Theocentric Preaching

A prayer from John Stott’s book Your Mind Matters:

I pray earnestly that God will raise up today a new generation of Christian apologists or Christian communicators, who will combine an absolute loyalty to the biblical gospel and an unwavering confidence in the power of the Spirit with a deep and sensitive understanding of the contemporary alternatives to the gospel; who will relate the one to the other with freshness, authority, and relevance; and who will use their minds to reach other minds for Christ.

From Gospel-Driven Blog:

The common sentiment among many Christian circles today is,

“Don’t preach doctrine. Rather, give us something practical that is relevant to our daily life. Encourage us to live holy lives but don’t do it with doctrine (i.e., gospel). Such preaching will not help us one bit. Preach to us practically. Tell us how to live so we can go do it.”

Though never voiced, but in practice demonstrated, preaching the gospel is assumed to be too simplistic and impractical. What pastors need to understand, we are told, is that we live in a complex, fast-paced, ever-changing culture. It is naïve to think that preaching the gospel is sufficient for life and godliness. To be sure, the high priests of Christian therapy will say the Gospel is important. But, what one also needs to know is the secret of the Christian life, the secret to prayer, the secret to happier marriages, the secret for successful parenting, the secret for financial freedom, the secret of the abundant and overcoming life.

In other words, what the culture of therapy is really saying (albeit not always consciously) is, “Don’t give us gospel (i.e., doctrine) give us law (i.e., tips, principles, action steps, takeaways, secrets, etc…). However, a life based on legal principles rather than upon gospel principles will never lead to obedience. Such a life will ultimately fail in obeying God because law of any kind never stirs up one’s heart to obedience (cf., Rom. 7; Gal. 3:3).

Pastors who encounter such a legal mentality need to recognize it for what it is and remain faithful to their calling and office, which is to proclaim the gospel (cf., Rom. 1:1-5).

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In Preaching to Convince, Ben Patterson speaks of five deadly temptations in the ministry, the last of which is to try to “make Scripture relevant” in our preaching:

This particular temptation used to be the sole province of the liberal theological tradition. But in the past few years, it has gained a number of victims in the evangelical community…The sin courted in this temptation is the presumption that it is the Bible that is dead and we who are alive…

Is the Bible relevant? Dr. Bernard Ramm once remarked, “There is nothing more relevant than the truth.” The longer I preach, the more convinced I become that the best thing I can do is simply get out of Scripture’s way.

(quoted in Michael F. Ross’s Preaching for Revitalization)

From the book Total Church:

We ask, “Where does God fit into the story of my life?”, when the real question is “Where does my life fit into this great story of God’s mission?”

We want to be driven by a purpose that has been tailored just right for our own individual lives, when we should be seeing the purpose of all life, including our own, wrapped up in the great mission of God for the whole of creation.

We talk about “applying the Bible to our lives.” What would it mean to apply our lives to the Bible instead, assuming the Bible to be the reality - the real story - to which we are called to conform ourselves?

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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.

From John Piper’s Book The Supremacy of God in Preaching:

The greatness and the glory of God are relevant. It does not matter if surveys turn up a list of perceived needs that does not include the supreme greatness of the sovereign God of grace. That is the deepest need. People are starving for God. So I am persuaded that the vision of a great God is the lynchpin in the life of the church, both in pastoral care and missionary outreach. Our people need to hear God-entranced preaching. They need someone, at least once a week, to lift up his voice and magnify the supremacy of God. They need to behold the whole panorama of his excellencies.

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