Theocentric Preaching

There are many reasons why preachers don’t preach God-centered messages. One of the reasons, though, has to do with the fear that preaching about God will be irrelevant to people’s lives today. In other words, we fear that preaching about God will lead to sermons that lack relevance.

I can understand this concern: preaching has to connect with the people sitting in the congregation before us. It isn’t wrong for preachers to be concerned about relevance at all.

The challenge for preachers, though, is to truly believe that there is nothing more relevant to people today than God. Nothing is more relevant to God.

I was reminded of this yesterday when I received The John Piper Sermon Manuscript Library. The back of the case says:

Since 1980 John Piper has labored in the ministry of preaching at Bethlehem Baptist Church under the conviction that “People are starved for the greatness of God.” More than success, or riches, or esteem, or sex, or family, or sport, the glory of God satisfies the yearnings of our souls and sustains us in all our joys and pains…The glory of God is vital for our lives and for the life of the church.

Ultimately, preaching is a reflection of our theology of God. If one believes that God is all-sufficient, and that all things exist in relationship to him and for his glory, then preaching will center itself on God. If one has a lesser view of God, then that preacher will speak on lesser things.

Two beliefs form the basis for God-centered living and preaching:

• the belief that God is the only true God, and
• the belief that “we understand ourselves, our experience, and even the world itself from the perspective of our acknowledgment of the God who chooses to be known by his creatures” (Stanley Grenz).

If we really believe these things, we will work towards living - and preaching - in a God-centered way.

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.

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 for Revitalization, Michael F. Ross describes one of the symptoms of a congregation that has lost its love for Christ:

First, human personalities begin to take preeminence in the life of the church, over the person and work of Christ…

When Christ is not preached (1 Cor. 2:2) then a vacuum is created; people need some leader, some champion, some “holy man” to cling to other than Christ. Therefore it is essential that preaching be both Christ-centered and devoted to regularly focusing on the beauty and bounty of Jesus Christ.

At Preaching Today, Haddon Robinson describes the type of sermons we hear when our preaching is light on doctrine:

They end up being nothing more than moralisms: We should, we must, we ought. Or, here are three ways in which we can be better off financially. A sermon I heard a while ago on how to deal with procrastination had as its first point to get a Day Timer. You knew you were in trouble when you heard that. I have no doubt that when people left that church, if they were procrastinators, they thought it was a helpful sermon. But it was simply something that a motivational speaker could have done.

If people are raised on cotton candy, they are not going to grow as Christians. When Paul writes to his young associate Timothy, he says that ‘all Scripture is inspired by God,’ and that all Scripture is profitable for doctrine, for teaching, for putting the fundamental truths in front of people, and for ‘reproof, for correction, for instruction in right living.’ We have ignored that first affirmation - that the Bible is given to teach doctrine. It’s not the only thing it does, but doctrine is first, and out of that there is reproof and then there is correction and then instruction in right living.

From an interview with Kevin Vanhoozer:

The problem in too many evangelical churches is that we know what we’re supposed to believe, but we’re not sure what practical difference it makes and so we’re unable to bring it to bear on everyday life. To be sure, biblical and theological illiteracy remains a problem too. But that doesn’t really explain why even in churches where the Bible is faithfully preached the congregation doesn’t look that different from everyone else.

My own hunch is that we need to recover the imagination in order to set the cultural captives free. I believe that many people in today’s society, and church, suffer from an impoverished imagination. By imagination I mean the cognitive power of seeing things together, as wholes; clearly a worldview is an affair of the imagination, at least in part. In any case, I believe that our imaginations are captive to secular stories/worldviews that do not nourish our souls. Eugene Peterson says something similar about the function of the 10 plagues of Egypt: they were intended to free the imagination of the Israelites from thinking that the power of Egypt was sovereign. The plagues systematically deconstruct Pharaoh’s power. It takes imagination to see that what God is doing with a small tribe of slaves is greater than the might of Egypt or the grandeur that was Rome. Similarly, it takes imagination to see that North Americans are not in bondage to similar powers and principalities: consumerism and therapism, to name but two. I wonder whether in our haste to preserve doctrinal truth, we have not done our evangelical churches a disservice in surrendering our imaginations to stories (and advertisements) that serve the interest of some worldly empire (or multinational corporation) rather than the kingdom of God.

Pastors need to make it a priority to teach their congregations how read Scripture theologically, and this requires the imagination, the ability to make sense of thing by fitting the little bits into larger patterns - the big canonical picture. It takes imagination to see the Bible as a unified whole, and then it takes even more imagination to fit one’s own time and place into this biblical drama of redemption.

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