My prayer for this series is that singles will view being single NOT as a sickness, but rather as a season that needs to be embraced in order to learn all that God desires to teach them.

Perry Noble this week:

We started to hand two marbles out to every single dude who attended NewSpring today…because that is the only “set” they would have!!! Dude…if you are single…MAN UP and pursue a woman instead of a video game!

The lesson? Singleness isn’t a disease; it’s a deformity.

The sermon you hear on your iPod is significantly inferior to the preaching you hear at your local church on Sunday morning. Here’s why:

1. The preacher doesn’t know you. Although preaching is not the only aspect of shepherding, ideally preaching and shepherding should go together. A preacher feeds his flock the Word of God, though always presenting it in a way that’s meaningful for that particular congregation. To your pastor, you’re a known family member sitting around the (metaphorical) table; to your podcast preacher, you’re a hit, an anonymous number.
2. You can choose your sermons. Podcasts are perfect for people with itching ears (that’s all of us). Each sermon is labeled and invites us to download or delete it. When I go to my local church on Sunday, I usually don’t know the details of the pastor’s sermon. He commits to preach the Word of God as it’s written, and I commit to listen, test and obey the preached Word as I hear it. Dodging difficult messages is harder when you don’t see them coming.
3. You can listen while distracted. When you listen to a preacher while driving down the interstate eating your lunch, you’re probably not going to be able to concentrate quite as well as if you were sitting in church. The very value of podcasting is that we can take our preachers with us, so the assumption is that we’ll be multitasking when we listen. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with multitasking, but it’s not worship.
4. You can listen without your Bible. Although this is possible to do in church, the on-the-go multitasking quality of podcast audiences makes this much more likely. Having a Bible on hand as we listen lets us see as well as hear the Word; it also lets us quickly check the context of a verse and engage in on-the-fly testing of the preacher’s message.
5. You’re alone. In church I am both encouraged and challenged by the fact that I see my Christian family worshipping with me. Fellowship with God is accompanied by fellowship with his family. Although podcasting and Internet participation carry with them the idea of a virtual community, it’s still only virtual. I know there may be thousands of other believers sharing the podcast with me, but I don’t know who they are. Neither will they know me.
6. He’s always preaching to someone else. When we listen to a podcast preacher, it’s almost always someone else’s preacher. When the preacher challenges his congregation, it’s always someone else who’s being challenged, not me. Not only am I anonymous and unaccountable, the preacher isn’t even expecting me to be accountable.
7. It’s usually out of context. Sermons are an integral part of church worship, which usually includes other elements like singing, prayer, confession, communion and giving. To take the sermon out of that context deprives it of the participation and preparation that is a valuable part of the in-church sermon.

I’m not saying that we need to delete all of our podcast subscriptions. There are obviously exceptions to all the points I’ve just made.

Clearly, there is value in hearing the Word of God preached well by anyone, but our primary source of spiritual sustenance, beyond our own Bible study and prayer, should come through membership in a local church with a preacher that faithfully preaches God’s Word.

Everything else is gravy. Tasty, but not filling.

(Full disclosure. My own podcast list, in order of most listened to, is Sinclair Furguson, Alistair Begg, and RC Sproul.)

It took a while for Scripture to enter the conversation, but it made a cameo appearance yesterday as a subpoint under his main point about being creative.

After acknowledging that “correct theology must drive our methodology,” he describes a methodology that is about as theologically driven as my dog’s breakfast.

I bring others into a meeting to discuss the scripture passage because there are people at different stages of life that will see scripture through a different lens.

You would be amazed at some of the conversations that take place in some of our meetings for example I will bring in women who point out, “You know what Perry, that is the fourth sports illustration you’ve used this week. It’s not really connecting us.” Or…I’ll bring in singles and ask how they believe this passage applies to where they are in life.

In fact…I will bring in people that may be different on some minor theological issues that I would happen to think of because I want to take an all-around view of scripture.

This, perhaps, explains why he couldn’t decide whether he was pre- or post-millennial for his end-times series.

The Bible is to be read through the lens of Scripture, not that of whoever happens to be in the room with the pastor that morning. If different people see different things in the Bible, who is to decide which one is true, or which one is God’s word for the church that week? It’s a methodology that will produce unfaithful, weak, man-centered and inconsistent preaching.

How should it be done? The Westminster Confession gives us useful advice.

The infallible rule of interpretation of Scripture is the Scripture itself: and therefore, when there is a question about the true and full sense of any Scripture (which is not manifold, but one), it must be searched and known by other places that speak more clearly. (WC I.IX)

Truth through focused study, not focus groups.

I was impressed that Noble had stepped up the plate. After last weekend, it looks like he’s been given the take sign from the coach.

I did NOT get into pre-trib, mid-trib, post-trib, pre-millennial, post-millennial…or ANYTHING else along those lines because…I do not CARE!

I’d offer a critique, but what do I care?

God taught me the 5 Purposes of Church at 24, but few paid attention. Now,in my50s,I ask”What 24yrold should I be listening to?

1. Had God been hiding these purposes until 30 years ago? You mean to tell me the Church wandered around for 1,970 or so years without knowing its purpose, until 24 year old Rick Warren comes along and recieves some type of special knowledge from God?
2. Is Warren really hoping to find another man in his 20s who has received new divine revelation?
3. Which 24 year old should you listen to? Pretty much anyone who is clinging tightly to the Word of God. Of course, that wouldn’t be new revelation, but really, really old revelation…but at least it is real revelation.
4. Age shouldn’t disqualify someone from being heard, nor should it be the reason we listen to them. I am sure there are some 24 year olds out there carrying the true message of God…and I would love to hear them. I know for a fact that there are some men in their 60s who are faithfully delivering God’s word.
5. Why is the messenger all that important anyway? The message itself is what matters.

Troubling.

Thoughts?

How did Noble do that? What powerful message on baptism did he preach to persuade so many believers to take that sacred step?

The answer: he didn’t say much at all.

His sermon was focused mainly on Joshua taking off his shoes when, according to Noble, he met Jesus in Joshua 3. Jesus asked Joshua to obey the small, insignificant step of taking off his sandals. As a consequence of his obedience in such a minor matter, God put Joshua on the map.

Noble then asked what minor steps we needed to obey God in, and suggested that it might be baptism. He then explained baptism to his congregation. You can see the entire sermon here, but it was full of nonsensical examples that had the church voting for Chevy or Ford, and cheesecake or cheeseburger. You’ll have to watch it yourself to see how it related to baptism, but somewhere in there he did teach about the Why, How, Who and When of baptism.

With such an ambitious agenda, you might think this would take a few weeks to cover, though Noble got through it all in less than four minutes. The following clip is an edited version of the substance of his teaching. (I have edited out extraneous material on marital authority, fear of water, and infant baptism.)

Please understand that I am not criticizing anyone who was baptized last week, nor the church’s mission to baptize believers. What is disappointing is that the pastor thought it was worth a thousand people immediately taking an important spiritual step, yet he didn’t think it worth more than a few minutes of substantial teaching on a doctrine that literally defines his denomination.

Now, a part of his message is unassailable and praiseworthy–if Jesus tells us to do something, we really have no argument against it. That is true, but there is much more that Scripture offers us on the meaning and mode of baptism than demanding straight obedience. Can we not be obedient and informed? One would assume that knowing more about the sacrament would add to the believers’ blessings.

Commentator Tommy had guessed last week that Noble had achieved his numbers by presenting the sacrament as meaningless.

My interest here is the irony of Baptists celebrating nearly 1000 baptisms, by a group who thinks it’s meaningless.

Tommy appears to have been correct. Where does one find any meaning in Noble’s presentation here? Noble’s message was that this is such a minor step–just like taking off your shoes–, that you’d only refuse to do it if you were afraid or proud.

The only meaning he did provide was that this meant one was “going public” for Jesus.

If that’s all it is, how does getting wet in an above-ground pool behind the church building make one’s faith any more public than attending church in the first place? If going public is what it’s all about, why can’t we just post an announcement on Craig’s list?

Surely there’s more to baptism than this.

(Noble posed four questions: Why, How, Who and When. If I am to complain about his cursory answer, it might be expected that I provide my own, and so I will. Over the next few weeks, PP will answer these questions, probably in four different posts.)

Just decided Kanye, Taylor, & Beyoncé will make a guest appearance in my sermon this weekend.

That’s interesting. My Pastor preached about 3 famous people this weekend, too. Mordecai, Esther, and Haman.

Perry Noble is preaching about how he ignores his critics, and uses a cute little travel anecdote from a recent missions trip to help us see his point.

It’s hard to ignore some things. It really is.

Back in February when I flew to Kenya–went over there for several days, we were very tired. We get on a plane, we fly from Nairobi to Amsterdam. We get off the plane at Amsterdam. We’ve got a layover. We finally get on the plane. We get there, and we were flying to Detroit, and I just want to sleep. I’m like, craving sleep. I don’t want food (and when I don’t want food, it’s bad). I just wanted to sleep.

So I get on this airplane, and I sitting there, and this really large man gets [on] and sits right next to me, and he’s, like, right over here across the aisle, and he kind of sits down. No problem, you know. And he sits there.

He had been sitting down two minutes, and all of a sudden he started snoring. The plane takes off, and this dude–he wakes up for a few minutes and goes back to sleep–and he is snoring. And it’s not like [a gentle snore], it’s like [very loud]. Like the oxygen mask fell, and stuff like that. I mean, like, the stewardess walked by, and she looked at me and went, “I don’t even know what that is. I’m sorry.”

So I started praying for him. I prayed for God to kill him, because he was…

Don’t judge me!

Some of you prayed that for your husband last night while he snored. “God, take him. I know where he’s going. Take him, now! We have life insurance.”

So, I tried to watch a movie, and I’m trying to watch the movie and [he's snoring loudly]. It’s almost impossible to ignore, but finally, over a period of time, I learned how to ignore the snoring and kind of move on.

That’s what Jesus says we need to learn how to do [in] Matthew 7:6.

Matthew 7:6, by the way, says,

Do not give dogs what is sacred; do not throw your pearls to pigs. If you do, they may trample them under their feet, and then turn and tear you to pieces.

Jesus wants us to develop discernment, not murderous fantasies.

Perhaps Noble was a little peeved at being abandoned on these pages, but if you review his tweets from last weekend, it appears that he provided his own response, which was, to paraphrase, It’s best that I don’t preach as well as some others.

How else do you explain this tweet?

The worse thing God could give some of us is more information b/c it would not draw us 2 Him but cause us to run from Him in disobedience!

It must be nice to think you can give advice to God, though perhaps he’s just emulating his pal Steven Furtick, who thinks God spent too much time talking about Moses and wasted all his time on Leviticus. Or Andy Stanley who says we should excise the word shepherd from Jesus’ teaching. As he says, “That word needs to go away.”

Andy Stanley also says that concealing or dumbing down information is a useful leadership technique:

Here’s an incredibly important principle. You cannot communicate complicated information to large groups of people. As you increase the number of people, you have to decrease the complexity of the information.

We talked about church marketing earlier in the week, and here we see how a sales mentality can corrupt faithful preaching. Note two lessons that Tony Morgan says are a characteristic of proper church marketing:

We focus less on what we say and more on how we act.

We reduce the number of competing messages we are trying to communicate.

The spoken word is deprecated and replaced by action, guided by a local pastor who thinks there’s benefit in intentionally hiding the whole counsel of God from his congregation. As Noble reminds us, an emphasis on continual action also suggests that we can stop learning.

Many times with me it isn’t always learning something new…but rather being reminded of what I should already know!

Stay shallow, friends. Stay shallow.

(An alternate interpretation of Noble’s first tweet would be that God only gives new revelation to people who are willing and able to properly respond to it, which often includes Noble himself. Such an interpretation suggests that the Bible is insufficient, and sets up pastors as special receptors of extra-biblical wisdom. It also limits God in whom he’s allowed to speak to.)