The Grammar of the Gospel
Things Unseen with Sinclair B. Ferguson
Ligonier Ministries
4.9 • 1.7K Ratings
🗓️ 2 October 2023
⏱️ 6 minutes
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Summary
Apart from the influence of the Holy Spirit, the message of the gospel will seem like a foreign language to fallen people. Today, Sinclair Ferguson describes our need to be trained in the "grammar of the gospel."
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This week on Things Unseen, I want to think about a subject that may have bored you in |
| 0:12.3 | elementary school, and perhaps it still bored you today, but it is actually enormously |
| 0:18.0 | important. And I want us to think about how important it is in the school of Jesus Christ. |
| 0:25.6 | Well, what's that you might ask? Well, it's the rules of grammar. What's grammar? Well, |
| 0:33.6 | here's how the multi-volume Oxford English Dictionary defines it. Grammar is that department |
| 0:39.3 | of the study of a language which deals with its inflectional forms or other means of indicating |
| 0:44.6 | the relation of words in the sentence, and with the rules for employing these in accordance |
| 0:50.9 | with established usage. Well, now you might think I'm just confusing you, but that's just a |
| 0:58.1 | technical way of saying this. Grammar is about how the language we use actually works. If you've |
| 1:05.3 | ever had to learn a foreign language, then you'll know that every language has its own grammar, |
| 1:10.8 | and one of the first challenges for us may be discovering that the way that other language works |
| 1:16.7 | is different from the way our own language works. So in order to speak up properly, to make sense, |
| 1:22.8 | you've got to follow the rules of its grammar. Now most of us at first learn grammar not from |
| 1:29.7 | textbooks, but as we grow up from listening to other speak by a kind of Osmosis, and the same |
| 1:37.0 | is true in the Christian life. Because my point is the Christian gospel has its own grammar, |
| 1:44.4 | but it's a foreign language to the natural man. By nature, we speak another language and use a |
| 1:51.4 | different grammar, and the more we use it, the more natural and actually the more right it seems to |
| 1:57.8 | us, and as a result, we're not able to understand the language of the gospel. |
| 2:03.4 | Remember how Paul says this when he writes to the Corinthians in 1 Corinthians chapter 2 verse 14, |
| 2:09.8 | they were overly impressed by this world's language and wisdom, and he says, look, |
| 2:15.7 | the natural man doesn't accept the things of the Spirit of God, they're folly to him, |
| 2:21.3 | and he is not able to understand them because they're spiritually disarmed. By contrast he says, |
... |
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