Theocentric Preaching

I’ve been posting my recent article that appeared in the Evangelical Baptist magazine. Here’s a link to the entire article in PDF:

God-Centered Preaching

(continued from previous posts)

We desperately need preachers who preach God-centered sermons. This type of preaching will pull us “out of our own drama and cast as characters in his unfolding plot,” where “we become part of the greatest story ever told,” writes Michael Horton. “It is through God’s word of judgment (law) and salvation (gospel) that we are transferred from our own ‘life movie’ and inserted into the grand narrative that revolves around Jesus Christ.” I can’t imagine a better way to preach or to live.

(I’ll be posting a PDF of the entire article shortly.)

An article I wrote for the Evangelical Baptist magazine just came out. This week I’ll be posting the article in sections. Here’s part one.

David Neff, an editor of Christianity Today, tells of visiting a church one summer on his vacation. The first week, the preacher spoke on the story of God’s call to Moses at the burning bush. In this passage, God reveals how he will fulfill his promises made to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob through Moses. He also reveals his ineffable name. It is a “pivotal point in the Bible,” Neff writes, “a hinge on which the door of sacred history swings.”

The preacher rose to speak on this passage. Moses was afraid to walk through the door set before him, said the preacher, but he walked through it anyway. We must do the same. “End of message,” Neff writes. “No God. No divine plan revealed. No theophany. Just stages in the life cycle.”

The next week, Neff returned to hear a different preacher. The sermon text was the story of Jesus calming the storm, thereby revealing that he is Lord over creation. The preacher chose to speak about the fear of travel. “The sermon many have soothed some fears,” Neff writes, “but theologically it crashed and burned. I didn’t come back the next Sunday.”

Neff argues that these two sermons are not isolated examples of bad preaching. Evangelicals, he writes, often strip miracles of their biblical significance, reduce parables to lessons for effective living, and hand out moralisms and three-step how-to’s.

Two decades ago, Preaching and Pulpit Digest studied 200 sermons preached by evangelicals. The study analyzed how many of the sermons were grounded in the character, nature, and will of God. Only 19.5% met this test. Reflecting on this study, theologian David Wells writes:

The overwhelming proportion of sermons - more than 80 percent - were anthropocentric. It seems that God has become a rather awkward appendage to the practice of evangelical faith, at least as measured by the pulpit. Indeed, from these sermons it seems that God and the supernatural order are related only with difficulty to the life of faith. He appears not to be at its center. The center, in fact, is typically the self. God and His world are made to spin around this surrogate center, for our world increasingly is understood within a therapeutic model of reality. (No God but God: Breaking with the Idols of Our Age)

I do not know how many sermons today are grounded in God’s character, nature, and will, but my guess is that things have not improved.

Few preachers set out to preach sermons that trivialize Scripture, reduce a passage to a set of how-to lessons, and push God to the side. Yet it appears that this happens frequently, and with disastrous results.

Our churches desperately need preaching that is both God-centered and relevant, and one of our greatest needs is to learn how to do this. If we fail to preach this way, we dishonor God, twist Scripture, and rob our listeners of the biblical message. If we learn to preach God-centered, relevant sermons, our preaching will glorify God, be accurate, and genuinely help our listeners and churches.

Before we explore how to do preach like this, we must first recognize some of the ways that we have strayed from a God-centered approach and wandered into human-centered preaching.

Part 2 tomorrow

(photo from Subversive Influence)

Last year I heard a Christmas sermon on CD based on Luke 1. The story highlighted the stress Mary and Joseph faced in their relationship as they reacted to Mary’s surprise pregnancy. The sermon used Mary and Joseph as an example of how to handle stress in our marriages today.

What surprised me most about this sermon is that it came recommended as a good way to preach a Christmas sermon!

On one hand, it’s pretty hard to preach Mary and Joseph’s story without highlighting this as a significant issue. And, to be sure, marriage stress is a very relevant issue to people today. It’s fair to bring this up and even comment on it as we preach this passage. But there are all kinds of dangers in making marriage stress the center of this story.

Luke 1 is not ultimately about marriage stress. We need to be on guard against inserting ourselves and our needs into the center of every passage. Luke 1 is ultimately about one of the most significant events ever - the announcement of the arrival of the Messiah. It’s a pivotal moment in all of history. We risk trivializing the passage when we make it a how-to sermon on dealing with marriage stress.

As preachers, let’s help our people find their place in the grand story of God’s mission. Preach Christ and what his arrival means for the world today. It’s a story that deals with marriage and all the other stresses we face - but it is much bigger than that. Preach Christ this Christmas. It’s not all about us!

The final version of my thesis includes this paragraph:

Theocentric preaching does not begin with the inexhaustible demands of the human condition; it begins with the sufficiency of God. Rather than dwelling in the depth of human need, it lives within the realm of God’s richness. The preacher is not pressured to only provide answers; instead, the preacher brings the congregation into the presence of God, who is on a mission to re-create the cosmos and to redeem all things. Discouragement is part of the assignment of preaching, but a theocentric approach reminds us that our sufficiency is not found in ourselves. God, not the preacher, is the only source of eternal satisfaction and joy.

This is not the paragraph I had originally written. I had originally argued that theocentric preaching can help prevent against discouragement. Haddon Robinson challenged me during my thesis defense. There is no way, he said, to avoid being discouraged as a preacher. I forget his exact words, but the phrase in the paragraph above comes pretty close: “Discouragement is part of the assignment of preaching.”

There probably aren’t many preachers who don’t get discouraged at least part of the time. The main character in the novel Gilead wrote, “So often I have known, right here in the pulpit, even as I read these words, how far they fell short of any hopes I had for them.” In Lectures to My Students, Spurgeon wrote:

Be not dismayed by soul-trouble. Count it no strange thing, but part of ordinary ministerial experiences. Should the power of depression be more than ordinary, think not that all is over with your usefulness. Cast not away your confidence, for it hath great recompense of reward…Cast the burden of the present, along with the sin of the past and the fear of the future, upon the Lord, who forsaketh not His saints. Live by the day - ay, but the hour. Put no trust in frames and feelings…Trust in God alone, and lean not on the needs of human help…When your own emptiness is painfully forced upon your consciousness, chide yourself that you ever dreamed of being full, except in the Lord…In nothing let us be turned aside from the path which the divine call has urged us to pursue.

Discouragement is part of the assignment of preaching, but it’s also a reminder to us that our hope doesn’t lie within ourselves or the people around us. As i wrote in my thesis, “Our sufficiency is not found in ourselves. God, not the preacher, is the only source of eternal satisfaction and joy.”

I heard Steve Mathewson teach yesterday on preaching Old Testament narrative in a story-driven culture. Steve covered how to exegete a narrative and how to preach it. He then delivered a sermon on Judges 3 - a passage I just preached on last week - and deconstructed it, explaining why he made the choices he did.

I missed part of the day due to sick kids at home, but what I heard helped renew my commitment to the preaching task. Steve is an example of someone who is engaged in real pastoral life with all its pressures, and who models faithful exposition within that context.

MP3s of the day are available from Heritage Theological Seminary at a cost of $15. CDs will be $25. They’re well worth getting. Contact info is online.

Steve’s book, The Art of Preaching Old Testament Narrative, is also well worth reading.