A Conversation with Robert Smith Jr.

[Music] Welcome to the Beeson Podcast, coming to you from Beeson Divinity School on the campus of Sanford University. Now your host, Doug Sweeney. [Music] Welcome to the Beeson Podcast. I am your host, Doug Sweeney, and I'm joined today by my dear friend, Dr. Robert Smith Jr. I beloved teacher of preaching here at Beeson for many years. One of my best friends in the whole world, and this year's Conger Lecturer in biblical preaching. We want to catch up with him on his life and ministry and ask him all about the theme of this year's Conger Lecturer. So thank you, Dr. Smith, for being with us. Thank you, Dean Sweeney. Thank you. So the Beeson Divinity School community knows you very well. And Mrs. U. Dearly, we often begin these interviews by asking people a little about themselves. I think I'd be wasting our listeners time if I asked you to tell us about yourself. So why don't we just dive right in and ask you how you're doing these days. You still have an office in town. You still have your condo in town. You're still around quite a bit. But you're not here every single day, like you used to be. How are things going? How's the Lord using you? Are you staying off the streets and remaining useful and fruitful? What's going on? Well, I'm having a ball. I generally tell people who ask that question or some of the questions that I'm sailing on chartered waters and I'm traveling on the seal orders. So that's what's happening with me. I discover as I go and God reveals things to me and sets up appointments for me and gives me ministerial assignments at various times. And I'm not, I don't suspect that he will. I don't plan on it. He just does it and I'm having a ball. I think you told me yesterday, correct me if I get this number wrong, but you're still preaching about 40 Sundays here. 46. 46. Yeah. That's almost all of them. Well, that's six that I'm not. All right. How many of those are in Cincinnati? Are you still jet set and flying everywhere all the time? For the most part, maybe six of them are local in Cincinnati. And anything outside of that like Columbus or Louisville, that's 100 miles dating. That's another 60 miles. So most of them definitely are away from Cincinnati while I'm at home down. Yeah. You were such a wonderful man. One of the most beloved and best known preachers we know around here. And yet you're such a faithful godly man. Somebody could call you from who knows where they'll and ask you to preach. And if you could fit it in your schedule, I bet you'd say yes. I would, sir. Wonderful, sir. No, sir. No, sir. No, no, no. Thanks for being here and loving on the students. One more question before I ask you about loving on the students this week and what you're talking about for your congregate lectures and so on. So it's not a secret to people who know you and love you that you've retired, stay in active, but you've retired. You get a little over. Then you used to be your elder brother in the Lord and senior member of the Christian family. That's right. What's it been like for you feeling like your aging? I kind of want to get some advice from you for myself and for listeners as well about growing over in the Lord. How have you thought through that? What's it like for you thinking about questions such as is the Lord still growing you? Is the Lord still sanctifying you? Do you ever think about kind of preparing yourself to go and be with the Lord? What, you know, help us a little bit. Either tell us how you've been thinking about this or just go ahead and give us some advice about aging in the Lord. You know, I don't really think that I'm 76 and Lord willing and then too much 77 Lord willing. But people around me remind me that I am. So things that I could do easily, I think they do them for me. They open the door. They take me by the arm and escort me. When I get ready to go into the pulpit and I'm sitting on the audience floor or the audience level, they walk me up the steps. All of those kind of things. Too much like in a way that annoys you a little bit more you just find it kind of way of them showing respect for you. Exactly. Exactly. Okay. And so it's kind and they do that. I say, well, goodness gracious. You know, I could take this box out. But a young minister will be right by my side and you'll take it out for me. And so it reminds me that yes, I am aging. I'm kind of like Michael Jordan who knew it was time for him to retire when his body could not do what his mind wanted him to do. So he could do his mind was fine, but his body could say so I am physiologically experiencing some limitation and I understand that. I think what God is doing and constantly saying to me and I need to constantly hear this. The Lord says when I put myself in a position, I've got to get this done this. I got to get this, this, this. God reminds me, but I'm doing it. I'm doing it. I'm doing it. It does not relieve me from the task. I need to do that. But he's doing it through me, Dean Swini. And that is so liberating that I'm not responsible for doing what only he can do. And he does it through me. So that's one of the things that helps me not to become put in situations of real pressure and in the vice grip of anxiety. But to know that if it's his will, then it's his bill, you know, pay for it. So that's where I am. There have been a couple of times as you know in recent years when I've fussed over you just a little bit worrying about how you're doing. And in those contexts, what you usually say to me is preaching and teaching energizes me. I love it. You know, I don't want to do less of it. That would be less energizing. I want to still do a lot of it. Is that the way you still feel? Absolutely. Even if your body can't do quite what it did 20 years ago. I mean, you're just as excited as ever to preach and teach and be with students. I have feet and that's good. They're grounded in the word relationship that's fine. I love it. But also have wings. And what excites me is to have feet that's grounded and wings that fly. And I want to keep flying and soaring. They who wait upon the Lord show a new their strength and mine up with wings is equal. That's what I want to do. And that's the Lord is enabling me to do that. Do you ever get asked for advice? This kind of a loaded question. I'm still relatively young. I turned 61 this summer. But when you're in your 60s, you just start thinking a little bit like you weren't thinking before about aging. And in our marriage, we still have four parents who are with us in their 80s. Not doing as well as they were doing in their 60s. And I find myself in context in churches, even in my own church where I teach on a somewhat regular basis. And oftentimes there are seniors who come and listen. And I think more than I used to think about how do I apply this text? How do I apply this lesson to people in the different age groups that I'm ministering to here, including the seniors? It's a funny thing to say. But when I was 40, I didn't think much about that. But now I think a little bit more about it. So what does somebody who's 80 or 85 need to hear that maybe, well, they probably needed to hear it when they were 42, but they feel maybe a greater sense of urgency to kind of get right with the Lord in a certain way now. Is that something that you think about as aging done that to you? Or you just don't feel, you don't feel old, so it's not occurring to you maybe. Yeah, I do. I think about that. I need hearing aids and I need eye glasses, metaphorically speaking, so I can hear what people who are 80 and 90 years of age and then be able to see what they're going through. So I can't really hear but see. And that's important to me. One of the things that has helped me is that I live close to a mother who lived to be 96 years of age. My daddy died at 79 and my love for people has always been love for seniors. Even when I was a kid, I didn't have a very few friends, not that I was anti-social, but I wanted to be with older people in the church. I go to the Cargolesson Center as a teenager. And so I think that way. How does this text fit, ain't Lucy and Grandma Jones? That's the way I think and how can I apply it to them so that they can see themselves in the biblical pictures. That's me. I'm there now or make some kind of application from the text. That's a great segue to my next question because I want to make sure we spend some of our time together here talking about what you're sharing with the students and others who are coming to listen to your Conger lectures. You are trying to help people get better at preaching by getting them thinking about helping listeners to see what they're talking about. You've already started talking about that a little bit but let our listeners know so that when they, or I'm going to encourage them to go ahead and click and tune in on the recordings of your lectures. When they do that, what are they going to hear you emphasizing? What have you been talking to? Not just the students. Lots of people are listening to you. Seniors, middle-aged people, young people. But the chapel's full of Beeson Divinity School students. What do you want them to know? What's your message to us this week? My message to them comes from Proverbs 20 verse 12. God made both the ear and the eye. The left lobe is the analytical portion. The right lobe is the imaginative portion. I want them to, even though they may be dominant in one, and not the other, and certainly that's true. But I want them to have a kind of a crossover experience so that if they're dominant in the analytical, they go across and connected with the imaginative. If they're dominant in the imaginative, they're connected with the analytical, so that they're holistic in applying imagination to that which is conceptual and that which is filled with ideas so that you have a marriage between both. So that's what I'm trying to do. I'm trying to encourage people who teach and preach and who witness whatever ministry they may have. I'm trying to encourage them to be people who are photographers, who take pictures so that people can see the picture that's behind the textual proposition. Here is the textual proposition. Now here is the picture. This is what it looks like. This is what justification looks like. This is what sanctification looks like. I want to give them because Jesus was always using pictures. The kingdom of heaven is like this. He even said to his disciples, "Tell Herod." He just said, "Tell Herod Antibas." He says, "Tell Herod the fox." The fox. Well, you don't need much more than that. You know what he means by that? Yes. And that's what he honestly did. I want us to be able to always understand that there's a picture in the doctrine. I, first of all, get a proper understanding of the doctrine. That's first, proper understanding. What does the text mean? Now, sure what it looks like. Describe it for us in picture form. Now, if you don't have the right understanding of the text, no pictures don't help at all. Yeah. It came through clearly this morning during the question time when a student was asking you some about that and you even, you kind of double down on, make sure you're teaching the text well. And the reason for the kind of visualization emphasis I'm giving you is so that you will teach the text well. It's not a substitute for what God has given us in the text. It's a way of helping people to feel it and sense it. You should be giving the lecture. That's better than-- Oh, I'm a good student. I listen carefully. Oh, I'm serious. That's exactly what I was after. Just give our people, just in case they don't get to listen to the whole lecture. Give our people a couple of examples, maybe from your own preaching ministry. How do you do this? How do you take something that's in a passage of scripture that maybe most of us, and maybe someone like me would be a culprit here. He spent his whole life in seminary contexts where we're thinking kind of big thoughts with big words and so on. We're very kind of verbally oriented. And we teach students who love reading books and love words and that kind of thing. Probably everybody needs to hear the message about preaching you're giving us this week. But I bet seminary people need to hear it even more than most people need to hear because we're so word oriented. How do we take this? What you would say is a marvelous emphasis on the words through which the Lord has revealed Himself to us in the Bible and make these words tangible for people. Help people to see it. Help people to connect with it. Help people to sense the truth that's being revealed through these words. Do a couple of examples come to mind from sermon you've preached to sort of what you have done and why you've done it in that way and what effect by God's grace that is had on people? Yes. I think the reason, one of the reasons that we don't see the pictures in the text is that we don't expect to see them. We just don't expect to see them. We expect to define words. But we don't expect for pictures to come from the womb of the text. The womb is ready to deliver. But we don't have a midwife there. We don't have an OB/GYN doctor there. We don't expect it at all. And the pictures are not going to emerge on their own. And so if I expect it, it's like Warren Wiesby would say, "If you ask the Bible of course that it will give you an answer, you go in and expecting to get an answer because you go in and asking the question. You expect to get a picture from any text like John 1838 and Pilot asked Jesus, "What is truth?" A philosophy, a concept, an idea. And truth is standing right in front of it. I am the way, the truth. He's looking for some concept. No, he's picture. Look, you won't see truth. There's truth right there. I think if we go in, inquiry, expecting, and then using our imagination because life is filled with examples and with pictures. But if we are not willing to at least take a picture, as I was trying to say this morning, and take the negatives into the dark room and develop them so that we can bring them out and show a full-blown picture in color to our congregation. That takes work. It doesn't just happen. But you develop them, it takes time to present them so that people will say, "I see it. I got it now. You painted the picture." And as you were saying this morning, the Bible itself is full of these pictures. The Bible itself uses to make these things clear to people. Absolutely. Tangible to people. I'd never thought until three, four minutes ago when you were saying, we tended to find things in very kind of conceptual, verbal ways. It never occurred to me that even when we talk just day to day about the definitions of things, the definitions of words and a dictionary, the definition of theological concepts in a theology book, we almost always just use words to define these things. In the old days, I had dictionaries that had pictures along with the words to help define the words in the dictionary. But way more importantly than that as you were propounding this morning, the Bible itself is full of these pictures that it uses to define the things it talks about. And yet somehow, kind of dopey intellectual academic preachers like me don't think enough about helping to visualize things, helping people see it, see the divine truths that are being revealed to us graciously by God. You've already talked about what the Mars lecture is going to be like, but it's true. When I was a little boy in church, the preacher would be preaching and we would listen and our pastor was right. We set up looking at our Bible. And the adult Bible, they had pictures. We weren't reading the words. We were looking at the notes. in the ark, the Exodus, Daniel and the Lions there. We read words six, seven years old, we couldn't read them, but we saw the pictures today. And I know we have a children's Bible on standard, but today adult Bibles, charts and formulas and this and this, are pictures. I think that no child has ever been an adult and yet every adult has been a child. And if that's the case and they are children, because we grew up in the day we didn't have children's church, they just sit with the parents. But all the preachers such at a level that I provide pictures that children can relate to and since children have never been adults, but adults have been children, I know children can relate to the pictures the adults can. That needs to be brought in together. I do need line upon line, presep upon, presep here a little there. But I want to get these two minds together. I think they're left low, not minds, but I think they're left in the right low, they have been divorced too long, they need to be remarried. If they're not divorced, then some kind of way they've been separated too long. Give us some advice about a judicious use or right use of pictures. I'm thinking about this in a general way and because you just gave a lecture a little while ago, I'm still thinking about a question one of the students asked you afterwards about how do you know when it's a bit too much, how do you know when it's just right? Because I know you well enough to know you certainly don't want an unbidical picture to be the thing that people remember after sermon time. So is there kind of just prudential guidance that you provide young and older preachers about how you decide how best to paint word pictures in your sermon, how best to use images in your sermons? You have a couple of things. I want, before I even think about pictures, again, I want to rightly divide the word. I want to treat the text in a way that is accurate and responsible. That's the first thing I want to do. Then I want to go court and find a partner. I don't want to use that word, but find a word of meat, a married meat for that text. Start with the text. Work on that. And then think about how can I say this in such a way that it's picturesque? And I'm saying the same old thing, Dr. Lee speaking, but in fresh new ways, which I will talk about tomorrow, I don't want to spend five minutes presenting a picture and three minutes interpreting the text. I think that's too much. I've given too much emphasis. I've put too much emphasis on the picture and not enough on the text. So I won't, as I said today, I want the text to be the operator. If the text is round, I don't want a picture that square and force it to the world. It's got to come natural. And the text says, "Come unto me. I will accept you." But if there's something that does not fit, and I certainly don't want it, and I'll say this tomorrow, Lord, I don't want, because there's a thin line between persuasion and manipulation. I believe in persuasion, but that persuasion has to come as an effort to persuade people toward the authorial intent. What the text is meant to say and to mean. That manipulation just to fulfill my ego. I said, "Well, he's serious, artistic, and look at this static value now. Now that's not important." Because the way you like to do it, it's divine persuasion. Absolutely. The Lord is persuading. That's right. And you're the servant of the Lord, is proclaiming what he's given you to proclaim. I told you you need to do these lectures because that's exactly what I want to say to him. That is so different from manipulation. The most important thing to you in the end, and I want to talk you into doing something that I prefer. But that's not what you do when you preach, and it's not what you're teaching us to do when you preach. I wonder, I've been hesitating. I don't know if this is a good question to ask you. I'm going to try it and just see what your instinct is. It may be too specific, but I'm thinking about trying to do this from certain texts of the Bible as a preacher. And some texts come built in with their own pictures. They're just right there in the text. Exactly. So you can't help but use them. Other texts don't come in with built-in pictures, but I've listened to you preach enough so that I know that you like to preach individual texts faithfully, but also use other parts of the Bible to help preach individual texts faithfully. And maybe those other parts of the Bible will come with some built-in pictures that you can use. But here's the question. Maybe it's too specific. But what if you're preaching a text that doesn't have built-in pictures, or you could say what if you're preaching a text that does have built-in pictures, but you're trying so hard to explain it well to people and make it tangible for people, that you're also thinking about other pictures you might paint for them that very faithfully would teach this same text. How do you figure out how to combine the built-in, divinely revealed pictures and the stuff that we might be able to develop on our own from our own experience that would help illustrate the text itself? Dynamic equivalent is what I call it. Proverbs 22 and 6, obviously from the Proverbs. That book was the literature. It is not a book of guarantees. It's a book of generalities. If you generally do this, the result will generally be this. Proverbs 22 and 6, "Train up a child in the way that he should go or she should go and when he or she is old, he or she will not depart from it." Now that text I used to preach as a young pastor, I took and really destroyed what the text meant. My intentions were good, but because I said, "If you keep your children in church and you keep the children around the family altar, they will not depart." I know friends who have departed from ministry and so forth. So I need a supporting text to give me the picture. This is a child, "Train up a child." Age 12 to 40 is what that means. Not a little infant. In the way that they derrick the bent that child should go and when they are old, they depart from it. So I moved to Luke 15 and look at the parable of the Prodigal Son. Train up a child and the way that she go. This boy was trained in the way. He got out of the way of the word, but he could not get the word of the way out of him. He got out of the way of the word and went to a far country and wasted his goods and riots his living, but he couldn't get the word of the way out of him because he comes to himself without the benefit of a sermon or track or quiet in the pickpink. Now he confesses that he sent against God and against his father that he's no longer worthy to be called. His son made the one high of the service he's going back because he got out of the way of the word, but he could not get the word of the way out of him. And the parents sit on the porch and the father looked down the road and saw the boy before the boy saw him and had the fetid calf already ready because he said when the boy came home and he hugged the boy, he said to the servant, "Go and kill the fattened calf, the calf that we've been fattening in expectation and anticipation of him coming back home." And I apply that and I talk about parents whose children have gone astray and their heart broken, but they on the porch, I say stay on the porch and keep looking down the road in expectation and keep the calf fatten so that when you see your child come back you could have instant celebration. Rather than go and fatten the calf and after a few months when it's fat enough then kill it then we'll celebrate. Oh no no no no. That Luke 15 helps me to make sense and yet be faithful to the text because even Jesus put the word, I mean God put the word in his first two children and yet had to evict him. Was he a bad parent because they want to stride? No. And yet he had plans and Jesus will come and now they'll be brought back in. So I mean that I don't want to permit the supporting text, Luke 15, to take over Proverbs 22. I say Proverbs 22 is the address you must live in. And Luke 15 is a zip code. You go and visit the zip code and bring it into Proverbs 15, the address, and that helps you to get a picture of what's going on in the text. - That's good. Okay, last question. I loved the advice that you gave the students yesterday, afternoon, during a question and answer time, from Gardner Taylor. You remember the story better than me. I learned it from you yesterday. But apparently in one context, Gardner Taylor was being asked how to become a better preacher. - Yeah. - And according to your telling of it yesterday, his advice was pretty simple. - Yep. - Maybe it didn't seem as exciting and sophisticated as the person asking the question was hoping it would sound, but I love the advice he gave. Read the Bible more. - Yeah. - And pray more. - That's right. - And last night when you and I had dinner together, I said to you, one of my favorite things, probably the single most favorite thing for me about your preaching is that your preaching is just so full of love for the Bible, and so full of the Bible, it just exudes Scripture. Not in a chaotic way. You're always preaching and teaching very well a particular text of the Bible. But you're doing it with so much love and familiarity with the whole of Scripture, that it just comes out of you in ways that the Holy Spirit uses very powerfully. So I guess the question is, do you wanna repeat Gardener Taylor's advice just that simply? I kinda want the people listening to us now to kinda learn a lesson by listening to you preach and listening to what Gardener Taylor said about improving as a preacher. And my hope for our students and for all preachers. People listening to us now is that will be as in love with God and the Bible as you are, and that will mean we internalize it. We spend time in it. It just becomes the most significant part of what's going on inside us. And I think that means that while many of us will never be quite as good at preaching as you are, we can be much better because like you, we're full of the Scriptures and full of love for the Scriptures and it just kinda comes out of our pores, you know, and we're with other people. So I'm not sure that's a great question, but it's what I love about your preaching. Is this something yourself conscious about or when that student asked you yesterday about becoming a better preacher? Was that just the first thing that came to your mind? How do you think about that advice? And what would you say to us about it? Well, it comes out naturally. And eating, with any question, I'm gonna always go to Scripture. First, unless it's someone who is an atheist and knows nothing about the Bible, then I'll go to the secular world and then bring that back into the Bible. It's gonna always, whether I respond, you know, initially with the Bible, or I respond as it relates to a secular response that come back to the sacred. It's one of the, the Bible's gonna be there always. I just hope, Dean, that there's no process, but I just hope that people will get an appetite for Scripture. My mother was an incredible cook. No question about it. But she wanted us to eat things that were profitable, not palatable. Palatable, that's what I wanted. I wanted unreasoned and afraid of lies and how dogs, and we get that sometime. But she wanted to give us lima beans and squash, things like that. They were profitable. Other things were palatable. She says, no, I've gotta give you, that's what just profitable. And I sit to myself, when I get your own and leave this house, I'll never let another lima bean, a piece of squash, and just other things, green beans, stuff like that. I'll never let it come into my mouth. But she can't give it to her. And I never, I've never been appetite for it. Now, today, my favorite foods, lima beans, wow, squash. And I think that's what has happened. You kind of fall in love. You get an appetite. You start craving for those things. You can't get enough as the summers would say, I love your word more than my necessary food. Yeah, that's it. And it takes a while, but once you get an appetite for it, there is no substitute. - Dr. Smith, thanks for being back with us this week. Our listeners to the podcast, I know from testimony, they like to be praying for us. They like to be praying for our students. I think the Lord. - I bet they'd like to be praying for Robert Smith as we conclude, is there something they can be praying for you about these days? - And I will represent the Lord with excellence and then I will finish well. - All right, friends, this has been Dr. Robert Smith, Jr. dear friend, heart and soul of the Eastern Divinity School, back on campus all week, given our congregate lectures and biblical preaching. It's been a delight to have you with us thus far this week, Dr. Smith can't wait for the rest of today and tomorrow, rest of the week. Thank you for being with us. - Cheers. - listeners, please pray for our students for the Lord's work here at Beeson and for the Lord's work and Dr. Smith's life. Pray that he be faithful to the Lord, faithful in preaching and proclaiming God's Word and faithful even to the end. - Yes, Lord. - We love you, we pray for you, and we say goodbye for now. (soft music) - You've been listening to the Beeson Podcast, coming to you from the campus of Sanford University. Our theme music is by Admin Birmingham, our announcer is March and Olet, our engineer is Rob Willis, our producer is Neil Embry, and our show host is Doug Sweeney. For more episodes and to subscribe, visit BeesonDevinity.com/podcast. You can also find the Beeson Podcast on iTunes, YouTube and Spotify. (soft music)