In this sermon, Scott Brown discusses the need for expository preaching and the importance of restoring the moral authority of the Word of God in the church. He cites Ezra as a role model for preparing his heart to seek the law of the Lord and to do it and teach it to others. Brown believes that for a reformation to occur, Scripture must take center stage in church life, fathers must become Bible expositors, and churches must be reformed or planted without modern secular encumbrances. He also highlights the problem of the deplorable state of the church today and lists 15 unintended consequences of superficial preaching from John MacArthur's book. The goal is to raise up and pray for men like Ezra who will faithfully deliver the message of Scripture and restore the moral authority in the home, church, and society.

The following message, The Need of the Hour, was given at the Expository Preaching Workshop in Wake Forest, North Carolina in 2007. I would like for you to open up your Bibles to Ezra chapter 7. In this passage of Scriptures found a man that we would like to become like Ezra chapter 7 verse 10. We learn that Ezra was a skilled scribe in the law of Moses and there are particular things that are said of Him that we would desire to be accomplished as a result of our time here. God is kind to give us so many role models in Scripture to help us to understand how to make our way in the world.

And here He's given us Ezra. And there's a simple and very powerful statement that really forms the essence of what we desire here at this conference. It says in verse 10, for Ezra prepared his heart to seek the law of the Lord and to do it and to teach statutes and ordinances in Israel. And that lifestyle, that character quality that he had summed up in those three things that he did is central to the message of this conference. We desire to call one another to faithfully deliver the message of Scripture.

And I say that very carefully to call one another. I trust that I will go farther as a result of being together with you, that Andy and Dan and all the men who will be presenting, that this would also be a time of tremendous progress for us, that we would not stay where we are today. I think of how poorly, how slowly we move, I move, and how much I desire to move forward. And so I trust that that will happen with all of us today. The foundational doctrine that all these things are based upon is the doctrine of the sufficiency of Scripture.

And I like the way Doug Phillips likes to explain how to think about this in kind of a winsome way. He issues the Desert Island Challenge, and the Desert Island Challenge goes like this. If you were stuck on a desert island and all you had was the Bible, what would you do? What kind of life would you live? What kind of church would you have and what kind of home life?

What kind of government would you have if you only had the Bible? We issued this same call here in this conference here and to be dedicated like the skilled scribe in the law of Moses, Ezra, who prepared his heart to seek the law of the Lord and to do it and to teach statutes and ordinances in Israel. So the goal of our time together is to saturate ourselves and the people around us with the Word of Life. Oh, the words of life are so good, aren't they? How many times have you thought along with David, unless your law had been my delight, I would have perished in my affliction." I don't know how many thousands of times God has rescued my soul with His Word.

And so we're talking about such great things here. I'd like to introduce briefly those who are here with us. Of course, I'm Scott Brown. I'm an elder at Hope Baptist Church here in town. Andy Davis is right here.

Andy, if you could just let everybody know where you are here. Andy's the pastor at First Baptist in Durham and I'm going to embarrass Andy right now. So he's going to both smirk. He's going to reject this idea, but Andy's my favorite preacher. He really is.

So I'm so glad to have you here, Andy. Steven Brege, who is part of Hope Baptist, here and a student at Southeastern Seminary. And Jason Dome, my long-time co-laborer since he was a baby, who's also an elder at Hope Baptist. That was last year. Dan Horn, also a member of our church who's the president of Data Tech and a great resource for us.

I know you'll find great challenge and blessing from his teaching. Jonathan Sides is joining us and he's going to give a session that perhaps very, very few people in all of the body of Christ have ever had. It's a session on the expository reading of Scripture. Jonathan, where are you right here? Jonathan is a student at Duke University in the Philosophy Department there, and he's a member of our church.

Jonathan is going to challenge us to read Scripture and give it the voice that it was intended to have. Now, oh how far short. We all will always fall on that one. But what a wonderful objective to give scripture the voice that it was intended to have. So Jonathan's going to lead us in that.

So that's who will be with us presenting here this weekend. I would like for us now to bow before the Lord and seek His face for help now as we engage this time together. Let's pray. Oh Lord, I have rejoiced in Your testimonies. Your ways are pleasant ways, and all Your paths are peace.

Like David, Lord, our souls break with longing for Your judgments, Your testimonies. They are our delight. We meditate on them, Lord. We long for them. We trust in them.

We speak them. We desire to speak even more of them and to be bold with them, resting everything on them and not on our own imaginations. Lord, remember your word to your servants that we would remember your law. Oh, how I love your law. It is my meditation all the day.

How can a young man keep his way pure? By keeping it according to Your Word. And now, Lord, we desire this in our hearts and in our homes and in our communities, and let it be that we would be men full and trustful in all of it, in its fullness. In Jesus' name, Amen. Let me give you the outline of this presentation.

I have three main points. I'll tell you what they are now. The problem we have on our hands. I want to give you 15 unintended consequences for rejecting expository preaching from John MacArthur. Those are just taken from him.

And then I want to give you six profiles of men who brought the Word of God faithfully as ones that we can look to to help us know how to make our own way in the delivery of Holy Scripture. We do believe that the recovery of biblical preaching is the need of the hour in the church. I have a long title for this that helps you understand why and what. Wouldn't this be a good title for a Puritan book? Well, it's the title of this message, and that is The Restoration of Moral Authority in the home, the church, and the street through the careful, faithful, systematic, sequential expository preaching of the Word of God in the church and in the home.

And that really says it as well as is least is in my heart on the subject. I'd like to quote a great book that Stephen Lawson has written. We're going to give each of you a copy of it. It's called The Expository Genius of John Calvin. Here's what he says, The greatest seasons of church history, those eras of widespread Reformation and Great Awakening, have been those epochs in which God-fearing men took the inspired Word and unashamedly preached it in the power of the Holy Spirit.

As the pulpit goes, so goes the church. Thus, only a reformed pulpit will ultimately lead to a reformed church. In this hour, pastors must see their pulpits again, marked by sequential exposition, doctrinal clarity, and a sense of gravity regarding eternal matters. This, in my estimation, is the need of the hour. And for this reason, we so dearly need to raise up and pray for, nurture men like Ezra, men who are skilled as scribes in the law of Moses, who prepare their hearts to seek the law of the Lord and to do it and teach the statutes and ordinances to the church.

This is an extremely practical, extremely street-level issue. It can be understood by asking a number of questions And I'll only ask a couple of them, but one is, why is it that only 2% of the people in the church today have a biblical worldview? Why is that? The answer is, we have lost the Esra's in the church today, and we need to train them and raise them up in this generation. Why is it that people in the church have the same lifestyle features of those in the world who are not Christian?

And the reason is the lamp of the Word has gone out in the culture because it's gone out in the church first. Men in the church are afraid of speaking the Word of God. They're afraid of being dogmatic. Instead they should be what someone said, bulldogmatic, because that's exactly what the Bible is about all these things. Well, how about this question?

Where were the Todd Beamers at Virginia Tech two weeks ago? As you know, recently, 32 students at Virginia Tech were killed by a gunman. A few days after the tragedy, I was with a police officer, and it made me wonder after that conversation, where were the Todd Beamers at Virginia Tech? This police officer told me that down at the police department, the other police officers are absolutely dumbfounded that this could possibly happen. He said one or two motivated students could have sent this killer to flight or taken him down but everyone was either cowering or they were running away or they were jumping out a window while a 76 year old man was holding a door closed and instead of trying to stop him, these men, these police officers suggest that the gunman, had he been rushed, would have been stopped immediately.

And he remarked that, you know, there were no less than three bullets in each victim indicating that there was an unusual level of passivity among those who were in those classrooms and he had total control. He was, he noted that this kind of control of shot placement is only possible with a totally compliant, passive group of people. And he said the conversations down at the police department revolve around different issues. Here's that not one single young man rose up to oppose the gunman. That students were bailing out the back window, and they wondered down at the police department, where were the men, where were the real men in that room?

They were only serving themselves. That's what they're saying down at the department. They had no visible mental preparation for the protection of others. And you know, why did something like that happen? We could speak of the deplorable condition of manhood in this country today and the home and the entertainment and the church life that's producing you know feminized men in the world today.

We could comment on a college culture that coddles unprincipled self-centered you know cowering kind of students. They have no moral capacity to stop something bad. We could talk about the college itself that has no moral authority. It can't speak on issues without drawing a lawsuit and it promotes it. It promotes a moral-less society and it gets what it maybe not deserves but it certainly gets the fruit of it.

Consider that the reason is possibly that the students did not stop this is because they let immoral things happen all the time. They watch immoral and violent things all the time. And they're simply numb to it. And they don't have a sense of moral responsibility to do anything about it. These colleges, they nurture relativism they destroy students moral gyroscopes and they don't feel that they have a moral responsibility to confront evil.

Now I'm not saying that all these people who died were purposeful cowards at all. I think what I am saying is that they just happened to grow up in a culture that was cowardly and it was cowardly for a particular reason. It was perhaps, I think we would say it was not their fault, but the adults in their lives did not give them a sense of moral clarity. And there never was a thus saith the Lord. And because of that, they had no moral roadmap to protect anyone else except themselves.

Their self-esteem was so advanced that protecting women and children somehow died on the vine. And I would say that this is a picture of one reason why we so desperately need to restore the moral authority of God's Word in the church, because we need men like Ezra who seek the Lord and they seek the law of the Lord and they do it and they teach it and they teach it to the littlest ones, to the oldest ones so that they have a mental road map of preparation to do something when something bad is happening. I would just say that we should use this as a lesson to prepare ourselves to raise up a generation of sons who have a sense of moral authority. Not their own authority, but God's authority. Instead of raising children for a problem-free life, we need to raise astute, morally courageous sons who know how to do the right thing.

We need to raise boys like the boy David, you know, who was ready to take on wild beasts with his bare hands, so that when they grow up, they'll do what Todd Beamer did on 9-11. Now, I'll just have to confess, it's with fear and trembling I can even say these things. I wonder how I would have acted myself knowing how self-centered and self-preserving I am. I am a sinful, self-preserving human being. I resonate very much with my friend who wrote me, I hope I would be so courageous, but I fear that window might have been as inviting to me.

But let's be clear about why that is in any of us. The sense of moral authority, the sense of thus saith the Lord, is so diminished in the culture that our sons and daughters grow up in it and things like this end up happening. And It's the restoration of the authority of the Word of God. The voice of moral authority needs to be restored in the church. And we can restore it, but we must restore it in our hearts first, just like Ezra did, and then we must restore it by our acquiring wisdom with great energy, and then we restore it by teaching it.

And that's why we're here, to speak about the teaching of the Word of God, to raise up a moral consciousness that's founded in the gospel, not just moralism, but that is rooted in the deepest things of Holy Scripture. Now, I believe that if there's a Reformation to occur, there are at least three things that have to happen. And I do so believe the church needs to be reformed radically. Not in a small way, but radically and mightily. And here are three things that I believe must happen.

First, Scripture must take center stage in church life, and church leaders must become fiercely thorough and expository in their teaching. There are so many offensive things in Scripture. There are so many words that will offend your sensibilities and send everyone cowering. We must not allow those to go unrepeated. We must repeat them, embrace them, and then explain them with as much clarity as we can, but without our own motivations seeping into them to try to preserve our reputations or to to preserve our relationships, but that we would say, let God be true and let every man be a liar.

But we must put Scripture in center stage. Secondly, fathers must become Bible expositors, taking on the mantle of prophet, priest, and king as the heads of their households, delivering the whole counsel of God. It's really interesting. If you read the commands to fathers, The detail and the clarity is stunning. God has called fathers to do exactly the same thing as He has called preachers of the Word of God.

The Bible says, Now, many of you become teachers, and we should understand that there are particular responsibilities that are different than fathers. We have to understand the distinctions, but let's also acknowledge the amazing commands of fathers to teach really the whole counsel of God when they sit in their house, when they walk by the way, when they lie down, when they rise up. And thirdly, churches need to be reformed or planted that are free of many of the modern secular encumbrances that are plaguing the church today. We need a reformation like the one that took place in the 16th century. And that means that we ought to pray that God would raise up careful and faithful, anointed expositors of Holy Scripture who will take every part of it with humility and deliver it powerfully.

We need men who say, speak Lord, for your servant is listening. We need men who are skilled scribes in the law of Moses who've prepared their hearts to seek the law of the Lord and to do it and to teach the statutes and ordinances in Israel. Well, we have a problem on our hands and that problem is I'm gonna call it the deplorable state of the church today. Church life today is dominated by so many other priorities other than the careful exposition of the Word of God. And if you look at Scripture and look at the balanced life, it's overbalanced on the declaration of the truth of God.

Church leaders today seek a balanced church life, which really means that preaching becomes a sideshow. It's a condiment. It becomes parsley on the side of the plate. If faithful preaching ends up, it's roadkill. It's roadkill on the superhighway to church growth because there's so many other exciting and interesting things that people want to do.

They want their social needs met and all these other things, but the proclamation of the Word of God and the sanctification that comes from it is severely neglected. You look at the schedule of the modern church just broadly. I don't know any really much about your churches, but if you just look at the schedule broadly we must be forced to ask ourselves how much is dedicated to the proclamation and The instruction of the Word of God so that the people get the mind of God. It is the mind of God that matters the most. And the Bible makes it so clear that we get it not through socials, we get it through the preaching of the Word of God.

We cannot abandon preaching in the church. Preaching is a has-been. It's relegated to just a few minutes. Some churches demand 20-25 minutes for their preaching time. I just think that's absolutely unconscionable.

It doesn't reflect the priority of the Word of God. Instead of the Word of God, the Son of the church, it's a candle. Instead of the skyscraper of the church, it's like a mobile home. It's not towering in any sense. And that's why the modern churchgoer doesn't really even understand the Bible, because the modern churchgoer has been raised all his life on one sermon about a felt need after the next.

And the modern preacher goes to Proverbs one week and and then he goes to James the next and he bounces back to Song of Solomon and then shoots over to Ephesians. A verse here, a verse there, and the modern churchgoer ends up with nothing of the mind of God. The modern churchgoer has no sense of the whole counsel of God. It has a sense of sound bites from God, but not the whole counsel of God. And this is what the church so desperately needs.

The church looks just like the world. You know, when you have conditions like we have today, where the average person in the church statistically has the same behaviors in every category as the unbelievers. In the entertainment that they imbibe, in the divorce rates that they enjoy, in the lifestyles that they live, in the emotional life that they have, we're statistically indistinguishable from the world and the church. You know, survey after survey for at least a decade has proven this over and over again. I almost hate repeating it because it's so obvious.

It's been so obviously proven so many times. People claim to be converted and it only seems to be a mind game. They accept Christ, they walk an aisle, but they don't change. Their affections don't change. They don't change the television they watch.

They don't change the music they listen to. They don't change the way they use their time. And I just wonder if they've been transformed by Christ at all. Another problem that occurs in the modern church, and that is this, if you become a Christian and over a decade or two change your lifestyle, if you change your unchanging friends will begin to have a problem with you, Okay? It's not popular in the church to change.

It's more popular to stay the same, and that is such a massive contradiction to the gospel. We are people transformed by the renewing of our minds, And then it works out in every area of life or it's not the true gospel. Faith without works is dead. There is no live faith without change over time. With progressive holiness, with progressive sanctification, These things are just simply the result of a famine in the Word of God.

The church is very busy, but it's not very busy with the Word of God. It's busy with activities and outings and fellowship groups and all kinds of things that are very interesting and they need a lot of needs and they help with a lot of social questions. But this kind of church is not hungry for the Word of God. The Word of God is a side dish. It's not steak, it's garnish.

And the impact is doctrinal confusion. The impact is the breakdown of Christian culture in the homes and in the churches, where you do not have Christian culture, even in the churches today. Hey, that's what the statistics mean, by the way. If the church is indistinguishable from the world, it means this. It means that there is no Christian culture in the church.

I just hope that takes your breath away to think about that for a minute. And it does, I believe, arise from superficial preaching that does not carefully attempt to understand the text and to deliver the meaning of the text because there's so many other competing priorities for growth and things like that so that there is a famine in the Word of God, and those who preach it are shut up by their own embarrassments and their own motivations for building whatever they're trying to build. All of us understand how that works. Few people in the church know their Bibles anymore. Now, we have pretty comprehensively a church in which biblical preaching is absent.

I will say something that is so encouraging to me here though. When we first moved here 20 years ago, there really was perhaps one church in this entire area that was doing expository preaching. One. Because of the changes at Southeastern Seminary and the sending out of Bible Expositors, that is changing. That is so encouraging.

You know, God will use this mightily. He will use it mightily, and I'm so grateful for it. The men who are mounting that challenge there, I am just incredibly amazed at the fruitfulness of the work. It's a blessing. We should pray for the men who operate the seminaries in our land that they would successfully turn the hearts of their students toward the exposition of Scripture.

Fearless, joyful, happy exposition of Holy Scripture. I would like to give you 15 unintended consequences of the kind of preaching that we have today. This comes from John MacArthur's book, Preaching. It's an excellent book. If you're interested in expository preaching, I recommend that you buy it and read it.

It's very inspiring, incredibly clear, and helpful. Here's what MacArthur says are unintended negative consequences of the superficial brand of preaching that's rife in evangelicalism. First, it usurps the authority of God over the soul. And you know, who has a right to speak to the church? God Almighty has a right to speak.

And when men mess with the message to tone it, to fix it, to make it more palatable. They defy the authority of God. They usurp the authority of God. It's as serious as you might imagine it could be to try to usurp the authority of God and that's exactly what we do when we hold back the thunder and the lightning of the Word of God that's there in order to try to protect people's sensibilities or our own reputations or maybe even our own jobs. Secondly, it removes the lordship of Christ from the church.

You know, who is the head of the church? The Lord Jesus Christ is the head of the church, and so he ought to be allowed to speak. And he has arranged it so that he doesn't speak in voices over intercoms or in the heavens, but he uses mere men, he uses dust to speak, and the only hope for dust is that they would take the words and deliver the words as they are in their context, in the way that they were meant to be delivered. But when we look at the contemporary church, we see programs and methods that are the fruit of human invention. We see them as the offspring of opinion polls, neighborhood surveys, and other pragmatic artifices.

Church growth experts have rested control of the church away from the head, not ultimately, but temporarily. It hinders the work of the Holy Spirit. Number three, what is the instrument at work in the church? God's Word. And He uses His Word through His Spirit.

It's the Holy Spirit that illuminates. It's the Holy Spirit that guides into all truth, to help us to understand it in our thick-headed reasonings. And it's a hindrance of the Holy Spirit when we hold back what is there in the text. Number four, it demonstrates an appalling pride and a lack of submission. In the modern church, the Word of God is downplayed, the reproach of Christ is repudiated, and the offense of the gospel is eliminated.

And worship is tailored to make people feel good about themselves again, and to relate to it, to try to help somehow so that they would feel good about God somehow. Number five, it severs the preacher personally from the regular sanctifying grace of Scripture. When we jump around the Bible and pick out our own passages because we think we've got it figured out what the church needs. We end up severing ourselves from the sanctifying work of grace that we need so desperately. How many times if you preach expository, do you run across passages you do not want to preach.

You don't even like them the first time you read them. But then as you do read them, they take you by the heart and they change you and God drags you through the sanctification process, through those words that you never would have had if you were just bouncing around finding your own way trying to be as hip as you possibly can to try to figure out what the church needs to get down and come up with it yourself. I've done that so many times. God knows what His church needs and it is in His Word and it needs to be mined. It clouds the true depth and transcendence of our message and therefore cripples both corporate and personal worship.

It prevents the preacher from fully developing the mind of Christ. Number eight, it depreciates by example the spiritual duty and priority of personal Bible study. It prevents the preacher from being the voice of God on every issue of His time. It breeds a congregation that's weak and indifferent to the glory of God as their pastor is. You know, seeker-sensitive preaching fosters people who are consumed with their own well-being, And that's what you end up with when you try to have a church based on a neighborhood survey for what people want.

Number 11, it robs people of their only true source of help. This perhaps is one of the saddest things of it all from on a personal level in people's lives. Number 12, it encourages people to become indifferent to the Word of God and define authority. It lies to people about what they really need. It strips the pulpit of power and it puts the responsibility on the preacher to change people with his cleverness.

You know, we can't change anybody with our cleverness, with our humor, with our amazing insights. Who are we? Simon Magnus? Simon the Magnificent? Is that who we are?

No. No, we don't preach ourselves. We don't come with sleight of hand as Paul said in 2 Corinthians. We don't come to wow people to get them to change their hearts because we were so fantastic or super fantastic. I used to preach in a school where up above my head they had a sign that said Magnificent Me.

And I just absolutely was amazed and thankful to be out from under that. But we think somehow that that's how it happens, isn't it? If I could just be more magnificent. I used to think if I could just be funnier, if I could just be deeper, if I just prayed enough, God help me so that I could be better. But the responsibility for change is not by cleverness.

Oh, there's only one who can change sinners. There's only one who can cause a heart to melt before God. It's the Holy Spirit. And as we're preaching, we should be so aware of that prayerfully before the people actually praying for them that they would get it somehow in spite of us because that is how they will get it. We need men like Ezra skilled in the law of Moses, like Ezra, who prepared his heart to seek the law of the Lord and to do it and to teach statutes and ordinances in Israel.

We need men like Ezra who loved the text. Ezra was a scribe. He loved the text. He copied the text carefully. Every word.

I once knew a young man whose father made him copy the text of the Pentateuch before he turned 18. He said it absolutely changed his life. He wrote in his own hand. An hour a day his hand would just cramp for pain after writing all that time. He said it helped him so much.

This was Ezra. He poured over every word. The text, the text. What does the text say? What does it mean?

There's an evangelical scholar Walter Kaiser was giving a commencement address at Dallas Theological Seminary about six years ago or seven years ago And he said that a man when he preaches should always have his finger pointing in the text of Scripture. And that if he gestures with one hand, the other hand finger ought to be in the text. And if he raises both hands, his finger should go to the text as quickly as possible to get back to the text. It's the text that people need. One of the things you'll see in this book, The Expository Genius of John Calvin, 32 marks of his expository genius.

It's a great book on preaching. One of the things that Calvin did is he quickly swooped into the text. He would have short introductions and he would drive to the text as quickly as he could. He needed to get there, I think, because he realized how foolish and stupid he was, even though he was a magnificent thinker in every way, he wanted to get to the text. He needed the text.

He needed the words that were not his own. And so Walter Kaiser says, get to the text. Get to the texture of them. Get to the feelings that are loaded into them, the demands of them, the beauty, the joy that's in every word. You know, when you read Scripture, it can be read much better, so slowly, and just to savor each word, to hang on the word, each word, one after another, and then seeing how it all fits.

This is the beauty of memorizing scripture. It allows you to hang on a word and just stop and hang there and rejoice at the beauty and the goodness of what is there, so that you can say, if your law had not been my delight, I would have perished in my affliction without that word. That word saved me from my affliction. There are a number of boys here. I would just like to address you for a moment.

We are talking about the best things in life here. We are talking about swords. We're talking about the sword of the Spirit. We are talking about fire. Do any of you boys like fire?

The word is a fire. You know, the word is a hammer. We're talking about the very best things in life. I believe that every boy loves a hammer, and every boy loves fire, and every boy loves a sword for one reason. So that when he grows up, he has the same amazing love for the sword of the Spirit, the fire of the Word, and the hammer that rebuilds everything that's broken down.

And every man I trust would never lose his boyhood joy in the fire, in the hammer, and in the Word. Every time your boy loves a fire, you should praise him. Every time your boy loves a sword, you should help him and help him enjoy the sword, because there is a sword that cuts so beautifully. Somebody came to George Whitefield and said, you know, Mr. Whitefield, we would like to print your sermons.

And he said, well, that would be fine. But how do you put thunder and lightning on a piece of paper? That's what he said. And that's the power and the glory of the preached Word of God. Is that it can be like lightning in the human soul when the Holy Spirit is at work.

It can be like thunder that just shakes everything to the bone. And this is the desire of God for all of his men that they would take the thunder and the lightning the bread the water the light of the word and let it rip that is something that every boy can understand can't they Why is it that I've never met a boy that did not love fire or a sword? I think there's a reason. I really do. Where do we start?

Where do we start with preaching? Well, here's where we do not start with. We do not start with a thought. This is D. Martin Lloyd Jones in his book Preachers and Preaching.

We do not start with a thought, even though it be a right thought, a good thought. You do not start with that and then work out an address on that. God forbid that we would be men like that, men who would start in our own minds. You must not do that, because if you do, you will find that you will be tending to say the same thing each time. You will be repeating yourself endlessly.

If there were no other argument for expository preaching than this, to me, it would be sufficient in and of itself. It will preserve and guarantee variety and variation in your preaching. It will save you from repetition. And it will be a good thing for your people as well as for yourself. How dearly do we need men who do not start with their own thought, men like Ezra who's a scribe in the law of Moses, men like Ezra who have prepared their hearts to seek the law of the Lord and to do it and to teach statutes and ordinances in Israel how much we need the heart of Ezra, the passion of him, to be a scribe, to take the time, to do the work, to mine the mind, to follow the vein to the gold, to beat your head against the text until you get it because we are so dull.

It often just doesn't come in an apparition. We must mine it because we are so dull. We have to take time in it to get it. Well, I'd like to give you six profiles of men who are this way. Let's start with Moses.

Moses, 1450 BC, Exodus chapter 3, we learn that Moses was called by God to say things. He was called by God to repeat God's words. Do you know that's what Moses did? He was just repeating God's words. That's all he was doing.

It got him in massive amounts of trouble. He was the meekest, most humble man who ever lived, Bible says. It made him a pariah, a thorn. He was the skunk of the garden party. But God said to Moses in chapter 3 verse 15, Thus you shall say to the children of Israel, Thus you shall say.

Thus you shall say. That's what preaching is. Hey, that's what fatherhood is. It stands in the place of prophet and priest and king and the family and says, Thus saith the Lord. A father stands up and he speaks for God.

Isn't that amazing? But he doesn't come up with his own message He doesn't have to go create it. He just goes and gets it and then delivers it. He's not a creator He's a deliverer. We're delivery boys just like Moses.

Thus you shall say to the children of Israel, Moses is a tremendous role model for all of us. How about Jonah? 850 BC, Jonah chapter 3. God comes to Jonah and He says, Proclaim the proclamation I am going to tell you. Proclaim the proclamation I'm going to tell you.

That's the role of the preacher in the world. We know Jonah had a cold heart, but he had the message of God. God can even use a cold-hearted messenger. That's hard to think about, isn't it? But that's true.

God uses sinners, but if they use His Word, it will not return void. It will accomplish what it was intended. The Word of God is it. This is why we must memorize it. You know, I went down to visit a young man in prison two days ago, and I didn't have a Bible with me, and I was talking with him in front of the camera.

You know, you speak over a video camera. And I was so grateful for whatever scripture I had memorized, because I was able to just speak the things that I knew. I didn't know what to say to this man. He was so reprobate. He was so rebellious.

He was so proud. It was everywhere. It was just oozing out of him. It just seemed like demons had just covered him up with pride and it was destroying his life and I had nothing. I said, I said, brother I have nothing to give to you except this the words of the Lord Jesus Christ every word of Scripture is a word of Christ every single word every phrase every jot or tittle is a word of the Lord Jesus.

And I was able to sit there in my seat and just try and ask God to help me to remember something from His word that would not return void. Jonah was like that. He had a word from God and he spoke it and the results were absolutely stunning. God issued a directive, he delivered it, he cried out and the consequences were astonishing. If you think that you're too sinful to deliver the Word of God, think again.

Ezra, we've been talking about him. The Lord Jesus Christ, he began his ministry teaching. He opened their minds to understand the Scriptures regarding all the things that were written about him in the Law of Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms. He then turned to his disciples and he said, teach, go into all the nations and teach them everything that I have commanded. And then in the early church we see them devoting themselves to the Apostles teaching.

Again, it's instruction, it's teaching. This is the way that God transforms His people. It's the primary way that He transforms His people. We take the Apostle Paul. It's interesting this Sunday, we are in Acts 20 verse 17 through 21.

It's amazing that we were just falling on this passage of Scripture where Paul says, I kept back nothing that was helpful but proclaimed it to you and taught you publicly and from house to house testifying to both Jews and Greeks repentance toward God and faith toward the Lord Jesus Christ. He said, I've not shunned to declare to you the whole counsel of God. He said, I commend you to God and the word of his grace. The Apostle Paul was that kind of man. He was delivering the words of God.

Now Let's fast forward 1, 500 years. We'll pick up John Calvin in Geneva. The year is 1560. When Mary Tudor became Queen of England in 1553, she made it her aim to destroy the Reformation and to reinstate Roman Catholicism. She showed no signs of compromise.

She was burning Protestants at the stake. This era is known as the Marian exile. Hundreds of English scholars left England with little hope of ever seeing their homes again. And where did many of them go? They went to a little town called Geneva.

And in Geneva, four simple things took place that absolutely shook the world and I do believe that the Reformation that took place in Geneva the elements of it the heartbeat of it at least should be taking place today because the heartbeat of it was the exposition of Holy Scripture and the Reformation of the church by it. Four things happened. A church was reformed. Fifteen English families settled in Geneva and it formed a momentous church. This church was an atom bomb in the history of Christianity.

Geneva was a refuge of persecuted Christians. Mary and Philip were persecuting the church and John Calvin took the people under his wing and encouraged them. And God used this exodus to advance the Reformation. Here were some of the members of this church. John Knox, Miles Coverdale, the brilliant scholar who translated the Bible.

John Fox, the author of Fox's Book of Martyrs. Thomas Sampson. God brought together in Geneva in this very short period of time, a number of men. So the first thing that happened in Geneva was a church was planted by 15 families, and it was reformed according to the Word of God. Secondly, a Bible was translated.

It was the Geneva Bible. This is a 1615 copy of the Geneva Bible here. The English rendering of this Bible was substantially based on William Tyndale's translation. At least 90% of it was right out of Tyndale. It was the first.

It underwent 200 printings. And with this Geneva Bible, the Reformation took off. It put God's Word in the tongue of the people, and it put it in their hands. It was the Bible of the pilgrims, and it was the most widely read and influential English Bible of the 16th and 17th centuries. James made it illegal to print this Bible after 1615, so many of the Bibles after 1559 were backdated, 1599.

This Bible here, 1615, was one of the last legal Geneva Bibles that was printed, and it was the first Bible with notes, the first Bible that stood on the mantles of English homes. It was the first time that there were verses and chapter divisions, and it was outlawed in 1616. This was the Bible that Shakespeare was taught with by his nanny. This is the Bible that shook Western civilization. By the mid-1600s, the average family was literate.

It was literate because of this Bible right here. This is what transformed English civilization. You can see how quickly civilization is destroyed, but you can also see how quickly it can be reformed and restored through what? Through the Bible. Thirdly, a pastor preached expositionally.

This, I believe, is the most significant thing that happened in Geneva. Calvin preached expositions of Scripture. Calvin was almost maniacal about exposition. He would not vary from the progressions that he was in. He would start in a book and finish it.

And at one point Calvin was banished from Geneva for three years and he was in Strasbourg for those three years. The city fathers invited him back in. It was still a terrible, horrible, divisive environment in Geneva. But he came back anyway because he felt like God would have him come back even though he was so bitterly hated. He was just severely abused in Geneva.

And he came back and he walks into the pulpit after three years and he opens up his Bible and puts his finger on the next verse that he ended with when he was there three years before. Calvin was an exegete and a biblical theologian of the first rank, says John Murray. The greatest and best theologian who has most accurately apprehended the meaning of the statements of Scripture, who by comparing and combining them has most fully and correctly brought out the whole mind of God on all the topics on which the Scriptures give us information who classifies and digests the truth of Scripture in the way best fitted to commend them to the apprehension and acceptance of men." If you've ever read Calvin, you know this is so true. He is so careful. It's actually very beautiful.

He is always careful to take into account the unity and the harmony of Scripture. His expositions are not therefore afflicted with the vice of expounding particular passages without respect to the teaching of Scripture elsewhere and without respect to the system of truth set forth in the Word of God. Upon our reading of the Institutes we shall immediately discover the profound sense of the majesty of God veneration of the Word of God and the jealous care for faithful exposition and systematization which were marked features of the author institutes are infused with warmth of godly fear. That is so true. God gave us a role model, a help, someone to help us move back closer to being on track with this whole thing.

Calvin and his expositions of scripture attacked the false teaching of the day. He attacked the false teaching in every area of life that was ruling and reigning as a result of the teaching of the Catholic Church. Doctrines of celibacy, godparents, childhood commitments to marriage, hundreds and hundreds of other false doctrines, which just became cultural practice as a result of syncretism in the church and a lack of preaching the word of God. People flooded, they flocked to Geneva. The population of Geneva went from 10, 000 to 20, 000 because people wanted to get in on the action, because they wanted their lives reformed, they realized they were trapped in their culture, and they had to get out somehow, and they believed that the exposition of Scripture was the way that they could make their way out, and many did, of course.

Many other things happened in Geneva, but the genius of Geneva was the doctrine of the sufficiency of Scripture. The last thing that happened in Geneva was a theological foundation was laid. Calvin's Institutes was written and underwent a number of revisions. Here's a copy of Calvin's Institutes. The language is beautiful.

Calvin's Institutes is theology. They did good theology. If we would do well in the church, we do good exposition and we take that exposition and we apply it to every area of life. Institutes is really four books. It follows the Apostles Creed.

I believe in God the Father. The first section is on God. The next section is on Jesus Christ. The next section is on the Holy Spirit. The next section is on the Church.

There's no better theological education than can be God in this book right here. So four things happened. A church was reformed and planted. A Bible was translated. In two years they translated this Bible, by the way.

Imagine the energy, imagine the passion for the word that existed in that church. Does that passion exist in your church? Does it exist in your heart? I pray that it... I see how it lacks so much in my heart, in my church, that I'm a part of.

But Would it be that we would be more like that than the way we are now? They translated a Bible, they preached expositorily, and they laid a theological foundation. And that is what we need to do today. So many things happened in this church. Foxe's Book of Martyrs, John Foxe was a member of this church.

This is a 1684 edition of Fox's Book of Martyrs. It's absolutely stunning. 3, 000 pages of detail that you'll never read anywhere else. John Fox set himself to document what was happening in the church. Next to the Bible, it was the most influential book printed in the 1500s.

The King James Bible was printed. I have a 1620 copy of the King James Bible here if you'd like to come look at it. Samuel Rutherford was a member of this church. He wrote a book called Lex Rex. Law is King.

The King is not law. There is a law over the King. This book here, Lex Rex, the copy that I have, 1644 edition, is a capital crime to carry this book until the 1690s. If you owned this book, it would mean your head. Rutherford died just before this book became illegal on pain of death, but there were those who died who carried this book.

It's a capital crime to preach the Word of God in Reformation, Geneva, and afterwards. It's a capital crime to preach the Word of God in some places. And I trust that it would not be a capital crime in our hearts, that we would so love ourselves and hate our brothers that we would not preach it as it is as best we can. So what is the need of the hour? The greatest need in any culture, in any era will always be the same.

And that is to bring the knowledge of Jesus Christ to mankind. And the way that God has determined to do this is to deliver His words, His phrases in the contexts in the books. And as amazing as it might seem, God has delegated to men the task of spreading His Word everywhere He goes. God has brought His Word so kindly in the texts of Scripture so that we might be able to read them carefully and go slowly enough with them so that we could perhaps understand them and then hide them in our hearts and then teach them diligently to our children when we sit in the house, when we walk by the way, when we lie down, when we rise up, or if God has appointed us as teachers in season and out of season to reprove, rebuke, and exhort with great patience and humility. And so God has brought His Word to man through the text of Scripture, and they are infallible, they are eternal, and they are sufficient for everything pertaining to life and godliness.

So I do pray that through our time together here in these next two days, that we would have a swelling heart toward becoming a skilled scribe in the law of Moses like Ezra who prepared his heart to seek the law of the Lord and to do it and to teach statutes and ordinances in Israel. Would you pray with me? Oh Lord, who is able to do this? You are able to do this in our hearts and in our churches and in our communities. And I pray that You would, Lord, work mightily in spite of the slowness and the dullness that exists in us.

Oh Lord, charge us to be faithful in all these things. In Jesus' name, Amen. You