Dick Lucas

Could you? Could you? And so Jesus needs to speak to them plainly.

And then when Peter jumps up and tries to take Jesus aside to rebuke him, to correct him, or as Dick Lucas says in his commentary in these verses, to explain the Old Testament to him.

to get rid of all these silly notions about suffering and death, while in turn he finds himself on the wrong side of a rebuke from Jesus.

And look at what Jesus says to him.

I don't have them all.

But Dick Lucas is now 101 years old, an Anglican clergyman.

He's still living in his own apartment in London.

He has minders that look after him.

And so before the last evening of this week of talks, he got down on his knees and he prayed and he threw out his prepared notes and he determined that night that he would simply preach about the blood of Jesus Christ and the cross.

And Dick Lucas, who was a pastor in London for many years at St. Helen's Bishopgate, recalled being there on that last night in 1955.

He says, I'll never forget that night.

I was in a totally packed chancel.

with the Regis professor of divinity on my right and the chaplain of the college who would later become a bishop on my left and both of these were good men he says but they were completely against the idea that we needed salvation from sin by the blood of Jesus Christ Billy Graham got up and beginning at Genesis He went through the whole Bible and he talked about every single sacrifice.

The blood was flowing all over the great hall, everywhere, for three quarters of an hour.

Both my neighbors, said Dick Lucas, were horribly embarrassed by this crude proclamation of the blood of Christ and also must have been sure that no bright, sophisticated, young British person was going to believe any of this stuff.

But at the end of the sermon, 400 young men and women stayed to commit their lives to Christ.

people think that they invented all these things in the modern day.

So they say to me, you know, Dick Lucas started the Tuesday lunchtime talks at St Helens and that this is some new radical thing.

Not so.

You know, one of the chapters in the book, I look at a sermon that John Wesley preached at St Helens on a Tuesday lunchtime.

Why are they going to church? And that kick-started a bunch of events.

Was that in the Dick Lucas preaching days?

It was William.

William.

It's what we're doing now, isn't it? Studying the words of the apostles.

A number of years ago, my predecessor here, Dick Lucas, was preaching.

I was sitting right at the back over there.

Must have come in late or something.

And I ask myself, is my boat, my heart ready for that? Now, that's important.

It is important, brothers and sisters, because Dick Lucas said that the Book of Philippians is a book whose time has come.

Because this is a letter which teaches us to rejoice in suffering, and that is what is coming for the church in Britain, says Dick Lucas.

So Paul writes this thank you letter back to Philippi from prison and he says, you've been brilliant to me, verse 10 of chapter 4.

He says, you've renewed your concern.