Theocentric Preaching

Bob Hyatt on a story that’s frequently misused in sermons:

For instance, the story of David and Goliath? So not about how you can defeat the giants in your life (how many times have you heard that sermon???) It’s about how you can’t - but God can. And it’s specifically about how He does so through the weakness of the substitute - the unlikely one who stood in Saul’s place, who came in the name of the Lord and the power of the Spirit and defeated the enemy of the people of God. If you read that story and see yourself in David, you are reading it wrongly. You’re not David - you are the cowering Israelites who face an undefeatable foe…

But God is on the scene, sending One who can defeat whatever we face - and that’s who David points us to - Jesus. The point of the story is not ‘Be like David.’ You can’t… it’s trust Jesus, the real and true David who wins the victory over death and sin.

The more I read of Scripture, the more I see that this is the way it’s meant to be read - it all points to Jesus and in such amazingly literate ways as to boggle the mind. As Art said, the writers of Scripture were better writers than even they knew…

The entire post is worth reading, including this paragraph:

The Old Testament is a record of failure and the New a record of Jesus and His success where others had failed - His success and the success of the Gospel in bringing the life that the Law could not bring through obedience and the Prophets couldn’t bring through their preaching.

I have on my desk a book that challenges preachers to apostolic preaching - preaching that is “Christ-centered, redemptive-historical, missiologically communicated, and grounded in grace.” If you’re looking for a book that shows you how to preach in a God-centered way, then this volume is for you. It’s Him We Proclaim: Preaching Christ From All the Scriptures.

The author, Dennis E. Johnson, says, “If we settle for anything less than living for God as the center of our life, then we’re settling for second best. We’re selling ourselves short…To be God-centered is to be exactly what I was designed for.”

For a sample of what you’ll find in the book, you can listen to an interview with Johnson on White Horse Inn:

If the main focus of a sermon is to preach Christ, what do we do with the book of Proverbs and a host of other Biblical texts that seem to focus on wisdom for life, or our own personal growth in holiness, etc? That’s the focus as Michael Horton talks with Dennis Johnson about his new book, Him We Proclaim: Preaching Christ in All the Scriptures.

The interview, and the book, are well worth the time.

Selected quotes from an excellent article by Marianne Meye Thompson:

To preach the gospel is to proclaim the accounts of the Scriptures in light of the fact that their central character is God, and that the gospel is from God and about the God who is Father, Son, and Spirit.

It is so easy to make the most powerful of Gospel stories center on human action and not on God, to think that somehow our actions, our decisions, are the heart and center of the gospel story. To make that move is to sell out the gospel.

To be guided by the gospel is to remember that the gospel is first and foremost about what God does, and not about what we do.

Preaching should help people locate themselves in the context of the biblical story of God’s creation of the world, call of Israel, sending of Jesus Christ, and promised consummation, because it is there that we find our identity and purpose. Preaching helps people to identify their stories with and submit them to God’s grand story as found in the Bible; to find their identity, meaning, and hope in the purposes of God. Preaching narrates our individual, particular lives into the grand narrative of God’s purposes and work in the world. Often, however, our stories get the banner headlines, whereas God’s story is delegated to small print on the fifth page. It ought to be the other way around: God’s story deserves the banner headline; our little stories deserve far less space.

Presbyterian theologian John Leith once wrote a book subtitled What the Church Has to Say That No One Else Can Say. This subtitle is an obvious pun: the church has as its gift something to say; but the church has that something as its responsibility or obligation as well. Advice columns can advise people about their problems; therapists can help us in our relationships; but the church can help people to situate their stories in the biblical narrative in a way that illumines their meaning. The church can and must speak the gospel. That is to say, the church articulates what it means that we live in a world created by God, tainted and marred in every way by sin, and straining for redemption.

Preaching helps people to understand this story, this “gospel of God,” and to see their own stories as part of the larger story that begins with God’s action and longs for the time when “God will be all in all.”

more

Tim Keller outlines two approaches to preaching about biblical characters as he preaches on Esther:

An example - even a great example - can only crush you. It’s crushing because it’s an inaccessible standard…But there’s another way. Let me tell you how you can change. What if you didn’t just see Esther as an example, but as a signpost, as a pointer?

…If you see Esther as an example and say, “Be like Esther!” it will crush you. You will never live up to it. But if you see Jesus as your Savior - not as an example of doing something for others but as a Savior doing it for you, and you know that you’re that valuable to him and you know that your future is secure - that changes your identity.

Tim Keller on the problem with using biblical characters as moral exemplars:

When both liberal and conservative people read the book of Esther - in fact, they read the Bible - so many of them get so upset, because they say, “Look at these people! Look at what they’re doing! These are supposed to be moral exemplars, aren’t they? What kind of people are these? I don’t want to read about this!”

If you ever feel that way about reading the Bible, it shows that you don’t understand the message of the Bible. You’re imposing your understanding of the message on the Bible. You’re assuming that the message of the Bible is “God blesses and saves those who live morally exemplary lives.” That’s not the message of the Bible. The message of the Bible is that God persistently and continuously gives his grace to people who don’t ask for it, don’t deserve it, and don’t even fully appreciate it after they get it.

Just discovered a helpful article on Wikipedia summarizing the redemptive-historical approach to preaching:

The proponents of this kind of preaching argued that Old Testament narratives are not given – primarily - to us by God to be moral examples, but as revelations of the coming Messiah…

Opponents of redemptive historical preaching often fault this type of preaching as being weak when it comes to practical application of the Bible. Because the moral examples given in Scripture are undermined or diminished, redemptive historical preaching often fails to challenge the listener to conduct consistent with Scriptural direction given in places such as Matthew 5-7, Romans, and the Pauline Epistles.

I look forward to exploring this issue more. Not sure I’ve resolved this one in my mind quite yet.