Application Without Moralism

James 1:22 is a sentence every preacher should have to read before he writes an application, because it cuts both ways. It says a hearer who hears and does nothing is deceiving himself. And the image James uses next is merciless: the hearer who does not act is like a man who looks at his face in a mirror, walks away and immediately forgets what he looks like (1:23-24). A sermon that leaves people in that condition, informed and unchanged, has failed by James's standard however accurate it was. The Lord himself ends the Sermon on the Mount the same way: everyone who hears these words of Mine and acts on them is like a wise man who built his house on the rock (Matthew 7:24), and everyone who does not is a fool building on sand. Why do you call Me Lord, Lord, he asks in Luke 6:46, and do not do what I say?

But James does not begin at verse 22. He begins with God. Every good and perfect gift is from above (1:17). He chose to give us birth through the word of truth (1:18). Then: humbly accept the word planted in you, which can save your souls (1:21). Only then: be doers. The doing James demands is the life of a word God has already planted, not a self-improvement programme for people who have been told what they ought to be. That order is the whole of this lesson in miniature. The command is real, it is urgent and it is concrete; and it stands on something God has already done.

And James, of all New Testament writers, uses examples freely. Abraham, Rahab, the prophets, Job and Elijah all appear in a letter of five chapters. So the anchor of this lesson guards against two errors at once. It forbids the sermon that never asks for anything, which is a real and growing failure in pulpits that have learned to fear moralism. And by its own order, birth before doing, it forbids the sermon that asks for everything and supplies nothing. The previous three lessons argued about how a sermon reaches Christ and how it handles the law. This one asks what happens in the last fifteen minutes, when the preacher turns to the people in front of him and says, so then.

Everyone has heard it. David faced Goliath; you have giants in your life; face them with courage, as David did, and God will give you the victory. The Hermeneutics track used this sermon as its example of what redemptive-historical reading objects to, and it is worth seeing here exactly why it fails as preaching, because almost every preacher has preached a version of it.

First, it misreads the passage. 1 Samuel 17 is not mainly about David's courage. Saul and all the Israelites were dismayed and greatly afraid (17:11). David's own explanation of what is about to happen is about God: the LORD, who delivered me from the claws of the lion and the bear, will deliver me from the hand of this Philistine (17:37), and he tells Goliath the point of the whole episode, that all those assembled here will know that it is not by sword or spear that the LORD saves, for the battle is the LORD's (17:47). The chapter's subject is the LORD saving his frightened people through the king he has chosen, and its readers in Israel would have heard it as the story of how God's anointed won the battle his people could not fight. To make the congregation David is to put them in the one place in the story they do not belong.

Second, it assumes the hearer can. The sermon tells people who are frightened to be brave, people who are weak to be strong, and people who are failing to succeed. Some will go home and try, and some of those will manage it for a while and become quietly proud. Others will try and fail and conclude that they lack David's faith, and they will go home worse than they came. Neither group has heard anything about what God does for people who cannot fight their giants, which is what the passage is actually about.

Third, it is selective. The same David remained in Jerusalem in the spring when kings go to war (2 Samuel 11:1), and what followed was adultery and murder. A preacher who holds up David as a model must decide what to do with that, and the moralist usually solves the problem by not reading 2 Samuel 11 in the same series. Scripture does not flatter its heroes. Almost every Old Testament character the moralist holds up as a model, Abraham, Jacob, Moses, Gideon, Samson, David, Solomon, is shown by the text itself to be a sinner whom God used anyway. That is evidence about what the narratives are for.

Bryan Chapell, in Christ-Centered Preaching, gave this family of sermons a name that has stuck: the deadly be's. Be like messages hold up a character to copy; be good messages exhort people to behave better; be disciplined messages urge them to try harder at prayer, Bible reading or self-control. Chapell's point is not that any of those things is wrong. It is that a sermon consisting only of them is a sermon that a person of any religion, or none, could preach, and that it leaves the hearer with a duty and without the grace by which a sinner could ever perform it. Moralism, in the sense this lesson means, is not the presence of morality in a sermon. It is morality cut off from the God who gives what he commands.

The remedy is not fewer commands. It is commands in the order scripture gives them. New Testament scholars call that order the indicative and the imperative, after the grammatical moods: the indicative states what is so, the imperative commands. Rudolf Bultmann put the pair at the centre of Pauline ethics in an essay of 1924 on the problem of ethics in Paul, and Herman Ridderbos's Paul: An Outline of His Theology, published in Dutch in 1966 and in English in 1975, gave it the form most evangelical preachers have learned. The idea is simple. Paul first tells believers what God has made them in Christ, and then commands them to live it out.

You can see it everywhere once you look. Romans 6: we were buried with him through baptism into death, in order that we too may walk in newness of life (6:4); so you too must count yourselves dead to sin, but alive to God in Christ Jesus (6:11); therefore do not let sin reign in your mortal body (6:12). Colossians 3: since you have been raised with Christ, strive for the things above (3:1); you died, and your life is now hidden with Christ in God (3:3); put to death, therefore, the components of your earthly nature (3:5). 1 Corinthians 5:7 compresses it into one sentence: get rid of the old leaven, that you may be a new unleavened batch, as you really are. Ephesians takes three chapters to tell the church what God has done and then begins the fourth, as a prisoner in the Lord, then, I urge you to walk in a manner worthy of the calling you have received (4:1). Romans has eleven chapters of the mercy of God before 12:1 says therefore, on account of God's mercy, offer your bodies.

It is not only Paul's pattern, and it is not only a New Testament one. The Ten Commandments begin with an indicative: I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery (Exodus 20:2). Israel was not told to keep the law in order to be redeemed. They were redeemed, and then told how redeemed people live. The slogan often used for the whole pattern is become what you are. It is a good slogan as long as it is heard in that order.

Three refinements keep the pattern honest. First, the ground of the imperative is not always a past event. Paul also motivates obedience by what is coming: the night is nearly over; the day has drawn near, so let us lay aside the deeds of darkness (Romans 13:12); we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ (2 Corinthians 5:10). A grace-grounded sermon may warn, because scripture does. Second, the indicative is not merely a doctrinal preface the preacher gets through before the real business. Christ's love compels us, Paul says in 2 Corinthians 5:14; the indicative is the power by which the imperative is obeyed, not just its justification. Third, the imperative is not optional or softened by the indicative. Put to death is a hard command, and Paul means it. The pattern does not make obedience easy. It makes it possible, and it makes it the response of a son rather than the wages of a servant.

Here is the practical test. When you write an application, write the because before the therefore. Not forgive one another, but forgive as the Lord forgave you (Colossians 3:13). Not be generous, but because the Lord Jesus, though he was rich, became poor for your sake, give. Not stop stealing, but the full sentence of Ephesians 4:28: he who has been stealing must steal no longer, but must work, doing good with his own hands, that he may have something to share with the one in need. Paul does not only forbid. He replaces the old life with a new one and gives it a purpose. If you cannot find the because in your passage or its context, you may have found a passage whose command rests on something earlier in the book, and you should go and find it.

None of this means a preacher may never hold up a person in scripture as an example, and the overcorrection is a real danger. Hebrews 11 is a chapter of examples, and its writer clearly expects his readers to be strengthened by them. Paul says you are to imitate me, just as I imitate Christ (1 Corinthians 11:1), and tells the Philippians to carefully observe those who walk according to the pattern we set (Philippians 3:17). James gives Elijah, a man just like us, as a model of earnest prayer (5:17). Whatever you concluded in the first lesson of this module about the debate between the redemptive-historical school and its critics, both sides agree that the New Testament uses examples; they differ over how central the exemplary use should be in preaching Old Testament narrative.

So the question is not whether, but how. Watch how Hebrews does it. Every example in chapter 11 is an example of faith, which means trust in God's promise: by faith Abel, by faith Noah, by faith Abraham, by faith the prostitute Rahab (11:31). The characters are commended for looking to God, not for their own qualities, and the list includes people whose lives were seriously flawed. Hebrews 11:39-40 says none of them received what was promised, because God had planned something better for us. And then 12:1-3 draws the line from the whole cloud of witnesses to Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith. The examples are real and they are pressed on the readers. But they are examples of looking at God, and they end by looking at Christ.

That gives three rules for preaching an example. Preach the person's faith in God, not his virtue in general: David's courage at the brook makes sense only as trust in the LORD who delivered him from the lion and the bear. Preach the person whole, including the failures the text itself records, because those failures are part of what the text is saying about the grace of God. And preach the example as a pointer, not a destination: the hearer should leave having looked at the God whom the example trusted.

There is a real argument on the other side of the moralism debate, and you should hear it. Some writers, Kevin DeYoung in The Hole in Our Holiness (2012) among them, have argued that a generation of preachers so afraid of moralism that they never press a command has produced congregations that know they are forgiven and do not expect to change. John Carrick, whom you met in the first lesson, made a similar case from the history of Reformed preaching. They point to the sheer quantity of imperatives in the New Testament, and to texts like Titus 3:8, where Paul wants these things emphasised so that those who have believed God will take care to devote themselves to good deeds. They are not arguing for moralism. They are arguing that the cure for moralism is grace-grounded commands, not the absence of commands, and James 1:22 is on their side.

Grace-grounded is necessary. It is not sufficient. The commonest failure in application is not moralism at all but vagueness. Trust God more. Be more loving. Put Christ first. Those sentences are true and nobody has ever been unable to obey them, because nobody knows what obeying them would look like on Tuesday. The Hermeneutics track showed how a principle can climb so high that it asks nothing of anyone; application is where the preacher has to climb back down.

The Westminster Assembly said this plainly in its Directory for the Public Worship of God of 1645. It told the preacher not to rest in general doctrine, however clearly he had proved it, but to bring it home to special use by application to his hearers, and it admitted that this is a work of great difficulty for the preacher and unwelcome to the natural man. It then named the kinds of use: instruction in some truth, refutation of false teaching, exhortation to duties, warning against sins, comfort, and self-examination. That last one is worth noticing. Sometimes the right application is not do this but ask yourself this, and give the hearer the questions that let him examine himself.

John the Baptist gives you the model in three verses. The crowds asked him, what then should we do? He told those with two tunics to share with those who had none. Tax collectors asked; he told them to collect no more than they were authorised. Soldiers asked; he told them not to take money by force or false accusation, and to be content with their wages (Luke 3:10-14). Notice two things. Each group got a different answer, because each faced a different temptation. And each answer could be obeyed tomorrow morning. That is what concrete means.

So think about who is actually in front of you. A congregation is not one person. There are believers and unbelievers; the young and the old; the employed and the unemployed; the grieving, the newly married, the widowed; the persecuted and the comfortable; people who have too much and people who have nothing. William Perkins, in The Art of Prophesying, sorted hearers into seven conditions and told preachers to apply the same text differently to each. You need not use his categories, but you must use some. And if you preach in a place where many hearers are poor, watch the applications you have borrowed from preachers in rich places: give more to the church, buy fewer things, take a day off to rest can be cruel to a widow with nothing and a labourer with no days off. The text may ask something quite different of her, and it may, as James 5:11 does when it speaks of Job, offer her more comfort than command.

Daniel Doriani's four aspects of application, which the Hermeneutics track introduced, are a useful check here: duty asks what I should do, character asks who I should be, goals ask what we should aim at, and discernment asks how to see the situation truly. Most sermons apply only the first. A passage like James 1:22-27 applies all four: what to do with the tongue and the widow, what kind of person is quick to listen, what pure religion aims at, and how to see through the self-deception of a hearer who only hears.

Two cautions. First, do not use the application to settle a private score or ride a hobbyhorse. If every sermon you preach ends at the same sin, your congregation will notice before you do. Second, do not apply a text by pointing at people in the room, by name or by description so clear that everyone knows whom you mean. Describe situations, not persons. A pastoral example in a sermon should be a composite, built from many cases and identifying no one, and it should never be told in a way that would humiliate someone if they recognised themselves.

You have a passage, a main idea, a line to Christ from the first two lessons of this module, and from the third a decision about how law and gospel will sound in your sermon. Now write the application. You will need your notebook and an honest picture of the people who will hear you.

First, write the because. In one or two sentences, say what God has done, is doing or will do, according to your passage and its context, that grounds whatever your passage asks. If you cannot find it in the passage itself, look in the surrounding chapters, and write down where you found it.

Second, list four real kinds of people who will be in the room. Do not name individuals; describe situations, such as a young man looking for work, a grandmother caring for children whose parents have died, a believer whose family opposes her faith, a church leader who is tired. For each one, write a single sentence saying what your passage asks of that person this week. The sentences should differ, as John the Baptist's did.

Third, test each sentence three ways. Can it be obeyed by Friday? Does it rest on the because you wrote first? Would a person of any religion, or none, have said exactly the same thing? If a sentence fails the first test, make it concrete. If it fails the second, connect it. If it fails the third, it may still be true, but your sermon is not yet saying what only the gospel can say, and you should go back to step one.

Fourth, choose one of your applications and write it out as you would actually say it, in no more than five sentences, beginning with the because and ending with something a hearer could do. Keep it. The fourth module of this track will show you where in the sermon it belongs and how to end in a way that sends people out to do it.