Spurgeon writes in Lectures to My Students:

Just as the earth is not the centre of the universe, so man is not the grandest of all beings. God has been pleased highly to exalt man; but we must remember how the psalmist speaks of him: “When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained; what is man, that thou art mindful of him; and the son of man, that thou visitest him?” In another place, David says, “Lord, what is man, that thou takest knowledge of him! or the son of man, that thou makest account of him! Man is like to vanity: his days are as a shadow that passeth away.” Man cannot be the centre of the theological universe, he is altogether too insignificant a being to occupy such a position, and the scheme of redemption must exist for some other end than that of merely making man happy, or even of making him holy. The salvation of man must surely be first of all for the glory of God; and you have discovered the right form of Christian doctrine when you have found the system that has God in the centre, ruling and controlling according to the good pleasure of his will. Do not dwarf man so as to make it appear that God has no care for him; for if you do that, you slander God. Give to man the position that God has assigned to him; by doing so, you will have a system of theology in which all the truths of revelation and experience will move in glorious order and harmony around the great central orb, the Divine Sovereign Ruler of the universe, God over all, blessed for ever.

This blog post suggests that people are leaving the church because many sermons are polished, but are theoretical and lack the gospel:

Why are people leaving good, established, traditional churches with great facilities, full of quality individuals and extensive children’s programs to attend churches that meet in old schools? Because their pastors have fallen into this trap of theoretical preaching. Therefore, the message is no longer relevant. The pastors are not communicating the life-changing message of the gospel. They are delivering well-polished lectures with biblical points. People know the difference and they vote with their feet.

I’ve heard a lot of sermons in the past 10 years or so that make me want to get up and walk out. They’re secular, psychological, self-help sermons. Friendly, but of no use. They didn’t make you straighten up. They didn’t give you anything hard. … At some point and in some way, a sermon has to direct people toward the death of Christ and the campaign that God has waged over the centuries to get our attention. (Garrison Keillor, Leadership, Vol. 6, no. 3)

J.D. Greear on preaching Scripture focused on Christ rather than on us:

The Bible was not primarily intended to explain to us what we should do for God, but to point us to what God was doing for us in Christ.

Take the popular Old Testament story of David and Goliath. The teaching usually goes like this: “Like David, we have giants in our lives. Through the power of God, we can knock them down like David did!” The main point of the David narrative, however, was not simply the ability of one man to defeat in this life every giant that comes against him, but that David a young Jew, hated by his brothers, who went out and defeated a giant who had completely immobilized Israel, and through his victory all of Israel was saved, even though they didn’t lift a finger to help him! Then all Israel shared in his victory. In this way, David was pointing us to Jesus. Because Jesus, the “greater David,” has conquered the “giant” of our separation from God, we don’t have to worry as much about other so-called giants, like cancer or vocational failure. Through Jesus’ work, no longer does death really defeat us or personal failure devestate our sense of personal worth!

…Postmoderns have lost the centrality of God in the universe and replaced it with the centrality of themselves. It is the preaching of the Gospel which reverses that. It is only when we teach people to trade their self-centered story for the story of God that we can truly be “preaching the Word.” Preaching the Gospel means to teach people to put Jesus back in the center of the universe where He belongs and to trust what He has done and can do on our behalf.What we should be exposing from the Bible is the Gospel!

Excellent post.

David Powlison contrasts the therapeutic gospel with the once-for-all gospel in this very helpful essay, and asks:

Which gospel will you live? Which gospel will you preach? Which needs will you awaken and address in others? Which Christ will be your people’s Christ? Will it be the christette who massages felt need? Or the Christ who turns the world upside down and makes all things new?

The entire article is well worth reading.

From A Quest for More:

You see, when God enters our lives by his grace, he isn't working to make our kingdom work so much as he is calling us to an excitement with, and dedication to, a much greater kingdom.

From D.A. Carson's A Call to Spiritual Reformation:

So much of our religion is packaged to address our felt needs – and these are almost uniformly anchored in our pursuit of our own happiness and fulfillment. God simply becomes the Great Being who, potentially at least, meets our needs and fulfills our aspirations. We think rather little of what he is like, what he expects of us, what he seeks in us. We are not captured by his holiness and love; his thoughts and words capture too little of our imagination, too little of our discourse, too few of our priorities.

In the biblical view of things, a deeper knowledge of God brings with it massive improvement in the other areas mentioned: purity, integrity, evangelistic effectiveness, better study of Scripture, improved private and corporate worship, and much more. But if we seek these things without passionately desiring a deeper knowledge of God, we are selfishly running after God's blessings without running after him. We are even worse than the man who wants his wife's services – someone to come home to, someone to cook and clean, someone to sleep with – without ever making the effort to really know and love his wife and discover what she wants and needs; we are worse than such a man, I say, because God is more than any wife, more than the best of wives: he is perfect in his love, he has made us for himself, and we are answerable to him.

From Bekah's Weblog:

Too often when we study scripture, we start with the wrong question: "What does this say to/about me?" If we start our study asking, "What does this tell me about God?" then we really get down to the deep riches of the Word. After all, if we are called to conform to the image of Christ, shouldn't we be learning more about him and less about us?

David Powlison writes about the therapeutic gospel, which is probably one of the most common forms of anthropocentric (human-centered) preaching:

When this way of looking at things is ported into Christianity, then the gospel of Jesus becomes the better way to meet your needs. Perhaps your sin is that you look to your girlfriend/boyfriend or spouse to meet your need for love, when Jesus is the one who lives to meet that need. In this way of looking at things, God's chief purpose is often portrayed as merely giving us what we deeply desire, gratifying our deepest instinctive longings.

This way of describing how God interacts with our desires is a "therapeutic gospel." It offers to heal the woundedness we feel because our needs weren't met. It offers to fill those empty places inside with Jesus.

I think that the therapeutic gospel gets it wrong. It gets God wrong. It gets people wrong. It gets suffering wrong. It gets the gospel wrong.

more (via)

It's been way too long since I last posted. Let's get things moving again with a quote from A.W. Tozer:

"Christianity never begins with man. Christianity begins with God, and then looks around for man."