In 2000, my sister, Joy Dyer, tried to pay for a purchase at a department store but could not make her hand write out a check. That was the first sign that something sinister was attacking her body. Almost one year later to the day, cancer took Joy’s life. The following article is taken from the upcoming book, Suffering with Joy, which is comprised of letters that were written out of a desire to walk with Joy, her husband, Dean, and their family and friends through this hard journey. My hope is that these letters will provide comfort and encouragement in Christ to other fellow sufferers who are walking a hard path.

Blessed is the man who endures temptation; for when he has been approved, he will receive the crown of life which the Lord has promised to those who love Him.

James 1:12

Joy had her first treatment of new chemotherapy on Monday. The side effects were hard on her. She was very sick Monday evening and night and unable to sleep at all until Tuesday afternoon. Her next treatment is scheduled for July 17. Continue to pray for Dean and Joy, specifically that this new treatment would eradicate the cancer cells and that the side effects would not be as difficult next time. Most importantly, pray that they will continue to experience God’s grace and strength to help them through this. Their faith remains intact. Despite the number and intensity of the assaults this ordeal keeps bringing against their faith, they continue to trust Christ. They are looking to God for strength day by day. In other words, they are fully engaged in what the apostle Paul calls the “fight of faith” (1 Tim. 6:12).

Our next Joy Verse comes from the same book as last week’s verse. James 1:12 says, “Blessed is the man who endures temptation; for when he has been approved, he will receive the crown of life which the Lord has promised to those who love Him.”

The word translated “temptation” is the same word translated in the plural as “trials” in verse 1:2. Trials become temptations to us because, when we go through them, we are often plagued with doubts about God’s goodness or sovereignty or wisdom. Such doubts are natural, and we might even say inevitable at points. But when doubts and questions give way to despair and unbelief, then we have moved from being tempted to actually sinning. While it is never right or helpful to fall into this kind of sin, it is easy to do.

Everyone who loves Joy and Dean is facing this temptation right now. Why has God let this happen? Why doesn’t He miraculously intervene? The simple truth is we do not have definitive, complete answers to these questions. So we must live by faith and trust God through this trial. The things we have learned about Him from His Word are still true. He is still good, sovereign, and wise. He does not make mistakes. Successfully resisting the urge to quit believing these truths during severe trials is what James means by “endur[ing] temptation.”

That person is truly blessed who lives through trial and does not give in to unbelief. Such endurance proves the genuineness of his or her faith. Real faith lasts. It doesn’t always soar on the wings of eagles. Sometimes it barely walks. But it never finally quits. 

What does real faith look like amid a severe trial? There is a great deal of confusion about this in our day. Some well-meaning but wrong-thinking Christians have taught that real faith will always be bright, almost happy-go-lucky, no matter what kind of trial it goes through. But this kind of superficial spirituality is foreign to the Bible. In the Old Testament, Job provides a great example of one whose faith was severely tried. He lost his family, his wealth, and his health. But he did not lose his faith. He faced his trial with genuine agony and sorrow. And at times he entertained serious doubts about God and looked like he was right on the brink of cursing God and turning away from Him. But in his weakness and brokenness, he persevered. And his faith was rewarded with a deeper knowledge of God. 

Real faith lasts. It doesn’t always soar on the wings of eagles. Sometimes it barely walks. But it never finally quits. 

An even better example is given to us in the Lord Jesus Christ. As He hung on the cross, dying in the place of sinners, He cried out, “My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?” (Matt. 27:46).He felt utterly abandoned by His Father and expressed His sorrow of heart in that cry. But even as He asked this question of His Father, He prefaced it with, “My God.” Jesus did not give up His confidence in God even at the point of feeling most forsaken by Him. 

So what did faith look like for Job in his trial? And what did it look like for Jesus on the cross? Glib, superficial pronouncements that all is well? No! Rather, in both cases real faith was demonstrated by what John Piper calls, “an uncursing hope in an unfelt God.”[1] For Job, the refusal to curse God, even when God seemed so uncaring, so distant, was faith. And for Jesus, the refusal to come down off the cross and to turn away from His planned death was faith. 

So for us, humble submission to God in steadfast hope may be the clearest demonstration of our faith when we are going through trials. James says such tested, proven faith will be rewarded with a crown of life, just as the Lord has promised. Like every reward that comes from God, this crown will not be given because we have deserved it. It is not because we have in any way earned it by our faith. Faith does not earn or merit God’s gifts; rather, it accesses them. 

The crown of life, which is eternal life with God in heaven, is given to everyone who loves God. We love Him because He first loved us. We trust Him because He has given us faith to believe. As we go through trials, we must fight to keep trusting Jesus Christ. We must remember all that God has done for us and is for us. And we must hope in God, knowing that a crown of life awaits us on the other side of the grave.

[1] John Piper, “We Do Not Lose Hope,” desiringGod.org, April 11, 1998, https://www.desiringgod.org/messages/we-do-not-lose-hope. Accessed April 19, 2024

It can be an inglorious task to say anything about the current generation. Some concepts that would have been considered “conventional wisdom” a few years ago and wouldn’t require a lot of explanation are now under scrutiny and being reframed in an impressive and frightening exercise of deconstructing ideas that we see today.

I want to reflect on something that seemed like commonplace knowledge not so long ago, but is now under this sort of re-signification, which is the respect for the elderly.

It seems that we live in a time when the elderly represent a way of thinking and doing things that no longer works in our society (and, to our astonishment, in some churches) and therefore it is necessary to distance oneself from them (or from us). My subject is brief and I want to deal with it in the context of the Christian faith, for my concern is with the state of the church, I mean, the state of those who professes faith in Jesus Christ.

A huge number of young people from the “Z” generation, that is, people born from 1995 and on, seem to be leading a relentless patrol to everything that stands in the way of the new ethics that the so-called “woke” movement established as the immutable clause of our society. This new ethics is comprehensive and incorporates practically all the ideas that have emerged from the progressive narratives of the last 25 years that give new guidelines on what it means to live well in society. The escalation of change in core values was very fast, and, it seems it started to be implemented even more aggressively after the 2020 pandemic. From areas related to the environment to complex issues in medicine, science, politics, sexuality, psychology and religion, in short, for everything there is a new norm that does not accept any discussion. Its imposition becomes violent, whether due to the cancellation culture, very strong in the press and social media environment, or, even more dangerous, as we see in Western governments, due to the creation of new bills and jurisprudence that criminalize public opinion and the discussion of ideas. Thinking in an old-fashioned way in the 2023 can be very dangerous and even get one arrested.

It is curious, however, that the method of this new ethics takes place through the fragmentation of truth, through the end of empiricism and common wisdom and through the use of broken narratives, disconnected of a metanarrative in favor of a broad pluralism. This has been called post-truth and means that each person or social group has its own truth and values, which can never be questioned.

It is very disconcerting to realize that this trend has infiltrated the Christian church as well. Many among God’s people are strongly influenced by this new post-truth ethics and begin to confuse Christian ethics with the new (and suffocating) ideas that regulate the life of Western society in this 21st century. Alisa Childers, American Christian author, addressed this issue in her moving testimony published in book form under the title Another Gospel? A response to progressive Christianity, and also in here more recent title, Live your Truth.

But I digress. Let me get back to the point. Elders are being canceled left and right and it is happening in the church too, right under our nose. So, let me first bring the biblical principle to tackle this issue.

The fifth commandment of the Decalogue, written by God’s own hand (and spoken before His people in the Sinai) says: “Honor your father and your mother, that your days may be long in the land that the Lord your God is giving you”. 

In this commandment, God’s people are called to love and obey their parents. A first and important element that must be highlighted is that the commandment is not addressed to children only, but to all who have living parents (Proverbs 19:26; 23:22). This commandment, in distinction from most commandments in the Decalogue, is put in positive terms and, furthermore, is bound up with a promise. The promise has to do with the effects of obedience. As we see in the wisdom books of the Bible, taking good advice from our parents, listening to and respecting our elders, dealing respectfully with authorities are generally attitudes that will prolong one’s days and make life easier. Add to this the fact that God himself promises to bless those who seek to keep the fifth commandment and preserve its spirit.

The expression “honor” comes from the Hebrew kabod and has a sense of weight, importance, glory and prestige. It is the respect that an inferior offers to a superior. The Westminster Larger Catechism, in question 126, proposes that the scope of the fifth commandment is the performance of those duties which we mutually owe in our several relations, as inferiors, superiors or equals.

The Reformers went even further and expanded the understanding of this commandment to all who are in authority over us—primarily and immediately our parents, but also the elderly, the magistrate, educators, and spiritual fathers. French reformer John Calvin, commenting on the fifth commandment, highlighted three expressions of honor—“reverence, obedience, and recognition”—and demonstrates how the principle of honoring parents can extend to all in position of authority: magistrates, elders, fathers in faith, pedagogues. In his elaboration, Calvin will condition this obedience to obedience “in the Lord” (Ephesians 6.1).

A very important point of the commandment is that honor, respect and consideration begin in the heart. Reverence for our parents and other authority figures should be a reflection and evidence of our honor and reverence for God in the first place.

Reverence for our parents and other authority figures should be a reflection and evidence of our honor and reverence for God in the first place.

We also read in Leviticus 19:32: “You shall stand up before the gray head and honor the face of an old man, and you shall fear your God: I am the Lord.” Proverbs 16:31 and 20:29 reinforce the teaching of Scripture that elders should be honored. This principle is there because normally the elderly are associated with maturity, experience, wisdom, and the accumulation of knowledge and a better sense of realism of life. In the Bible, the elderly are treated as a reservoir of tradition, of family history, as the living archive of a society that lives through oral tradition. 

The influence of the Christian faith in the world did a good job of carrying this principle of life forward. Societies that preserve the value of respecting their elders are usually prosperous and very well organized.

It must be said, however, that not every elderly person is wise and a model for others. We have examples of old men in Scripture who were involved in awful sins, and it is possible that some old men and women hold very immature standards or find themselves involved in ugly sins. Therefore, associating maturity with age can be a mistake. Nineteenth-century Austrian author Hugo Hoffmanstall, in his book The Book of Friends, said: “Precocious children and immature old men there are plenty in certain states in which the world sometimes finds itself.” The Portuguese poet Antero de Quental made a harsh comment to a foe of his, an already old man, saying: “I get up when Your Excellency’s white hair pass before me. But the mischievous brain that is underneath and the garish little things that come out of it, I confess, do not deserve my admiration….Futility in an old man disgusts me as much as injudiciousness in a child. Your Excellency needs fifty years less age or, then, more fifty years of reflection.”

But I perceive with concern a certain anti-elder movement in our days, and our evangelical camps are not immune to this attitude, on the contrary. The desire to remove the most experienced from the center of ideas and discussions is becoming stronger each day. The Internet is the space where this is most strongly manifested. Such an attitude is sometimes veiled, sometimes explicit; sometimes unnoticed, sometimes intentional; but it’s real.

Some, like Dr. John McArthur Jr., for example, have lived long enough to become subject of controversy, vicious attacks and harsh criticism from people within the Christian church. Men like R. C. Sproul, J. I. Packer, Wayne Grudem, John Piper, Voddie Bauchan to name a few of the “international” gospel ministers who have blessed the Christian church in their own country and whose influence reached thousands upon thousands in Brazil and elsewhere, are now under enormous scrutiny, suspicion and attacks of all kinds, some even targeting their character.

I guess, on the other hand, the older generation might acknowledge that at some point we might have lost the ability to speak up to this younger generation, reaching out to them with patience and grace. But this is another matter for a future article.

The point is that I have seen many young people (and others not so young, but with the very much in-tune with this new approach), seeking their place of speech, their platform and their role in teaching so they can show that they also have a voice, an opinion, an idea that needs to prevail. They want to make the case that they are sensitive to the new causes and demands that society places before the church and that they should be heard; but there is a problem: the old pastors, theologians and professors who have a distinguished position are still alive or, those who have died, still exert an uncomfortable influence. They need to be silenced. I feel in this attitude something similar to the young man who asked his father who was still alive “his share of the inheritance” (Luke 15.12).

Furthermore, it must be said that many of those who seek to occupy the spaces of the elderly still do not have much of a life experience, much church ground, so to say, and really much to offer. All they have is their opinion and their complaints. Their criticism mostly comes with the weight of hammer, seeking for validation and applause in through social media, but it’s all very acidic and very virtual, with little or no fruit.

It is not rare, however, that this tough stance and criticism towards the elderly, generated in the superficial environment of social media have their origin in people who possibly never had the opportunity to exchange a single word with their targets (who become slogans or an idea), never visited their homes, never been to their churches or talked to their church members, and who rarely read more than a few lines of their writings (probably just the excerpts that ended up on the internet) and, worse , their criticism reach people all sorts of people indistinctly, including many neophytes, who in the end will reproduce this procedure, in an endless loop, making everything very public, very ugly.

To mention a few familiar examples, I single out J. I. Packer, Martin Lloyd-Jones and Iain Murray (the latter still alive in his 90s), who rediscovered the Puritans in the 1940s and shed new light on the their teaching. R. C. Sproul defended biblical inerrancy in the 1970s, and vigorously emphasized the biblical teaching on justification by grace through faith alone and the holiness of God. John MacAthur Jr. rescued and defended the doctrine of the lordship of Christ in the Christian life in the 1980s. John Piper taught about the joy of life by faith and fellowship with Christ in the 1990s. Wayne Gruden emphasized the biblical teaching on the dignity both man and woman, bearers God’s image, each one having harmonious and complementary role defined by God in Revelation and in their very physical constitution. Tedd Tripp has helped thousands of people realize the importance of reaching our children’s hearts with the life-changing truth of God’s Word. Men such as Voddie Baucham who have stood up for marriage between a man and a woman and the importance of educating our children in the ways of the Lord. All these men suddenly became targets of cancelation, open criticism and controversy. 

Scripture exhorts us to be grateful for God’s gifts in life of the church and to acknowledge the benefits of grace in the lives of those who trod hard paths and broke down stones harder than ours. Our elders in the church are our fathers in the faith and worthy of our honor, that we stand before their gray hairs.

Our elders in the church are our fathers in the faith and worthy of our honor, that we stand before their gray hairs.

Many of our elders have their struggles, it is true, they have their blind spots, their areas of failure and contradictions. But the reality is that we all have them. After all, we are all outside the garden Eden. Our elders may have made mistakes in some of their emphases and even in certain omissions, but what we do is cover their nakedness (Genesis 9.23) and not expose them to public spectacle, cancellation and mockery.

It’s one thing to fight heresy, false teachers, charlatans of faith, impostors – and these are doing a lot of damage. But it is something else to expose men of God who may have failed at some point in their ministry to public reproach and the court of social media. And even the measurement of ministerial failures needs a very honest and judicious judgment, which ideally should happen in the covenantal end godly context of the local community and never in the few characters of social networks.

Brazilian writer Machado de Assis said in his tale  “Relíquias da Casa Velha” that “it is not enough to be right, one must know how to be right”. This is wise. It is a good principle that the Lord Jesus and his apostles taught. The purpose of discipline is to win the sinner and not to destroy him (Matt. 18:15). If we have to correct someone, let it be to win the person. If we have to prevent mistakes, let it be through propositional and preventive teaching. Let our exhortations, and admonitions be tempered with respect, consideration, and love, and let them take place within the safe space of the church ground through mature conversation of edification. Otherwise, we won’t have much more than the exposure of partial and sometimes biased opinions, which can stimulate hatred and prejudice to an indistinct public and without any condition to promote healthy changes. That’s not how we do things.

We are all called to honor the gray hairs, to be grateful for God’s gifts to the church, and to sit at the feet of our elders with reverence, respect, and deference, like the fathers in the faith that they are. This will also teach our children, it will teach our churches, it will teach society outside the church how we deal with things: with the principle of grace, respect, forgiveness, redemption and mercy. If these virtues do not guide our zeal, all we will have to offer is resentment, bitterness, vanities and a lot of self-righteousness.

We do well to remember that God is also referred to in the Word as “Ancient of Days” (Daniel 7.9) and his wisdom is much more ancient than all of us combined.

Recently, the practice of sermon-copying received some anecdotal examination from a professional homiletician. It was not written to justify the prominent incidents of this of recent revelation. The professor used events in the life of Spurgeon to smooth the way for a more tolerant understanding of this phenomenon. One incident mentioned concerned Spurgeon’s attendance in the worship time of another congregation and hearing his own sermon from a country pastor and benefiting from it. Spurgeon was not offended and did not reprimand but thanked the minister for ministering to his soul. Spurgeon’s humility, the common possession of the word of God, and Spurgeon’s desire to benefit from divine truth is on display there.
Another incident to which he referred concerned Spurgeon’s confronting a student with preaching Spurgeon’s sermon only to find that it was from William Jay. The student and Spurgeon had a common source, so the story goes. Martin Lloyd Jones gave the anecdote. The professor who communicated this story in a twitter thread was not familiar with William Jay of Bath. He referred to him as William J. Bath. William Jay was one of Spurgeon’s favorite preachers, a much older contemporary, and perhaps he would borrow illustrations and even outlines from him. As far as I can discern, it never rose to the level of intellectual theft, or reproducing the exact language (including illustrations and errors!) for sentence after sentence. He certainly thought Jay worth emulating. In 1856 (when Spurgeon was 21) Paxton Hood noted the influence of Jay, observing that Spurgeon had “something of Jay’s plan and method, but that is all.” (Autobiography 1:355). Hood goes on to say, “He has [that is, Spurgeon] in his speech true mental and moral independence.” Another observer of the early Spurgeon (1855), James Grant, said “Models of different styles of preaching are so numerous, that originality must be of rare occurrence; but he [Spurgeon] appears to be an original genius. To the pith of Jay, and the plainness of Rowland Hill, he adds much of the familiarity, not to say the coarseness, of the Huntingtonian order of ultra-Calvinistic preachers.” (Autobiography 1:350) The “Huntingtonians” alternated between admiration and separation in Spurgeon’s evaluation.
In another place, Grant wrote, “Mr. Spurgeon evinces much aptitude in borrowing illustrations, not only from the pages of antiquity, and from modern life and literature, but also from most familiar incidents, as well as from public events.” Grant in that observation refers to Spurgeon’s genius in being able to squeeze out pertinent and vivid illustrations—short striking images or longer narratives—from a variety of sources. His own facility in application made them fit his purpose with clarity. Spurgeon recounts going to hear Jay preach when Spurgeon was living in Cambridge. “I remember with what dignity he preached, and yet how simply.” He goes on to say, “My recollections of Jay were such as I would not like to lose. It usually happens that, when we listen to a venerable patriarch, such as he then was, there is all the greater weight in his words because of his age.” [Autobiography 1:150]. He never forgot the text or its emphases, “Ever let your conversation be as becometh the gospel of Christ.”  (Pike’s Life and Work 1:75).
It is not unthinkable that Spurgeon could have had such a vivid memory of a Jay sermon he had heard (or read), that the outline came to him in his Saturday evening work of sermon preparation. Often in these evening hours, culminating his week’s labors of unremitting writing of various sorts and a disciplined regimen of reading, Spurgeon testifies that a sermon outline and most of its argument would fall on his mind in a few moments after some lengthy time of reading through relevant volumes in his library. In his Lectures to my Students, Spurgeon used William Jay as an example of hovering over the words of a text in order to fix them plainly in the minds of the congregation: “The many are not always sufficiently capable of grasping the sense apart from the language—of gazing, so to speak, upon the truth disembodied; but when they hear the precise words reiterated again and again, and each expression dwelt upon after the manner of such preachers as Mr. Jay, of Bath, they are more edified, and the truth fixes itself more firmly upon their memories. Let your matter, then, be copious, and let it grow out of the inspired word” [Lecture 1:76].
Early in his ministry, Spurgeon opposed the distribution of sermon helps and gave negative reviews to them-such tools encouraged laziness and disingenuousness preaching. When he read the letters that Susie received from ministers applying for books from her book ministry, he himself began to write for tired minds and bodies that had labored for six days and would try to piece together a sermon in a few hours on Saturday evening. He wrote as he said, not to encourage laxness but to pour some water into the pump to generate the fresh flow of thought.
Spurgeon, especially when young, would sometimes use an outline for a sermon lifted straight from Gill’s comments. Who has not used a commentary in such a manner especially when convinced that the outline’s exegetical insight is correct? He was also influenced greatly by reading sermons from J. Edwards and certain passages in Spurgeon have clearly been influenced by Edwards’s rhetoric and images (see below). Spurgeon had the most prodigious understanding of the Puritans of any in his day and read them regularly. It is no surprise that their ideas—both theological and applicatory—appear frequently in his sermons. We would hope that similar puritanical excurses would punctuate sermons of many a modern preacher. Spurgeon could discern their peculiar talents, styles, theological contributions with great alacrity and accuracy and one would expect, in light of the common source of authority and instruction in the Bible, that they too would appear in Spurgeon sermons in ways that Spurgeon would make his own. This in fact the case.
It seems completely inconsistent, however, with Spurgeon’s manner of preparation, his homiletical style, his irrepressible genius and originality that he would simply preach another man’s sermon. I am not, however, in a position absolutely to deny that it happened. Knowing his irrepressible penchant for originality, he would avoid like the plague preaching one of the sermons of his immediate contemporaries especially. It would be interesting to know which of Williams Jay’s sermons Spurgeon preached and published as his own, if it happened. Where is it in the NPSP or the MTP? If someone knows, I would be glad to be informed. Given the manner in which the sermons were recorded by amanuenses and then edited by Spurgeon before publication, it seems almost impossible for that to have happened, though perhaps it did.
There are places where Spurgeon would imitate an emphasis, the nature of the language, a compelling manner of expression, or a peculiarly tight theological point. In the manner of his appeal to sinners, sometimes Spurgeon resembles Whitefield in passion and in brief reminiscence of Whitefield’s language and the movement from one group of his auditory to another in pleading with them. He was, after all, referred to as the “Modern Whitefield” and might have used some of Whitefield’s methods and language in the early days of his open field preaching. In a sermon on John 3:18 in giving exposition of “condemned already” Spurgeon used a series of ideas and sometimes the very language from Jonathan Edwards’s “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.”
God is more angry with some of you than he is with some in hell….God’s wrath, though it come not on you yet is like a stream dammed up. Every moment it gathers force….Oh wherefore do ye stand out against him, and in this way pull down upon your heads the wrath of an angry God?” (MTP 16:681, 682).
In illustrating the fitting roles of the persons of the Trinity in the Covenant of Redemption, Spurgeon scripted a conversation between the persons concerning their common agreement to bring to completion the divine redemptive purpose (e.g. “The Gracious Lips of Jesus” MTP 54 #3081). This followed the style of John Flavel in a similar simulation of an intra-trinitarian discussion.
Yes, Spurgeon was influenced by the greatest of the preachers of the past, but that he preached another man’s sermon apart from rigorous study and preparation of his own must be proved. Spurgeon’s own testimony of the selection of a text seems to make this virtually impossible: “I confess that I frequently sit hour after hour praying and waiting for a subject, and that this is the main part of my study; much hard labour have I spent in manipulating topics, ruminating upon points of doctrine, making skeletons out of verses and the burying every bone of them in the catacombs of oblivion, sailing on and on over leagues of broken water, till I see the red lights and make sail direct to the desired haven. I believe that almost any Saturday in my life I make enough outlines of sermons, if I felt at liberty to preach them, to last me for a month, but I no more dare use them than an honest mariner would run to shore a cargo of contraband goods” [Lectures 1:88]. This does not seem like the attitude and method of a preacher who would settle for using another man’s sermon.
I am aware that the centuries have produced, by God’s kindness, a rich store of exposition, sermonic material, doctrinal discussions, and polemical engagements from which we want to benefit personally and then share with those to whom we minister. That we so benefit is, I think, an element of our stewardship of the “communion of saints.” It is an admission of our finiteness and the particular giftedness of other saints through the centuries. If a preacher is unwilling to benefit from Chrysostom, Augustine, Anselm, Luther, Calvin, Jonathan Edwards, George Whitefield, John A. Broadus, Charles H. Spurgeon, B. H. Carroll, J Gresham Machen, James Montgomery Boyce, or Don Carson, he is missing sources of enrichment for his own exposition. He should consider some investment of time in these pivotal thinkers, commentators, and homileticians of the past and present. But the same body of material should teach us to internalize the insights and distribute them, as they did and do, in the context of a personal pastoral stewardship of calling and obligation to the revealed word of God and the people God has given us. Paul’s concern for Timothy is true for us—“so that all may see your progress” and that we may “keep a close watch on [ourselves] and the teaching.” (1 Timothy 4:15, 16).

Tweet Share