Well, this is a very special privilege to be invited by one of my heroes in the faith, Dr. Al Mohler, to be able to stand here today and to address you on the subject of so great a cloud of witnesses who should inspire our preaching. This is a very sacred pulpit. I have pastored a Southern Baptist church for over twenty years. I was called to preach in a Southern Baptist church, licensed to preach in a Southern Baptist church. My last two pastors were none other than Dr. Adrian Rogers and W.A. Criswell. And so to be able to stand in this particular pulpit here at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary is a little bit like a baseball player being able to play in Yankee Stadium. So this is a great joy, and Dr. Mohler, thank you so much for this opportunity. The President asked if I would speak on the subject of heroes. heroes in the Christian faith and our need for church history, our need for heroes in the Old Testament and in the New Testament who will shape and mold our ministry. And the obvious passage to which to turn is the one that has already been read, but I want you to turn back to it again, Hebrews chapter 12. And I want to begin by reading verses 1 and 2, and I want to set it back before your eyes and your heart again with special focus on what is at the beginning of verse 1, so great a cloud of witnesses. You need a great cloud of witnesses. I need a great cloud of witnesses. The imagery here is of a stadium in the ancient world. They would hold multiplied thousands of spectators. And in this Greek culture, in the Roman Empire, the rock stars of the day were the great athletes who excelled in their particular sport. And the sport of all sports was the runner, especially the marathon runner, but also the sprinters who would compete in the stadium. And they would be surrounded by an enormous throng And they would be cheering the runners on as they would run their race. And it put wind in their sails. It put a higher octane in their tank, if you will, that moved them and motivated them to widen their stride and to press on to the finish. I know what it is to play in a football stadium with a a small crowd, and I know what it is to play in a massive stadium of 80,000 people, and for them to be cheering you on. And you rise to a higher level of performance. You rise to meet the moment. And that is the backdrop of this Hebrews 12, verse 1 passage. And as you run the race that God has set before you, And for so many of you here called by God to preach His Word, and I agree with Martyn Lloyd-Jones, there is no higher call upon this earth than the call to preach the Word of God. As you preach the Word of God, you need to do so not in a stadium that is empty. You need to do so in a massive stadium that is standing room only. and who are cheering you on and you draw strength and you draw encouragement and you draw instruction from them as they find themselves, as you find yourselves in this enormous stadium. This is the analogy, the metaphor that the writer of the book of Hebrews is using when he says, therefore, and the word therefore is so important because it connects us to the previous chapter, God's hall of fame, where the greatest runners of faith are recorded and their names and their epics are chiseled into the pages of inspired Scripture. They are found in Hebrews 11, by faith Abel, by faith Enoch, by faith Noah, world-class men and women who ran their race well. So therefore, pulling Hebrews 11 forward, since we have so great a cloud of witnesses surrounding us, And the word great here means great in number, great in quantity. They are a cloud of witnesses who have already run their race and they have assumed their place now in the grandstands. And they are cheering us on by the example of their lives. They do not witness us, they bear witness to us. of how to compete and how to run and how to buffet our body and make it our slave, how to forget what lies behind and to press forward to what lies ahead. And they are, for us, examples. They are, for us, models. And your ministry and my ministry will be far more effective as we run with so great a cloud of witnesses who are surrounding us. He then says, let us also lay aside every encumbrance, anything and everything that would slow you down in running the race must be jettisoned and set aside in order to win the race. And the sin which so easily entangles us, and I believe that in this context, it's not a sin, it is the sin, it is the sin of unbelief. The failure to have faith in God, as Hebrews chapter 11 articulates, a self-reliance, a self-trust, trying to run this race in and of your own strength, without looking to God, without relying upon God. That is the sin which so easily entangles us. It's like a runner who has his shoelaces tied together and he just keeps tripping and falling. And let us run with endurance, with perseverance, with steadfastness, the race that is set before us. If you were to enter my study at home where I live, you would step into a cloud of witnesses. Though my study is simply the second floor of a small apartment, it in reality is a study that is in the skies. As I sit at my desk, there is immediately behind me an exact replica of Jonathan Edwards that hangs in Nassau Hall at Princeton, where he was the third president of Princeton. It hangs with every president of Princeton University. And he is on the third tier up in this massive Nassau Hall. At the end is George Washington and George III. And they took that portrait down and laid it on the floor and put a stepladder and stood on top of the stepladder and took an exact replica of that portrait that hangs in Nassau Hall. It is now framed and hangs behind my desk. For me, it is a message of solidarity with Edwards as he looks over my shoulder, that he is a part of a cloud of witnesses in which I study, in which I write. To my left, there is William Tyndale, an exact replica of what hangs in the London Portrait Gallery. It inspires me to deeper commitment to the Lord. Every time I see that portrait and think of how he went underground for 12 years to be the first man to translate the Bible out of the original languages into the English language. And next to him is John Knox, the trumpet blast of Scotland, who was used by God to turn a nation to the Word of God. And next to him is John Calvin, the man Philip Melanchthon referred to as the theologian, as though everyone else is merely a theologian, but the Genevan Reformer is the theologian. And then next to him is Charles Haddon Spurgeon, the prince of preachers. And on my right, there is Martin Luther. And there is George Whitefield preaching at Mooresfield in London that summer. And as a young man, only 24 years of age, he preached, he estimated, to over one million people in the course of that summer in London. And there are busts of Spurgeon and Luther and Calvin and others. James Montgomery Boyce hangs there, and so does Benjamin Breckinridge Warfield. I'm surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses and it is intentional because I want to have a ministry that transcends the times in which I live. I want to be a part of a long line of godly men that reaches over the centuries and reaches around the world and across oceans to be raised up and to be lifted up by an invisible hand of God. to excel the best that I can in the preaching of the Word of God. I believe that great preaching is as much caught as it is taught. that we learn by observation and by rubbing shoulders with the giants of history. And not only do they instruct us, and they do instruct us. When I was in seminary, I learned more theology in my historical theology classes than I did even in my systematic theology classes. We learned how these men exegeted the passages that became pivotal in their generation. But we are also inspired by the example of their lives as they propel us to widen our stride and to reach forward to the prize that lies ahead. You need to have a great cloud of witnesses surrounding you. Ian Murray has written a book entitled Heroes, in which he chronicles believers who were past champions of the faith. And Murray writes, more than we can tell, we are all affected by examples. Let me just pause for a moment. We all speak with an accent. Some of us have a southern accent. Some a northern accent. Some a Scottish or a British. Some speak with an Australian accent or a New Zealand. No one tried to learn how to speak with an accent. It just happens subconsciously because you are listening to others speak around you. And when you open your mouth, more than you even realize, you have been molded and shaped by those who are speaking into your ear. And what is true of an accent is true in preaching as well. And that is what Ian Murray is noting with heroes. You need to have the right people in your ear so that you will be, in some extent, an echo chamber of those who are the greatest spiritual giants to ever walk this earth by the grace of God. So Ian Murray writes, more than we can tell, We are all affected by examples, and we are affected by figures from the past, recovered in their biographies, who influence us deeply." Murray then adds, the history of the Christian church. offers a whole galaxy of men and women whose lives are worthy to be held up for imitation. I need this. You need this. We need to run in a stadium where there is a cloud of witnesses who, by the example of their lives, challenge us, encourage us, motivate us to reach forward for the prize that lies ahead of us. One such man who drew great strength for his ministry was the one man that I think, by looking to those in the past, was the one man I think we could arguably say is the greatest preacher in the history of the church since the Apostle Paul. He is known as the Prince of Preachers. His name was Charles Haddon Spurgeon. easily the greatest Baptist preacher, easily, I think, the greatest preacher of the English language, unprecedented in the scope and effect and power of his preaching. So how did Spurgeon learn how to preach? He never went to Bible college. He never went to seminary. How did Spurgeon learn to preach? And Spurgeon, by his own admission, said that he modeled his preaching specifically, first and foremost, by a man who lived a hundred years before him, the man, I believe, arguably the greatest evangelist that God has given to the church since the Apostle Paul, none other than the grand itinerant himself, George Whitefield. Spurgeon, who began to preach at age sixteen, Spurgeon who began to pastor at age seventeen, Spurgeon who went to London at age nineteen, Spurgeon who founded his own pastor's college at age twenty-one, Spurgeon who became the greatest influence upon the evangelical world, said, "'Often I have read Whitefield's life. and I am conscious of distinct quickenings whenever I turn to it." In other words, he is saying his heart is reignited with holy passion for God and holy ambition for God. Every time I just pick up Whitefield and read it, Mart Lloyd-Jones himself would say, other men merely existed. Whitefield lived. Robert Murray McShane, the favorite son of Scotland, said, oh, for just one week of Whitefield's life. Oh, if I could just live but one week of his life in London. Spurgeon said of Whitefield, Whitefield lived. Other men seemed to be only half alive, but Whitefield was all life, all fire, all wind, all force. My own model," Spurgeon says, if I have such a thing in due subordination to my Master Jesus Christ, is George Whitefield. With unequal footsteps, must I follow his glorious track? You need a Whitefield. You need several Whitefields. You need a cloud of witnesses. You need a stadium of spiritual greats who have gone before you, who as you read their biography and read their sermons and read their diaries and read their journals and read their tracts and read their treatises and read their works and read their commentaries, who pull you up and thrust you forward, that is what Spurgeon found in Whitefield, and I believe in an argument from the greater to the lesser. If Charles Haddon Spurgeon needed such an example, how much more so do mere mortals such as you and I have such a need? I want us to look in time that remains at some things in this text, and I want you to turn back to the previous chapter in Hebrews 11. which is really where this section begins. In Hebrews 11, in verse 1, and very quickly in the brief time that I have left, I want to set before you just several headings. First, the priority of faith. What marked these spiritual champions for God who are this so great a cloud of witnesses? Well, it is obvious that the thread that ties together this long line of godly men and godly women is faith, aggressive faith, dynamic faith, active faith, obedient faith. sacrificial faith. It is faith that put them into the Hall of Fame. It is faith that put them into this chapter. And we can't get around the fact that, as he begins, now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. Those who are in so great a cloud of witnesses are those men and women who had audacious confidence in their God, who stepped forward to meet the challenges of their day, and ministered and served God in a way that required daring faith. They had the assurance of things hoped for. They had unwavering confidence in God. as they looked to the future for their lives and for how they would serve God. They had a big God, and they were, by faith, connected to this God. This is the priority of faith. So much so that verse 2 says, for by it, referring to faith, the men of old, and that refers to all those who have gone before us. In this case, these who are listed in Hebrews chapter 11. The men of old gained approval. The ESV says they received commendation. We ask the question, from whom? And it is implied in the context, it is from the one in whom we put our faith. It is from God. Faith honors God, and God honors faith. Jesus, in chapter 12, verse 2, is the author and perfecter of faith. And so, for us as preachers of the Word of God, what we learn from these great men and women who have gone before us is the absolute primacy that God places upon faith. One of the greatest steps of faith that you and I will ever take is the mere act of preaching, because it requires great faith in the sufficiency of Scripture. It requires great faith in the sufficiency of the Holy Spirit of God. It requires great faith in the sovereignty of God, that as I stand with just an open Bible and nothing originating from me, that I am merely the mouthpiece and the spokesman for what God has said in His Word. It is an act of enormous faith to be a Bible preacher, to be an expository preacher. And I, for one, believe that those places where there is a departure from the Word of God in preaching is very simply nothing more than rank unbelief. They do not believe in the sufficiency of Scripture. They do not believe in the power of the Holy Spirit. They do not believe that Jesus said, I will build My church and the gates of Hades will not prevail against it. And in these churches that have gone astray, even in their methodology, while they still affirm the authority of Scripture, but by their methodology they deny the centrality and primacy of the preaching of the Word of God and compromise the message and water it down. It is because of their unbelief in the power of God. And so preaching requires faith in God, that we declare the message and we leave the results to God. And while we persuade and while we urge, we do not manipulate people into a false decision. Great preachers are those who have a great confidence. in the authority and sufficiency of the Word of God and the ministry of the Holy Spirit to draw sinners to faith in Jesus Christ. Not only the primacy of Scripture, but I want you to note the prelude of Scripture in verse…of faith, the prelude of faith in verse 3. This is singled out in verse 3 as the beginning place. The entry level into faith, the foundation of faith, before we even get to Abel and Enoch and Noah and Abraham, etc., he begins with the starting blocks of faith. He says, by faith, and that phrase will be repeated 19 times throughout the rest of this chapter. It is a nail that He drives into the board of their minds and into our minds so that we understand the primacy of faith even in preaching. We can't be saved apart from faith. We cannot be sanctified apart from faith. Neither can we preach apart from faith. So he begins, verse 3, by faith. We understand that the worlds were prepared. Your translation may have the universe, but it is not the word kosmos for world. It is the Greek word aion, meaning the ages. Not just the physical creation, but that God is governing and administrating that which takes place upon the stage of history. that God has prepared even the script of history, and that God is overseeing His creation. And it is by faith we understand that the worlds were prepared by the Word of God. And word here is not logos, for we would synonymously associate with the written Word of God, but rhema, meaning primarily the spoken Word. that God spoke everything into existence out of nothing. And this is to underscore the power of the spoken Word of God, that God said, let there be light, and there was light. And let there be a separation in the heavens, and there was. And for us as preachers, what power there is in the spoken Word of God. I agree with John MacArthur that there is no more powerful figure on planet earth than a Spirit-filled preacher who is equipped in the Word of God and who will stand to preach it under the authority of the Lordship of Christ by faith. We understand that the worlds were prepared by the Word of God so that what was seen was not made out of things which are invisible. And so, as we stand to preach, we too have faith in the spoken Word of God in the sense that we are merely a mouthpiece for the Word of God. The preacher has nothing to say apart from the Word of God. Nothing is to originate from us. I agree with Augustine, and I agree with Calvin, who says, when the Bible speaks, God speaks. And it is by faith that we speak the Word of God. But third, I want you to note the pioneers of faith. And beginning in verse 4 and extending through the rest of this chapter, leading up to chapter 12 when he will say, therefore, since we have so great a cloud of witnesses, verses 4 through 39 now is the roll call of this so great a cloud of witnesses. And it's not a small cloud. It is a gathering cloud that covers the horizon of the heavens. and we learn lessons even about preaching from each and every one of these. Some of them were very noted preachers. Others were not. But there are lessons for every preacher to be found as we look at God's hall of fame. Abel reminds us of the high price or the one who holds to the Word of God. And there will be a price for every preacher here today who will go out into this world and to preach the Word of God, and for Abel, it cost him his life. In the front of my preaching Bible, I have a wood carving of the first martyr burned at the stake by Bloody Mary. His name is John Rogers. The year was 1555. The place was Smithfield, London. And every time I go to London, I go first to where John Rogers, who completed William Tyndale's translation, was burned at the stake to remind myself of the price that must be paid for the preaching of the Word of God. Abel is a reminder to us that if we are men and women of convictions, be a price to pay. I agree with Adrian Rogers, who once said, the problem with preachers today is no one wants to kill them anymore. We're just cuddly little people, like the captain of the love boat, just wanting to make sure everyone's having a good time. And the Enoch reminds us that We must please God. Verse 6, without faith it is impossible to please God. As a preacher, we must understand from Enoch, if you please God, it does not matter who you displease. And if you displease God, it does not matter who you please. So preaching is very simple. Get your amens out of heaven. And that is what we learn from Enoch. As you go out, you may be the only preacher in your town who believes what you believe and will have the courage to say it in the pulpit when you preach on Sunday morning. And Noah knew what it was like to be the only person who believed what he believed in the entire world, along with his family. And we learn from Noah how to take a stand in a world that is perishing. And that circle around us is tightening. We need the faith of Noah to stand strong in these days as we minister the Word of God. And Abraham, as you graduate from here, so many of you will not know exactly where the Lord will take you. Abraham did not know. He just knew God had called him, and he followed God. Person by person, as we go through this chapter, we see the examples of those who live by faith and who ministered by faith and who serve by faith. These are the cloud of witnesses. These are the men and women like them who should be hanging on the walls of your mind and of your heart. As iron sharpens iron, so one man another." Paul said, follow me as I follow Christ. You need someone out ahead of you who is following Christ, and for you to come in behind them and to follow their example to the extent that they are following Christ. That's the whole principle of discipleship. It is one man influencing another. And I like what John Piper says, my best friends are dead men. to have those who have gone before us over the centuries passing down their influence to us. By faith, John Wycliffe translated the Bible into English and preached the Bible at Oxford and sent out waves of preachers known as the Lollards. By faith, John Huss had dared to preach in the vernacular language so that the people of Prague could understand what he was saying. By faith, Martin Luther translated the Bible into the German language. and preached sola fide and shook the very foundations of Rome. By faith, William Tyndale said, it is my desire that a plowboy in the field will know more of the Word of God than the pope in Rome. and set a course for his life by faith unprecedented. He wasn't even sent out by a church. He wasn't even sent out by a denomination. He, by faith, left England and went underground to Europe for the next twelve years, meticulously translating the Bible into the English language. Every man and woman God has ever used greatly have been men and women of bold, daring faith in God. By faith, the Puritans would not agree to the act of conformity when Charles II required that you will pray our prayers and you will preach our sermons. And on August the 24th, 1662, the day of the great ejection Two thousand Puritan preachers were ejected from their pulpits because they refused to bow the knee to the king. And they would preach the Word of God, not as it was dictated to them. And subsequent legislation was passed. They were not even allowed to come into the cities of England. That is why Bunhill Fields, where a lot of the Puritans are buried at that time, was outside the city limits. It was a sign of reproach. But it was by faith that they preached. It was by faith that George Whitefield had the audacity to say that the clergy of the Church of England were unconverted, many of them. And the doors of the Church of England were closed to Whitefield, and by faith he did something unprecedented. He took to the open fields of England. He went to Bristol. He set up a little pulpit in the middle of a field. There were coal miners under the ground. And first, it was a small gathering, and it grew and it grew. And within some five weeks, there were some 20,000 people gathered around Whitefield who said, I've come here today to talk to you about your soul. You must be born again. It was by faith that Whitefield even left the beautiful buildings like this and took to the open field to preach the Word of God. And he came to this country, and he electrified the colonies by the preaching of the Word of God. When he went to Philadelphia, he preached to twice the population of Philadelphia, more than twice the population of Philadelphia. That took faith. It was by faith that Jonathan Edwards decided, after twenty-plus years, that he would require those who come to the Lord's table to be regenerated and to be converted. And by faith, he took a stand, and he was voted out of his own church by a ninety percent vote. And it was by faith he then went to the mission field and ministered to Native Americans. It was by faith William Carey left England and went to India, there to bring the Word of God to a distant land and not see a convert for seven years, and even one of his translations to be burned in a fire. But it was by faith he pressed on. And after over 40 years, he never took a sabbatical and never returned from the mission field, even for a brief respite. He was by faith, and it was this faith by which God used him. It was by faith that Martin Lloyd-Jones, in the midst of a skyrocketing medical career, who was the assistant to the physician of the King of England, made the extraordinary decision in the middle of his 20s that he will leave the medical community and go to Nowheresville in Wales and preach to one of the most poverty-stricken areas of Wales. And there, one of the first converts was his own wife. And then the chairman of the board of directors, it was by faith that these great men were mightily used by God. And this is what God requires of you and is what He requires of me as well. We need the training. We must have our minds renewed. We must be theological expositors. We must be exegetical expositors. We must be evangelistic expositors. But we also need this other element of a living, daring, bold faith that propels us forward in the will of God to stand before the people of this world and to say, thus says the Lord, and to leave the results to God. It takes faith to be like Jonah and to be one man to go to a towering city and to be airdropped in and to have nothing else going for you but the Word of God. This is our commitment. the sufficiency of Scripture and of the Spirit, so much else could obviously be said. But it is these examples in the Old Testament, in the New Testament, but also in church history that light a fire under our souls and bring about a great motivation to invest my life by faith that God would use me to reach the kingdoms of this world through the primary, ordinary means of grace, the preaching of the Word of God. God had only one Son, and He made Him a preacher. And God sent a preacher before Him to prepare the way, and that Son sent out preachers to preach the Word. And so it has come down to us century by century, and this baton now has been passed down to you. And there is the blood of the martyrs on this baton. There is the sweat of the Puritans and the Reformers and those in the Great Awakening and the Victorian era. It's all on this baton that has now been passed down and placed into your hand. and to know something of the sacrifice and the commitment that was exerted to bring this baton to you and to place it into your hand should inspire us all to run with all of our might by the grace of God and pass it on to a perishing world and to pass it down to the next generation. May God continue to raise up spirit-filled, Word-saturated, God-exalting, Christ-centered, Spirit-empowered, world-shaking, faith-driven preachers from this institution. Let us pray. Father, thank you for a great cloud of witnesses. They are unmistakable. A blind man could see them. A deaf man could hear them. May you open our eyes and open our ears that the examples of those who have gone before us would lift our spirits and move us greatly into this world for Christ. In Jesus' name we pray. Amen.