In this sermon, Scott Brown discusses Ezra's method of preaching as seen in Nehemiah chapter 8. Ezra preached at the Watergate, symbolizing cleansing and purity. He taught the whole people, not just special age and gender segments, and brought a lengthy exposition of the law. Ezra stood on a wooden platform, exalted God, and had many men help him explain the law. The preaching led to the people understanding and rejoicing greatly. The next day, Ezra called a meeting of the heads of the fathers' households to further instruct them in the law. This method of preaching emphasizes the authority of the Word of God and the importance of joyful obedience.

Please turn in your Bibles to Nehemiah chapter 8. We began yesterday in the last session of the day a profile of a great preacher Ezra. We talked about Ezra the man, and now we are going to talk about Ezra the method. We'll see his method, and let's read about that method in Nehemiah chapter 8. So let's read.

When the seventh month came the children of Israel were in their cities. Now all the people gathered together as one man in the open square that was in front of the Watergate and they told Ezra the scribe to bring the book of the law of Moses which the Lord had commanded Israel so Ezra the priest brought the law before the assembly of men and women and all who could hear with understanding on the first day of the seventh month. Then he read from it in the open square that was in front of the Watergate from morning until midday before the men and women and those who could understand and the ears of all the people were attentive to the book of the law. So Ezra the scribe stood on a platform of wood which they had made for the purpose and beside him at his right hand stood Mathathiah, Shema, Ananias, Urijah, Hilkiah, and Messiah and at his left hand Padiah, Mishael, Malchaiah, Hashum, Hashbadanah, Zechariah, and Mishulim. And Ezra opened the book in the sight of all the people for he was standing above all the people and when he opened it all the people stood up and Ezra blessed the Lord the great God then all the people answered Amen Amen While lifting up their hands and bowed their heads and worshiped the Lord with their faces on the ground.

Also, Jashua, Bani, Sherabiah, Jamin, Jacob, Shabbethai, Hudijah, Messiah, Kelita, Azariah, Jazabad, Hanan, Pellaiah, and the Levites helped the people to understand the law, and the people stood in their place. So they read distinctly from the book in the law of God and they gave the sense and helped them to understand the reading. And Nehemiah who is the governor, Ezra the priest and scribe, and all the Levites who taught the people said to all the people, this day is holy to the Lord your God. Do not mourn or weep. For the people wept when they heard the words of the law.

Then he said to them, Go your way, eat of the fat, drink of the sweet, and send portions to those for whom nothing has been prepared. For this day is holy to the Lord. Do not sorrow, for the joy of the Lord is your strength." So the Levites quieted all the people saying, be still for the day is holy. Do not be grieved. And all the people went their way to eat and drink, to send portions and rejoice greatly because they understood the words that were declared to them.

Now on the second day, the heads of the fathers' houses of all the people with the priests and Levites were gathered to Ezra the scribe in order to understand the words of the law. And they found, written in the law, which the Lord had commanded by Moses that the children of Israel should dwell in booths during the feast of the seventh month and that they should announce and proclaim in all their cities and in Jerusalem saying go out to the mountain and bring olive branches, branches of oil trees, myrtle branches, palm branches, and branches of leafy trees to make booths as it is written. Then the people went out and brought them and made themselves booths, each one on the roof of his house and on their courtyards or the courts of the house of God and in the open square of the gate of Ephraim. So the whole assembly of those who had returned from the captivity made booths and they sat under the booths. For since the days of Joshua the son of Nun until the day of the children of Israel it had not been done so and there was very great gladness also day by day from the first day until the last day he read from the book of the law of God and they kept the feast seven days and on the eighth day there was a sacred assembly according to the prescribed manner Let's ask for God's help in understanding what we just read here.

Lord, we do cry out to you again for understanding. Pray that you would make our hearts hungry for this and that you would help me to speak of it correctly, but that you, Lord, would send your spirit to minister to us and to help us and to bring forth fruit that lasts from these beautiful words. Amen. So we have seen the man, he came up from Babylon, he was gifted by God to understand and communicate, his heart was prepared, he sought the law of God, he determined to obey the law of God, and he worked to teach the statutes and the ordinances. And now we turn to Ezra's method.

Ezra was a priest, a great-grandson of Aaron, and so are we, a kingdom of priests, a royal priesthood and a holy nation, a people for God's own possession, and we stand in His line through the Lord Jesus Christ. And because of our relationship with Him, we can learn from Him as an ancient older brother. Thanks be to God for the provision of so many brothers like this who have gone before us. And though he is dead, he can add value to our account. He is going to make a deposit now into our souls that we would understand method.

So let's speak of the method. Now, this method that we see before us is in an amazing context. Here's another place that you would have loved to have been, loved to have seen this. 42, 360 people are gathered in front of this pulpit, and it was the first day of the seventh month, it was the first day of the Feast of Trumpets, it was the Sabbath, it was a holy Convocation. What was the method?

Number one, he brought out the law before the assembly. Verse 2, so Ezra the priest brought the law before the assembly of men and women and all who could hear with understanding. Now, it strikes me that this takes place at the Watergate. Water in Scripture symbolizes cleansing and purity, the cleansing of Christ's love toward his people. He washes us with the water of the Word, and there at the Watergate we are going to hear the sound of many waters coming upon the people.

It was the voice of Jesus Christ coming off of that great pulpit that was built. The sound of many waters was heard that day. They brought the law of God. This is a very dramatic scene. It's very carefully worded, and they brought it out in a careful manner.

Now if you tour the churches that were established in the colonial era in America, you'll find that the Word of God was in the center, either on a table in the center of the church or on the pulpit, with the baptistry on the left and the communion service on the right. Often the pulpits in colonial period were built far above the people. In fact, I was in Old North Church some years ago with a number of people and I was there with a number of men, and a man had his children up in the pulpit, and I was down taking a picture, and I realized that one of his little children was crawling off the pulpit and was gonna fall 20 to 25 feet. So I snapped a picture and shrieked and I got the picture of this child getting ready to go over the edge. He grabbed his son and pulled him back.

These pulpits were high up above the people. It was to proclaim that the Word of God was preeminent. Notice the reaction, all the people were gathered, they were unified as one man. I love that phrase, one man. Would that God would give us this kind of gathering tomorrow morning as we gather, that there would be one man gathered, hungry, desiring Almighty God, not proud, understanding their sinfulness, bathed in the blood of the Lord Jesus Christ, ready to give everything to Almighty God.

Oh, that God would give us that tomorrow as we gather on the Sabbath. The ears of the people were attentive. Verse 3, you know, how do people come in to approach the Word of God today? We just saw how they came here. They were attentive, they were ready, they were as one man, but often it's so true in casual America.

People come in to the people of God, they've got their coffee cups, they're in their sweatpants, they're jiving, joking around. That's how so many come into the assembly. It's quite different than what we see here. Preaching and picnicking are not the same thing. We find this gathering of a solemn assembly.

So the first thing we see is he brought out the law of God before the assembly. This is his technique. He brought out the law of God, and that's the first thing that we must do. Number two, he taught the whole people, not just special age and gender segments. Verse two, this was not a crowd like our modern segregated educational system in the public school and the church.

It was nothing like that at all. There were not only men, there were not only women, there were not only adults, but all who could understand. Derek Kidner in his commentary on Nehemiah says this, the law had always envisaged a wise and understanding people, taught from childhood not only the words of God, but what words and rituals meant. Mindless superstition was the mark of paganism. They did not understand.

And that had been the downfall of apostate Israel. My people are destroyed by lack of knowledge." Kidner just acknowledges that Hebrew education was age and gender integrated. We often go to Romania and we find that the men are on one side and the women are on the other. Where did that come from? This seems to be a mixed gender and age crowd.

Matthew Henry says, I'm commenting on Nehemiah 8, masters of families should bring their families with them to the public worship of God. Women and children have souls to save, and they are therefore concerned to acquaint themselves with the Word of God and attend on the means of knowledge and grace. Little ones, as they come to the exercise of reason, must be trained up in the exercises of religion." Martin Luther had very strong feelings about including children in preaching. He says, "...I have all my eyes on the servant maids and the children, and if the learned men are not well pleased with what they hear, well the door is one. In other words, I'm going to speak to the children and I'm going to speak to the ignorant and if you smart guys out there don't like it there's the door that's what Luther was saying the door is one it's right over there you can get out of here right now I am going to speak in plain language to all people so that they can understand Lloyd-Jones was the same way Lloyd-Jones says The wise preacher keeps his eye on the simple and the children.

He condemns himself, And if he walks out, well, he is the loser. He's talking about those who are high and mighty. They want something urbane, they want something sophisticated, and they can't stand to hear the language that even a child can understand in the worship service of Almighty God. Well, he taught the whole people, not just special age and gender segments, verse 2. The third thing that he did in terms of method was he brought a lengthy exposition, verse 3.

He brought a lengthy exposition. Then he read from it in the open square in front of the water grate from morning until midday. How many hours was that? Several hours, we know that. This was probably a four to seven hour reading-based Bible conference.

These were not sermonettes for Christianettes. This was lengthy and it was careful. When I was in seminary, they encouraged us to have 20 to 22-minute sermons and definitely no more than 30. And they said to us so many times, most of you brothers are 20 minute men. Now of course there are some like the MacArthurs, the Lloyd-Jones, the Spurgeons who could go on and on, but not you brothers.

So we believe that and many of us still do believe it. In fact, I was speaking with somebody here earlier who was talking to an executive at Sermon Audio telling him several years ago that the average sermon on sermon audio was 17 minutes. That's staggering to me, but whatever it really is, the short sermon is in vogue today. We know that and we've experienced it. How much of the Pentateuch did they read?

Now I know that you cannot read the Pentateuch in four to eight hours. I know you can't do it. A few years ago we gathered the men of our church together in this building to read the book of Genesis, and it took us about six hours. Just Genesis. So they didn't read every single word of the Pentateuch, but they did spend this tremendous amount of time in it.

The emphasis here is their devotion and attentiveness and understanding. The understanding of the people as mentioned in verse 2, verse 3, 7, 8, and 12. That is really what he's trying to get at here, not how many words exactly the Pentateuch were being read, but it was that they understood. Now what we see here is that the message of the Word of God is not confined to the temple, but it's also in the public square. That's another thing we learn about method.

The Word of God is preached in a number of different venues. So the third thing that we see is He brought a lengthy exposition. This is method. The fourth matter of method is that he stood on the wooden platform, verse 4. So Ezra the scribe stood on a platform of wood which they had made for that purpose.

So picture this large platform. He was in a position of authority, it was a sizable platform. It could hold six men on his right and seven men on his left and there were 13 other interpreters that he mentions later. Were they on the platform at some point? I don't know, probably.

Let's just say it was a big platform. There were a number of people on it. This is one of the places that the church has gone to find the pattern for the platform and the pulpit. Did you ever wonder where that came from? This is one of the places that we go to get that idea.

This is why when you go to churches that were built in the Reformation period, the Puritan era, or the colonial era of America, you have these elaborate pulpits that are placed high above the people. This is intentional, and it's not really about a man-ward power grab either. It's about the authority of the Word of God that stands over all the people. That's what they're trying to get at. It's funny, you go to some of these churches, you think, how high does it have to be?

They build them way up in the sky. Some of them are only at head high level, and some though are 20 feet up. It's absolutely remarkable. But it was to establish in everyone's mind the authority of the Word of God and the submission that God calls his people to demonstrate. When I was a young senior pastor of age 26, a single man in California, it was popular to think that pulpits were bad.

Pulpits are bad. They separate you from the people. It was desired at that time, and of course there's good motive for this, to be more relational, to be one of the boys, to communicate in a collegial counseling way. It wasn't so much preaching that was valued, but it was more a therapy. Let's get eye to eye.

Well, of course, we want to be eye to eye. We do want to be therapeutic. We do want to be real. We don't want to be as if we're someone necessarily different. We don't want to be that.

I recall there was a beautiful pulpit that was built by an individual at the founding of this church 20 years before I showed up as their pastor, and I was advocating that we not use that pulpit. Let me tell you, this was a more difficult thing than you might imagine. Of all the mistakes that I've made as a pastor, This would be counted as one of them. When you are 26 or 36 or 46 and 56, there will be things that you will see through a glass darkly, even regarding brick and mortar and wood and pulpits, everything like that. But the Word of God here does present a situation, the godly situation in which there is a platform and a pulpit where the Word of God is lifted high.

Let's just say that. It was there to establish authority. I was reading an author last week, he said the pulpit has five aspects to it. And this really grasps, I think, this solemn occasion that's here. It's a place of dread, it's a place of worship, it's a place of eternal significance, It's a place for the glory of God alone.

It's a place for the privilegedness and the set-apart. This author speaks of the dreaded place of the pulpit. He says preaching is not just morally edifying speech. It's not a pep rally to excite listeners a day or two of penitential service. It's taking the dominion of God, placing it within the deepest reaches of the soul of those he's ministering to.

It's screwing the truth into men's minds in such a way to enthrall the heart with Jesus Christ. Preaching is a spiritual infection which ought to impregnate the hero with the life of God in Christ." That was kind of the tenor of this grand time that we find here. It's interesting, Spurgeon, when he was at Park Street, had a wooden pulpit, but when he moved to the Metropolitan Tabernacle, they did not have a pulpit there. Some would just suggest a pulpit has practical value. It centers the attention on the preaching.

It makes the delivery easier. It confines the preacher, and it gives everything a more convenient place to, you know, rest notes and things like that. There was a wooden platform. He stood on a wooden platform. That was his method.

Number five, the next element of his method, he exalted God, verse six. And Ezra blessed the Lord, the great God. Then all the people answered, Amen! Amen! And they lifted their hands and then they went down on their faces in praise.

What a dramatic thing. You've seen the wave. I just picture that. There was this Amen! Amen!

And for some reason, God had put into their hearts and they went down and they had their faces in the dust, just like Jonathan Edwards did in the scene that was played just a few minutes ago. They had these men there. They were helping the people understand the law. Preaching should contain an outpouring of happiness toward God as was here. John Piper calls us expository exaltation.

And if we would not bring the beauty and the praise of God into our messages, we've not preached the Word of God. If we do not exalt the King of Kings as He is in all of His beauty as best we can, to be there praising Him with every word, What have we done? We must be praising Him constantly in our teaching of the Word of God. Lifting up in joy of this great God. So He exalted God, verse 6.

Then the sixth element of His method, He had many men to help Him explain. Verse 7, Joshua, Bani, Cherubiah, and all these others, There are 13 of them listed. Maybe we would call them the teaching priests. If they were Presbyterians, they would probably call them the teaching elders, but they were the teaching priests. They were out there among the people.

I love this picture because you have a scene of men in combat with Almighty God, doing business with the Word of God. The men of the church there, the deacons, the elders, all of the men wanting to communicate the Word of God. You have these 13 men that are set aside. What a blessing it is to have men doing this. The ministry of the Word of God should be a collaborative, shared ministry, And we should constantly be giving it away and giving men responsibility for it and facilitating this kind of thing among men.

How do you do this? First, by preaching the Word of God in your church so that there's a love for it. Secondly, by encouraging facilitating men to be family shepherds, family expositors, Bible expositors in the home. When you have men who are expositing scripture in the home, you'll have more men rising up to teach it to the people. I know that's true.

I've seen that. I know it happens. My counsel to pastors is, brothers, if you can get family worship rolling, you will see leaders, you will see teachers like you've never seen them before. Throw away anything in the program that gets in the way of that, because they'll rise up and you'll have teachers like you've never seen before. It is the method that was practiced here in ancient Israel.

Number seven, in his method, he read the Word of God, verse 8. So they read distinctly from the book in the Law of God. Paul says to Timothy in 1 Timothy 4 13, give attention to the reading of Scripture. Matthew Henry says this, When ministers go into the pulpit, they should take their Bibles. That's what they did.

They brought the scroll of the Word of God. The word for reading in verse 8 is the same word that describes the preaching of Jonah. There was passion, there was conviction here. This wasn't a deadpan recitation. It was more like that animated recitation of Scripture that we saw on the screen earlier.

It was a beautiful reading of Scripture. It perhaps included other things as well. But it wasn't just word-by-word mind-numbing, just, you know, cranking through the text sort of exegesis. No way! God forbid that we would do that to people!

And that's not what they did here. And obviously was anointed, because the people responded in such a beautiful way. So, they read the Word of God, number eight. They gave the sense. He explained it.

In other words, he made commentary about it. He made it clearer. You didn't just take the bare words. It's right that we read the word, but we don't stop there. God has not just told us to read this.

He's told us to give the sense of it. In God's providence, this is the way He wants it done, and He wants men to do it, so they should do it. They should take up the mantle and do it, and explain it the best they can. For some reason, God has desired that men would grapple with it in their own soul, wrestle with it, be convicted by it, and then give it out. This is just the way that God has designed for we creatures to operate in the church.

So he explained it, and six times it says they understood it. They understood the reading. And then number nine in his technique, Nehemiah and Ezra and the Levites encouraged the people. There's this force of encouragement that was coming off the platform from everybody, from Nehemiah, Ezra, and the Levites. They were all out there encouraging the people, and it says that they rejoiced because they understood.

And all the people went their way to eat and drink. They went out with joy. It says here that they rejoice greatly, not slightly. Oh, that God would give us that. When our meetings are concluded, that they go out greatly encouraged, greatly happy, not slightly at all.

This is a work of God. They say, The joy of the Lord is your strength. It's full of joyful passion. Matthew Henry says, Holy joy will be the oil to the wheels of our obedience. Isn't that wonderful?

God does desire a happy people, and we as leaders of his church should help the people to be happy, because Almighty God desires his people to be going out with joy because the joy of the Lord is their strength. You think the Lord wants his people weak? Well, if there's no joy, they will be weak. God does not want a weak church, a joyless church at all. So number nine, Nehemiah and Ezra and the Levites encouraged them.

This was their method. They were encouraging joy in the people. Number 10, the next day Ezra called a meeting of the heads of the fathers households, verses 13 through 15. Now the second day, the heads of the fathers households of all the people with the priests and the Levites were gathered to Ezra the scribe in order to understand the words of the law. So you picture this?

They had this mass meeting with everyone. Then the next day they brought the fathers together to instruct the fathers so that they would do this work, and they further explained the Word of God to them in a smaller setting. This was their pattern. Speak to the heads. You see this all through Scripture.

There are many occasions where the heads of Israel are brought together, the fathers are brought, and they are instructed and they are told to go out and teach their families. And that's exactly what was happening here. It's not enough, it's not enough for the priests and the Levites to do the preaching. It's not enough for the set-aside pastors and teachers to do the teaching. It's not enough!

It never was enough and it never will be enough and because God has established that fathers would teach when they sit in their house, when they walk by the way, when they lie down, and when they rise up. That's what God has ordained. The teaching is deeper that way. It's spread out that way. It's repeated.

It's more memorable that way. How ridiculous it is to center the teaching ministry of the Church only to this pulpit. That's wrong. The teaching should be going on every day. We should help our men to do this.

There are a number of ways we can do that. How ridiculous it is and how completely unbiblical it is to think that the teaching ministry of the church is something that happens an hour a week or something like that. That's not the way that God intended it. Think of how broad and how deep the teaching can go when it's given by a father who's doing it in everyday life. He reaches a moment in time, a real life situation, and bam, the Word of God gets injected into it.

It becomes atheoretical. It's not theoretical at all. It's about life. It's about walking and talking and doing business, having relationships, marriages, friendships, time in the community. The Word of God ends up filling everything instead of just Sunday morning.

God desires something far more wonderful and far more effective. Now pastors should not think that their ministry rises or falls on their activity. It is very important, but it can fall when the lifestyle of fathers in the assembly are negligent and disobedient and they do not understand these things. And so they found in the law that Moses commanded the children of Israel to dwell in booths during the feast. And so what did they do?

This is really interesting to me. They read this, they said this is what they were doing at the end of the days of Joshua. We should do the same thing. And they replicate it. So they started building these booths on the tops of their houses, out in the square and the water gate, out in Ephraim's gate.

It sounds like they were building everywhere they could find a flat piece of something to build them on. They wanted to identify with godly things of the past. That's what it was. This wasn't a law that was being set up here. They were just doing something that was a pattern in Scripture out of faithfulness.

They desired to do what their godly fathers had done. That was all it was. I liken it a little bit to what we see in the book of Acts where the Apostle Paul takes a Nazarite vow. He's not saying everybody in the world has to take a Nazarite vow. He just wants to be faithful.

He's just doing what seems to be a faithful act before God and is led to do it. So they they did this, they lingered for seven days, they kept reading the Word of God for this seven-day period, and day by day from the first day until the last day, they had a second exodus, and they celebrated in booths, just like their forefathers. So here they lingered, they continued to study the Word of God. These means so remind me of another man in history more than 2, 000 years later, seemingly doing the same thing. It was September 29th, 1770, over 2, 000 years after this wooden platform was built for Ezra in Jerusalem.

It was on September 29th that George Whitefield headed to his next city. He was weary, he was sick, he didn't think he could go on and he went to the next city where he would find rest and sleep for the night and he came into the city intending to fall into his bed. And when he arrived, he found that a crowd had built a wooden platform. And there were thousands of people waiting for him to preach. And they begged him to preach.

He could barely walk. They say he could barely talk. He was so exhausted and sick. And yet they continued to beg him to preach. And so this pulpit was built.

Whitefield was 55 years old. He had worn himself out at the preaching of the gospel. He delivered over 18, 000 sermons and spoken to over 10 million people. He would get up in the morning, sometimes delivering his first message at five or six o'clock in the morning, and he would continue on through the week, and he would deliver a message, and people would come, and he would wrangle with them about their souls, either to comfort them or to urge them to be saved from this perverse generation. And they would come and they would just beat him to death, and he would just pour out his energy on these people.

And he had worn his body out at age 55, people said to him, you can't do this. And he said, I would rather wear out than rust out. That was his reply. So here he is in September 29, 1770, before this wooden pulpit that had been built. So he mounted the pulpit and he began to preach and it began to get dark and so they lit a candle and put it on the pulpit and he preached and he preached and he preached and finally nightfall came and then the candle went out and Whitfield went into his resting place that night and he laid down on his bed and by morning he was dead.

He preached his last sermon. The light had gone out of this candle that had been spent in delivering the thunder, the water, the fire, the hammer, the sword, which is the Word of God. He was like our brother Ezra who came out out of Babylon, who was skilled in the law of Moses, whose heart was prepared, who sought the law of the Lord, who determined to obey the law of God, who worked to teach the statutes and ordinances in Israel. He brought the law of God before the assembly. He taught the people of all age and gender segments.

He brought lengthy exposition. He stood on a wooden platform. He exalted God and he had men to help him explain. He read the Word of God. He explained it.

And like Nehemiah and Ezra and the Levites who went before him, he encouraged the people that the joy of the Lord was their strength. And he was one who believed what we speak with our lips. For the Word of God is living and powerful, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the division of soul and spirit, of joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and the intents of the heart. There is no creature hidden from his sight, but all things are naked and open to the eyes of him to whom we must give account." And this is why we must continue to preach the Word in season and out of season, in the square, in the pulpit, by the riverside, wherever God might put us, that we would be faithful to deliver what is true bread, what is pure water, and what will soothe our souls and all those who hear it. And that, brothers, is why we've gathered here in this place to praise God for this amazing book that He has given us, that we would be people of the book, that God would restore a people of the book in this land and raise them up in mighty fervor.

Let us not waste our lives. There will be a day when this candle will go out and we will be with the Lord. Let's redeem the time for the days are evil, dedicating ourselves to this precious testimony. Would you pray with me? Lord, we thank you for the many hours you provided for us here.

Please multiply your word by your spirit. We realize how weak and stupid we are, but how beautiful and how perfect you are, and how you are able to bring about life to dry bones. Let it be so. Amen. Of the Church and the Family to the Word of God and for more information about the National Center for Family Integrated Churches where you can search our online network to find family integrated churches in your area, log on to our website ncfic.org.

O-R-G.