Robert Smith: Exegetical escort
WAKE FOREST (BSCNC Communications) - Ken Fentress still remembers Robert Smith from his days as a student at Southern Seminary in Louisville, Ky. “Whenever I saw a crowd gathered most anywhere on campus, I knew Robert Smith was nearby,” remarked Fentress – now the Senior Pastor of the Montrose Baptist Church in Rockville, Md., and former dean of intercultural studies at Southern Seminary. “He always had a love for students and you would catch him praying with someone or laughing with a student whom you knew was going through a trial,” Fentress said. “But the main thing Robert Smith is known for by everybody is his preaching. Put simply, this brother can preach.”
There does seem to be universal agreement about this man who serves as the Associate Professor of Divinity at Beeson Divinity School. While he may be a preaching professor, he seems to be more pastor than professor. Those who know him all testify to his own special sort of pastoral care in their lives. Whether it is receiving a long voice mail from him as he encourages them to remain faithful to their mission for Christ or his smile and embrace during a season of personal darkness, Robert Smith has bridged the gap between the classroom and the pulpit with a scholar’s mind and a pastor’s heart.
Evidence? His latest sermon at the Great Commission Resurgence Evangelism Conference on the campus of Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary. With characteristic eloquence his opening statement called for an exuberance of witness from God’s people as those who have too easily “become accustomed to living with Jesus so long that we have forgotten what is was to live without him.” Smith focused on Phillip and the Ethiopian eunuch in Acts 8 and underscored its historical context by bringing out the persecution which arose and afflicted the church in Jerusalem. “Acts 1:8 and Acts 8:1 show the progression of persecution which thrust the gospel into Samaria,” Smith said. “After the great power of God has been seen by many, we quickly see that God adds by subtracting. God is a paradoxical God who says that when you want to be first you must be last; when you desire to lead you must serve; and when you want to win you must lose.”
Smith shows a command of both language and literature as he intersperses the key events of the Biblical text with quotations from the early church fathers to G.K. Chesterton (which he quotes from memory). His rate of elocution causes a growing passion between both the preacher and the people making his role as “exegetical escort” one of simply ushering people into the very presence of God.
He approaches preaching from a doctrinal center and is unafraid to say so. While escorting his hearers through Acts 8 he refers to Simon the magician as one who is in love with the “tricks rather than the truth of God.” He goes on to say that those who simply work to bring about the trendy ideas of the day without working to make sure their preaching is “Christologically saturated” run the risk of preaching a false gospel. Philip’s “divine appointment” was a radical change from encounters with the masses to preaching to only one person. “We specialize in the masses, but we overlook the one,” Smith said. “We are good at preaching to the masses but how can we preach to only one person?” God’s change in Philip’s ministry was used not only in the eunuch’s conversion, but “it serves as a model and an encouragement to us in the power of the gospel to overcome barriers where once only the Jewish nation knew the truth of God.”
“The gospel overcame a linguistic barrier in that they spoke a different language but were united in the gospel. Philip overcame racial, cultural, educational and geographic barriers through the gospel and broke stereotypes which are so very common,” Smith said. Philip used a critical “dialogical question to explore the depths of the man’s heart and allowed room for God to work in the reading and understanding of His word – Do you understand what you are reading?” The honesty of the man is a “lesson which we must learn because God is waiting on us to confess our ignorance – a recognition that we simply do not understand and without His help we will never fully understand what we must understand to obtain eternal life.”
Preaching as an “exegetical escort” echoes the same theme of Smith’s newest book, Doctrine That Dances: Bringing Doctrinal Preaching and Teaching to Life. Therein, Smith states, “while the preacher escorts the hearers through the substance of the Word of God, the preachers also doxologically dance with exuberance, having themselves already been in God’s presence.” And dance he does. As the sermon progresses, he refers to the Bible as “the Him book” and encourages preachers to get out of “the woulds” and into the promises of God as those who have been commissioned as heralds of the gospel. “I know too many people who are lost in the woulds – I would do this if I had this professor or I would do this if I had this opportunity. Move out and trust God for the power which you will have when you need it.”
Echoing the statements of the great British preacher, D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, he reminds those who preach “to prepare carefully, but preach freely” as the Spirit of God is the key agent in the application of truth to the human heart. “Preaching can almost be an out of body experience as we see how the power of God uses mere human beings and their words to do what only God can do by the Spirit’s power.”
Smith is the best example of what he describes in his book as the path and the task of preaching: “Preaching is both cranial and cardiological; it involves head and heart, fact and feeling.” The sermon ends as it began – with a definitive call to rejoice in God by a recognition of the sufficiency of the Spirit of God to those who labor to “escort” people exegetically through the riches of God’s revealed Word.
