“If an experienced pastor had 10 minutes to exhort 200 of the next generation of ministers what would you say to them? That was the charge for Albert Mohler Jr., Mark Dever, Ligon Duncan and C.J. Mahaney”

(Editor’s Note: The Aquila Report will publish all four of the responses separately over the next week or so.)

Mark Dever gave ministers who attended T4G Late Night advice that may seem shocking on the surface: live provocatively.

But the kind of provocative living Dever advocated is deeply counter-cultural, the type of which Paul speaks in 1 Corinthians 15:19: “If only for this life we have hope in Christ we are to be pitied more than all men.” Gospel ministers, Dever said, must live as if the Gospel is true and this will lead to a form of provocativeness that is far different from the cheap, tawdry kind that many in the current young generation prizes.

“The world around you has a very cheapened form of provocativeness,” said Dever, pastor of Capitol Hill Baptist Church in Washington, D.C. “It’s about style. It’s about your website not looking like anybody else’s website. It’s about things that are passing.

“The kind of provocativeness you want is not the kind of cheap provocativeness of style. It’s the kind of provocativeness that is living in a kind of way that doesn’t make any sense if you are trying to make it all add up this side of the grave.

I’m concerned that all of us by nature live in such a way that we try to make it okay here, where, if Christianity isn’t really true, it’s okay, because I’m really getting a pretty good deal out of it. You really don’t want to live like that.”

Dever said his three T4G friends – R. Albert Mohler Jr., Ligon Duncan and C.J. Mahaney – are living illustrations of such provocative living.

Mahaney, Dever said, regularly “involves himself in other people’s lives in a way that brings him no immediate blessing and has quite a bit of cost and he even puts up with mockery for it.” But Mahaney is clearly living in a way that makes no sense if this world is ultimate, Dever said. From the world’s perspective, this is provocative.

Dever was a student at Southern Seminary when it was thoroughly liberal and knows first hand that Mohler walked into a profoundly difficult situation when he was elected as the institution’s presidency in 1993. Mohler could have used his incredible gifts to become better known or to make more money and avoid the trouble, but Dever pointed out that he used them for the sake of the Kingdom and by God’s grace led Southern Seminary back to biblical fidelity.

“If you look at Al’s life closely, you will see a profound provocativeness where you can see he is living this kind of life,” Dever said.

“He is living as if his hope must be in Christ. Because if his hope were in this world, that man could do a lot of other things rather than what he is doing and get a lot more plaudits from the world and popularity from the community and political power and money – these things that the world values, Al could have them far more than he has them now.”

Dever said Duncan in recent months spent much time confessing sins and weaknesses to his T4G brothers, a reality which Dever said shows a deep desire to live for another world.

“I want to be clear: his sins were nothing scandalous or disqualifying, but Lig has a sensitive conscience, he loves those around him and he can confess his sin fully and openly and he hasn’t just done it with us,” Dever said, “but he has done it with brothers he lives around. But why would he do that when he has our esteem, when he lives a life that, from everything we can tell, we admire so?

Why does he bother confessing sin to us? Because he’s not living for our opinion. He’s living out of this hope in Christ.”

Dever admonished attendees to live all-out for the Gospel of Christ and not to live as if this present world is all that exists.

“Don’t settle for a cheap provocativeness that your generation out there in the world is in love with and is really a poor substitute for a genuine provocativeness,” he said. “You want to be the kind of person that, the more someone gets to know you, the more you are an absolute mystery to them if Jesus Christ did not rise from the dead. But if Jesus Christ rose from the dead, it makes entire sense.”

This article first appeared on the Southern Seminary’s official news portal and is used with permission. Source: http://news.sbts.edu/