Are You Misunderstanding What Christ-Centered Preaching is?

The Road to Emmaus and Christ in the Old Testament

Luke 24, the resurrected Christ encounters the disciples on the road to Emmaus and these men are sad because and they don't recognize Jesus. And then he asked them, what's the reason that you're so sad?

And they say, well, you know, maybe you haven't heard. But this Jesus, who we thought was the Messiah, then we thought he was one. And then all of a sudden he was killed. And, you know, and now come to find out something has happened to his body.

We just got word that someone has stolen his body. And then Jesus takes them and he begins with the Old Testament or with the Psalms and the law. And he walks them through the scriptures showing. And Luke is clear in making this point, showing how Christ must suffer all these things.

So he used the Old Testament scriptures to show that the death of Christ does not mean that he was not the one. So I think Christ-centered preaching, therefore, is to understand that the overarching purpose of the scriptures in general is to reveal God's saving grace, power and purpose through the person and work of Jesus Christ.

And that is laid out for us in type and shadow and promise and fulfillment. And it's explicit, it's implicit, it's presented in a lot of ways. But the overarching purpose of the scriptures is to reveal God's grace in the person and work of Christ.

So, therefore, Christ-centered preaching is preaching all of the scriptures through the lens of the person and work of Christ.

Apostolic Preaching of Christ Crucified

When they preached, they at the time were writing New Testament. So they had to preach the Old Testament. Let's just be frank here. So listen to this. So this is how it starts. This is 1 Corinthians 1 .23.

He says, we preach Christ crucified. This is 2 Corinthians 1 .19. The Son of God, Jesus Christ, was preached among you by me and Silas and Timothy. Galatians 1 .16. God was pleased to reveal His Son in me so I might preach Him among the Gentiles.

Grace was given me to preach the unsearchable riches of Christ. Ephesians 3 .8. Christ is preached. Philippians 1 .18. We proclaim Him. Colossians 1 .28. Pray that we may proclaim the mystery of Christ.

Colossians 4 .3. When the apostles preached, they proclaimed what? The ethics of Jesus? The ethics of the old law? They were preaching the person and work and finality of who Christ is for us. And I think there's something to be said that when the New Testament speaks of preaching specifically, which I think is different from teaching, and we'll do a whole other podcast on that, but when they specifically mention preaching, they're always connecting it to Christ and the work of Christ, whether it's preaching the cross, preaching Christ as Messiah, preaching the work of Christ.

Romans as the Gospel Promised in the Scriptures

The way Paul begins the letter to the Romans is striking when it comes to this whole thing in terms of his hermeneutic, in terms of how he even understands his calling as an apostle. He says that he's a servant of Christ Jesus, called to be an apostle, set apart for the gospel of God, which he promised beforehand through his prophets in the Holy Scriptures.

That's the Old Testament. He's promised the gospel. And the gospel concerns God's Son, who was descended from David according to the flesh and was declared to be the Son of God in power at His resurrection by the Spirit.

And so now the apostles have received grace and their office to bring about what? The obedience of faith. That's the purpose of everything that they're doing, is to proclaim Christ so that people might trust in Him.

Then he says that he desires to come to the saints in Rome because he wants to preach the gospel to them. I think we could all learn quite a bit when it comes to preaching the Old Testament from the apostles.

The Bible as a Biography of Jesus from Beginning to End

When you're thinking about Christ in all of Scripture and you approach it the way in which the apostles did, you could break the Bible down in this way. If you're in modern-day context and someone walks up to you and goes, hey, for some reason Jesus is super significant in the world, in world history.

I don't want to learn more about this guy. Well, you could say, hey, listen, the Old Testament, this big book, is the anticipation and explanation of why He matters and why you can trust Him. And then when you get to this thing called the gospels, it's the manifestation of Jesus.

He arrived. He's here. Then when you get to the book of Acts, it's the proclamation of how that person spread around the world. Then when you get to the epistles, it's the explanation of the significance of who He is in light of all of that.

Then when you get to Revelation, it's the consummation of all things. We're waiting on that part. That's how you approach it. It's like the book is a biography of Jesus from beginning to end about all the different parts of His life.

If you're preaching in the book and you're not concluding about Jesus, first of all, I don't think you preach the sermon, which we're going to get to in a second. But secondly, you definitely missed the point of the book.