The blessings as well as the intimidations of
being the president at Dallas Theological Seminary is
the legacy of leadership that our school has
enjoyed.
I'm only the fifth president since the founding
of DTS, and that means there were four
before me.
Three of them are still alive.
I was two when Dr. Chafer passed away,
so I obviously did not know him.
I was introduced to him as a child
when a pastor of ours tried to steal
my father's copy of Dr. Chafer's book on
grace, and that was a fun family event
in the living room of our home in
Glenwood Springs, Colorado.
But I began to hear about Dallas at
a very young age, and it's been my
privilege to know the previous three presidents, all
three of which have offices on our campus
that tells you a little bit about their
commitment and their support of what we're doing
in our day and time here at DTS.
Dr. Wolvard served Dallas Theological Seminary since September
the 1st, 1935.
That's 67 years of faithful service to our
Lord through the ministry of Dallas Seminary.
Since 1986, when he retired from being president,
he served as the chancellor until just a
little over a year ago when he was
given a promotion to Chancellor Emeritus.
That made room for Dr. Swindoll to become
a chancellor.
Along with his academic credentials, which are huge
and many, he also pastored for 17 years
in the city of Fort Worth alongside of
what he has been doing at Dallas Seminary.
He's recognized as one of the world's leading
conservative evangelical theologians, especially in the work of
eschatology.
He's written, contributed, or edited over 30 books,
including the best-selling Bible Knowledge Commentary.
He was named the alumnus of the year
by Wheaton College, but he and his wife,
Geraldine, have been married for over 60 years,
and their relationship has been a model for
us all.
During the school year, when I'm not traveling
quite as much, I try to venture over
and get an hour with him every few
weeks, and it's been my privilege this last
year to do that, to pick his brain,
to listen to the history, to hear his
heart, and to appreciate his support and his
prayers for what we're doing here and why
you're here at Dallas Seminary.
Gives me a great privilege to introduce our
Chancellor Emeritus, our honored colleague and friend, Dr.
John F.
Wohlford.
Would you join me in welcoming him?
Thank you.
All the generations love you, as I do.
Thanks for being here.
First, may I apologize for coming to you
in a wheelchair, but I've been declining other
invitations to speak, but this was one I
couldn't turn down.
Geraldine and I have been so wrapped up
in this school for so many years that
the possibility of saying something effective and helping
in the beginning of the school year was
too much to resist.
I want to say a personal word of
welcome to the 300 new students we have
this year.
You are precisely the size of the whole
student body when this chapel was built, and
they debated a little bit about whether they
should build it as big as they did.
We have had a wonderful privilege from God
to see the work grow.
Now, this morning I want to speak on
a subject that I'm not fully able to
expound, and that is how to be effective
as a preacher.
It's possible for a person to go through
Dallas Seminary and take all our courses, and
when he gets through, still be a mediocre
preacher.
I don't think that's necessary.
It isn't a matter of gift.
It's a matter of dedication and meeting the
standards of Scripture.
We have Paul's consensus of this in 2
Timothy chapter 4, where he in five verses
packs in the elements of effective speaking.
I charge you, therefore, before God and the
Lord Jesus Christ, who will judge the living
and the dead that is appearing in his
kingdom, preach the word, be ready in season
and out of season, convince, rebuke, exhort, with
all longsuffering and teaching.
For the time will come when they will
not endure sound doctrine, but according to their
own desires, because they have itchy ears, they
will heap up for themselves teachers, and they
will turn their ears from the truth and
be turned aside to fables.
But you be watchful in all things, endure
afflictions, do the work of an evangelist, fulfill
thy ministry.
Now, this passage is worthy of a careful
exposition, but I want to confine myself to
these first three words, preach the word.
If the purpose of Dallas Theological Seminary can
be summed in those few words, we were
founded not so much as a protest against
modernism, though our doctrinal position is distinctive.
We were founded because Dr. Chafer believed that
the average seminary curriculum did not give its
students enough Bible to give them a basis
for expository preaching, which to him was the
absolute necessity of effective preaching in our modern
day.
Accordingly, he wrote these words.
Now, how can we be sure that we
are effective at preaching?
I personally am quite critical of much of
our modern preaching.
There are, of course, liberals that don't have
much to say, but even evangelicals often fall
completely short of what they ought to be
in the pulpit, and the result is disastrous
for the church as a whole, for its
growth, for its growth and blessing of God,
because the truth has not been effectively proclaimed.
Therefore, today I'd like to say just a
word or two about this.
Now, there are some things that are important.
You probably have heard the little expression that
the preachers are supposed to, not to expound
the Bible, but they're supposed to inspire the
audience.
That sounds rather interesting, but it happens to
be totally scripturally false.
The Bible doesn't talk about inspired preachers.
It talks about the inspired word, and the
power of the preaching comes from the word,
not from the preacher.
There are, however, requirements, and one of the
requirements is that you be filled with the
Spirit.
It's entirely possible to go through Dallas Seminary,
take a place of leadership, and still be
far from what you ought to be by
the power of the Holy Spirit in your
life, because being indwelt by the Spirit and
being filled by the Spirit is possible only
as we yield ourselves to him and let
him have his way with us.
I passed that hurdle back in my teenage
years when I was in college, and I
faced the issue of whether Jesus Christ was
really the Lord of my life, and I
really hadn't given it too much consideration.
I was saved, but it never occurred to
me that if you accept Jesus Christ as
God, you automatically accept him as Lord.
He has the right to rule your life,
and I made a definite decision in my
first year in college that I was going
to commit myself to the will of God
regardless of what it was.
Nothing else, nothing more, and so forth.
The whole idea of preaching and dealing with
the word of God effectively was being filled
with the Spirit.
Now, there are certain things, I think, that
are wrong in our modern preaching, and I'd
like to have you avoid it.
I think I've tried to in my latter
years particularly.
I wasn't conscious of all this when I
first started preaching, but it's first of all,
of course, very necessary to have a passion
for the truth of God.
We are not dealing with trivial things that
simply are ornaments in the lives of those
who hear us.
We're dealing with heaven and hell.
We're dealing with judgment on sin.
We're dealing with an effective life for God
that will be rewarded at the judgment seat
of Christ.
All these things are tremendously, tremendously important, but
let me ask you a question.
How do you regard lost souls?
You know that scriptures make plain that everybody
who isn't a Christian is going into a
Christless eternity where he'll experience eternal punishment, and
every hour and every day there are thousands
of people who end their earthly life and
are plunged into eternal punishment.
What's your feeling about it?
Now, personally, that troubles me.
That's awful.
So many of these people perhaps deserve it,
even from our human standpoint, but unless they
have trusted in Christ, they might have religion,
they might be members of a church, they
might have many of the things that belong
to the Christian life, but if they aren't
born again, they share the same destiny as
a total atheist or a total unbeliever.
And that bothers me.
What can I do and what can you
do to stem this tide of thousands of
souls going into eternity without salvation?
I think that's a question we have to
face because it's a central question of our
life.
What are you going to do about it?
Well, I faced it as a young man
and went to seminary here and completed my
course of study and I reasoned that being
surrendered to the Lord was being willing to
be a missionary to China.
So my college and career, seminary career, I
was planning to go as a missionary to
China.
When it came up to the point of
making an application, however, the Lord very definitely
said no.
And to make a long story short, the
administration of the seminary asked me to come
on as a member of the faculty and
as a registrar.
Now that had seemed to be a given,
that was very easy, but back in those
days the seminary was badly managed.
It meant you had a job but no
salary.
And I don't know if you've ever faced
that before.
To be sure, they started me out at
$100 a month but they didn't pay it.
And six months later I discovered they had
raised it to $2,000 but it took
me three years before I found out.
And it's humorous in a way, but have
you ever been faced with the idea of
a full-time job for the Lord but
no money?
Fortunately I was single at the time and
I didn't have much financial need, living with
my mother and she had a pension and
the church paid me all of $125 a
month, I was a part-time pastor, and
I could live on that.
And that's what happened.
Do you know how much they paid me
the first year?
Well, they paid me exactly $7.50 a
week.
I hope you never have to face the
question of choosing a job when it's $7
.50 a week.
But it's the will of God, what else
are you going to do?
And so I became a member of the
faculty and that was really an important job
because as registrar you're in charge of the
whole educational program, class schedule, courses and so
on.
And we had only 100 students, but there
was the need of admissions and that was
his responsibility.
And so I've been serving the Lord for
these many years in the seminary.
And while I doesn't qualify as a missionary
to Africa or China, nevertheless I've had the
privilege of training hundreds of students, some of
whom at least have gone to the mission
field.
And I've written books, one of which has
been translated into 16 languages.
So I'm reaching hundreds of thousands of people
through the written word that I never would
have reached as a missionary.
So the Lord knows best.
And the will of God is perfect, it's
always perfect.
Nothing better than that can be possible for
us.
Now it's very important that we first of
all be ready to preach because we are
filled with the Spirit.
But if I can answer the question as
to what you think about the people being
lost, I think that we get at the
heart of the problem.
A preacher should have a passion to win
souls to Christ.
He should have a passion to get out
the truth.
So much of our modern preaching is entertaining
perhaps, and perhaps sometimes inspiring, but it doesn't
get at the whole problem.
It doesn't really reach the souls of people,
lead them to Christ, and lead them on
into an effective Christian life, and how very,
very important that is.
I've heard so many sermons, and you have
too, you sometimes ask the question, what in
the world is he preaching on that for?
And you can't see any rational reason for
developing the subject that he's developing.
I've listened to hundreds of godly preachers who
preach to Christians, but in their entire sermon,
no one became sensitive to the fact that
probably 25% of their audience were unsaved,
and not a word was given as to
how to come to Christ and how to
be born again.
The person ending that service as an unsaved
person would leave it as an unsaved person.
I believe that while sermons can't include everything,
one sermon cannot, one of the blessings of
an expository ministry is that you explain the
whole Bible, and sooner or later you cover
every subject that comes through it.
My own personal ministry, as was mentioned, I
was a part-time pastor for many years,
and I had three preaching assignments on Sunday.
I taught a Sunday school class.
We went through the whole Bible on a
10-year cycle, and then in the morning
services and evening services, I would preach one
service, expounding the Bible word for word, and
then another subject, the second service, would be
a topical sermon where I dealt with the
great doctrines of the scripture.
In the course of my years, I covered
the whole New Testament, verse by verse, one
and a half times, and spoke on half
the Old Testament books, and taught every important
doctrine of the Christian faith.
So much of our modern preaching just ignores
theology.
You go to the church all your life
and not be grounded in the truth, and
that's a tragedy.
God wants people to know the truth, and
the truth will set you free.
If your preaching isn't about the truth of
God, it's not real preaching, and so it's
very important that we employ the word of
God.
I believe personally that in every sermon, you
should have a section where you explain what
it is to be a Christian.
That's how I got saved.
I went to a church all my life.
It wasn't until I was 15 that I
learned that you couldn't get to heaven by
doing the best you could.
I thought that was all that was required.
I finally listened to a preacher who was
a great soul winner, and he explained that
we're spiritually dead, we're born, we're under condemnation,
that there wasn't anything we could do about
it, but that Christ went to the cross
and died in our place and bore our
sins, and now it's possible for God to
extend by his grace the wonderful salvation that
we have in Christ.
There's only a half a dozen or more
sentences of what he said, but I grabbed
it.
It was like a shaft of light for
the first time in my life I knew
what it was to be saved and to
be trusting in Christ.
Because I was saved by a preacher who
went out of his way to preach the
gospel, it certainly taught me a lesson to
do the same thing.
When you preach, when you get through, ask
yourself the question, if there was a man
saved present in the audience tonight or today,
what would he hear?
Would he learn how to be saved?
Would he have an opportunity?
Would he be taught the truth of the
scriptures about salvation?
Certainly that is very important.
I believe today the pulpit is often failing
in this regard.
They assume that the main message is to
Christians, and they pass up the opportunity to
preach the gospel to the unsaved.
I think it's very important that we keep
salvation up and forth in the front in
our ministry.
There's another aspect of this that I think
is obviously necessary, and that is that almost
every sermon I've ever heard exhorted us to
do better.
Did you ever hear a sermon that exhorted
you to do worse?
No.
They all want you to do better.
How many sermons have you heard who told
you how?
See, God has a program of sanctification.
It's complete, it's complex, but it's his program
of leading a person who's a Christian into
a holy life.
And certainly that is very, very important.
Important in that, of course, is the fact
that we have an indwelling presence of the
Holy Spirit.
He's our teacher and our guide.
If we're surrendered to him, we will learn
much about God's truth for our personal lives.
It's impossible for a person to be an
effective Christian without the power of the Spirit
in his life.
It's also important that we have the other
aspects of the truth.
We know that the Bible itself is a
sanctifying power, and that's why we should read
it every day, why we should preach it,
why we should meditate on it, like the
psalmist who meditated on the Word of God
day and night.
You see, the Bible was intended to be
a sanctifying part of our life.
The question is asked, how shall a young
man cleanse his way, and the answer is
by taking heed thereto according to thy word.
You and I not only need the Word
of God to preach to others, we need
the Word to sanctify our own lives and
to make us the kind of Christians that
are an example as well as a source
of information about it.
We need this sanctifying power of the Word
of God.
And then there's the intercessory work of Christ.
So many people don't realize that we have
a Savior who's at the right hand of
God the Father interceding for us.
And in the infinity of the God, he's
able to give his full attention to you
and to me 24 hours a day without
any confusion.
When we pray, we join a prayer meeting
already in session where the Son of God
himself is praying for us.
It really is amazing that we don't accomplish
more when we realize the power of that
prayer.
But God is an intercessor for us.
Then we have the wonderful blessing of association
with other Christians.
There's a wonderful fact that if we go
to church and mingle with our fellow Christians
that they help us and strengthen us in
our task for serving the Lord.
So there's this whole program of sanctification, absolutely
necessary, it isn't enough to tell people that
they ought to be good, you tell them
how, and search the Word and do the
things that are helpful in giving us a
holy and effective life.
And then Christianity by its very nature is
a message of hope.
I've been taught eschatology or prophecy all my
life, probably because it was assigned to me
when I joined the faculty, I didn't have
much choice.
But what a wonderful thing it is to
have the hope that we have in Christ.
One of the tragedies of our day is
that some churches never speak on prophecy.
I get invited to whole prophecy conferences in
church and sometimes people come to me and
say, our preacher never preaches on prophecy.
It's amazing.
Twenty-five percent of the Bible was prophetic
when it was written, and you cross out
prophecy and you've lost a fourth of the
Word of God, and you've lost your position
as an expositor of the entire Word of
God.
We must believe and must preach the truth
of hope.
I recall in Canada one time, I was
speaking at a conference, and a lady who
was a senior citizen came up to me,
she said, this is the first prophetic sermon
I've heard since I was a teenager, fifty
years of no preaching on the truth of
the hope of Christ.
It's so important, and I know there's excuses
for it.
They say there's so many other subjects why
dwell on prophecy, but God's Word makes it
plain that from God's standpoint, it's important, and
it's rather interesting that again and again in
the Bible, the exhortation is given especially to
preach on prophecy, 1 Thessalonians 4.
Comfort one another with these words, you see.
We're told, we're commanded to do it.
We understand a preacher told us never to
read the book of Revelation, it just confuses
us.
Well, it's obvious that he was confused, and
he didn't read it, because if you had
read just the opening verses, there's a special
blessing on those who read and take heed.
Prophecy is a wonderful instrument in leading people
to Christ, in sanctifying believers, in giving them
the hope they need in a world that
has so much sorrow and trouble.
Hal Lindsay, of course, is the one that
capitalized on that, when he was in Campus
Crusade, he led hundreds of people to Christ,
and he wrote the late great Planet Earth,
which had a phenomenal sale, and it's hard
to believe that the publisher only published 10
,000 in the first printing, and now it's
in the many millions.
He's had over 2,000 letters from people
who said through reading the book, they've come
to Christ, and for everyone that writes, there's
10 that don't, so you can't imagine how
that one book has influenced the Christian public.
But it's necessary for them to preach the
word, and I don't think it's necessary to
spend a lot of time on all the
details of prophecy, but people should know that
Christ is coming, that they're going to be
judged by him, that it's a blessed hope,
a wonderful expectation.
To be with Christ is far better.
We need to preach the truth about prophecy,
and I hope you never get in a
position where you're silent on this important aspect
of what God has asked us to preach.
You see, being an effective preacher covers many
things.
It covers salvation, it covers sanctification, it covers
eschatology or prophecy, but most of all, it
means to preach the word.
When you get through, if you haven't preached
the word, you haven't preached the word, and
I believe what I've said tonight is the
sum of what the Bible has to say
on this subject.
I trust when you get out, if you
want to join the ranks of the many
that are mediocre preachers that don't preach the
Bible, that don't know exactly where they're going
or why they're going, but instead will have
a clear message, a dynamic message that comes
from the Bible itself, the power of the
word of God to change people's lives, to
lead them to salvation, to lead them to
hope, and lead them to have lives that
are well-pleasing to God.
So I've covered for you the Lord's best,
and may it be your challenge never to
be satisfied with mediocrity, but to preach the
word effectively in the power of the Holy
Spirit, to cover the whole word of God,
not just pieces here and there, and be
an expositor of the word of God.
Shall we pray?
Our Father, how grateful we are for the
Bible and all it means to us, for
the blessings that have come to those of
us who have preached it, and believed it,
and lived our life in the light of
the scriptures.
We pray, Lord, that thou will bless this
student body.
They're in the time of wonderful privilege of
studying and preparing for the future.
Some of the happiest years of their lives
are going to be spent right here on
our campus.
And we pray that thou will help them,
not only to arrive at the truths that
we're talking about, but when they get out,
to be a man who is filled with
the Spirit, who is preaching the whole word
of God, and expecting God to hear and
honor their ministry.
So we commit our many needs to you,
Lord.
There are no doubt many individual problems in
the lives of students who come.
The devil is a way of putting obstacles
in our way.
But we trust that thou will give them
the victory, and will make them effective as
a servant for God, now and every day
until Jesus comes.
And we ask it all in Christ's precious
name.
Amen.