Editorial

What I remember from Dann Filyer's sermons

Dann Filyer died in March. Most readers of the Herald have never heard of him, but he was a very significant figure in my life. He came to be pastor of our small Baptist church about the time I entered high school, and he profoundly changed my life through his sermons. More than 30 years later, I can still remember quite a few of the things he said. In fact, many of them have become the building blocks of my life. Following are just a few of the things I remember.

The Bible. Mr. Filyer always held the Bible as authoritative. He once demonstrated this by taking a rock (a symbol of God's Word) and a 78 record (a symbol of man's word). At the end of the sermon, he smashed them together; the record shattered, a visual reminder that God's Word is true forever, regardless of what people say. It wasn't this one illustration that stays with me so much. It was his whole attitude. He taught us to find meaning in Scripture. Every week, he would show us: This is what the Bible says, and this is what it means for our lives.

Sin. Mr. Filyer did not spend a lot of time denouncing specific sins, but he certainly was clear that sin is sin. He had a clear doctrine of the fall. One evening, he preached on "The whole creation groans" from Romans 8:22. It was the first time I understood clearly that all of creation, not just people, were contaminated by Adam's sin.

The Gospel. Mr. Filyer preached on being clothed with Christ's righteousness (II Corinthians 5:1-4), drawing parallels to Genesis 3, where God provided a covering won by blood for Adam and Eve. He thus clearly demonstrated salvation from sin through Christ's death for us. Many times he told us, "It doesn't matter if you're down and out or up and out", if you don't know Jesus, you have missed the most important thing in the world.

Practice. Mr. Filyer also practised the gospel. One time, he went to an evangelism conference in another city. During one of the breaks, he and another pastor came across a homeless young man and invited him into a restaurant to eat lunch with them. When the restaurant refused to serve the young man, the pastors decided the restaurant didn't want their business either, and they all went to another restaurant.

Grace. Mr. Filyer had a profound sense of the overwhelming grace of God, a grace restrained only by our unwillingness to receive it. A favourite verse for him was Luke 6:38, the promise that God would give us good measure, pressed down, heaped up, shaken together and running over.

Key doctrines. Mr. Filyer once decided that our church needed a refresher course in basic Christianity, so he preached a series of sermons from a detailed confession of faith he had written in Bible school. This was where I first heard terms such as the omnipresence and omnipotence of God, not as abstract theology but as central truths to live by; we could have a personal relationship with a God who knew everything about us and who could do anything.

Perseverance. Another key idea he taught is that "the perseverance of the saints is made up of new beginnings". It was a reminder that we should keep our love for Christ fresh and new.

Creation. Mr. Filyer had a strong delight in God's creation, an overwhelming gratitude for God's bounty, and a contentment in God's provision.

Christian lifestyle. Mr. Filyer had a profound sense that, because of the salvation God had given us, we should live our lives for Him in gratitude.

He was impatient with people who realized they could not become perfectly righteous and so ceased trying to become more righteous than they were. He noted, "People will never have all the money in the world either, but that does not stop them from trying to get as much as they can."

Judgement. I learned also from Mr. Filyer not to be afraid to make judgements. He was convinced that if some things are right and true, then things that contradict them must be wrong. As a result, he had no patience with a certain denominational Bible school which was very unclear about what it believed. I was too young to know whether his criticisms of the school were justified, but I later concluded that he had been right.

Wisdom. I also learned from Mr. Filyer that, if some things were wrong, then other things were simply unimportant and, in fact, hindrances to the important things. For instance, at a denominational convention, he helped defeat a resolution supporting the recycling of pop cans. He believed in recycling, but he was concerned that the church not get sidetracked into minor issues that could distract from the important matter of the gospel.

Our church also required the pastor to visit each member family at least once a year. He visited occasionally, but not as often as he was supposed to. Such visits tended to be formal occasions when not much was accomplished. He wanted to accomplish something through his ministry.

Preaching. Although we have almost opposite styles of sermon preparation, Mr. Filyer is the person, more than any other, who taught me to preach--simply by being a good preacher himself. He did not prepare sermons in detail but prepared his life through a continual study of Scripture and then preached from his heart out of the wealth of Scripture he had incorporated into his life. I prepare my sermons by writing them out word for word; yet I have not forgotten the lesson that sermons should come from the heart and from a life lived in the Bible.

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