Are You Misunderstanding What Christ-Centered Preaching is?

Theocast

Subscribe

Download

Share

00

00:00

Luke 24, the resurrected Christ encounters the disciples on the road to Emmaus and these men are sad because and they don't recognize

00:08

Jesus. And then he asked them, what's the reason that you're so sad?

00:14

And they say, well, you know, maybe you haven't heard. But this Jesus, who we thought was the

00:19

Messiah, then we thought he was the 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.

00:32

We just got word that someone has stolen his body. And then Jesus takes them and he begins with the

00:39

Old Testament or with the Psalms and the law. And he walks them through the scripture showing.

00:45

And Luke is clear in making this point, showing how

00:50

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.

01:03

So I think Christ -centered preaching, therefore, is to understand that the overarching purpose of the scriptures in general is to reveal

01:12

God's saving grace, power and purpose through the person and work of Jesus Christ.

01:19

And that is laid out for us in type and shadow and promise and fulfillment.

01:25

And it's explicit, it's implicit, it's presented in a lot of ways.

01:31

But the overarching purpose of the scriptures is to reveal God's grace in the person and work of Christ.

01:37

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

01:47

When they preached, they at the time were writing New Testament, so they had to preach the Old Testament.

01:53

Let's just be frank here. So listen to this. So this is how it starts. This is 1

01:59

Corinthians 1 .23. He says, we preach Christ crucified. This is 2

02:05

Corinthians 1 .19. The Son of God, Jesus Christ, was preached among you by me and Silas and Timothy.

02:11

Galatians 1 .16. God was pleased to reveal His Son in me so I might preach Him among the

02:17

Gentiles. Grace was given me to preach the unsearchable riches of Christ. Ephesians 3 .8.

02:23

Christ is preached. Philippians 1 .18. We proclaim Him. Colossians 1 .28. Pray that we may proclaim the mystery of Christ.

02:30

Colossians 4 .3. When the apostles preached, they proclaimed what? The ethics of Jesus?

02:37

The ethics of the old law? They were preaching the person and work and finality of who

02:43

Christ is for us. I think there's something to be said that when the New Testament speaks of preaching specifically, which

02:49

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

03:00

Christ as Messiah, preaching the work of Christ. The way Paul begins the letter to the

03:05

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.

03:13

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

03:23

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

03:31

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?

03:39

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.

03:45

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

03:54

Old Testament from the apostles. 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

04:03

Bible down in this way. If you're in modern -day context and someone walks up to you and says, for some reason

04:08

Jesus is super significant in the world, in world history, I don't want to learn more about this guy.

04:16

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.

04:23

And then when you get to this thing called the gospels, it's the manifestation of Jesus. He arrived, he's here.

04:29

And then when you get to the book of Acts, it's the proclamation of how that person spread around the world.

04:35

And then when you get to the epistles, it's the explanation of the significance of who he is in light of all of that.

04:41

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

04:51

And so if you're preaching in the book and you're not concluding about Jesus, first of all, I don't think you preached a sermon, which we're going to get to in a second.