Category: College

Gary Millar on Application

Gary’s tips on application

  • Know the context of the passage and the context of your people.
  • Know the people you’re teaching the Bible to – people keep changing. We have to keep reading the culture.
  • We have to know individuals and know the challenges facing every stage of life.
  • “We need therefore to know every person who belongs to our charge… we should know deeply every person in our flock.”
  • We have to be able to apply the gospel to teenagers, to grandparents… to every member of the flock.
  • Start where people are rather than where you think people ought to be.
  • We need to be prepared to spell things out – and keep spelling things out. We only want to have one thing to say – the gospel. And we need to be prepared to keep saying it. We don’t need to be original.

Our challenge is to preach and teach for people’s good and God’s glory.

Questions to ask when applying:

  1. Is my teaching applied specifically enough?
  2. Do I know my culture and context well enough?
  3. Do I know the individuals in my church well enough?
  4. Do I know the unique challenges facing the individuals in my church well enough?
  5. Do I care enough to find out?
  6. Is my speaking health promoting or damaging right now?

March 4, 2010

Gary Millar on Preaching (from Titus)

Looking at Titus 2.

You must teach what is in accord with sound doctrine.

False teaching wrecks people’s lives.

“You and I look at things very differently. For you things are black and white. For me there are shades of grey.” – a former minister to Gary.

Like what? Like the divinity of Jesus and every other core truth of Christianity.

Paul’s main concern is not for doctrinal orthodoxy (everyone teaching the same thing) but for the application of doctrine through preaching. The nuts and bolts of Christian living.

He doesn’t say make sure your doctrine is sound – but make sure you speak in accordance with sound doctrine.

It’s not a question of Titus’ doctrine but a question of his preaching. Speak in a way that fits with sound doctrine – his concern is with the damage caused by false teachers rather than what they are teaching.

2v1 introduces the subject of teaching that doesn’t damage but gives health. Calvin says “teaching that can build men up in Godliness.

Paul is saying “we need to learn to teach the Bible wherever we are in a way that promotes spiritual help.”

Calvin says “if we leave it up to men to decide which teaching to adhere to they will never move one foot.”

No other passages that spell out the responsibility of preaching like this one here.

Impactful teaching is almost always preaching – sometimes the preachers have broken every rule in the book and have bad models – but the common thread is the powerful application of the gospel.

March 4, 2010

Gary Millar on how to preach a series on a book

  1. Read the book. Read it and keep reading it. Reading the text will save you from getting into trouble later on. Have a go at the big idea of the book.
  2. Sit down and break up the book.
  3. Work out your big idea for each passage.
  4. Work out how you get each passage to Jesus (Biblical Theology).
  5. How am I going to preach the gospel from this part of the Bible.
  6. Set up a table with your break up of the book as rows, and your bid idea, Biblical Theology and Gospel (NT passage) laid out. Make sure you’re not doing the same Biblical Theology model two weeks in a row or you’ll bore people.

Some further bits of wisdom

  • Have your Kid’s program in synch with teaching program… but this means you’ve got to sort out your big ideas in time for your Sunday School teachers.
  • It’s nice to be ahead in your thinking. Do the prep thoroughly prior to the week you have to preach.
  • How to test a big idea – read back over the passage and if there are a bunch of verses that aren’t covered, start again.
  • Sometimes there’s a major idea and a minor idea – it’s almost always right to focus on the major idea.
  • If you’re not clear in the preparation stage you’re not clear on Sundays.
  • Usually if people are confused I assume that it’s my fault. Normally it’s because I’m underdone in the planning stage.

March 4, 2010

Gary Millar on preaching God’s wrath

You can’t preach the Old Testament faithfully while avoiding the subject of God’s judgment. Especially in the current age where the idea that the God of the Old Testament is “evil”.

Bonus Bit – David chopping Goliath’s head off is an echo of, and an allusion to the story of the Philistines capturing the ark and it causing their idol to fall over until its head falls off.

Apparent injustice may in fact be a case of not knowing all the facts.

To make sense of the cross we need to understand that God is:

  • Infinitely angry at sin
  • Infinitely irrevocably committed to justice
  • Staggeringly creative and innovative.

The God of the Cross is breathtakingly holy, passionately commited…

Without the OT – and in particular these stories of judgment – we can not have any idea how holy God is, or the depths to which people sink, or how important it is for the God of the Bible to deal with sin in a way that is fitting. We can not hope to understand the cross without it.

If we ditch the nasty bits we are ditching the holiness and justice of God. These stories are there to teach us that God is not tame – that he does things that shock us.

It is not our job to apologise for God’s behaviour.

God’s actions are explained in Romans 3.

19Now we know that whatever the law says, it says to those who are under the law, so that every mouth may be silenced and the whole world held accountable to God. 20Therefore no one will be declared righteous in his sight by observing the law; rather, through the law we become conscious of sin.

21But now a righteousness from God, apart from law, has been made known, to which the Law and the Prophets testify. 22This righteousness from God comes through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe. There is no difference, 23for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, 24and are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus. 25God presented him as a sacrifice of atonement, through faith in his blood. He did this to demonstrate his justice, because in his forbearance he had left the sins committed beforehand unpunished— 26he did it to demonstrate his justice at the present time, so as to be just and the one who justifies those who have faith in Jesus.

Bizarrely, we culturally think that our treatment of the planet reaps just rewards – seeing causation in our actions – and occasionally predicting our own painful demise – but we will not afford God the same courtesy. Gary referenced the Day of the Triffids and this post from an Irish friend.

In the two episodes (which were rather a drag unfortunately), we got lots of warnings about what happens when you interfere with nature, namely that nature will eventually inflict its wrath on you. Come to think of it, this was a sort of Wrath of God story with nature standing in for God.

In fact in the last few years there have been several ‘Wrath of Nature’ movies; The Day the Earth Stood Still and The Day After Tomorrow to name but two. In both movies, and in this latest version of The Day of the Triffids, we are led to believe that we deserve what’s coming to us.

The funny thing is, no-one would ever make a movie these days about the Wrath of God in which the message also was that we had it coming to us. We’re able to accept that if we sin against nature we deserve our punishment, but not if we sin against nature’s maker.

March 3, 2010

More on preaching the Old Testament from Gary Millar

Reading back on my post about Gary Millar’s tips for preaching the Old Testament I realised I’d missed a couple of pages of notes. Here are some more nuggets of wisdom from the mouth of the Irishman…

  • If you have the text at your right hand and a pile of commentaries at your left the biggest mistake you can make when preparing a sermon is to reach out first with your left hand.
  • The OT is often preached with scant regard to the text – it’s almost always “be like the Old Testament Character”…
  • Narrative doesn’t commentate on the action “this is a bad idea”… we have to be sensitive to what’s going on. We have to get into the flow of the story in order to pick up these little things.
  • The biggest problem that we have when approaching Old Testament narratives is reading the text. If you don’t read the text you won’t get it right. You have to work on the text, then work out how it fits with Biblical Theology, this needs to be done before you start the talk.
  • Having done the work on the text we need to start figuring out how we present the work as Christians.
  • We don’t just need to pull Jesus from the hat in every text. Christ-centred preaching does not seek to find where Christ is mentioned in every text – but to show how each text manifests God’s grace in order to prepare people in relation to Christ. This is not quite so tenuous as Spurgeon suggests in the following quote (from this sermon here). He’s right to want to relate every part of the text to Christ – but sometimes his connections are tenuous.

“Don’t you know young man that from every town, and every village, and every little hamlet in England, wherever it may be, there is a road to London?” “Yes,” said the young man. “Ah!” said the old divine “and so form every text in Scripture, there is a road to the metropolis of the Scriptures, that is Christ. And my dear brother, your business in when you get to a text, to say, ‘Now what is the road to Christ?’ and then preach a sermon, running along the road towards the great metropolis—Christ. And,” said he, “I have never yet found a text that had not got a road to Christ in it, and if I ever do find one that has not a road to Christ in it, I will make one; I will go over hedge and ditch but I would get at my Master, for the sermon cannot do any good unless there is a savour of Christ in it.”

March 2, 2010

Gary Millar on the Song of Solomon

Last night Gary Millar spoke on Song of So(ngs)lomon. With a particular focus on how to preach it. He had what I think is a pretty interesting take on the book – an interpretation that would make Song of Songs a nice foil to Ecclesiastes (which explores the futility of a life lived pursuing material happiness).

He suggests the book is written by Solomon about “the one that got away” – a woman who rebuffed his advances because she had found true love with her “beloved”. The thrust of the argument is that the book then gives Solomon’s insights into a life lived pursuing happiness and completion through the pursuit of sexual encounters – and comes to the conclusion that true happiness is found in its proper context, and if you fully subscribe to his theory, real satisfaction and joy comes through experiencing the love of God.

Here are my notes in slightly edited form. Simone has blogged her response to the evening here.

  • What is Song of Songs doing in the Bible? Nobody seems to know – none of the commentators agree.
  • When we read the Bible our starting point has to be “this is the word of God” – and with careful reading we really should be able to figure out what it’s about.
  • There’s a very long tradition of ignoring the sexual element – the Westminster council suggested that any reading along those lines was incorrect… Calvin said “it’s about sex, what’s the big deal?”
  • The people who insisted it wasn’t about sex believed it was all about Jesus.
  • Ascribed to Solomon – uniquely placed to write this sort of treatise on love and marriage. 1,000 women, world’s wisest man… Solomon realised that he’d mucked it up. And that’s why he wrote this book.
  • The key to the book is found in the last few verses… chapter 8 verses 1-11. “Solomon had a vineyard”… These statements unlock the whole book – almost certainly a reference to Solomon’s harem. “Lord of the multitude”… the tenants are probably the staff of the harem… each was to bring for its fruit 1000 shekels of silver… “my vineyard (body in ch 1)”, the thousand shekels are for you and 200 are for those who care for the harem. Solomon would pick someone, send the guys out to make an offer they couldn’t refuse, and it seems there was a feisty woman “my vineyard is my own” – don’t try to buy me. Money, wisdom and henchmen can’t buy you love.
  • Solomon is the wisest man in the world. He is rich. He is powerful. “Who does this woman think she is…” perhaps leads Solomon to reflect on his life and “who does he think he is”. Perhaps realises that somewhere along the line he’s lost the plot.
  • Solomon realises he has missed out on real love. And perhaps even a relationship with God. And so he writes about a young couple who are passionately and permanently in love. As the book goes on it becomes less and less likely that Solomon is one of the lovers. He becomes distant to the story.
  • The book opens up a raft of very difficult pastoral issues – because as soon as we start talking about issues surrounding sex people become edgy. Many people have baggage in this area.
  • The man works really hard to make his beloved feel beautiful. His beloved is his standard of beauty cf Driscoll (one area where he was helpful). It’s clear when reading the poetry (though sometimes the imagery is culturally odd for us) that this man thinks and puts all of his effort into making his words encouraging for his wife.
  • It’s hard to distinguish between actuality and anticipation. The book is full of images that are clearly enticing but can’t actually be tied down. General pictures not specific pictures. It’s a mistake to press this book into service of saying anything about sex. The metaphors are deliberately slippery – nudge, nudge, wink, wink – you can’t work out what the specific language is. Immensely sexual but not explicit.
  • It’s not entirely clear who is speaking at what point. We’re not sure if the people are real or parables. We’re not sure if he’s writing through the lens of rejection and imagining the world of the woman who turned him down… the way in which this relationship is described is with Solomon as a stranger to this kind of love.
  • Chapter 1 v 5-6 – dysfunctional families do not rule out the possibility of real love. Solomon seems to be urging us to hold out for the real thing.
  • Chapter 3 v 6 – “Solomon’s carriage”, King Solomon made it himself, royal guard, wearing the crown etc… This woman is dreaming about her wedding. It’s a royal wedding – she dreams of her dream man rocking up in the royal regalia. No suggestion throughout the rest of the book that this is a royal wedding, she gets beaten by the night watchmen which is unlikely if she’s a princess etc… Possible explanation: The girl has a dream, having seen Solomon’s wedding she imagines her wedding to be something like this. Her dream man has the face of her lover – by the end of chapter 3 it could potentially still be Solomon.
  • Solomon is being passed over for this woman’s real king. “I opened the door…”, “oh daughters of Jerusalem what would you tell my lover…” – this is not how things work for Solomon in terms of securing a wife. Solomon starts to understand that he has love wrong.
  • Solomon isn’t the Bible’s sex therapist – he warns us of the problems of sexual idolatry.
  • Because of Ephesians 5 we’re used to modeling love on the trinity. But Solomon instead suggests we need to look the other way. We should see marital love as an echo of God’s love for us.
  • God is the ultimate – not sex. So at the end of his debauched life Solomon comes to the conclusion that he’s mislead it and that God should be the focus.

March 2, 2010

Gary Millar on preaching

Apologies – these are rough notes – Kutz is also liveblogging…

A couple of questions I ask myself as I teach parts of the Bible.

  • Have I pointed people to what God has done for us in Christ as a solution for all our problems?
  • Have I reminded people that when we come back to God we both discover his forgiveness and are set free to live for him?
  • We haven’t preached the gospel if our message is to “be like” someone, or “be good”, we haven’t preached the gospel. Even if it is “be disciplined” we haven’t preached the gospel. These things aren’t wrong in themselves but they are wrong by themselves.
  • Have we pointed people to grace despite our sin?
  • We must give the reasons to live in a way that brings glory or honour to Jesus. The ultimate reason to live a holy life is Jesus Christ himself.
  • The hard work of teaching the Bible comes because we have to work hard to get this message under peoples’ skins. Speech not only conveys information it has other force and purpose. It may be to challenge or encourage, to make us laugh or feel sad – but this comes down to the intention of the speaker.
  • Good exposition invites the listener to feel with the text as well as to think with it.
  • One of the things we need to do is to be thinking that we need to recover the rhetorical impact of the text – we need to encourage people to feel the same way as the original hearers of the text. For example: Amos 1-2 – “you know what really bothers me about our neighbours… you know what really bothers me about you…” as a rhetorical device.
  • Preaching can involve stealth bombing – sometimes we need to surprise people. Working hard to get the text in to their lives will help people to listen.
  • The first 90 seconds is the most important part of a sermon – you’ve got about 90 seconds to convince people to listen (this may be a concession to people’s sinfulness). We need to justify the audience’s decision to keep listening. We must connect with people. We must exegete the listeners. We must speak to the people in front of us.
  • We can’t make general statements on behalf of our audience – “as followers of Jesus we all want to be living for God” – don’t assume the people are anywhere at all.
  • Work really hard at understanding people who aren’t like you. Single people, women, young people, people who come from different cultures and demographics.

March 2, 2010

How to preach OT with Gary Millar

Gary Millar is an Irish OT scholar who is Yoder smart. I’ve been wanting to use that pun since listening to Mark Driscoll.

He’s at QTC today speaking on how to preach the Old Testament. He’s got seven basic ways to bring an Old Testament passage to Jesus. These are the points with some notes.

1. Follow the plan – Genesis to 2 Kings is a narrative that leaves us waiting for the ultimate king – wherever you are you can say “this is the first bit of the plan which will ultimately lead to Jesus”

2. Expose the problem – sometimes the Bible just shows up that left to our selves we do some horrendous things. Some narratives just highlight that we are deeply sinful people.
3. Some parts are there to explain categories – what is Leviticus doing in the Bible? Several things. It explains how sacrifice works – how can we understand sacrificial language in the NT if we don’t understand how it worked in the OT. Leviticus explains the category of “ritual cleanliness” – we can’t leave the house without becoming unclean (like Israel who couldn’t avoid becoming unclean).
4. Highlight the attribute – Some stories are there just to show us what God is like. What’s the book of Hosea there to do? In essence it’s there to show us the love of God to an unfaithful people. If you’re preaching on Hosea you highlight the love of God by being faithful to the text – but at some point you have to interact with the NT and what it has to say.
5. Trace the fulfillment. Micah – the “ruler coming out from Bethlehem” – some passages make it easy, in others it’s harder. Different to “following the plan” which involves following the story, tracing the fulfillment is more direct/specific. God promised to do this, he did this.
6. Focus on the action – David and Goliath – the action is 33 words of 58 verses. The rest is David’s commentary on the action – it’s the Lord fighting his enemies. (extra thinking – David and Goliath is like a boxing match with a huge descriptive build up and a very quick knock out).
7. Point out the consequences – Some parts of the Bible make it very clear that if you live without God this will happen, if you live with God this will happen… how wisdom literature fits into the scheme of Biblical theology.

“I think that boring preaching is sinful and we’ll have to answer to God for it.
Boring preaching makes the pew warmer feel guilty and then bored. They walk out feeling worse than they felt when they walked in.”

When approaching the OT Gary takes the following steps.

  1. I sit with a big bit of paper and divide the book up into the chunks that I’m going to preach on…
  2. Read the book as many times as I can
  3. Write down what I think the big idea is for each passage.
  4. Write down if one of the seven options works beside each passage – and I make sure I’m never doing the same one of those seven two weeks in a row.

He added the following insights…

  • When we take bigger chunks of narrative there are more possibilities.
  • The further back you go in history the longer and more complex it becomes to “follow the plan”

March 2, 2010

YouTube Tuesday: A bridge over troubled water

This was our drive to college today. Jeremy is hardcore.

March 2, 2010

Now I know my ג ב א

I am not a fan of Hebrew yet (though I do like walking around before and after classes saying “hey brew” to anybody who walks past.

Perhaps I should purchase this Hebrew learning game to make learning language fun and engaging.

February 19, 2010

How to type in Greek and Hebrew on a Mac

Macs make typing in foreign languages ridiculously easy. But if you haven’t figured it out yet here are some handy links.

How to set your language to Greek and use special characters.

How to type in Hebrew (I haven’t figured out how to get the vowels under the letters yet) (and a second helpful look at the keyboard layout).

February 18, 2010

Mad Skillz: Simone on supply teaching

Simone is married to Andrew. Together they are my boss. Kind of. In that I am currently a student minister at their church. At the moment I feel like Hebrew is my master.

Simone writes songs of goodness and blogs deeply and often at Another Something. When I first started blogging I had a template that featured white text on black. Simone told me it was too hard to read. I changed it. She stopped reading. She started again a while back.

When Simone is not writing songs, children’s material or soppy poems to her husband she is a supply teacher. Here’s what she has to say about Supply teaching.

I have one of the best jobs in the world. A job that makes me a nice pocketful of money, that is strictly school hours, and gives me the flexibility to work or not to work on any particular day. On top of this, it (often) takes little emotional energy, gives me the chance to contribute something nice to the world, and is (mostly) fun.

I am a supply teacher. I’ve been supplying for over two years now, and I’ve developed some mad skilz in my area. Let me share.

My top 5 tips for being a good supply teacher

  1. Don’t be a nuisance to the school. Schools are busy places. Get in there and do your job. Take responsibility for your kids and try to have things run as smoothly as they would if the teacher you’re replacing was there. And don’t whinge if you have to do an extra playground duty. You are getting paid more than any other staff member and really have nothing else to do. Leave the classroom tidy.
  2. Make the kids come into the room well. Have them line up over and over again if you need to. Once they are quiet, move to number 3.
  3. Bribe the kids with fun and semi-educational activities. At the start of the day, write all your incentive activities on the board. Tell the kids that you’d love this to be a great day and if they get through their work, they’ll get to do some of these fun things. Promise them obstacles courses outside, sport, art, anything – but be positive. With you there, there is the opportunity for an unusually excellent day. (If I have to teach a P-3 class, I take in a piece of ‘lovely lycra’ and a few teddies. There is almost nothing younger kids won’t do for you if you promise them a chance to bounce bears on a trampoline! Make them count in 2s or 3s while you bounce the teddies and it becomes a maths game!)
  4. If the teacher leaves you no work, be thankful! You have 5 hours to teach the kids whatever you want. Pull out your favourite stories (Roald Dahl is always good), read to them for a very long time, then make up some creative writing or art or maths or SOSE activities around your reading. Play with character transformations (‘If the enormous crocodile was a person, what would he look like? What would he do?) or points of view (re-write parts of ‘the Enormous Crocodile’ in a voice sympathetic to the EC). Turn it into a comic, with or without text. Make up maths word problems based on the story. Research the diet of crocodiles… Endless options, and they all take little or no preparation. If you are not tied to any program, you are free! Make the most of it! (If work is left, do it! And thank the teacher.)
  5. Show the kids that you like them. This goes a long way. (If they are not very likeable, this one will be hard. But try.)

And finally, don’t stress. Whatever happens, it will all be over at 3 o’clock.

February 17, 2010

T-Rex doesn’t speak Greek

February 14, 2010

Theological leanings and Acts 15

After a week of studying theology and one team meeting bandying about a bit of (in my opinion) a speculative theological interpretation of Acts 15 (see Andrew’s blog for details) I’ve been wondering about how to balance the excitement I feel at new “special knowledge” interpretations of old passages.

On the one hand I think there’s lots to learn from better understanding the original culture and context of passages and grappling with different nuances of the original languages – and on the other I have a high view of God’s sovereignty and the perspicuity of scripture (the idea that God teaches truths clearly through his word).

So I wonder what place new theological ideas grounded in particular and special knowledge (as opposed to general knowledge and a plain understanding of the text understood in the context of the Bible rather than in the context of history) has when it comes to application.

Because I’m now all about nuance and balance I have come up with this fence sitting position where you can own both the perspicuous reading of a passage and the more historically and theologically nuanced position at the same time – unless they are in direct conflict with one another.

The example I’m thinking most about is the Acts 15 passage that Andrew wrote about. Acts 15 is a little story where the church leaders are called on to decide how Gentile converts to what is essentially the continuation of the Messianic Jewish faith should conduct themselves. Some Jews want Gentiles to circumcise themselves and obey the law – but the church leaders decide this is unnecessary because salvation is through grace, not the law.

But they do give the Gentiles some ground rules – rules that have been traditionally understood as relating to how Gentile and Jewish Christians could share “table fellowship” – ie eat together as brothers – while not causing one another offense.

Kutz’s position (based on someone else’s position) on Acts 15 is slightly more exciting. The Gentile Christians are given a list of four things they are not to do as Christians. They can’t eat food sacrificed to idols, food strangled, food with the blood still in it, and they can’t engage in sexual immorality. These requirements tie in to the Levitical law (and in Leviticus also apply to gentiles sojourning amongst believers). The exciting new bit is that this may well have been shorthand for not participating in first century idol temple worship. All of the prohibitions address elements of that practice.

I would argue that the everyday Christian believer throughout the last two thousand years would understand this passage on the basis of table fellowship – I don’t think the new argument is convincing enough to do away with this perspicuous understanding – it is enough to nuance it though. We can better understand that these actions were synonymous with the worship of idols, but that doesn’t negate the understanding that Gentiles should be avoiding that conduct in order to stay in fellowship with Jewish believers.

In conclusion, I think it’s a case of “both” not “either”. And I wonder how this is going to work out as we continue to grapple with new and exciting ideas. I think the temptation can be to throw out the old understanding when we come up with something better, rather than improving our understanding of the old. And I don’t know what that does to two thousand years of church history which if you’re a trinitarian and Calvinist is Holy Spirit inspired and God ordained.

February 11, 2010

Visiting grammar

One of the perks of moving back to Brisbane is that we’re living around the corner from my gran for the first time ever – she moved to Brisbane this year from regional New South Wales. It’s nice having the family together.

I have no doubt that my gran would be horrified by the story I’m about to share with you. It comes after Robyn and I (along with some other first years at QTC) took a crash course in English grammar as part of our first Greek lesson today.

There may be hope for us yet – apparently first year university students in Canada are demonstrating a complete lack of proficiency in the English language. This is happening all over the world, but some of the quotes from lecturers at the university are brilliant.

“Little happy faces … or a sad face … little abbreviations,” show up even in letters of academic appeal, says Khan Hemani.

“Instead of ‘because’, it’s ‘cuz’. That’s one I see fairly frequently,” she says, and these are new in the past five years.

I must confess – in the past I was a complete comma fiend. My father always used to bang on about run on sentences. I solved that problem by replacing commas with dashes and throwing in the occasional ellipses between disparate clauses. This little quote from a second professor is pretty funny.

“Punctuation errors are huge, and apostrophe errors. Students seem to have absolutely no idea what an apostrophe is for. None. Absolutely none.”

“I get their essays and I go ‘You obviously don’t know what a sentence fragment is. You think commas are sort of like parmesan cheese that you sprinkle on your words’,” said Budra.

February 9, 2010