In studying for a class on the Westminster Confession of Faith, it was recommended to me that I get a copy of Chad Van Dixhoorn’s commentary on the confession, entitled Confessing the Faith.

I began by reading the commentary on Chapter 14 of the confession (since this is the beginning of the session that we will discuss in the next class session). I liked these paragraphs and thought I would share them with you.

“The ministry of the Word is used by the Spirit to work saving faith in us. It should be added that the Word of God can increase and strengthen our faith.

What new Christian and what seasoned saint will not confess that his or her faith is often weak? All the honest ones will. For that reason Christian elders impress upon every believer the importance of attending as often as possible to the preaching of the Word. We want to see trust in Christ grow and be strengthened as the weeks and years go by. The Apostle Peter once urged believers to desire what he called ‘ the pure milk of the word’ precisely so that they would ‘grow up into salvation’ (1 Peter 2:2). Paul said much the same to the leaders of the Ephesian church when he commended his listeners to the ‘word of his grace, which can build you up’ (Acts 20:32). This is biblical advice; the soundest sort of wisdom.”

In the internet age, we have many ways of encountering Christian teaching in written, audio and video formats. I could fill my podcast app with enough teaching to listen all my waking hours.

But there is something very special about hearing the Word of God proclaimed by capable preachers along with my brothers and sisters in Christ. I read recently, that for many years, Martyn Lloyd-Jones resisted having audio recordings made of his sermons for this reason.

“The intellectual coup d’état by which the Enlightenment convinced so many that ‘we now know that dead people don’t rise,’ as though this was a modern discovery rather than simply the reaffirmation of what Homer and Aeschylus had taken for granted, goes hand in hand with the Enlightenment’s other proposals, not least that we have now come of age, that God can be kicked upstairs, that we can get on with running the world however we want to, carving it up to our advantage without outside interference. To that extent, the totalitarianisms of the last century were simply among the varied manifestations of a larger totalitarianism of thought and culture against which postmodernity has now, and rightly in my view, rebelled. Who, after all, was it who didn’t want the dead to be raised? Not simply the intellectually timid or the rationalists. It was, and is, those in power, the social and intellectual tyrants and bullies; the Caesars who would be threatened by a Lord of the world who had defeated the tyrant’s last weapon, death itself; the Herods who would be horrified at the postmortem validation of the true King of the Jews. And this is the point where believing in the resurrection of Jesus suddenly ceases to be a matter of inquiring about an odd event in the first century and becomes a matter of rediscovering hope in the the twenty-first century. Hope is what you get when you suddenly realize that a different world view is possible, a worldview in which the rich, the powerful, and the unscrupulous do not after all have the last word.”

N. T. Wright in Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church