The Teachers Word

Our subject this evening is that of teacher, and primarily, of course, of the Lord, of the Lord himself, Jesus Christ, as our teacher. So let me begin by reading some scriptures and integrating them with some prayer that we might prepare our hearts for what the Lord might say to us this evening about himself and about his call on our lives. So the Lord is a guide.

Teachers are very much guides and show us our way. From Psalm 25, show me your ways, O Lord, teach me your paths, guide me in your truth and teach me, for you are God my Saviour and my hope is in you all day long. Let's just pray and think about that and pray.

Lord, we thank you that you are our teacher, that you are our guide, that you have something to say that we can follow, you have a way for our lives here on earth. So we thank you and praise you for that. We pray, Lord, that you would give us ears that are willing to listen to your teaching and your guidance.

Amen. And then I thought also, the Lord in scripture, the idea of a teacher, he's at one stage more personal than just a teacher up at the front of the classroom. Indeed, scripture uses the idea of God as our shepherd, that he wants an individual involvement with us.

And so a reading from John, from the Gospel of John. I am the good shepherd, I know my sheep and my sheep know me, just as the Father knows me and I know the Father, and I lay down my life for the sheep. I have other sheep that are not of this sheep pen, I must bring them also.

They too will listen to my voice and there shall be one flock and one shepherd. And then finally, perhaps we need to read scripture when it speaks against us as well as for us, that God is not just our shepherd, but he wants to be our Father. And with that desire to know us intimately and to know our lives and to want our lives to be intimately involved with him, on occasions he needs to speak to us in ways that we don't always find comfortable.

So a reading from Hebrews. My son, do not make light of the Lord's discipline and do not lose heart when he rebukes you because the Lord disciplines those he loves and he punishes everyone he accepts as a son. Our fathers disciplined us for a little while as they thought best, but God disciplines us for our good that we may share in his holiness.

No discipline seems pleasant at the time, but painful. Later on, however, it produces a harvest of righteousness and peace for those who have been trained by it. Let's just pray again.

Lord, we pray too that you would help us hear your voice when you want to chastise us, Lord, when you want to change the direction of our lives. Pray Lord that we would learn to be obedient. Obedient to your Holy Spirit as he speaks through our consciences, as he speaks through your word, as he perhaps speaks through friends and fellow Christians.

Lord, we pray for your presence here tonight by your Spirit that we might hear you speak. And then, Lord, as we go on into next week, we might learn to be obedient to what you've said to us. In Jesus' name, amen.

Let us sing. 201. Guide me, O thou great Jehovah, help me through this perilous land.

Guide me, O thou great Jehovah, help me through this perilous land. Please be seated. Very glad to have you in our service this evening.

And I'd like you to turn to our scripture reading in the book of Ecclesiastes. You can always be assured that when you ask a congregation to turn to the book of Ecclesiastes, there will be some problems. Page 677 in the pulpit Bible, but that doesn't really help.

Some clues are, if you're near Isaiah, you're a little too far. And if you're in the Psalms, you're a little, you're not far enough. Ecclesiastes, a book right in the middle, 12 chapters, and it has some tremendous teaching.

Let's read from, well, maybe read the whole chapter. Remember your Creator in the days of your youth. Before the days of trouble come and the years approach when you will say, I find no pleasure in them.

Before the sun and the light and the moon and the stars grow dark. The clouds return after the rain when the keepers of the house tremble and the strong men stoop. When the grinders cease because they are few and those looking through the windows grow dim.

When the doors to the streets are closed and the sound of grinding fades. When men rise up at the sound of birds, but all their songs grow faint. When men are afraid of heights and of dangers in the streets.

When the almond tree blossoms and the grasshopper drags himself along and desire no longer is stirred. Then man goes to his eternal home and mourners go about the streets. Remember him, that is God.

Before the silver cord is severed, that's an illustration that speaks of the end of your life. Or the golden bowl is broken. Before the pitcher is shattered at the spring or the wheel broken at the well and the dust returns to the ground it came from and the spirit returns to God who gave it.

Meaningless, meaningless says the teacher. Everything is meaningless. And here's the punchline for this evening.

Not only was the teacher wise, but also he imparted knowledge to the people. He pondered and searched out and set in order many proverbs. The teacher searched to find just the right words and what he wrote was upright and true.

The words of the wise are like goads. They're collected sayings like firmly embedded nails given by one shepherd. Be warned, my son, of anything in addition to them.

Of making many books there is no end and much study where is the body now all has been heard. Here is the conclusion of the matter. Fear God and keep his commandments for this is the whole duty of man.

For God will bring every deed into judgment including every hidden thing whether it is good or evil. Not only was the teacher wise. He imparted knowledge to the people.

He searched to find just the right words. His collected sayings are like firmly embedded nails given by one shepherd. Be warned, my son, in adding to them.

John Patton is not a name that will cause a lot of folks from various educational institutes here in the tab to stand up and cheer. The Daily Mail, every man's thinking paper, said that the headmasters and mistresses treat John Patton so badly that had he when he was addressing them or rather when they were addressing their school assemblies if they had been treated with a similar sort of response they would have kept the whole school in. We've got problems in education today.

Lack of empathy between the piper who calls the tune or the one who pays the piper and the piper who actually plays. The teachers are not too happy about what Mr. Patton wants. Mr. Patton thinks he's reflecting what you and I want as those who pay him who in turn in his ministry help to pay the teachers.

The teachers say that, well, their work is not exactly helped by an avalanche of paper. They were paid not to be clerks but actually to confront boys and girls and to help in their education. While teaching and tuition is my subject this evening, but as for Mr. Patton, you can bury him at the back of your mind or wherever else you may feel is appropriate.

There is a sense in which our Lord Jesus is the great teacher. What you get in these four verses from the ninth through to the twelfth in this particular passage is if you like a cameo, a little description of our Savior, teacher and teaching at its best. You know, when you read of our beloved Lord in John's Gospel, references made to Him coming into this world, and we're told in the prologue in the seventeenth verse that the law was given by Moses but grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.

Our Lord's ministry was to educate, and the title, the teacher, is a very noble title. If you go to Korea, between the South Korean border and the North, there is what is known as the DMZ, as the Americans call it. The DMZ is the demilitarized area, and as you approach it, civilization seems to fall behind and there's just a straggling community of people, and then you come to the last representatives of the human race before you actually hit the border.

It happens to be an American regiment, part of the American Army, and in unblushing fashion they have the description of their regiment and its motto, ahead of them all, that there's no one else who's nearer the enemy than this particular group of soldiers are, out in front of them all. Now that's what you can say about our Lord Jesus Christ, the teacher. He is in front of them all, and it's our Lord as teacher that we hone in on this evening.

We're told in this particular passage something about his character. Not only was the teacher wise. If you have a wise teacher, well, you're a very fortunate person.

We're told about our Lord Jesus as you go into Colossians, the letter or one of the letters which the Apostle Paul wrote, and in the third verse of our Lord Jesus, in him is hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge. He's the one who can distill all the sagacity, all the wisdom that there is to know in this world. He's wise in the way that he handles his pupils.

That doesn't go for every teacher. Some teachers presume that their pupils have an ability in excess of what they actually have. Some teachers are very unskilled in their art of tuition, and they pitch their lessons at a level that others cannot understand.

But you couldn't say that of Jesus. The teacher was wise. So wise that when he picked his disciples, he got the right bunch of men, even though perhaps teachers here might not really have wanted any one of them in younger years in their particular class.

Our Lord was able to bring them together and eventually to merge them into a unit so that they could do what he wanted them to do. Our Lord, with great wisdom, decides that the one who receives intimation of his resurrection shall be none other than a woman. And you recall how he speaks to Mary in the garden, a time when the testimony of women was not exactly looked for or counted as being of particular value.

Yet Jesus, the wise teacher, in his wisdom, brings not only a handful of rather quarrelsome men and makes them his disciples, but he honors a woman with the most incredible piece of information that the world has ever received. I, Jesus, have come back from the dead. Our teacher is a wise teacher.

But not only do you read of his character here, you also read something of his intention. He imparted knowledge to the people. He did achieve his goal.

You see, wise is that pupil who listens to what Jesus has to say. If you come here to the tab on a Sunday night, the question is not so much what is the preacher saying, but what is the preacher teaching you about the Lord Jesus. Because the Lord Jesus does want you in his class.

He wants you to be his disciple. But more about that in a moment. He wants to impart knowledge to you in a way that you will never forget what he has to say.

We had a teacher in my grammar school back in Sheffield who was a fairly unpopular man. One of the reasons why he was unpopular was that he was completely unintelligible. He had the task of trying to make vulgar fractions look decent, and he failed miserably.

One occasion, some of our boys tried to get their own back on him by doing something that no one in Worthing would ever dream of doing. In an agricultural paper, they actually booked a space and suggested that horse manure could be bought at a ridiculously low price. And they quoted the telephone number of the math master.

It wouldn't have been so bad, but that other paper for intelligent people to read, The Story. And my, was our headmaster mad when he addressed the assembly when the story had broken. The problem as far as the kids were concerned that related to the unpopularity of the senior math master, he was not on their wave level.

He lived in a world where algebra and geometry and all the rest of it were so natural to him. He didn't have the ability to break it down and to make it clear to others. But Jesus, he does that.

He's wise. He imparts knowledge to the people. And he does so by developing a method which is so sweetly reasonable, you wonder how anyone could miss the logic for themselves.

He pondered and searched out and set in order many proverbs. The old rabbinical teachers in the days of the Old Testament and the New Testament, they loved to get stories. They loved to have puzzles.

You know, in those days, those blessed days before television and radio, you actually had to talk to one another at night. And the enjoyment of the evening really depended on your ability to engage in conversation. A good teacher, he had a stock of stories.

Not just stories, but also stories with a meaning hidden so that when the story was told, you realize the truth that he was trying to present in front of you. And our Lord, well, he's famous because he could teach parables. He could teach these little stories in such a fashion that what he had to say became clear in terms of the inner meaning.

So he talks about a sower who goes forth to sow. He talks about different sort of ground because you know that there is a variety. Some seed, it's immediately nourished when it falls onto a particular patch of land.

But if it happens to hit a stony bit or a hard path, then it doesn't easily germinate. So our Lord tells this story and it becomes perfectly obvious that what he's actually saying is that there are people who are very much like that soil. They're different.

There are some folks who listen to what Jesus has to say and they run with his message. They understand it and they make what he has to say the driving force of their lives. Jesus has as his method the putting together of stories and proverbs and principles that can be of help.

He pondered and searched out and set in order many proverbs. And this is his method. Look at the 10th verse.

The teacher searched to find just the right words. Just the right words. The right words for what? The right words for his congregation.

Now it says of Jesus in the New Testament that he wasn't like the other rabbis. Why not? Well, when he spoke, the ordinary people said, we actually understand what he's saying. He finds the right word at the right time for the people that he's trying to address.

Sometimes it's a word with a great deal of salt in it. For example, he sends a message to a man who doesn't have a very good reputation whose name is Herod and he calls him that fox, Herod. On other occasions, because a good sermon doesn't necessarily need to be a long one as I shall try to demonstrate this evening, on another occasion, he just has three or four words to say.

He's now on the cross and just in front of him is the woman who depends most on him. And at the human level, he has depended most on her when he came into this world. I refer to Mary.

And Jesus catches the eye of Mary and he catches the eye of his closest disciple and he says, woman, behold your son, son, behold your mother. Just a few words but measured for that occasion to meet the needs of Mary and in turn to entrust to John someone who he could well look after. Our Lord has words, just the right words at the right time for the right person.

Here is another Mary and Martha, their sisters, and their brother has died. And they are absolutely smitten by grief. And their problem is made worse because they've sent a telegram to Jesus.

Now, they know Jesus as their friend but they haven't yet come to fully understand him as their teacher. Why were you so late in coming? And Jesus has to convince them that the reason for his lateness has got nothing to do with his lack of care. Rather he wants to impart to them a bit of information which is absolutely sensational.

And as he approaches the grave of the brother of Mary and Martha, he utters these remarkable words, I am the resurrection and the life. No man comes to the father but by me. Our Lord goes on to say, I am the resurrection and the life and he that believeth on me shall never die.

Our Lord Jesus has the right word on the right occasion for the right person. He's a wise teacher. His intention is to impart knowledge.

His method, to select stories that are helpful in getting across what he has to say and with great care he addresses the people who will come across his path. Put all that together and what conclusions are you driven to? Well, the same conclusions as you find here in Ecclesiastes 12. Because we're told that what was said by the teacher, what he wrote was upright and true.

In other words, they're underlining the accuracy of what he had to teach. Now, our Lord Jesus never made a mistake in his teaching. What he had to say was upright and it was meticulously accurate.

So when a woman is taken in sin and brought in front of him, the first thing that he does is to dismiss her insensitive accusers. And he does so by writing something on the ground. We're not told what he actually wrote, but it so provoked the consciences of the ones who were highlighting the sin of this wretched woman that from the oldest to the youngest, they left the scene.

And then Jesus accurately speaks to the woman. He pinpoints her sin, but he shows to her the love that he has. And he says, go and sin no more.

Jesus never deals lightly with human sin. He can't do so. He can't just in a sort of cavalier fashion say that sin doesn't matter.

It does matter. Sin is an awful thing. And Jesus will accurately pinpoint the sin that there is in the sinner.

And then he will accurately tell you what to do about your sin. For he speaks of his death on the cross. And he tells us that the reason why he came into the world is that he might die.

And within the death that he dies will be the possibility of your sins being pardoned provided you accept what he has had to say and respond by confessing and throwing yourself on the Lord Jesus Christ. The accuracy of his words, but also the pungency of his words. Look, the words of the wise are like goads.

They're collected sayings like firmly embedded nails given by one shepherd. The idea is taking the truths of Jesus as a nail, getting a hammer and having those truths nailed into you. The goad referred to here is what the shepherd would use to encourage the sheep to go in the right path.

The teachings of the teacher Jesus are given in exactly the same fashion to help you to go in the way that you ought to go, to do what you ought to do. And if you respond to what he has to say correctly, then you will appreciate that his words have a pungency, have a forcefulness about them. And then finally, his words are utterly adequate.

Be warned, my son, of anything in addition to them. You see, there's no other teacher who can give you an insight into what it means to become a disciple of Jesus than the master himself. There's no one else who can actually introduce you to his father.

On one occasion, a man who was himself a great professor, came at night because he was rather embarrassed to see Jesus Christ. And he says, I've got a problem, a theological problem. And when he addresses Jesus about his problem, he says, we know that you are a teacher sent from God.

There are teachers and teachers. There are masters of religion and masters of religion, but you are the teacher. You are the grandmaster.

The Bible says in the New Testament, God at various times spoke in the past to the fathers, that's the Old Testament people, by the patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and the rest, and the prophets, Jeremiah, Isaiah, Amos and the rest. He spoke, he taught them by these men. But in these last days, he has spoken to us by his son.

And the implication is, what Jesus has to say is so full, is so concentrated and paradoxically is so exhaustive, God has no further word to say to anyone apart from what he has said in Jesus. There's a classroom scene 2,000 years ago that are just 12 relatively young men in the classroom. It's in the open air.

Actually the class has been much bigger. At one stage it was numbered in hundreds, possibly it went to thousands. But the classmates became disillusioned with the teacher and they left.

It's easy to leave when your classroom is in the open air, you just slip away. And they went in their droves. And Jesus is left just with his 12 original pupils and he says to them, my teaching is so hard, it's created such a problem, the vast majority have left.

Will you also go away? And there was an amazing response, for Peter said, Lord, to whom shall we go? Because only you can teach what we want to know. Therefore, the way to the Father, only you can give us eternal life. There is no other teacher like our Lord Jesus Christ.

Not only was the teacher wise, he imparts knowledge to the people. He ponders and searches out and sets in order proverbs. The teacher searches to find the right words and what he wrote was upright and true.

These words should be your convictions, given by one shepherd. To add to them is futile because there is nothing more of great importance that needs to be said. Let's bow our heads in prayer.

So, the invitation remains for you to stay in the class, to become a disciple of Jesus Christ. For the word disciple comes from the word mathematics and in the original language, a disciple was a person who followed the discipline of the teacher. What makes a man a Christian is he listens to what Jesus teaches and he responds to it.

When Jesus says, I've come to deal with your sin, if you respond to what he has to say and you ask for his forgiveness, then you slip into his class and become a full-time pupil throughout the whole of your life. The register is open. He wants to write your name down.

He wants you to be in the classroom of life during these next months and years until you've run through your allotted course of time on earth. Will you make this teacher your teacher? Will you respond to his tuition? To whom else shall we go? There's no one else who has the words of eternal life like Jesus does. Make him your Lord, your Savior.

How? Say, Lord Jesus, I recognize imperfection in my life. I recognize that you are of God. You came from God.

You speak for God. I give you my life. Fill me with your spirit.

Make me your disciple. Always. Amen.

And the way that we show our discipleship and our faith and trust in our Lord Jesus is by doing what he has to say. You see, no person in a class can give any greater honor to his teacher or professor than by acting on what he's learned. And one of the commands of our Lord Jesus was to take bread and wine in remembrance of him.

And in a moment or two, that's what we're going to do. But first we're going to sing about him, his greatness, his preciousness, fairest Lord Jesus, ruler of all nature, all thou of God and man, the Son. Number 33.

It's stuck. Stand up. Jesus is ready.

Son of God. Son of God and Son of Man. O Savior, Lord of all nations.

Son of God and Son of Man. As we stay standing, let's turn to number 97 in mission praise. Come let us worship our Redeemer.

Let us bow down before his throne. Come let us kneel before our maker. Holy is his name.

This might be unfamiliar to some of you. We will sing through the first chorus and verse. And if you'll join us in the chorus after the first verse and sing through to the end.

So we'll sing the first chorus and verse. Come let us worship our Redeemer. Let us bow down before his throne.

Come let us bow before our maker. Holy is his name. Come into his presence with thanksgiving.

Make a joyful noise. For the Lord is a great God. King above all gods.

Come let us worship our Redeemer. Let us bow down before his throne. Come let us kneel before our maker.

Holy is his name. The sheep of his hand. For Christ the Lord is our shepherd.

He will lead us home. Come let us worship our Redeemer. Let us bow down before his throne.

Come let us kneel before our maker. Holy is his name. Oh praise this day to God the Father.

Praise to Christ his Son. Praise to God the Holy Spirit. Bless the free in hope.

Come let us worship our Redeemer. Let us bow down before his throne. Come let us kneel before our maker.

Holy is his name. Holy is his name. Number 176 in the supplement speaks of faithful God.

Faithful God all sufficient one, I worship you. So let us sing this now together. Meditating on those words that God is faithful.

Number 176. More on the overheads I hope. Faithful God.

Faithful God. All sufficient one, I worship you. To hold my peace, my strong deliverer.

I lift you up. Faithful God. Faithful God.

Hold my peace. Let's listen to the instruments play it through. Faithful God.