard that as anathema. Or just a herald as we heard earlier today. And Harold just repeats the words of the Sovereign and expounds them. You know, when John Calvin had the town council of Geneva around him on his deathbed, he said, I have two things I want to say to you. First of all, I want to apologize for my irascible temper.

Once in a while, I get out of, you know, I exercise my temper, I'm sorry about that, and I suppose if you work 20 hours a day, seven days a week, you might lose your temper once in a while, too. But he asked for forgiveness, got the forgiveness, and then he said, but one thing I can say about my ministry, I have never, ever falsified the Word of God in the least degree. I have always, in every exposition, every teaching, I can say honestly, tried to bring you exactly what the Word of God says. That's the way we want to be as ministers. And our people will feel that genuine authenticity about us.

So our first calling is to listen, listen, Listen with humility as a son of Adam, like Ezra, who had prepared his heart to seek the law of the Lord and to do it and to teach in Israel statutes and judgment. He prepared his heart by listening, by living in the Word. So you wives as helpmates to your husband, you should do what you can to guard their life in the Word. Protect their time in the study. Pray daily that Christ will be your husband's teacher.

Listen to them as they share what they're learning. Encourage them as a pastor's precious life companion. Be a woman of the word yourself and use what little precious time you have to carve out in your own life as a busy wife and mother to read the Bible and study it. That will bond you more deeply with your husband as well. But most of all, it will bond you more deeply with your Lord.

So we must hear God's word because as sons and daughters of Adam, we were created to be God's servants. Oh, Lord, the psalmist says, truly I am thy servant. Let me take heed according to your word. And second, we must not only hear the word as the son of Adam, we must hear the word as the very word of God. But thou son of man, says our text, hear what I say unto thee.

That's the Lord speaking to us in scripture. That's obvious, of course, but let's not forget that. Every time we open the word, it's God speaking. His presence is overwhelming. In fact, in Ezekiel 2 here, this glorious one who reveals himself to Ezekiel is called the Lord God and the placing of God in caps in the KJV indicates the name of the sovereign master the Adonai the the one who is who he is the I am that I am and Ezekiel uses this title 210 times 70% of all the usages in the Old Testament.

So the Lord is saying to his servant, hear what I, your Master, your possessor, your Lord God who owns you, hear what I am saying to you." Which brings me to a third hermeneutical principle. That is we're to live our life in the word, in the fear of God with reverence. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge and wisdom. To which man do I look, God says, to the man who trembles at my word and is a poor and a contrite spirit, the one who fears God. John Brown said, to fear God is to value the smiles and frowns of God to be of greater weight and value than the smiles and frowns of men.

That needs to run our ministry not only but our personal lives. Our consciousness of God profoundly shapes how we hear the word. If we're big and God is small, our sermons will be full of man's wisdoms and man's work and will distort the God-centered message of the Bible into nonsense, into some therapeutic, moralistic, pragmatic deism that characterizes too much of contemporary American religion. But if Our hearts are impressed with God's holiness and majesty. Our sermons will be full of God's glory, of Christ's grace, and we will do what the Westminster Divine said.

The holy scriptures are to be read with a high and reverent esteem of them, with a firm persuasion that they are the very word of God and that he only can enable us to understand them with desire to know, believe, and obey the will of God revealed in them and with diligence and attention to the matter of scope of them and with meditation, application, self-denial, and prayer. Larger catechism, question 157. That's the way to live in the word through the fear of God. Listen to whatever I declare to you, God, to say. You see, expository preaching through books of the Bible helps us to do that, for it forces us to tackle texts and topics we might not otherwise choose, But it will help us be motivated in the fear of God in all its dimensions.

Fourthly, in terms of a hermeneutical principle, preaching the whole counsel of God includes what the Westminster confession of faith called good and necessary consequences deduced from scripture. You see, God's revealed will is not limited to only what the Bible explicitly says but also includes what it clearly implies Westminster was saying. The Bible itself teaches us how to do that. For example, Jesus silenced the Sadducees by proving the resurrection of the dead by a logical deduction from God's statement, I am the God of Abraham, for Jesus said, for God is not the God of the dead, but of the living. That's a deduction.

This principle is based upon recognizing that God is the author of all scripture and since he is the all wise God, unlike human authors, he's aware of all the consequences of his own words. So we must think about the logical implications of biblical teaching and how the doctrines of the Bible fit together and expound them to our people, which in turn leads to a fifth hermeneutical principle and that is we must always have our life in the Word using the analogy of Scripture. That's the old reformation concept which I'm sure you're familiar with that you interpret each part of scripture in the light of the whole of scripture because you come with a presupposition that scripture does not contradict scripture. So you compare scripture with scripture, Interpreting texts that are less clear are written in symbols and figures of speech with texts that are more literal and more clear. In this way, you don't spin some bizarre interpretation from a text or a passage that contradicts other teachings of the Bible.

You become more balanced in your presentation of the Word and you avoid the trivial in preaching as well. So you take all this truth and then you look at it from an eternal perspective. You should, in the eyes of your people, as you speak, be standing on tiptoes, looking into the windows of heaven to see the glory of God in the word you're expounding. Martin Lloyd-Jones said it this way, I can forgive a man for a bad sermon. I can forgive the preacher almost anything if he gives me a sense of God, if he gives me something for my soul, if he gives me the sense that though he is inadequate himself, he's handling something that is very great and very glorious.

If he gives me some dim glimpse of the majesty and the glory of God, the love of Christ my Savior, and the magnificence of the Gospel, I can forgive that preacher his weaknesses. I was just down in Brazil last week and a lady came up to me after one of my talks and said she was crying and she said, this is the first time this morning in my life I've ever gotten a glimpse into heaven. I was preaching from Revelation 21, but it was such an encouraging comment for me, a glimpse into heaven. You want your people, you see, to be filled with the glory of God, but that means you've got to be filled with the glory of God, and you've got to be having those glimpses into heaven. You've got to know the word.

You've got to be a minister of the word through and through and through. One of the old Puritans, in fact the father of Puritanism called William Perkins, wrote in the fly leaf of one of his books that his relatives found after he died, thou art a minister of the word, mind thy business. Let that be your life, you've got to be in the word. That same William Perkins wrote the most famous hermeneutics textbook, a book on preaching the art of prophesying, which has now been redone by Sinclair Ferguson available in contemporary print, which was a standard classic text that all the ministers were trained by in the early 17th century in England. When he got to the end, he summarized his whole book this way, and the words are in the center of the page to give them emphasis.

So the conclusion of the whole matter is simply this. Preach one Christ by Christ to the praise of Christ. This is the essence of the word. The essence of the written word is the living word. This is what God is saying to Ezekiel.

Speak whatever I say to you. Bring the word of God. Today we too often put initials behind our names according to our degrees. The old times they just put VDM in Latin meaning minister of the word. This is my degree, I'm a minister of the word.

This is my passion, this is my life. I'm in the word, son of man, hear what I say unto you. So that's the first thing. If we're going to live a life in the Word, we've got to be hearing the Word. Secondly, God says to Ezekiel, be not rebellious like that rebellious house.

You see, the essence of rebellion is rejecting the word of God. The rebellious minister is a minister who's not in the word. God says in Ezekiel 20, 13, but the house of Israel rebelled against me in the wilderness, they walked not in my statutes and they despised my judgments." So what does this mean for a minister today? Well, it means two things. Number one, be not rebellious in your fallen condition, in your son of man condition, your son of Adam condition.

Remember Ezekiel, you're a sinner and you're an ambassador, but don't be rebellious because of your sinfulness. And that can be hard work, that tension, can't it? The struggle in which Ezekiel must put his corruption to death in order to truly live the word and yet finding indwelling sin still abiding in him. Indwelling sin that fights against the very word he's called to preach. What a challenge this is.

So how do we approach it? Well, we approach it in the context under the paradigm of a sixth hermeneutical principle, the covenantal principle of covenant of works slash covenant of grace. Adam broke the covenant of works. We've all fallen in Adam. We're sinners.

We're all sons of Adam. We all struggle with Romans 7. The good that I would, I find myself not doing evil, I would not, I find myself doing all wretched man that I am. So God is saying, Son of Adam, be not rebellious. It seems contradictory.

How can a son of Adam be not rebellious when the son of Adam is fallen? Well by delighting in the word and by the Holy Spirit applying the Word, so that on the one hand, while you discover to your horror that the Word exacerbates your inward struggle with sin and guilt, on the other hand, you find your life in the midst of that internal combat. You find your life and encouragement and strength and comfort in that very same word. Now the alternative to internal combat is hypocrisy. The minister who is not at war with himself, within himself, is a hypocrite.

Rebellion need not be a scandalous crime or blatant rejection of the faith. Rebellion can also be selective obedience. And when we as ministers don't live wholly and solely for the Word, when we don't put our sin to death, When we are not struggling against that indwelling sin, when we turn to idol worship and we shrink back from fully declaring the revealed will of God, we are hypocrites. How can we live in the Word when we as heirs though, heirs of Adam, are rebels by nature? Well, the answer is we must rely on the covenant of grace.

By faith, we grasp hold of the promises of the covenant of grace in Jesus Christ. You see, Ezekiel's obedience to the Word is only possible through the power of the Spirit. Look at verses 1 and 2 of our chapter. He said to me, Son of Man, stand upon thy feet and I will speak unto thee. And the Spirit entered into me when he spake to me and set me upon my feet and I heard him that spake unto me." You see, God spoke the word.

The Spirit empowered Ezekiel to obey the word, and just as the dry bones came to life later on in chapter 37, Ezekiel himself becomes a living example. The Word gives life into his bones. The Lord puts spirit into his servants and those that are cast down in death rise up to live for him. Ezekiel 36, 27, I'll put my spirit within you, cause you to walk in my statutes and my word, you shall keep my judgments and do them. Ian Duguid writes, Ezekiel is a model of spirit-infused submission, a prime member of a new community empowered by the infusion of the divine spirit to a life of radical obedience." Pure to John Owen said, the only way to rise above this bitter, groaning, indwelling sin as a minister of the gospel is to be in this word, studying this word, and studying it on your knees, he said, praying over it verse by verse by verse.

Owen warned that any man who undertakes to publicly interpret any portion of scripture without praying to God for the Holy Spirit to instruct him greatly provokes God for he acts in pride and ignorance. Be not rebellious, brother. Bow under the word and say, teach me Lord. Show me Holy Spirit. In every sermon you prepare, I say to my theological students something like this, in every sermon you prepare there will come times, maybe once, maybe twice, maybe three times, where you just can't get to the bottom of it, and you're struggling with it, and you've got to get down on your knees and say, Lord, help me.

Lord, give me light. Show me. Spurgeon said, your prayers on the anvil that go up to God, beaten out of you, your prayers are greater helps in sermon preparation than your entire library. Don't get me wrong, I'm a book guy. I love reading.

But if it's not salted with prayer, if that sermon is not agonized out of us, if it comes to birth out of a struggle and we're trying to engage ourselves fully with the text, getting our minds and hearts to interpret it, to read and to examine the original language as yes, but also to meditate on its meaning and application, utter dependence upon the supernatural work of the Spirit to illuminate our minds. That's what we need. Johann Bengal's famous dictum, you know well I'm sure, apply thy whole self to the study of the text, apply then the whole matter of the text to thyself. Then we lose our rebellion. Then we're submissive to the word.

Then we live in the word. Our study, you see, must be transcripts of our texts, and our lives must be transcripts of our sermons. But be not rebellious also in a fallen world. Be not rebellious in a fallen world. The Lord specifically says, Be not thou rebellious like that rebellious house.

So it's one thing not to be rebellious with a fallen nature myself. It's another thing not to be rebellious in a fallen world that is opposed to us on every hand. And God speaks of Israel as a rebellious house here 13 times. 13 times in a couple chapters. And yet God sends Ezekiel to this rebellious house.

You know I had a student in a seminary who had a struggle. Two churches are interested in him and he's not sure about that one and he's not sure about that one and this one has problems and that one has problems and he's talking to me about this and I looked him in the eye and said, brother, are you expecting to find a perfect church to go to? If you find a perfect church, that church probably doesn't need you. There's no one else to minister to in this world but sinners and every church is like an emergency room with all kinds of needs and That's what you're called to do. You're called to go to a rebellious house.

I'm living in a fallen world. Preachers are constantly under pressure to please people rather than to bring them the word of God. My dad used to say when he was an elder, ruling elder for 40 years, he said, sometimes it feels like the task of the eldership is trying to keep everyone equally dissatisfied. People have all kinds of complaints. You spin yourself in circles if you don't subject yourself to the word of God.

Be not rebellious in a fallen world. I'll never forget when I left my first church. Everything was packed. The band was ready to go and going to my second church and one of the deacons came to me and said I just have something burdened on me I want to tell you before you leave so I went the back porch with him it's the last visit of this church and this is what he said to me. I want you to know you're going to face two disappointments in your next congregation.

Oh? Yes, he said. You're going to be disappointed with every human being, and you're going to be disappointed with yourself. That was a really encouraging send-off. But you see that's what human nature is like.

Really, ultimately the one we aim to play is the only one that will never disappoint us is God. So we go to worship in that framework, we go into the word in that framework, we don't expect the ministry to be pie in the sky, we're going to minister to people in a fallen world And we must speak the truth in love to fallen sinners, rebellious sinners. And so when we realize that, we understand that sometimes we offend people in our community, in our congregation, even when we don't want to because we're bringing the truth in love. William Greenhill the Puritan imagined how Christ might answer our fears about preaching the truth in the face of opposition. He said this, We might say, Lord, if I preach this, I will lose my friends.

But Christ would answer, I am your friend, your best friend. We might say, I will alienate my family from me. But Christ reprised, I'm your kinsman, for I took your very nature to suffer for you and make you a child of God. We might say, great and powerful men will become my enemies, O Lord, but Christ says I am greater than they and my throne is above all thrones. And so the Lord promises Ezekiel that he would make his face harder than a flint to confront the rebels of Israel.

That's an amazing thing. You know, I read somewhere, and I think it's true, ministers tend to be of two types in terms of their personality. One is they're so tender, They can't take any opposition. They have the heart of a child, but they don't have the external hide of a rhinoceros to take the blows. And the other kind of minister just has the hide of a rhinoceros.

Everything bounces off him, but he doesn't have the heart of a child. He's not tender and both are wrong and I've been struggling for 40 years and not there yet. I've been struggling for 40 years trying to figure out how to have a hide of a monoceros and the heart of a child at the same time but that's what the ministry is all about. So the Lord promises Ezekiel, he'll make his face harder than a flint, and yet Ezekiel retains the heart of a child, doesn't he? He weeps over the people of Israel.

He's a Jeremiah. So Christ can make you as strong as you need to be to face the opposition and yet make you tender for the well-being of souls. And you know what? The more you're like that, the more you're like Christ. Isn't that what he was like?

Strong yet tender. So preach. Preach what God calls you to preach. Don't fall into the trap of some preachers in ages past, you purposely go out of your way to try to offend people. You don't do that.

But you preach the whole counsel of God. You don't make the manners of this world the rule of your life, wrote one Puritan, nor the worship of this world the rule of your worship, but you look higher. Be not rebellious like that rebellious house, but look to Jesus, run the race, fight the good fight, finish your course. Then finally, God says to Ezekiel, if you're going to live life in the Word, you not only have to hear, you not only have to be not rebellious, but you have to eat. That's how the text concludes, doesn't it?

Open thy mouth and eat what I shall give thee." That seems like a strange command, but it fits with the many symbolic visions and actions in the book of Ezekiel. Prophet sees the Lord holding in his hand a scroll written on the inside and out with sad words of judgment. And it's the word of God. Scrolls in those days were written only on one side. And by scrolls being written on both sides, God is saying, this is my word.

I'm filling your mouth with my message. So what does that mean for us as preachers today? Well, I think it means two things. First, eat the word with an open heart of faith. Open thy mouth.

The mouth or the speech of God's servant must be consecrated to him. That's what we see with Isaiah. I'm a man of unclean lips and God purges those lips and so God touches Jeremiah's mouth in saying that he's put his words in the prophet's mouth and so here also Ezekiel, his mouth must be open to receive the food of God. So if we're going to be faithful preachers, we've got to live in the Word. We've got to come to the Bible with hunger and thirst.

We've got to say with the psalmist, I opened my mouth and panted, for I longed for thy statutes. This is one of the greatest challenges of the ministry. You preach your heart out on Sunday two times, you've worked all week long to prepare these sermons. It's like doing a research paper as a student in class, a college student, and then on Monday you've got to get up and do it all over again. To keep that appetite, to keep the excitement, to keep the hunger and the thirst takes grace.

You come to the Lord every single day and say, let me hunger and thirst after thy truth and thy righteousness, O God. Come to the Word with faith. Expect that God will bless you. Expect him to say, open thy mouth wide and I will fill it. He's a faithful covenant-keeping God.

He can keep you excited and hungry for the Word of God, for Jesus Christ. Look for Christ. I have a friend, a pastor friend, he says, I take a flashlight into every text and I look around for Christ and wherever I find him I bring him out. That's exciting calling for a minister to find Christ in the text and expound him to his people. Jesus says, search the scriptures for in them you think you have eternal life and they are they which testify of me.

Which leads me to my last terminetical principle, the important one of the centrality of Christ in all scripture and in all preaching. Everywhere we go in the Old Testament, there are types of Christ, figures of Christ, institutions resembling Christ, events that imperfectly but truly foreshadow Christ. Christ is everywhere. The Bible offers the food and drink of life eternal through Christ. Our preaching had better sound like that any sermon that doesn't get to Christ is a failed sermon.

I had a lady in my church who, actually when I came 27 years ago, really, I don't know if she was saved or not, she was under a lot of conviction of sin, but she sure didn't like preaching about Christ. She didn't have freedom in the gospel. And so I started, of course, preaching Christ from the day I came. And first, she didn't like it. Then she found her freedom in it.

She found gospel in Christ. And she was set free. And then I couldn't get to Christ quick enough in my sermons. I'd come and visit her, and she'd say something like this. Oh, Beaky, she said, it took you too long to get to Christ last week.

It took you 15 minutes into your sermon before you mentioned his name. I'm saying get to Christ. There you go, now you got there. Okay, now stay there. This is the kind of hungry people you want, people that want you to preach Christ.

Thomas Adams of Puritan said, this blessed Christ is the sole paragon of our joy, the fountain of life, the foundation of all blessedness. He's the sum of the whole Bible. He's the main, the center, whither all lines are referring to. All roads lead not to Rome but to Jesus Christ. So to receive the Bible with an open heart of faith and preach the Bible for the faith of listeners, we must study the Bible feeding upon Christ.

Open your mouth wide. And then finally, God is saying to Ezekiel here, Eat the word with the digestion and meditation. He says, eat what I give thee. So the picture is Ezekiel is taking something into his mouth, he's chewing it, he's swallowing it, and Ezekiel 3. 3 speaks of not just eating with the mouth but also eating with the belly and the bowels, that is the whole affections, the whole emotions.

The Old Testament saints, of course, you know they used to think that the emotions and the affections were in your gut level rather than up here because when you feel something deeply you feel it down in here. And so there's an eating that involves the whole man. There's a digestion. There's an assimilation. Every part of your being becomes incorporated into what you're studying, into what you're learning, and it implies more, you see, than a superficial contact with the Word.

It's a process of thinking about the Word and meditating on the Word. As the old Puritans would say, chewing the cut of the Word, engaging it with my affections and my will and my mind and my soul and then putting it into practice to form habits of godliness. Now the Puritans did so much with meditation I can't possibly expound that to you in a brief compass of time. But I'm just going to summarize it for you in five minutes. Because we've lost the art of meditation.

We ministers know how to do it a bit, because we prepare sermons every week. Our people probably don't know how to do it at all. But for the Puritans, it was a daily art, a daily exercise. I once had to do a talk on the Puritan art of meditation and I knew one book a Puritan wrote a meditation well by the time I was done with the study which ended up taking me the whole summer is I found 41 books 40 of them out of print that the Puritans had written entire books ranging from 200 to 500 pages each on how to meditate And it's just phenomenal how they train themselves to meditate on the Word of God But basically here's how they did it. They used a seven-step process and they almost all agreed on the process.

Number one, you ask the Holy Spirit to help you. Number two, you then read some scriptures, usually in order, and you pick out a text or a topic or a doctrine in that section of scripture that you're going to meditate about. And the way to begin, they said, is to use relatively easy subjects to meditate on at the beginning. So you don't meditate the first day on the Trinity, but you might meditate on the sovereignty of God. Not that sovereignty is always easy subject, But you might meditate on one aspect of it, you see.

Now, if you're spiritually dejected, you would then meditate on Christ's willingness to receive sinners. If you're spiritually being desensitized to sin, you might meditate on the heinousness of sin. So you should also go by what you think your own soul needs as best you can determine it. If you're financially strapped, you might meditate on God's wonderful providences to those in need. So on.

So that's number two. Select your topic. Number three, you then memorize that selected verse or some aspect of the topic or subject. That stimulates your meditation, it strengthens your faith and it helps guide you as you go forward. And then number four, you fix your thoughts on that text or that topic and let everything you know about that topic come into your mind, sermons you've heard on it, books you've read, conversations you've had.

You go to nature, does nature tell you something about it? And you go to Scripture and you go to your own conscience. Puritans were fond of saying you ransack three books when you meditate. Book of nature, book of scripture, book of conscience. And then number five, you stir up your affections as you meditate.

You start thinking about how precious these things are. It stirs up your love, stirs up your hope, your desire, your courage, gratitude, zeal, joy. You do these things purposely, they said. Let the word be sweet in your mouth. They often quoted Ezekiel, who found the word sweeter than a honeycomb in his mouth.

Or Jeremiah, thy words were found and I did eat them, and thy word was to me the joy and rejoicing in my heart. Then number six, you stir up your soul to do your duty by some holy resolution or plan. So what you do is as your whole being is taken up with this subject, you then ask yourself, okay, I've been meditating now for 10 minutes about sin and I see its dastardliness. I see how it's just spiritual insanity. It's a heinous thing to sin against the Savior.

It's done everything good for me and I do everything ill to him. What can I resolve now? And maybe a resolution for that day will be resolved. With God's help To put every sin to death, every known sin to death, as soon as it enters into my mind. Put the sword through it.

And then you might make a resolution. Two or three ways that might help you to do that. Maybe if you have trouble with the lust of the eyes, you make a resolution. I will turn away my eyes from every evil thing, like Job said. But you make a resolution.

What are you going to do with that meditation? Just like you should do with every sermon, the Puritans said. The Puritans believed that sermons should not just be spoken, but they should be done. There's an old famous Puritan story of a guy who comes home a little bit earlier than usual. Preacher was a little bit short-winded.

And yes, Puritans could be a little short-winded once in a while. And his wife is at home. She's sick, and she hears the back door open and she cries out to Donald is that you already is the sermon done already oh it's me dear he says but it's the sermon is not done it's been spoken but has yet to be done and that's how they felt about meditation How is your meditation this morning going to change your life today? What's your resolution? Edmund Calome, one of the Puritans who has a whole book on this said, if ever you would get good by the practice of meditation, you must come down to particulars.

You must so meditate of Christ as to apply him to your soul, so meditate of heaven as to apply heaven to your soul, so meditate of sin to apply the heinousness of sin to your soul. And then number seven, you conclude with prayer, making sure you have thanksgiving in that prayer, thanking God for helping you to meditate, and psalm singing. Interesting, the Puritans almost always closed their meditation with psalm singing. They said what you sing lasts longer on your memory bank, so as you go into your day you can remember the words of the song, the God-centered psalm, and that would help you throughout the day. George Swinak, the Puritan said, meditation is the best beginning of prayer and prayer is the best conclusion of meditation.

And Joseph Hall said, the heart and voice lifted up to God in singing some verse or two of David's Psalms, one that answers to our disposition and the matter of our meditation will close up the heart with much sweetness and contentment and enable us to go through the day meditating on the things of God. So the point here is that Ezekiel must meditate on these things. He must eat them. He must digest the message before he can deliver the message. Greenhill said, when ministers and messengers of God have eaten and digested the truths of God, then they are fit to go out and preach them to the people of God.

So preachers are less like chefs who prepare meals for other people than they are like nursing mothers. Greenhill put it this way, if a mother does not eat and digest her food, she will not have nutritious milk to feed her baby. Soul preachers must eat the word to preach the word. And the more you wives are like them in that way, and the more you can communicate about living in the word, and living on the word, and living out of the word, living through the word, living by the word, the better your marriage will be, the more effective your ministry will be and the more you together will eat of the good things of God So devote yourself as pastor and pastor's wife to prayer and to the ministry of the word, especially to Jesus Christ. Preaching him.

Sinclair Ferguson used to say to us at Westminster Seminary, my alma mater, brothers, spend the best energy of your life preparing how to preach Jesus Christ and then preach him with heart and soul and mind, with theological grandeur and with practical application. The old Scottish Divine Samuel Rutherford used to say this, my two favorite things in this world are communing with Christ and secondly preaching him. Give yourself to this noble work until the day comes when the master will say to you, well done good and faithful servant, enter thou into the joy of thy Lord. Let's pray. Great God of heaven, we thank thee for thy blessing given to Ezekiel in a very hostile situation, to teach him how to eat the word and live in the word, so that the word would be his strength for all that was to come upon him.

And we do pray, Lord, that that word may truly enliven us and that our lives would be transcripts of our sermons and our sermons would be transcripts of thy word. Help us to eat, drink, sleep, think, dream of thy word. Let it become part and parcel of us. Let us truly be VDM, ministers of the word, in all that we do say and think. And to that end, Lord, help us to chop off all those parts of our lives that don't seem to touch upon thy word in any way, things that would distract us, even legitimate things, so that we can be truly men of the word, making mention of nothing but Jesus Christ and him crucified.

So bless us now and bless the furtherance of this conference. We pray in Jesus' name. Amen. Amen.