He said listening to a half-hour sermon on Sunday morning does not make a person Reformed and then asked if the preachers present were following the pattern of Calvin, who preached every day, gave Wednesday fully to prayer and, if the lay people present were “gathering every Wednesday when the people of God give themselves to pleading with God for the advance of the Gospel?”

Anyone who has ever interviewed with an organization or church with which Dr. Sinclair Ferguson is engaged can count on “The Ferguson Question” being asked.
That question is, “What do you think about when you have nothing else to think about?”
Ferguson told the audience at the Ligonier Conference on The Christian Mind in Orlando: “What fills your mind when there’s nothing filling your mind will tell you a lot about yourself.”
He noted that people allow their minds to drift, wander and worry about things and that ultimately tells them just “how carnal sometimes our minds can be.” He encouraged the audience, “We need more and more to be filled with the Word of God so that there’s something worthy in our minds to think about when we have nothing else to think about.”
Ferguson then confessed that he used to think “it’s not possible to think about nothing;” and then admitted, “now I find myself doing it. This is a battle to the end.”
Ferguson acknowledged that in cultural slang today, “Losing your religion means losing your cool” and that it is “also the title of a song recorded by REM in 1991 that sold 10 million copies,” but that “here we are interested and concerned in these words more literally understood.”
Sinclair then addressed the reality that many Christians today have lost the Biblical Christian faith by failing to really know God through the study of His revealed Word.
Ferguson gently but firmly addressed the Reformed evangelical crowd with the truth that “we are specialists at blaming others and we are poor at taking to ourselves the summons of the Word of God to take the Gospel of Christ with intense seriousness.”
He said listening to a half-hour sermon on Sunday morning does not make a person Reformed and then asked if the preachers present were following the pattern of Calvin, who preached every day, gave Wednesday fully to prayer and, if the lay people present were “gathering every Wednesday when the people of God give themselves to pleading with God for the advance of the Gospel?”
Ferguson was not advocating a formula, but a return to a seriousness of the pursuit of God where lives are placed under the power of God and intercession is made for the glory of God.
He expounded on the high Christology of Hebrews 5 noting that although some things in the Bible are “hard to explain … we need to put our thinking caps on.”
Echoing the Biblical concern that some Christians do not mature in the faith but stubbornly remain infantile in the approach to the things of the faith, the speaker acknowledged that “this is not a contemporary problem. This is perennial problem for God’s people.”
He then quickly moved through several passages of Scripture as he addressed the question, “What is the characteristic of mature thinking?” The answer, Ferguson said, is “a passion for the knowledge of God.”
Amplifying his point, Ferguson said, “That is the heart of the Bible’s teaching — not what we do or who we are, but that we know (God) and are known by Him.”
Calling upon the image of the Lord walking in the Garden of Eden in the cool of the day with Adam, Ferguson noted God’s hope for “fellowship and communion between the Creator of the macrocosm and steward of the microcosm.”
The restoration of that lost fellowship and communion is what “lies at the epicenter of the new covenant,” expressed as a genuine and personal “knowledge of the Lord,” Ferguson contended. Punctuating his point, Ferguson pointed out that “Jesus said in John 17, ‘This is eternal life; that they might know you and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.”
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