Theocentric Preaching

I confess to what has to be one of my greatest mistakes ever:

Four or five years ago I was unhappy with my own preaching. I knew something was missing, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. It was a highly frustrating time for me.

This past Saturday, one of our church leaders told me that a friend visited the church during that time. “Your pastor doesn’t talk about Jesus a lot in his sermons,” the friend observed. The church leader who told me this argued at first, but then listened for a few sermons and concluded that the visitor was right.

Something was missing. Someone, actually. Jesus.

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People long for preaching that is practical, as they should. Sometimes, though, preachers move away from theocentric preaching in an effort to be practical.

A.W. Tozer (quoted in Dallas Willard’s book Renovation of the Heart), argues that right thinking about God is intensely practical. In face, we can trace many failures in living back to wrong thoughts about God. Tozer says:

A right conception of God is basic not only to systematic theology but to practical Christian living as well. It is to worship what the foundation is to the temple; where it is inadequate or out of plumb the whole structure must sooner or later collapse. I believe there is scarely an error in doctrine or a failure in applying Christian ethics that cannot be traced finally to imperfect and ignoble thoughts about God.

Willard writes:

Failure to know what God is really like and what his law requires destroys the soul, ruins society, and leaves people to eternal ruin. “My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge” (Hosea 4:6 NRSV),  and “A people without understanding comes to ruin” (4:14, NRSV). This is the tragic condition of Western culture today, which has put away the information about God that God himself has made available.

Accordingly, the first task of Jesus in his earthly ministry was to proclaim God: to inform those around him of the availability of eternal life from God through himself…This is basic information for human life. It was then and is now.

Theocentric preaching is not impractical preaching.  Tozer, Willard, Packer and others establish that knowing God is one of the most important issues for practical living at any time.

Expository Thoughts has a good post reflecting on a chapter in Preaching from the Old Testament. This has a lot to do with preaching in a way that honors God as the subject of the text.

From her perspective, these books should be preached from a theological and historical perspective, over against personalizing, moralizing, and/or allegorizing them. Let’s take these one at a time…

First, I could not agree with Kaminski more when she states that “these books are not simply narrating history - they are telling a theological story that is communicated through narrative” (59). Thus, our sermons should not simply be recounting historical events within an outline designed to bring moral principles to our 21st-century audience. I have in mind here the multiple series of sermons I have heard throughout my life about leadership and building the walls from Nehemiah, not to mention abuses of such stories as David and Goliath. In light of such abuses, Kaminski is right to call for preaching that is careful to place the narrative within the “redemptive story” of the Bible.

As a helpful example of this, Kaminski uses the story of Jericho, of which she correctly surmises that the intent of the story is not that God has promised that the “walls” of our life will fall down. As she points out, to preach the story that way could possibly give false hope to those who hear it: What happens if their “walls” don’t fall down? Are they not having enough faith? She rightly concludes:

While the story of Jericho clearly underscores the importance of faith, it is ultimately a story about God and his faithfulness. We can affirm that the God who was faithful to Joshua . . . is our God. (61)

We’ve all heard (or preached) messages like she describes: leadership lessons from Nehemiah, or how to handle the giants of life from David and Goliath. Kaminski shows a much better way.

One of the great responsibilities of a preacher is to help congregations…catch a glimpse of what an adventure it is in our little times and little places, to be part of this story…We are invited to see ourselves and our lives as part of God’s story. That produces a people with a cause. (Hauerwas and Willimon, Resident Aliens)