Q&A Genesis 34-35

Hey everybody, thanks again for listening to Q&A with a Pastor. I'm Asher and I'm sitting down with Pastor Keith Goad. Normally this is recorded on Monday and hopefully put up a couple days after, but here it is five days later where I've actually tracked down Keith because Keith is supposed to be on vacation, but he couldn't stay away. Keith, what have you been doing in this last week as this is supposed to be your planning time? What does that mean? Yet to clarify, I'm going on vacation in the future. I've been in a planning week. This past week I've been looking over the last part of Genesis to go ahead and start thinking through how I'm going to conclude that book, looking into my preaching calendar, and just getting ahead. So the biggest one was for next year, the beginning of the year, I wanted to start Colossians. So I went back through and organized the preaching schedule for that and started doing some preliminary study over the big picture of what Colossians is about. I've also been working on a few little things for discipleship, writing a paper on the Doctrine of the Trinity for a journal, which will also be helpful for our upcoming Wednesday night Our Life Together study on the Doctrine of God. So a little task here and there. A couple books. You've written a couple books? No, no, I read. I read a couple books. I finished Reformed Pastor by Baxter, and I'm finishing today, Lord willing, The Pastoral Rules by Gregory the Great. So really two very helpful books on the pastoral ministry. Would you recommend non-professional pastors to read those books? Are those good for laymen to read? Well, part of the discipleship thing I've been putting together is how to train up elders. And so I have decided that sections of each book, it's interesting, both books are basically organized in the same way. Qualifications of a pastor, demands of a pastor, teaching of a pastor. And so I think, yeah, the qualification section would be something that would be good to go over with. Because it's thinking through practically what the qualifications, what does one have to do to be a healthy long-term pastor. Have you mowed the yard at all? Have you got to? You look sort of pale. Okay, but I mowed the yard yesterday. I took advantage of the glorious day God gave us. I could have done it today as well, but yesterday was the day I mowed the yard. I'm supposed to do a little painting project tonight. Well, as long as you're taking time to relax, this is all very good. Next week is vacation. All right. Now, Keith, for the last couple of weeks within your preaching, you've made distinctions in which audiences you're specifically talking to. So you've said a couple of times directly now to the children or now to different people in different lifestyles. How do you think through ahead of time and how are you going to preach to a church at large, but a church that is naturally broken up into different kinds of audiences? It's interesting, you asked that Gregor the Great, his section starting with preaching to the people and instructions on teaching, it has, it's broken up into I think 20 different categories of different kinds of people. So how to address men, how to address women, how to address the rich, how to address the poor. Making sure that the pastor, or what he would call the physician of the soul, is thinking about all the different possible problems that different kinds of people will face. I really try to make it as organically connected from the text as possible. So here, you know, this past week we saw a father and a daughter. The father not having proper responsibility over his child. The child not being properly responsible for their temptations. And so I just addressed naturally that, you know, I want to address the fathers and how they should make decisions. And I want to trust children to trust those decisions and to trust their parents. Usually it comes straight from the text. I can't remember if we talked about this last week or not on the air. I know we talked about it in person, but I try to address the children as often as possible because I think they're in the church listening. Giving them specific address and specific direction is very helpful. You've also found that to be encouraging to the parents as well, so that the parents don't feel like they're just I haven't had any parent tell me thanks for sending in my child, but they seem to smile and nod while I'm talking to their children. Parents have told me that they enjoy when you talk. They're smiling and nodding. I see the smiles. Do the children smile and nod? They look scared to death. Considering the topics that we've been preaching about the last couple of weeks, I would hope they would be. Now, going into some of those topics, specifically last week was pretty heavy on a lot of the dangerous issues that one could throw themselves in. So you talked a lot about justice, a lot about peace, a lot about evil. How do you, how did you correlate within the text the idea of showing justice to people who are extending evil? How to show peace to people who are extending disruption in our own lives? And how did you, if you could just do it again, how are you connecting that to the gospel itself and how the gospel drives those actions? Yeah, I mean this story has no justice in it and it has no grace in it. It's one of these stories that actually is just perverse, corrupt, and destructive because even if you're going to go from a strong justice standpoint, the man who rapes Dinah, he shouldn't have put to death. But Israel goes over. justice and kills everybody. This story wasn't eye for eye. This story isn't about justice at all. This story is about being cruel and evil in the name of God. So, justice wasn't in the story. There's no grace in the story. The way I want to teach from the Old Testament is based upon what Paul tells me in 1 Corinthians 10. These are examples of evil, to protect yourself from evil. And as I meditated more upon how to respond to evil, obviously Jesus' command to love those who do hatred, who hate you and do hateful things towards you, to overcome evil with good. It really led to a longer meditation on 1 Peter 2 and 3, where I was challenged, what if somebody you love gets raped? Are you really going to respond with grace and love? The whole point of the sermon was to say, by my nature, absolutely not. That doesn't mean that's not what I'm called to do. Now, that doesn't say that the state doesn't have a role in punishing evil. Capital punishment is a whole other issue in terms of if the government should employ that. But the church, we should teach that sin is sin and that it's wrong. But when people hate us, I believe the clearest teaching in scripture for us is to respond to that hatred and that evil with good and love. It's kind of hard to get away from. Okay, so connect those ideas to the gospel. How do you preach a text that has no justice or grace? God was not mentioned in the text you preached over. How do you talk about the gospel when God isn't mentioned? Yeah, well, I mentioned 1 Corinthians 10. I think Paul really gives us the hermeneutical principle we need there. So, he's talking about Moses and the Exodus and the people sinned then, but I think that's really a principle for all of the Old Testament. So, when we see the Israelites or God's people sinning, You know, most of the stories in the Bible aren't models for how to be moral. They're actually models for how we should be scared to death of our sin and rely upon God instead of ourselves. So that 1 Corinthians 10 where Paul says, these are examples for you so that you do not practice and you do not follow your evil desires, that really is a hermeneutical principle to look at their sin, see their sin, and then see how to interpret their sin in light of the gospel and love. It reminds me of Edwards' resolution, whenever I see someone sinning, not to stand over them and say, look how much better I am than them, but to look at their sin and say, I am as vile if not more than them. If we look at other people's sin in the Old Testament, we judge rightly that they were sinning. But we judge wrongly if we stand over themselves righteously. We judge ourselves wrongly. So we need to judge them rightly and say, yes, that is despicable sin, but then judge ourselves rightly and know how we can identify with that sin. Now, I trust that there's not anyone in the church who has raped and then murdered an entire village, but that doesn't mean that lust and hatred and murder isn't lying in our hearts. And so we need to be careful and protective against that sin that so easily hinders us. We may not act out in the same way, but that those same desires do exist in our sinful hearts. Now you talked at the beginning of the sermon a little bit of how you decide on big decision-making So how do you decide on where to live? How do you decide on how to raise your kids or who to marry? just specifically How did you go about, when moving to Charlottesville, how did you think about trying to be biblical in where you placed your house? Or as you think about your young daughter who is not in school, how do you begin to think about how you and Lisa want to raise her in that way? Yeah, well, we moved to Charlottesville because of a vocation and a church. We didn't have to worry about what church we would go to and make sure that was a good, healthy church. Well, the vocation came with a church in many ways, or rather, the church came with a vocation. So that way, all things kind of flowed together. How do we choose our exact house? It's close enough to the church where I can get here in 10 minutes. 10 to 15 minutes depending on traffic. It also allows for a certain lifestyle that we want to lead. We want to try to have a simple, relaxed lifestyle where at least Lillian has some protection from the world and we're able to do certain things. We're able to work and labor in the yard. I personally enjoy that. It gives me great relaxation and relief while I'm out. I work in the garden or mow the yard, so it gives me some relief from, it gives me an opportunity to relax in a way that the city wouldn't have. So how I chose up there, it really just was, it suited the lifestyle we hope to pursue as a family. All right, Keith, that's all the questions I've got from the sermon because you said everything so well the first round. I couldn't even think of what to ask you now. You're going to be gone from the pulpit for two weeks. We've found fillers for you, but what are you excited about in coming back? What are you going to gear towards when you preach two weeks from now? probably most excited about moving into Joseph and the new dysfunctional family. So he's gone through a different trough, right? You start off pretty low with Abraham with faith, but a pretty weak faith, and you got to see him mature and grow. He really got to know him. Isaac, you know, he's kind of a quiet figure. He was just meant to bless, you know, one of the twins and finally got the right one. With Jacob, he's sort of really, really low. And you saw him do very despicable things. But we saw him receive revelations from God and grow, and so that was encouraging to see. And now we're going to start all over afresh. We're going to see a really, well, after Judah and Tamar, which is somewhat like the Dinah episode, just kind of one of these gross events we have to read about and reflect on our own sin. But then after that, we're going to see Joseph start out as like a really cocky kid. who gets to see God use evil for good, one of the great lessons we see from Genesis. So we've moved, we'll continue to see that God is faithful to the faithless, but now one of the major themes we're going to meditate upon for chapters and sermons is God uses evil for good, one of the great things to meditate upon. All right, well, Keith, thank you for your time with us. For those listening, if you have a question that you want to ask Keith based on the sermons a couple weeks from now, be sure to email those in to congregation at jpbc.org. And we're also going to try to sit down with the other preachers who are going to preach here in the coming weeks, and hopefully we can grab 10 or 15 minutes with Dr. Russell and Dr. Fowler. All right, hope to see you all soon.