We Can Always Trust Our Word-Keeping God
Because of what Christ has done for us, we desire to image and reflect him in the words we say. We want to think before we speak and consider the consequences of what would happen if we don’t keep our word (Prov. 29:20, James 1:19) We desire to follow through on the words we say and apologize when we let someone down. We hesitate to make commitments we know we can’t keep. If we know we can’t follow through on our promises, we refrain from making them.
Have you ever had someone tell you they would do something for you and then fail to deliver? Perhaps it was a co-worker upon whose work you depended, and when he didn’t follow through, you were left hanging with more work to do. Maybe it was a friend who many times in the past told you, “Let’s meet for coffee.” Yet, every time you initiate a meet-up, she can never commit. Or maybe someone in your family promised multiple times to work with you on a project, and it still lies there unfinished.
Whatever the commitment, when someone commits to something and doesn’t follow through—doesn’t keep their word—we are left disappointed. In some situations, it may leave us in a difficult situation. Or worse. When people let us down multiple times, we begin to question and distrust the things they say. Often, we find ourselves depending on that person less and less.
In my own life, I’ve certainly experienced this. I’ve expected friends, family, or co-workers to follow through on something they promised and felt let down when they didn’t. I felt disappointed. I was left burdened. In some cases, it created a barrier in my relationship with that person. Trust was broken—one of the hardest things in life to rebuild.
Thankfully, we have a word-keeping God.
For those who have been hurt or let down by those who have not kept their word, there is good news. There is one who will never fail to keep his word. There is one we can always trust to fulfill his promises: our word-keeping God.
God only has to speak and worlds come into being (Gen. 1:1). His word is powerful; even the wind and rain respond to his command (Mark 4:39). His word never returns void; it always accomplishes his purposes for it (Isa. 55:11). He makes promises and never fails to keep them.
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Who Was William Farel?
On May 21, 1536, the council of all the heads of city households voted the following motion, drafted by Farel: “With God’s help, we want to live according to the evangelical law and the Word for God as it is preached to us, forsaking all masses, other ceremonies and papal deceits, images, idols and live united and obedient to God’s justice.” Geneva was now officially and democratically a Reformed city. In God’s providence, only two months later, a promising twenty-seven-year-old Frenchman, John Calvin, passed through the city. The rest is history.
Guillaume (William) Farel is mainly remembered today for that famous encounter with John Calvin in 1536, when he convinced his compatriot to stay in Geneva and work alongside him. Like many other French-speaking Reformers, Farel has been overshadowed by Calvin. He is often described as a mere “fiery preacher,” more gifted at tearing down than building up. The reality, however, is far more complex, and he deserves to be better known.
Farel was born in 1489 in the French Alps, only six years after Luther and twenty years before Calvin. He died in 1565 at age seventy-five, outliving Calvin by about a year. He received a classic education in humanities in Paris and was converted to the new “Lutheran faith,” as it was then known, sometime in 1521. He was soon compelled to leave France for Switzerland, where he would live as an exile for the rest of his life. Beginning in 1527, he exercised an itinerant preaching ministry under the protection of the city of Bern and then ministered in Geneva from 1533–1538. During that period, Farel’s ministry was akin to what we would call “church planting,” which is unique among the first-generation Reformers.
Farel started evangelizing the city of Geneva in December 1533 and was instrumental in convincing the whole city to embrace the Reformed faith. He preached the Word tirelessly in the streets, and later, when the priests and monks left the city, in church buildings. He convinced several other men to join him, notably Pierre Viret. He also engaged in several successful public disputations against Roman Catholic opponents.
He wrote a few books that are forgotten today but were the first resources in French about the new Reformed faith: a short summary of the Reformed faith first published in 1529, a brief Reformed liturgy in 1533, and a short commentary on the Lord’s Prayer (largely inspired by Luther).
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What Does the Bible Have to Do with My Life?
The Bible contains 66 books written by 40 authors over 1,500 years on three continents over more than a dozen different genres. And yet they all tell the same story of the same God. The Bible is a theological book that shares true history, but even when it is telling true historic facts, it doesn’t do so like a 21st century western history text book. It does so like an ancient Middle Eastern theological story.
One of my least favorite reading experiences was reading Beowulf in high school English. Were you subjected to this torture? Beowulf was written sometime between the 8th and 10th century and uses an early form of Old English called West Saxon.[i] Maybe if I re-read Beowulf I would love it, but at the time it felt like it was just one of those books we were reading because of its historic significance. Getting through the language was just brutal. I could barely piece together what a sentence meant, much less a paragraph, and understanding the plot felt virtually impossible. On top of that, this bizarre story of a monster in a faraway land felt profoundly irrelevant to my life.[ii]
Maybe you feel like that about the Bible. I get it. The Bible was written 2,000+ years ago. It seems borderline ridiculous that Christians pick it up and it expect it say something valuable to them about life in a completely different world.
Isn’t the Bible out of date?
The final challenge that is made against the Bible is that it is out of date. The Bible has old-fashioned morality about gender and sexuality. How can we trust a book that is so backwards.
Let me offer two very brief responses to this: first, the Bible is likely much less backward than you might think. In fact, all over the place the Bible breaks cultural expectations regarding gender, socio-economic class, and race.
Second, in those places where the Bible appears to be “on the wrong side of history,” I would ask you first to engage the central question of whether or not the Bible is God’s Word. If it isn’t, then of course the Bible is a skeleton, an artifact, when it comes to morality. But if it does happen to be God’s Word, I would ask you where your objective measure of morality derives from? And how can you be guaranteed that your own morality won’t look extremely dated in mere years? And I would add that if the Bible is indeed God’s Word, wouldn’t you expect that God would disagree with us at points? If we found in the Bible everything we already believed, would it be God’s Word or our word?
Are you willing to read the Bible not to tear it down but to enter in? Would you be willing to taste and see Jesus through the eyes of his followers? It only takes the average reader between an hour and a half to two and a half hours to read each of the four gospels. Pick up Mark or Luke or Matthew or John and encounter the man who calls himself the Son of God and see if you think it is a fable or if it rings of truth.[iii]
MIT professor and atheist Rosalind Picard thought that Bible was “full off fantastical crazy stuff.” But, for the sake of intellectual honesty she felt like she needed to actually read it. And so she did. And when she started to read the Bible, she says, “it started to change me.”[iv] She’s a follower of Jesus now.[v]
I could describe to you what a dark chocolate gelato tastes like from Frost: the rich cocoa flavor with a hint of bitterness, the cold buttery smoothness as it coats your tongue.
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Brothers, We Can Do Better
We tend to focus a lot on what we are saying and relatively little about how we are saying it. Preachers can focus so much on their content that they fail to consider their communication. As others have said, we worry so much about getting the text right but think comparatively little about getting it across.
Recently, the priority and practice of expository preaching have been recovered. I praise God for this development.
At the same time, I’m concerned that our expositional reformation hasn’t gone far enough.
We tend to focus a lot on what we are saying and relatively little about how we are saying it. Preachers can focus so much on their content that they fail to consider their communication. As others have said, we worry so much about getting the text right but think comparatively little about getting it across.
As a result, we can unwittingly end up neglecting a crucial element of our preaching: communication.
I don’t think this is a helpful pattern. Instead, since communication is an essential part of preaching and most of us are not naturally gifted communicators, we need to work hard—not only at what we say—but how we say it. Again, this is a way to love and serve our congregation.
We don’t have to decide between the two. We can strive to serve our audience well by being faithful in what we say and how we say it. We can work on our content and our communication.
As I think about my own preaching, there are a few categories I try to evaluate regularly. Perhaps these will be helpful to you when reflecting on ways to improve getting the text across.
These are descriptions I try to avoid.
The Museum Guide Preacher
This preacher sounds like he is giving a tour through a museum. He’s so wrapped up in providing all the details of the historical, cultural, and textual nuances that he comes off like a disconnected professional. He’s aiming at the head and neglecting the heart. He’s informing but not transforming. As a result, people can walk away from the sermon, asking, “What does this have to do with me?”
When it comes to preaching, important facts without implications are not usually helpful. We could go a long way in serving our people by asking and answering the question, “In light of this passage, what should my audience believe, think, feel, or do?”
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