Podcast: Sinclair Ferguson on Living a Life Worthy of the Gospel (Sinclair Ferguson)

May 01, 2023 by: Crossway

This article is part of the The Crossway Podcast series.

What Is It to Be Worthy of the Gospel?

In today’s episode, Sinclair Ferguson walks through why living lives worthy of the gospel is a biblical exhortation that all Christians must take seriously and one that doesn't inevitably lead to the sin of legalism.

Worthy

Worthy

Sinclair B. Ferguson

Theologian Sinclair Ferguson explores what it means to live worthy of the gospel by imitating Christ, and why it matters for believers.

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Topics Addressed in This Interview:

00:58 - What Defines the Church Today?

Matt Tully
Sinclair, thank you so much for joining me again on The Crossway Podcast.

Sinclair Ferguson
Thank you, Matt.

Matt Tully
It’s nice to see you in person this time.

Sinclair Ferguson
Face to face.

Matt Tully
Face to face.

Sinclair Ferguson
Not across the Atlantic.

Matt Tully
That’s right. In the first half of Philippians 1:27, a pretty famous verse that many of us know well and maybe memorized as children, the apostle Paul offers what has to be one of the most clear, direct, all-encompassing exhortations in all of the New Testament. I wonder if you could read that verse for us, and then we’re going to unpack it together.

Sinclair Ferguson
This is Philippians 1:27, and I’m reading from the English Standard Version:

”Only let your manner of life be worthy of the gospel of Christ, so that whether I come and see you or am absent, I may hear of you that you are standing firm in one spirit, with one mind striving side by side for the faith of the gospel . . . ”

Matt Tully
For the purposes of our conversation today, I want to focus on that first clause, “Only let your manner of life be worthy of the gospel.” You call that calling on our lives as Christians in your new book a forgotten calling. You go on to write, “To live worthy of the gospel of Christ does not rank high on the priority list of the 21st century church.” As you look out over the evangelical church today, in both the US and in the UK where you’re from, what would you say are some of the adjectives, some of the things that come to mind, as you think about what would describe or define the church today?

Sinclair Ferguson
Well, one of them, I think, would be struggling, at least in the United Kingdom. You need to look pretty carefully to find a vibrant church. Many churches, I think, are struggling. They’re small churches. I think there’s also a great deal of confusion about the nature of the gospel, about the nature of the Christian life, and also, actually, about the nature of the church and its role and what makes it really significant. A big element of my own thinking is that the building of the church is at the epicenter of Jesus’s vision for his people. I think of Matthew 16:18 as Jesus’s manifesto for his people. And we’ve come through, certainly, a period, probably on both sides of the Atlantic, where the local church has been seen by many evangelical Christians as secondary to other things.

Matt Tully
It’s hard not to feel that way sometimes, because we look at the local church and it feels small and it feels inefficient and limited in what it can do. You look at these global events and at these global figures, Christian figures, and we see the impact of their work and their ministry and those events, and it kind of feels like, The local church. What is that?

Sinclair Ferguson
It’s been one of the paradoxes of social media. It has been a platform for the advance of the gospel and exposure to the gospel, but at the same time, it has also had a consequence. Hopefully, it’s the unintended consequence (but an actual consequence) that big is seen now as either normative (that is, that’s what we should all have) or seen as desirable. Therefore, and you can never really see this in social media of any kind, I think what has gone from it is—and not least in the increase of size of churches and size being seen as a measure of success—is that in my own view, the absolute basic language that describes the church in the New Testament is family. That is a controlling principle. There are other metaphors for the church, but in my own view, they are actually metaphors, and I don’t think family is a metaphor. I think family is what the church actually is. It’s the family of God, and this is true as much locally as it is globally and heavenly. If that’s a controlling picture, I sometimes think of it as the prescription that’s ground into the eyeglasses with which you view the Christian life, and then you become a little cautious about size. It’s possible to be a very large family, but it’s also possible that size can be an enemy of family. I know when churches grow, people try to do things and they will say, We use these computer methods and these technological methods—

Matt Tully
Or even things like small groups.

Sinclair Ferguson
But at the end of the day, what you are really doing is semi-artificial, difficult to pastor meaningfully. I’ve been a minister of churches of varying sizes, but the key thing to me has been the answer to the question, How do we express that, first and foremost, we are the family of God here, that we are brothers and sisters together, that we’ve a diversity of gifts? Increasingly, it seemed to me to be almost like the key to understanding our impact in a present society in the Western world where one of the most obvious signs of the disintegration of the gospel and the Christian lifestyle has been the dysfunctionality of families. My own conviction is that when a church really is dominated by that sense—we have a heavenly Father, we have an elder Brother, we have the Spirit of the elder Brother indwelling us, we are brothers and sisters together, we’re young and old together—then the impact that makes on our contemporary Western society is actually more magnified than it might have been 150 years ago. Because when people are exposed to this, even if they dislike or even hate what they think we believe, they are going to be driven to the conclusion that this looks like what life was supposed to be, where it’s safe. And I know the church has failed, but it’s safe for children to be speaking to older people, that there is a mutual affection, that people give place to one another, that there’s a variety of gifts, that there is a sense of absolute devotion to the Father. All of those elements speak right into the needs of our own society just now and are one window into how it is that the gospel of Christ saves. I remember years ago when we lived in Dallas at one time, it was at the time when the Mel Gibson movie, The Passion of the Christ was released. I didn’t actually see it, but when it came out, there was a pastor of a mega megachurch who said that this was the greatest evangelistic instrument we had been given since the days of the apostles. And my immediate thought was to say, Have you never heard of the church? You are pastoring, or should be, the greatest evangelistic instrument. It’s not because of all the different things they do—

Matt Tully
The programs.

Sinclair Ferguson
—but chiefly because of what they are.

Matt Tully
Why didn’t you see that movie? Was it because of a resistance to that impulse?

Sinclair Ferguson
Well, I think I actually have a DVD of it, but I don’t watch movies. I have a low attention span, so I just didn’t watch it. I have some underlying other concerns that you would understand. No, I didn’t see it.

Matt Tully
It’s so interesting the way that churches often think about evangelism and their witness. They think of programs, methods, tools, and strategies. But you do make the case in the book that maybe the primary way that the New Testament seems to envision the church’s witness and interaction with the outside world is they’re coming to us with questions, wondering about what it is that makes us different because of how they see us living with one another. What impact would you say that the broader church’s loss of an appreciation for the church as family, for the local church as central to our lives as Christians, how has that impacted this forgotten calling to live lives worthy of the gospel? How are those two things connected?

Sinclair Ferguson
I think answers to questions like this may depend on where you are, really, and people have very different experiences. My background was in a church life where the gospel had begun to disappear when the bridges between the gospel in the church and society were all still in place, but there was no gospel in the church walking over the bridges. And when the bridges began to collapse, the attitude of the church members was, These naughty people are no longer walking over the bridge! And they didn’t realize that they themselves had never walked over the bridge. They didn’t have anything to bring over the bridge, and so their first response was to complain. I think that probably is true in many places in the West. I think in parts of the United States the bridges have really collapsed. In other parts of the United States I think Christians may think “as it was in the beginning as now it ever shall be,” and they don’t notice that the bridges have collapsed and they’ve not been living the kind of gospel family life that creates those bridges. The bridges are collapsing around them, and it will be too late by the time they wake up to it.

Matt Tully
Anytime anyone stresses this kind of thing—the importance of our lives as Christians, lives together in lives as individuals—for the sake of our witness and the gospel, even when we read passages like Philippians 1:27 (“live as worthy citizens of the gospel”), we can start to feel a little bit uncomfortable. We can start to worry. This starts to feel a little bit like I have to do something to be a Christian. How do we distinguish this call, that even Paul himself in his own words is giving to us, from some kind of legalistic mindset when it comes to what it means to be worthy of the gospel?

Sinclair Ferguson
Maybe I can go back to this. I can’t remember when this first struck me, but it was certainly reading Peter saying you should always be ready to give a reason for the hope that was in you. And I thought this is interesting because he presupposes that people will be asking Christians questions. Certainly through the middle years of my life, one of the great evangelistic techniques was for Christians to go and ask non-Christians questions. And to be absolutely honest, I always felt a wee bit nervous about that because I thought there’s something slightly duplicitous about this. Maybe it is fishing for men, but if it’s fishing for men, the bait is not very clear. It looks as though you’re doing one thing when you’re trying to do another. And I thought, what a sharp contrast with Peter’s statement, because Peter’s statement seems to assume that they’re asking the questions about Christians, and not Christians asking the questions about them. I came to the conclusion that one of the reasons for that must be because there’s not very much about us as Christians that makes anybody ask questions. I think that is a real key into the significance of Paul speaking about being worthy of the gospel of Christ. He doesn’t use the term worthy in the sense that I think many Christians might fear. He uses the term worthy (and I think I maybe even say in the book in this sense) as a term that goes back to balancing the weights on the pans of a scale. So here is the gospel on the one hand, and your life on the other hand is to be a breathing equivalent of the gospel. And it’s not ultimately something that you do; it’s ultimately the Christ-likeness that’s created in your life by the ministry of the Spirit. And so I think one of the things that might be true statistically in evangelicalism—at least, I’ve read this—is the relative little difference between evangelical Christians’ lifestyles and other people’s lifestyles. One of the things that struck me is how little the New Testament actually says about evangelism. Why would that be the case? Because it didn’t need to say anything about techniques and so on. Here were people who had heard Jesus say, Look, if you are not unreservedly given to me, you are not worthy. Not in the sense of you become a Christian by amassing the merit, but that unless that’s true, your life is out of sync with the gospel.

Matt Tully
It’s not balanced.

Sinclair Ferguson
It’s not. It’s not expressive of it and it’s not a reflection of it. Therefore, it’s not surprising that nobody is asking you questions.

16:21 - Law and Gospel

Matt Tully
In the book you quote Geerhardus Vos, who is a well-known reformed theologian, who said, “The essence of legalism is to divorce the law of God from the person of God.” Can you unpack that for us? Help us understand how that sheds light on the difference between legalism and what we’re talking about here.

Sinclair Ferguson
At the center of everything is the knowledge of the Lord. Jeremiah 9:23–24, a famous Old Testament verse: “Let not the wise man boast in his wisdom, let not the mighty man boast in his might, let not the rich man boast in his riches, but let him who boasts boast in this, that he understands and knows me, that I am the LORD . . . .” The interesting thing is that is an Old Testament statement about Old Testament believers. At the heart of Old Testament faith was knowing the Lord. And the same is true of New Testament faith, and it’s Jeremiah that tells us at the heart of the new covenant is “they will know me.” And Paul, interestingly, cites the Jeremiah 9 passage and Hebrews cites the Jeremiah 31 passage. Jesus speaks about eternal life being not justification, but knowing the Father and the Son. And so if this is the gospel center of Christianity, then the next stage is, What does it mean to know him? In a way, the simple answer to the whole question of legalism is that if you know who he is, then you know what he’s like. And all of the commands of the Bible, in one shape or another, are saying, This is what I’m like, and I want you to be like this, and the only way you can be like this is if you are like this. Now, when it comes to the Old Testament commandments, we can read them in an isolated fashion without realizing there’s a reason why they are negative. They’re almost all negative.

Matt Tully
“Don’t do this.”

Sinclair Ferguson
“Don’t do this”—because we are spiritual babies. I never said to my two year old, Let me explain how electricity works. I just said, There’s a cover on that to stop you putting a screwdriver in there. So there’s a protectiveness about it. But enshrined in all of those commandments, as Jesus indicates and as the catechisms of the church have indicated, that written into all of these negatives is the positive of the command. “Don’t commit adultery” doesn’t just mean don’t commit adultery; it means be faithful to your wife. “Don’t steal” means be generous. “Honor your father and mother,” which is an interesting commandment because it’s all positive, I think is almost like the baby commandment to a youngster in a family of faith if they honor their father and mother are almost naturally going to keep all the other commandments, because their father and mother honor these commandments. So when you drive all that back, ultimately I think what you’ve got in all of the Biblical commandments is at the end of the day, actually when Adam and Eve were created, they were created with instincts to live this way, and they abandoned them when those instincts were tested. Therefore, one of the things that takes place in regeneration is that restoration to what we were originally created to be, and we were originally created to function in a way that was, in miniature, like the way God functions, because we are made as his image. And so we would malfunction if the way we behaved did not mirror, in miniature, his holiness, his righteousness, his faithfulness, his love, his integrity, and so on. And so I think what Vos is saying is that when you detach the commandments, whether they’re in positive form or negative form, from the person of God, then they simply become detached imperatives. They lack the personal goal, which is a character that reflects the character of God. I don’t know if I’ve written about this and I haven’t talked about this much, so in a way what I’m about to say is self-condemnatory, but I think it is one of the greatest tragedies of the American evangelical church—and I think in large measure the British evangelical church—that in our focus on how to get saved, we completely lost the sense of what it meant not to be saved, but to be created. And so many Christians grew up with very little appreciation of the idea that we are made as the image of God. And so long as that was true, I think—and I’m not saying it was inevitable—but I think that made it far more likely that the law of God would be detached from the person of God. And then in understanding the whole of Scripture, the imperatives of the gospel would be detached from the indicatives of the gospel.

Matt Tully
How much of that detachment is also due to just not only the theological tradition—the Reformed tradition that often does distinguish between law and gospel and wants to draw a hard line between the two in terms of their purpose and their use in our lives—but even in the words of Scripture itself, Paul seems to want to draw some hard lines at times between those two concepts. What are we getting wrong and how we maybe sometimes think about those two things?

Sinclair Ferguson
That’s a huge question, Matt, but my own response to that is to say that the truest Reformed faith did not see the teaching of Scripture in the somewhat narrower spectrum of—for example, Martin Luther, or that stage of the reformation. Luther says things are either law or they’re gospel.

Matt Tully
He wants to put them in two buckets.

Sinclair Ferguson
Yeah. And so you understand why that was true of Luther. You can see the impact of his own experience. But it seems to me that in the best Reformed tradition, the story of the Bible is not law and gospel; the story of the Bible is actually—the way I would put it, and I could demonstrate this from the literature—is the grace of creation as the image of God. Now, we use the word grace and we’ve almost defined it in terms of sin. The Reformed fathers didn’t define it in terms of sin. They defined it in terms of God—his graciousness—so that creation is an act of condescension—his relationship with Adam and Eve, making them as his image. We are non-existence that he brings into existence, and he didn’t need to bring them into existence.

Matt Tully
And that is grace.

Sinclair Ferguson
Grace. So, not all of the Reformed theologians, but there’s a whole bundle of the best of them, would speak even about the original covenant that God made with Adam and Eve as a gracious covenant. They didn’t call it the covenant of grace, but it was a gracious covenant. And I think that needs to be established, that the creation of man and woman as the image of God and all that that means is an act of infinite grace. It’s nothingness being brought into creation to be a miniature likeness of God. And so the whole story is one of graciousness and promise implied in the statements that are made—now, that’s another long story. And therefore, in order that the man and the woman would grow and would grow in fulfilling their commission to, as I say, garden the whole earth. They’re given this little garden and they’re to extend it to the end of the earth, which for all I know, might have taken millennia of their family, but probably speedier development of technology than there has actually been. All of this sets our existence within the context of the person of God, the generosity of God, the integrity of God. But then comes the fall. The restoration, therefore, involves, in its varying stages, whatever you call them—stages of covenant, and let’s even use the word dispensation because the Bible uses the word dispensation. Although, in my own view, not in the fully developed form of American dispensationalism. But at the end of the day, is always a means of answering the question, How does God restore us to what we were originally created to be and then take us on to what we were ultimately destined to be? And when we see the Bible story that way, I think we are released from the antithesis that there seems to be between either it’s all grace or it’s all law, and it’s all either legalism or antinomianism. And all of that, and I see this very clearly in Paul, all of that very clearly—legalism on one hand and antinomianism on the other hand—is a misunderstanding of the core idea that runs through Scripture. Then, actually to get to the answer to your question, what Paul seems to me to be saying when he looks back to the old covenant, the Mosaic period, is that he’s saying when you look back on that, a season in God’s purposes when, in a sense, there is this enormous rigor of the law, he says that’s like being a child. The way I illustrate it usually is this: When I was in elementary school, I had the time of my life. I loved it. Scottish Education is elementary school and high school. There are no junior high schools. So you go from five years in one to six years in the other. So when I was in elementary school, I loved it. And then when I got to the secondary stage, to high school, now I’ve got six or seven teachers instead of one. Now I’m studying Latin and French and even Russian and Greek.

Matt Tully
This is where we know that you grew up on a different continent than most of our listeners.

Sinclair Ferguson
I’m studying all these things and I look back on that and I think, We were just kept in prison in those days! And then when I went to university—I’ve never forgotten this—very early on, my English literature professor, who was a Shakespeare expert, gave a lecture on Hamlet. We had studied Hamlet for several months in my final year in high school. And I learned more about Hamlet in that one lecture than I’d learned in the previous ones. I thought, Boy, they didn’t know nothing there! And it was like a new world to me. And so I looked back on those high school days and I thought, Boy, they weren’t really up to all that much. And then eventually I get out of university and I think, They were really keeping me in. They were giving me exams right, left, and center. And in our educational system, it was the last battery of exams that marked you for the rest of your life academically. There was no adding up things.

Matt Tully
You had your one shot.

Sinclair Ferguson
It was now or never, so there was tremendous pressure on it. And you were released from all that. And I looked back and thought, They were all a bunch of jailers! But at each stage I felt liberty, and only at the next stage was I able to look back and I saw what looked liked bondage. That kind of illustration came to me because of what Paul says in moving in that redemptive historical section in Galatians 3 and 4 where he says, In those days we were children underage. There was the pedagogue who was making sure we got to the next stage. And so when he speaks what sounds like pejorative language about the old, I think we’ve always got to remember that he’s saying that in the light of the wonderful freedom there was in Christ. And at the same time, I think we are able to understand what otherwise would seem very paradoxical, that an Old Testament believer could say, I love your law. It’s my meditation day and night. Because if I can put it this way, it was within the law that he was given to understand what it is that God’s grace reproduces in us. Although, another way I sometimes put it is he was living in the pop-up picture book version for children. So he couldn’t move around without asking, Am I mixing the materials from which my garments are being created? Is this the right day? Are we doing the sacrifices properly? I think of it as a very physical, sensial world in which the old covenant believer could see these are symbols. These can’t be the reality. The argument that Hebrews uses is that if the priest is standing there day after day, this isn’t the sacrifice that takes away sin. It may be an argument that’s used in Hebrews, but it’s an argument that a real Old Testament believer would also have been able to see.

Matt Tully
They would’ve resonated with that.

Sinclair Ferguson
He would see the sacrifice of this animal can’t be the sacrifice that actually takes away sin.

Matt Tully
And we even see glimpses of that in the Old Testament. I think of Psalm 51, where David’s confessing his sin and says, You want a contrite heart more than the blood of bulls.

Sinclair Ferguson
And, of course, there’s something very existential for him about it. These sacrifices can’t take away this sin. So that's how I think it all fits together and helps us to understand that the Mosaic administration between Sinai and Pentecost, we might say, was always meant to be an interim measure. It was never meant to be final. And an old covenant believer would’ve been able to see that. And then as the revelation goes on, the old covenant believer is looking to the prophet like Moses, or there’s this sense, for example, and it comes out in Psalm 72 of the kingdom extending way beyond the kingdom of David, and then the Son of Man, or the suffering servant. Granted, those prophets, as Peter says, were still left with the question, Who am I writing about? When is he coming? But there’s an increased sense that all of this liturgy and all of these laws that govern us somehow are all funneling towards this person who’s variously described and who is the Messiah. So at the end of the day, to me it all fits together very comfortably within the principle that when you understand how the biblical gospel works, then you realize why, on the one hand, there is liberty, and on the other hand, there is law. On the one hand, there is indicative, and on the other hand, there is imperative, because the ultimate goal is we’ve been predestined to be conformed to the likeness of his Son, that he might be the first born among many brothers. And you could add to that, in a sense, so that what we were meant to be in creation, we will actually and ultimately—not just what we were in creation, but what we were meant to be, ultimately, in creation—is going to be fulfilled for us and in us through Jesus Christ. And it’s a just a great story, isn’t it?

34:53 - A Challenge for Pastors

Matt Tully
How much of our struggle, as normal Christians, to hold together the indicatives and the imperatives? As you’ve already said, we look around at the church today and it doesn’t seem like, generally speaking, we’re doing a good job of living worthy of the gospel in such a way that unbelievers would see us and want to ask questions. How much of our failure in that regard is due to pastors in particular not being able to articulate this dynamic that you’ve been talking about? You tell the story in the book of a pastor who was preaching a sermon from the New Testament, and he essentially skipped over all of the exhortation in this passage, only preaching grace and gospel but seemingly unsure of what to do with the actual exhortation—the commands—that are in those passages themselves.

Sinclair Ferguson
I’ve been a preacher and a pastor, and I carry a lot of blame. The older I’ve gotten, the more I’ve reflected on James’ words in James 3 about not many of you be teachers. As preachers who preach in public, we can strut about as though we wear ourselves God, when we’re tiny specs of dust, really. I think there’s a tremendous cry on the one hand for humility, and on the other hand, I think it may be coming true that while there are ministers who study more and more seriously, I have a fear that there are younger ministers who are actually studying less. I just picked this up recently and I don’t know whether it’s true in the United States, but I’ve begun to sense that there are younger ministers who prepare their sermons by listening to other people’s sermons. I don’t mean like straightforward plagiarism. But they’ll find out somebody did a series on something, and they’ll listen. At the end of the day, I think what they’re doing is cherry picking the fruit of the fruit of the fruit of something else instead of digging into the Scriptures themselves. And if you don’t do that latter, then at the end of the day what you’ve got is a cherry-picked message, and you’re not going to get to grips with the way the Bible and the gospel actually work.

Matt Tully
Have you had to fight against the temptation in your own life—and you’re a well-known preacher—not necessarily to cherry pick from others, but even to maybe cherry pick from yourself? You’ve got so much experience, so you can pull something together pretty quickly or easily, and you haven’t really done the work in the text yourself.

Sinclair Ferguson
Speaking about yourself is really difficult. I find myself sometimes in situations where I think people presume you can just get up and speak. And you find yourself in that situation and you’re able to do it because you’ve got this massive stuff that is somewhere at the back of your head. And at the moment, my brain still operates well enough to open up the files. I know my mind works that way anyway. Alistair Begg, my friend, talks about all these files in my head, and if you say What’s in that file? I might not be able to answer you. But what I do know is when I click on the file, it will open and the stuff will be there.

Matt Tully
Amazing.

Sinclair Ferguson
But at the same time, a really big thing to me in preaching has been the framing of my own spirit to what it is I’m preaching. I know God helps you when you’ve got these kind of unusual situations, but if I were to preach that preparation of framing my spirit—

Matt Tully
What do you mean by that?

Sinclair Ferguson
I wish I knew, Matt! What I mean by that is the best way to put it is that it’s being worthy of it in the sense that Paul uses that term. It’s that my sense of this passage, this message—the intellectually (how I think), emotionally (affectively, how I feel about it)—that these two things should be married together. Otherwise, I’m going to preach the cognitive truth out of being that has a kind of dissonance with that truth. So that my fear is the message comes, as it were, at this band of understanding and this band of effective resonance, whether it’s very sobering or very uplifting. But if I preach something that’s very sobering and it’s not sobered me, the words and the tune—I’m going to be singing the words to the wrong tune as a being. I know there are people who rubbish this as mysticism, but I have become increasingly convinced that when people listen to the preaching of the word of God over the long haul, they are slowly going to begin to think that God sounds like this. And that’s not just the words he’s saying but the way he’s saying them. To use a trivial example, you can listen to somebody telling you that God loves you, and when they say it they clench their fist. And actually, at the affective level, they’re coming down on you rather than lifting you up. You know this well; you work for a publisher. C S Lewis says on more than one occasion that you should never tell anybody how they should feel about something, because people don’t feel about something because you tell them to feel that way. You should describe that something so that they do feel that way. I think even when indicatives and imperatives are understood theologically, I think it’s still possible—and I think I’ve heard this in preaching—it’s possible to preach in the indicative mood, but at the affections level, actually the impact on people is much more imperatival. It’s not so much the magnificence of the love of God that draws out a sense of awe and appreciation. It’s that you should feel God loves you. But unless Christ, the gospel, the greatness of God, the work of the Holy Spirit, and especially the person of the Lord Jesus is held out before us, we’re just going to be told how to feel and we’re never going to feel it. And then we’re just going to feel more guilty. And what is really bad about that is it sounds as though it’s the preaching of grace but it’s actually, inwardly and inside, it’s actually a form of the preaching of law. And you know, as Scripture says, the law never works grace. I think there’s just been so much evangelical preaching that has thrust us back on ourselves in this way, and sometimes unintentionally because there has been this dissonance between the cognitive expression of truth and the affective level at which that truth has been expounded.

43:26 - What Is the Secret of Christian Unity?

Matt Tully
You tell the story in the book of two sermons that you heard preached by John Stott, a mentor of yours. You tell the story of the first time you heard him preach, when I think you were maybe seventeen years old or so, and the last time that you heard him preach, which was not too long before his own death. I wonder if you could tell us that story, and what did you learn? What insight did you gain into what it means to be worthy and be in sync, so to speak, in terms of what we’re saying?

Sinclair Ferguson
The first story is I’m seventeen and I’m in my first term at university, and John Stott came to speak at the university chapel. But on the Saturday night the InterVarsity group had him to speak. He spoke from Philippians 2:1–11. He began—

Matt Tully
This is the Christ hymn.

Sinclair Ferguson
Yeah. He began with a question. He actually asked a question. He maybe said it was a pleasure to be here and so on. He was a very English gentleman, even across the border. He had a distinctive way of speaking, partly because of his background and also partly because of where he’d been educated.

Matt Tully
His accent?

Sinclair Ferguson
His accent, the way he pronounced words—upper middle class Cambridge graduates sometimes tended to speak slightly out of the corner of their mouth. So his question was, What is the secret? He spoke this way: What is the secret of Christian unity? We are all sitting there expecting him to tell us, but he was actually asking the question.

Matt Tully
He was actually waiting for you.

Sinclair Ferguson
So I’m sitting there—I was really shy, Matt—and I’m sitting there thinking, Well, I am not putting my hand up here. And I still remember some idiot answered the question and got it wrong. I wanted to crawl under the seat. And then he says, The secret of Christian unity is humility. And he goes on to expound Philippians 2:5–11. Now, there’s a midpoint to this story because when I was twenty-three I was ordained, and just around that time, my boss (a senior minister) had arranged for John Stott to come to do a minister’s conference in the church and to preach on three evenings in the church. And my job—so I’m 23 now, six years later—my job is to look after him.

Matt Tully
Drive him around?

Sinclair Ferguson
Drive him around, see he gets there, I had conversations with him and I still remember some of the conversations. But fast forward from that, from 1971 to 1982. We are about to come to Westminster Seminary in Philadelphia. I get a letter from John Stott. I’d spoken at a conference with somebody he knew and the person had said, Listen to the recordings of these addresses that this Scottsman gave. And out of the blue he wrote to me. He had prayed for me during those eleven years. We hadn’t met. I’d had one letter from his church, All Souls, asking me to go and work there, but that was quickly dismissed because that was across the border. And here I’m finding myself going to the United States. He wrote this very sweet letter to me and he’d clearly remembered me. He remembered Dorothy’s name, he said he’d] been trying to pray for us, and he said he hoped I wouldn’t stay in the United States too long. And then, oddly enough, I saw him more frequently in the United States. But then towards the end of his life, I was at a conference that he was speaking at, and I can see him. He was having these TIAs—these really miniature, momentary strokes.

Matt Tully
How old do you think he would have been at this point?

Sinclair Ferguson
Oh, he could have been in his 80s maybe. And he would just say, I’ll be all right in a minute. And he would just stand there.

Matt Tully
In the pulpit?

Sinclair Ferguson
In the pulpit. Just stand there, waiting for it to pass. I know people who said, I can never read any of his books on a passage and preach on it because there’ll be no other way to preach it than what he’s done. He had really very considerable expository skills, and I remember thinking he’s standing there and he doesn’t know what to say next. I mean, most preachers have known that experience, but not him. And he’s standing there kind of naked for these people, humiliated in a way. And I remembered, What is the secret? The secret is humility. And it was just like a picture of it. As I’ve reflected on it later on, I thought, Isn’t this amazing that this was an illustration of the gospel? I’m not one to think that Francis said, Go and preach the gospel. Use words if necessary. But this was John Stott, worthy of the gospel. There was the gospel, the humility and humiliation of Christ, and there was a miniature reflection of it in him. And it’s that same principle, only embodied in every dimension of our lives. I think it’s really important and maybe not much emphasized. And I understand if that isn’t emphasized in seminaries, because in seminaries they’re really just helping men to be able to function as preachers. But as you grow as a preacher, and like Paul says to Timothy, Make sure everyone sees your progress. Sometimes when I’ve thought about that verse, I’ve been standing in the pulpit thinking, Is there any soul in my congregation that it’s ever even crossed their minds that he’s progressed from what he was like five years ago? And I think all of that is part of maturing as a preacher in a way that it’s everything about your preaching that communicates the gospel. While Paul isn’t talking to preachers in Philippians 2, like most things there’s a narrower application to preachers. And since I’m one of them, obviously I want to hear that application.

Matt Tully
Sinclair, thank you so much for taking the time today to help us better understand this call on all of us—preachers included—to live worthy of the gospel. We appreciate it.

Sinclair Ferguson
Thanks for having me.

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