Christ-Centered Preaching

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May 6, 2020

"Christ-centered preaching" has been a popular topic for a number of years. But what is it? What does it mean to preach Christ from all of Scripture? If we preach this way, are we just saying the same thing every Sunday? The guys consider all of this--and more--in today's episode.

00:01: Hi, this is John, and today on Theocast, we are discussing Christ -centered preaching. What is it and what it is not, and how you have to have an appropriate understanding of the entire
00:12: Bible before you ever want to try and attempt to preach Christ from all of Scripture, and how we can easily slip into preaching moralism while we're trying to preach
00:24: Christ from the text. In our members podcast, we have a fun conversation around how can you preach
00:31: Christ and yet sound angry at the same time. We hope you enjoy the conversation. Hey guys, just as a quick reminder, if you'd like to join
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01:17: Welcome to Theocast, encouraging weary pilgrims to rest in Christ, conversations about the
01:22: Christian life from a Reformed perspective. Our hosts today are Justin Perdue, pastor of Covenant Baptist Church in Asheville, North Carolina, Jimmy Buehler, pastor of Christ Community Church in Willmar, Minnesota, and I'm John Moffitt, pastor of Grace Reformed Church in Spring Hill, Tennessee.
01:40: It is good to be on the podcast with you gentlemen today. Jimmy Buehler, how are you, my friend? You have the update this week.
01:47: We're doing well. Good to see you both. Yesterday, here in Minnesota, we had our first day that hit 70.
01:56: That is a big day. Right now, even with all of the
02:04: COVID -19 shelter in place, things like that, people are getting stir crazy, so people are going outside regardless, but yesterday, people were out in full force.
02:18: We're not sure where we'll be when this podcast comes out, but we are still under the shelter in place, work from home, school from home, all of those things.
02:27: It's kind of an interesting time, and I know you guys would say this as well. It's an interesting time to be a pastor because I personally feel like I walk this fine line of, do
02:39: I overwhelm my people by trying to reach out too much, or do I underwhelm them? So it's pretty interesting, to say the least.
02:48: I'm sure you guys feel the same in a lot of ways. Oh yeah, for sure. I got a text from you yesterday saying that you were going to give a gift to all of your church members.
02:56: I looked at Judith and I said, well, there's one benefit of having a small church right there. Yeah, right. Yeah, you can do that.
03:03: Pretty easy. Pretty easy. Yeah, it's really strange times as a pastor.
03:10: We're all in uncharted waters. I just feel mega inefficient. I feel like I work a ton of hours and don't get a lot of obvious stuff done.
03:20: That's how it feels. Yeah, it's a weird time for sure. Well, it just feels like there's a lot of contemplation on decision making.
03:28: So you've got loan decision making, live stream decision making, financial, and you just feel like you're just researching constantly.
03:35: Then you never feel secure about anything because it's not a theological decision. It's not even an ethical decision.
03:42: Is this going to be even helpful or is this a waste of time? It's strategic and wisdom calls and all that. Yeah, it's a weird, unusual kind of exhausting.
03:55: Anyways, for any pastors that are out there, we had one reach out to us last night that heard this on the podcast, but if there's any pastors out there that are just kind of drowning, we've got a group of men that would be more than happy to encourage you on Facebook if you're there.
04:08: We do a Zoom call once in a while to reach out and send us a message. So JP, why don't you bring us in, man?
04:14: What are we talking about today? I just mentioned being exhausted. I think we're going to be talking about something today that can exhaust people in the church if not handled appropriately.
04:27: We're going to be talking today about Christ -centered preaching. We get a lot of questions and a lot of comments here at Theocast about the gospel itself.
04:36: We did a podcast a few weeks ago called Preaching About the Gospel, where we made the observation that many guys, many preachers will get up at conferences or even in their own pulpits and be very fired up about preaching the gospel, but then really don't preach
04:52: Christ and don't hold Christ out to people. Today we're doing something that's different.
04:58: It's related, but it's different. There's a lot of language, not only about the gospel in the church today, but there's a lot of language and a lot of writing and a lot of speaking done on Christ -centered preaching.
05:11: We want to try to bring some clarity, some light to this conversation and talk about what
05:18: Christ -centered preaching is, talk about what Christ -centered preaching is not. We hope that this conversation not only is clarifying for some, but we hope it's really encouraging and helps people diagnose and assess the preaching that maybe they're sitting under or the preaching that they're listening to on their podcast feeds or whatever it may be.
05:39: I know it's our conviction that many guys who will wax eloquent about Christ -centered preaching may not be doing it.
05:48: Then I know guys in our camp, Theocaste being a confessional, reformed place where we aim to preach the law and the gospel and all those kinds of things, sometimes the representation of us is a little bit reductionistic in terms of how we go about trying to preach
06:09: Jesus. I think we want to shed some clarity on that too. We're going to talk about a number of things today.
06:14: We're going to try to define some terms for people and hope this is encouraging and helpful to folks.
06:20: Yeah, this is a hermeneutic when we talk about when you get up and preach a sermon, you open up your
06:27: Bible, what are you trying to accomplish? What are you leading people to? The phrase expository preaching is often thrown around and we have some very dominant voices in the world for the last 50 years who have defined expository preaching.
06:45: The word expository is just a fancy word for explain. That's what it means. It means to explain or exposit the text.
06:52: Their question is, there's a debate on what is explaining the text.
06:58: When I was in seminary, I was taught to look at the immediate context. Let's say you're preaching 1
07:04: John 1 1 -5, that's what you're preaching, five verses.
07:12: Then you have to look at your immediate context. Then you look at the broader context of the book and then you look at the broader context of the
07:18: New Testament. That's about as far as you would get. You really wouldn't go any farther than that. What we're saying is that the
07:25: Bible in itself is an entire context. It's not just one book or one period of Christianity, but there's an entire section of scripture.
07:36: As an example, when you grab Lord of the Rings and you read a particular book out of the saga, you understand there's a whole world that functions there.
07:48: When you understand the story, you have to understand everything that Tolkien is saying from beginning to end within this world he's created.
07:56: That goes for the same as when it comes to preaching the context of a text.
08:02: When someone says they preach Christ -centered, mentioning Christ or talking about Christ or giving facts about Christ is not necessarily
08:10: Christ -centered preaching. When we say we are preaching Christ from a Reformed perspective, the most important part that has changed this and brought clarity for me is when we talk about the context of a passage.
08:23: It is the redemptive historic understanding of scripture. You have to back out and ask, what is the context of the
08:31: Bible? What is the Bible about? If you can answer that question, you'll be able to understand and appropriately preach
08:38: Christ -centered preaching. For a little minute, guys, maybe we should take a couple seconds here and talk about when we say redemptive historic, what do we mean?
08:47: Redemption, meaning that the Bible is about the redemption of creation, really, from the beginning of the fall to Revelation.
08:56: God is not only redeeming sinners, but he was redeeming all things. It's the restoration of all things. Historic, meaning that when we interpret scripture, we do it with a lens from beginning to end, from Genesis to Revelation, understanding that the purpose of the
09:10: Bible is redemption and it unfolds through history. We follow it in a historic fashion.
09:17: What are your guys' thoughts on that? Jimmy Buehler No, I think that's really helpful, John. One of the things that's important to keep in mind is whenever we're walking through a—and certainly, we want to be careful and very affirming of those who do try to seek to preach the
09:35: Bible in its context. Don't hear us say that that is a bad thing. It certainly is a good thing when you are reading through a rather difficult letter like 1
09:46: Corinthians, or even 2 Corinthians for that matter, to try to understand the original context in which it was written.
09:55: But what we are saying is, while it is great to understand cultural context, and that brings new meaning and new light, it's even great to understand linguistic context, and that brings new meaning and new light.
10:09: Ultimately, what we are pointing to is the great end of understanding how this particular passage or this particular book or this particular even topic within Scripture fits within the greater drama of redemption.
10:25: Meaning, it's not that we're turning over every rock and we're trying to find silly allusions to the gospel, so to speak, but rather we are placing the book within the greater context of how the gospel has been unfolded throughout history.
10:47: Justin Perdue The way that I'll frame it in our church often, and I think our people are almost catechized with this at this point,
10:54: I'll say the Bible is about God's plan of redemption accomplished through Christ. We preach and we understand every passage of Scripture in light of that main point.
11:07: One way this could be illustrated is, imagine that you were reading a book about,
11:14: I don't know, take Vince Lombardi's Green Bay Packers or something back in the day to make a sports reference, and we're reading about this great dynasty and all the championships they won and everything else.
11:27: That's the main point of the book you're reading is about the Green Bay Packers dynasty and maybe Vince Lombardi as a coach and all this stuff.
11:33: Then within that book that you're reading, there might be an anecdote about how a player was meticulous in putting on his uniform or something.
11:44: What often happens is we take hold of that one anecdote and we make a big deal about the particularities of how this man put on his uniform, and we divorce it completely from the context of what the whole thing's about, meaning the dynasty of the
12:02: Green Bay Packers and their legendary coach Vince Lombardi. I think it's an illustration that I'm trying to make of what we do with Scripture a lot of times.
12:11: It will kind of zero in on an anecdote or a particular passage, a story that we see in Scripture, and we divorce it completely from the context.
12:19: It's just like you would look at that person who read that book about the Green Bay Packers dynasty and then was geeked up about how a guy put his pants on.
12:29: You're thinking, did you not understand what the book was about?
12:37: We would never do that or a book about World War II, and then there's some illustration about a soldier putting his uniform on.
12:45: We would say, well, no, the book is about World War II, and we need to understand that everything that we're going to talk about with respect to this book needs to be understood in light of World War II.
12:54: That's all we're saying about the Bible, is that whenever we go to a passage, we want to understand that passage in light of the main point of Scripture, which is
13:02: God's plan of redemption accomplished through Christ. Jimmy, you sort of alluded to this already.
13:08: We're not trying to make silly connections. We're not trying to read Jesus into every verse of Scripture, because I think sometimes that's what people misunderstand us to mean when we talk about Christ -centered preaching.
13:20: It's like we're trying to find Jesus on every page like the Bible is some sort of Where's Waldo book or something.
13:27: That's not at all what we mean. Let me just frame it this way, guys, and I'll throw it back over to you.
13:34: The way that I approach sermon preparation every week, I'm asking a question that I think every preacher should ask.
13:49: The question that I'm not asking, first of all, is where is Jesus in this text?
13:55: I'm not asking that question. That's the wrong way to approach it, in my opinion. Where is
14:00: Jesus in this text is the wrong question. The right question is, where does this text stand in relation to Christ?
14:06: And so, when we go to the text, where does this text stand in relation to Christ is the first and most important question that I ask every week when
14:16: I get ready to prepare a sermon. That is what we mean by preaching from a redemptive historical perspective with Christ as the center and Christ as the focus.
14:27: That's right. Well, when you think about the purpose of the Bible, is the purpose of the Bible to get the world to act better?
14:35: Is the purpose of the Bible to create morality within humanity around the world? Then a redemptive historic understanding of Scripture would be a wrong perspective to have.
14:46: But if you understand that in Genesis, God sets up the entire story.
14:51: Genesis 1 -1, God creates the world. Genesis 3, the world crashes. And from that moment on, even from John 1, we learn
14:58: Jesus is in creation. He's the one who created. So, it starts with Jesus in creation.
15:04: Jesus is then promised in Genesis 3 -15 to Adam and Eve. And from that moment on, it is, how does this promise from God to restore creation to Adam and Eve's original garden, how is it going to happen?
15:20: And everything from that moment forward is God proving when he made this promise, he can fulfill it.
15:27: No matter how many times Israel's covenant with God fails, and how many times people try and stop.
15:33: I mean, the promise got all the way down to one person at one point. The promised seed, what got down to one human being, if that one human being died and did not procreate, that would have been it.
15:45: Promised over, God would have been a liar. And so, you have this story that is unbelievable, highs and lows, beauty, and just horrific, disgusting, what humanity does.
15:57: And then, every single one of those stories is the fulfillment. This is why we would say at Theocast, we're all confessional.
16:06: And because we're confessional, we understand that scripture is redemptive, historic, and it is a story of the fulfillment of a covenant, right?
16:13: The covenant of grace fulfilled as a covenant of works in the garden with Adam and Eve. They failed the covenant of works.
16:20: God gives us a covenant of grace, promising that he will save us. Jesus comes and fulfills the original covenant of works with Adam that's been further explained.
16:30: So, every sermon is not disconnected from that. The moment you emphasize something other than Christ and the work of Christ, you actually are emphasizing a subset story, like Justin just said, something that doesn't matter.
16:45: Because if the Bible began in Genesis with Jesus, and you know what the book of Revelation is all about,
16:51: Jesus coming back to restore all things, beginning to end, and the filler in between is this epic of proving to us
17:00: God's faithful. When you hear a sermon, and that sermon is somehow emphasizing a soldier's uniform as a great illustration, you should walk away a little disappointed.
17:12: I'm not sure why we're talking about that when the hero of the story, the point of the story is
17:18: Jesus. I can hear the alarm bells going off in people's minds and hearts right now as they listen to us.
17:28: And JP, I'm going to play devil's advocate with something that you said. The question that you ask before you prepare any sermon is, where does this text stand in relation to Christ?
17:39: And so, I can hear people as they are processing that, and as the wheels turn and the gears turn, there can be almost this idea that maybe what they're asking is something like, well, doesn't that kind of undermine the text immediately?
17:59: That as you look at the text, you have this presupposition approach of, well,
18:06: I'm just going to find where this text relates to Christ, and even if the text doesn't mention
18:12: Jesus, I'm going to work as hard as I can to get there. And so, specifically,
18:18: I've talked about this before, but I'm preaching through First Corinthians, and man, when you are in the middle of First Corinthians, it's a difficult journey, to say the least.
18:30: You are talking about church discipline, you are talking about sexual immorality, you're talking about lawsuits between believers.
18:37: And so, as you approach these really practical topics, maybe I'll throw this back to you guys. As you approach these really practical
18:44: Christian life, Christian living topics within, let's take a passage, for example,
18:54: First Corinthians 5 -7, where within that frame, Paul talks about, don't sue believers, settle matters with one another in love.
19:05: How do you take a passage like that and still preach it in relation to Christ? What would you guys say?
19:20: And we, the hosts, put this together to explain the difference between emphasizing one's faith in Christ versus emphasizing one's faithfulness to Christ, and how one leads to rest and how the other often to a lack of assurance.
19:35: And you can get this at theocast .org slash primer. And if you've been encouraged by what you've been hearing at Theocast, we'd ask you to help partner with us.
19:43: You can do that by joining our Total Access membership, that's our monthly membership that gives you access to all of our material that we've produced over the last four years, or simply by donating to our ministry.
19:55: You can do that by going to our website, theocast .org. We hope that you enjoy the rest of the conversation.
20:03: So, when I said what I did about where does this text stand in relation to Christ, what
20:08: I mean, I just want to further clarify what I mean, I am not, just to reiterate, trying to find
20:15: Christ in every single passage, but I am understanding everything that is written in Holy Scripture in light of Christ and His work and His sufficiency and what
20:25: He has done in the place of His people. It's sort of like that's the North Star, right?
20:31: That's what's orienting the compass. That's what's giving me my bearings as I look at Scripture.
20:37: And so then underneath the sufficiency of Christ and His work and His redemptive work for us and the fact that He has accomplished our salvation, there are any number of things that we can talk about.
20:48: So, I don't know how to answer your question, Jimmy, without going into something that we talk about pretty regularly here on Theocast, being the uses of the law.
20:57: And so, I know a charge. Let me just go ahead and say this. I'm going to anticipate another objection that's raised.
21:04: People will say that if you go about Christ -centered preaching the way that we are talking about the way that we are encouraging people to do, then what you're going to end up doing is preaching basically the same sermon every
21:16: Sunday. You're basically going to end up being a broken record saying something like, okay, well, here is what
21:26: God requires. None of us have done it adequately. Certainly, we've not done it perfectly.
21:32: We all stand condemned. But take heart because Christ has done it for you and trust
21:38: Him. And to say that that is the only thing that we would ever preach is very reductionistic, and I think it's an unfair caricature of the kind of preaching that the three of us aim to do in our own respective pulpits for sure.
21:53: Because we also will uphold the three uses of the law, not just the first use. The first use being to show us our sin and drive us to Christ.
22:02: We do preach that every Sunday. Even to the redeemed, we make it clear. We remind ourselves over and over and over again that all of us have failed to meet
22:11: God's law and are therefore in desperate need of Christ. But then we can also talk about what God prescribes in His word in terms of a way of living.
22:20: And so, Jimmy, your question specifically about 1 Corinthians 5 through 7, or there could be any number of other passages that we could refer to, there's all kinds of stuff.
22:30: There's all kinds of imperatives and exhortations and the like that we do preach to people underneath Christ and the gospel and the banner of all that.
22:40: We say, now, here's how we live, because there's the second and third use of the law where doing these things is going to be good for your life.
22:47: Avoiding these things is also going to be good for your life. And we strive in Christ Jesus to conform our lives to the word of God, because it's good for us, it's good for our neighbor, and it honors the
22:59: Lord. We can say all of those things, but the difference, I think, for us and many people that will want to preach imperatives as well is we strive to not preach those imperatives in a threatening way to the saints, because in Christ they're no longer condemnatory or threatening.
23:15: I could happily preach about not suing each other and talk at a common sense level about why that's not good, and we can do that underneath the banner of Christ and the gospel.
23:27: But the whole tone and tenor of the sermon, I would contend, is very different if you're preaching in light of Christ.
23:35: Yeah, that's right. I think to answer Jimmy's question and to maybe connect everything that Justin just said to law gospel as well, if the
23:45: Bible is a story of redemption and unfolds through history, what is
23:51: God redeeming people from? Well, it's a fence against the law. The original law given to Adam was, do not eat of the tree, right?
23:59: That's the original one. Then Adam falls, and in order for men to see who they are, because now it's part of their nature,
24:07: Adam and Eve were the only ones who went from pure nature to sinful nature and experienced both.
24:13: We now are born, and so the new law, the Mosaic law, was given so that we could see our need.
24:21: All of scripture is the unfolding of the law, you see your need, and then the good news of the gospel.
24:29: Gospel is, can't be done, Christ did it for you, belief. That's gospel, right?
24:35: When you read scripture, you have to hold those two very tightly together.
24:42: I'm sorry, far apart, because if you don't, you mix them together. You start mixing the story and the purpose of the story.
24:49: To go to your question about 1 Corinthians and suing each other, in there you have,
24:59: Paul begins with the gospel. Their foundation and their security in Christ is always based upon faith.
25:06: This is why he even says, look, I don't want to preach nothing among you except for Christ and him crucified. That's the foundation of their faith.
25:13: Yet, we also understand that the human body is still underneath the curse.
25:21: The spirit lives within us, but the body is still broken. Paul is helping believers who have broken bodies learn how to function underneath the spirit.
25:31: He's saying, listen, you have to live in grace and mercy, and these are ways, and unfortunately, you guys are messing this up.
25:39: So, if you preach that section of 1 Corinthians, which is don't sue each other, and you don't end that series with hope of grace and gospel, you actually only give people law and no hope.
25:55: I just don't see how, if you are a preacher of the Bible, that you can disconnect and only preach one section of it, disconnected from the rest.
26:04: If Christ is the point, and Christ is the conclusion, and he's the beginning and the end, and nothing else matters except for your eternity with God, then any instructions that you provide and you disconnect from hope in Christ, then
26:19: I think you've gone from preaching to explaining some historic text to somebody.
26:28: There's a difference between explaining historic text and preaching. Yeah. One of the things that I was going to say, as we think about preaching
26:35: Christ and preaching Christ from all of scripture, what's important to remember is that some of the things that we're saying, it's not that necessarily the content looks different, but I think one of the things that is very different when you are truly preaching
26:50: Christ is the tone. It's the tone and tenor of the pulpit.
26:57: In that, and here's what I mean, there is a difference. Just to use the example that we've been playing with for the past couple moments, there is a difference between saying, real
27:08: Christians don't sue one another, so get your act together and cut it out. There's a difference between saying that, which certainly, that is on some level true.
27:19: Don't sue your fellow believer, as we see laid out in 1 Corinthians. There's a difference between saying that and then saying this.
27:27: Hey guys, we have been given everything in our good
27:32: Lord and Shepherd, King Jesus. As we think about living life together, there are certainly going to be times of conflict and hardship and difficulty with one another, but we have been given everything in the gospel, the forgiveness of sins, life everlasting.
27:49: As we approach one another as fellow pilgrims living this life, let us keep that in mind.
27:56: There's just such a difference in tone as we think about preaching Christ, that it's not necessarily that we shirk the imperatives of what we see, particularly in the epistles in the
28:09: New Testament, but rather, when we see these things, we understand them within its greater context.
28:14: We understand it within its greater place. Michael Horton has given, I think, a wonderful illustration that if you think of the
28:22: Christian life, the law is kind of like a boat with a giant sail.
28:32: If you get in that boat, you know how it works. You know what it does. It keeps you afloat.
28:38: But here's the thing, with no wind, that boat ain't going nowhere. He talks about how the gospel is like the wind in our sails, that the gospel moves the boat.
28:48: I just think that's a wonderful illustration. I've even shared that with our church, actually, in preaching on conflict management within our church in 1
28:59: Corinthians. I think that's just so important to keep in mind that when we preach Christ, the content may look the same as when people are just simply explaining the text, as John has talked about.
29:10: But I think the major difference is the tone and the tenor of the pulpit. Justin Perdue Well, I think even in preaching,
29:19: I know we're hanging out in 1 Corinthians right now, and it's fine. I think even in preaching a passage like 1
29:24: Corinthians 6, you're preaching it in light of 1 Corinthians 1 and 2, where Paul begins with Christ and him crucified and the message of the cross and all these things.
29:36: Even where he says in 1 Corinthians 1 .30 that Christ has become to us wisdom from God and righteousness and sanctification and redemption.
29:43: It's quite clear that Christ is sufficient in what he has done for the Corinthian Christians and for all of us thereby.
29:52: Then even in 1 Corinthians 6, Paul, immediately after talking about the lawsuit piece, he talks about how when you sue your brothers and sisters in the church, you are essentially defrauding one another.
30:05: Then he goes on immediately to say, do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? He talks about all these various kinds of sins, and it's such were you.
30:15: But you've been washed, and you've been sanctified. You've been cleansed. You've been redeemed by Christ Jesus.
30:21: He continually goes back to the gospel and what Christ has done.
30:28: Even in exposing people's sin, he goes back to the gospel and will drive people constantly outside of themselves to Christ, reminding them of their need for him.
30:40: I do agree with your statement, Jimmy, that a lot of times the content will look similar, and the tone and tenor is completely different.
30:48: I do think at times we all agree that the content will be presented differently, too, because I know consciously for us, we're preaching 1
30:56: Corinthians 6 through the lens of 1 Corinthians 1 and 2, and we're preaching it through the lens of that whole redemptive historical framework of the
31:04: Bible. We're always going to be holding Christ out and extolling the mercy and power and grace of Christ to people, even as we talk about, hey guys, here's how the redeemed live with one another.
31:18: We don't sue each other. It doesn't do good things for us.
31:23: It's bad for our neighbor. It makes the faith look ridiculous, and we look just like the world, whatever it may be.
31:30: We can say those things, and then there is a tone and a tenor. I'll even use the word tincture.
31:37: It's an old word where everything that we preach and say is kind of tinted and flavored with the grace and mercy of God in Christ.
31:46: Yeah, I think there's a member in my church, and I'm stealing this from him, and I think he says it really well.
31:54: If you were to summarize the Bible in one verse, he says it's Psalm 3, 8, salvation belongs to the
31:59: Lord, full stop. That is kind of the lens through which we at Christ Community Church, we preach that salvation belongs to the
32:07: Lord, that even when we preach these imperatives, that they in no way change the indicatives of what
32:12: God has done for us in Jesus. What I mean by that is even when we preach things to do, ways to live, dare
32:21: I even say ways to behave properly as a Christian, they are done with the greater context of salvation belongs to the
32:29: Lord, that these in no way merit any sort of favor. These in no way merit any sort of righteousness before God, because all of that has been given to you in Christ and Christ alone.
32:39: Now, in light of that, in light of the wind and those sails, let us love and serve one another.
32:45: Let us pursue one another with grace. Let us live a life towards holiness, not because it gives us anything in terms of merit and righteousness or standing, but rather because man, those things have been freely given to us in the gospel.
33:01: What God has demanded of us in the law, he's given us freely in Christ. Therefore, in light of this, this is how we go on living the
33:10: Pilgrim Christian life. I've made this observation in the past, but to add to Jimmy, I would say if you look at Scripture, when we say redemptive historic, the majority of the
33:23: Bible, and you can try and pick the percentage on this, but the majority of the Bible is narrative. It's not instruction.
33:30: So, you have story of what God's doing and how men cannot live up to the expectation or the commands of God.
33:40: That is, I would say, it would be fair to say that 5 % of the
33:45: Bible is instruction that applies to the believer. You have the law that's reinstituted in the 30 years of the law in the
33:52: New Testament, not the ceremonial law, but the moral law. And then you have even in the epistles.
33:57: So, if you read Ephesians, you don't get the instruction still in chapter four. Same thing with Colossians, same thing with 1
34:03: Corinthians. What begins is either gospel or narrative. So, you have a very small section of Scripture that is instruction.
34:12: Yet, when it comes down to Christ -centered preaching, it seems like we preach instruction. That's what we preach.
34:19: When the Bible, if you're just going to take it at face value based upon the weight of what is used there, it is a story to prove to you that you should not trust yourself and that God is 100 % trustworthy, even though you may not fully understand.
34:37: I wrote an article recently called, Where is God in COVID -19? And in there, I say there's no way to solve the problem of evil.
34:45: We don't know why God chooses to save some and not all. We don't know all those things. But the one thing we do know is He's good.
34:51: He's proven that He's good, and He's never failed on His promise. That is the point of the Bible. Justin Perdue One thing that's helpful in this conversation is understanding that the
35:04: Bible is full of what we would call, theologically speaking, typology, where there are things that occur earlier on in the story of redemption that are shadows and pointers to things that are coming later that are ultimate.
35:20: And so we see a number of things transpire throughout redemptive history that are pointing us and driving us toward the
35:30: Christ, the Messiah, who is to come, who is going to accomplish all of the things that these shadows and pointers have been indicating.
35:39: And one way that we could even talk about this, my mind's going like a thousand miles an hour right now because I just heard your comment,
35:47: John, on the Bible being mostly narrative. Well, let me just do a little exercise in even redemptive historical,
35:54: Christ -centered thinking about a text, biblical theology, and then even thinking about types and anti -types, so the type and then the one that's coming that's ultimate.
36:06: So think about one of the most famous stories in the Scripture, and it's David and Goliath. There's no imperative given in that entire story.
36:13: It's a remarkable account. We read the story of David and Goliath, and the way that it's often presented is, here are the ways that you can do this, that, or the other and slay the giants in your life and all of that.
36:47: And the story is this, we have this great enemy of God's people, this giant, this conqueror, the head of the armies of the enemies of God and all this.
37:00: And we have this young shepherd boy who goes out to the front lines. He's only there because he's bringing his older brothers some food.
37:08: Nobody will go and fight the giant, the champion of the enemy. And he's like, well, shoot, man, this guy's defiling the armies of the living
37:16: God. I'll go fight him. And we have this insane account where literally
37:22: God's plan of redemption is hanging in the balance, like a young shepherd boy with some rocks.
37:29: And the rock is thrown, and it hits a giant guy in the head. And then the shepherd boy goes and cuts the head off of the champion of the enemy of God's people.
37:40: And we say, praise God, his plan endures and redemption can happen and everything else.
37:46: And we look at that account and we say, hey guys, here's some stuff that we can do.
37:52: Here's some stuff that we can go about doing and slaying giants in our lives rather than saying, man, there's one coming greater than David who will sit on the throne of David forever, who's going to cut the head off of the serpent named
38:06: Satan. And he's going to be our champion and our redeemer and our savior forever.
38:12: That's the point of that text. David's life is there because Christ is coming and Christ is the greater
38:21: David rather than us looking at it and saying, well, if we have faith like David, and if we go out there with our slings, and if we do this and that and the other, we'll slay the giants in our lives, the giants of anxiety and fear and whatever, and we'll have purpose.
38:35: It's crazy. Yeah, dare to be a David or dare to be a
38:40: Daniel, whatever it may be. I'm going to say something and I'll see what you guys think.
38:50: I think that it takes a lot more work to moralize
38:58: Scripture than to preach Christ from Scripture. That's my bold claim of the day.
39:04: I think it takes so much more work and energy to throw morals where they don't exist onto the framework of a redemptive historical understanding of the
39:18: Bible than it takes to actually preach Christ from the text. Case in point, you look at the
39:26: Psalms. The Psalms, in so many regards, are these difficult, hard words, as Chad Bird likes to say, hurled at the heavens, thrown at God saying, where are you?
39:43: What are you doing? It is so easy for us to look at the Psalms and moralize them and say, well, here's what we should be and here's what we should do.
39:53: In so many regards, particularly the Psalms of Lament, we just look at the Psalms of Lament and we say, it's okay for us to lament.
40:01: God's people have lamented throughout history. Even as we think about different things within the
40:10: Gospels, we will look at the miracles of Jesus or the works of Christ within the
40:16: Gospels and we try to moralize those. Literally, he's right there.
40:22: He's right there. All you have to do is just turn the light on and let people see how glorious Jesus is.
40:29: You don't have to do much. You don't even have to do much. He's shining, and instead, you want to find your place in somewhere else.
40:40: You want to find your place in some moral within the greater narrative, which to me is just so difficult.
40:48: I think it just takes a lot more work, but that's just me. Jimmy, I think that's a great observation.
40:53: I couldn't agree with you more. I've been both preachers. I've been a moral preacher,
40:59: I've been a legal preacher, and then now I preach Christ. Trying to come up with clever outlines that give people instructions was very hard, and it was hard not to sound like you were preaching the same thing every single week.
41:15: Topical ends up becoming easier because you can just pick whatever topic you want to cover. If you're preaching a text and you're trying to come up with instructions from the text in each one, it's very hard.
41:25: But if you are just going to lead people to rest in Christ and you're going to explain the text in its context, to me, it is the best kind of preaching.
41:33: It is wonderful because all you're doing is just revealing the glory of God in Christ to people each and every week.
41:40: But when it comes down to providing morals and it's not in the text, it is hard.
41:48: It is complicated. I will tell you what is hard for me, and thankfully my church has transitioned mostly out of this.
41:54: What's hard for me is that when I do preach this way, I get attacked because people say, but John, you're not giving me anything to do.
42:01: Then I get accused of being antinomian and not expository preaching. It's like, well,
42:06: John, you're not expository preaching because in their mind, expository preaching is read the text, now give me something to do.
42:14: I think to respond to the idea, is it more work to preach morals, to moralize the
42:20: Bible? I think my answer would be yes and no. I think that on the one hand, it is harder work homiletically, meaning how we actually go to preach and prepare a sermon.
42:33: I do think it's more work to moralize stuff and then fit it into a nice outline and make it hang and make it clever and everything else.
42:40: I think to moralize the Bible, though, is as natural as breathing for us, and I think it's also what we are taught in many church contexts too.
42:50: I think we tend to go to Scripture and immediately turn it into, okay, well, this is clearly about me and what
42:56: I need to be doing, rather than realizing that the whole point of Scripture is about Christ and what he has done for me, and now
43:02: I live in light of that. That's maybe how I would answer it, is it yes and it's no.
43:10: John, very quickly to pick up on what you were talking about, the way that we're charged with not being expository preachers because we're not giving people imperatives.
43:19: That's a really old song, I think, that's sung regularly and it's hurled against us, lobbed against us.
43:26: There's no moral impetus to your preaching. You're not giving people any kind of moral imperative ever.
43:33: My response to that initially is, well, why don't you come to some services and listen to me or listen to John or listen to Jimmy?
43:42: Why don't you get on our sermon audio podcast feeds? I think you'll understand pretty quickly that none of us are antinomian.
43:48: We're talking plenty about how we live together in the church. I'm not going to say it all again.
43:56: I go back to the fact that we use the law lawfully, 1 Timothy 1 .8. We uphold the law when it's used lawfully and we drive people to Christ unashamedly.
44:07: The first primary, most important main takeaway every Sunday from any sermon that we ever preach should be trust
44:16: Christ. If it's not, we're wrong. That will start there, but then after that, sure, there can be a number of other things that people are thinking about.
44:26: Yeah, I want to adjust how I'm doing that there because I want to love my neighbor better. Whatever it may be, we're all saying that stuff.
44:34: To act as though there is no moral imperative ever given when you preach in a
44:39: Christ -centered fashion, as we're describing, is just flat out not true. I think we could talk, and I think we maybe go in here, and I want
44:51: Jimmy to tee this up for us, about what people understand expository preaching to be and then why they would even make such an accusation like you just mentioned,
45:00: John. You're not preaching in an expository fashion because you're not telling me a bunch of stuff to do, and even your tone is confusing to me.
45:11: One of the things that I have noticed and I see frequently is that there is this strange desire that you want to be yelled at when you hear a sermon.
45:27: That there is this equating of feeling good and feeling spiritually filled if you also feel beat up at the end of a sermon.
45:37: If the preacher has injudiciously yelled at you for 40 minutes and you feel all sorts of beat up and all sorts of bad for how you're living or how your lack of Christian living you feel and you equate that to spirituality.
46:00: Maybe we take a couple of swings at this, but we really tee this up for the members. Maybe we should talk about some angry preaching.
46:10: I have been guilty. I'm grateful for the first church I ever served in.
46:16: They were beyond gracious. The only way to say it is hurling insults at God's people.
46:24: I lament at the way that I did that. The desire behind it, I think, is to wake up nominal
46:30: Christians. I have some thoughts on that, but maybe you guys take some parting shots and we hurl it over to the members.
46:40: Justin Perdue I'll give a parting shot really quickly. John, you said something earlier in the podcast, and I don't know that I ever commented on it.
46:46: You mentioned what the goal of preaching is. We were talking to each other before we hit record about this.
46:53: What do we understand the goal of preaching to be? My short answer to that question, and I take my inspiration somewhat from John Calvin in his commentary on 1
47:04: John 5 .13, where he basically says, paraphrase, that it's the duty of any godly minister to extol as much as possible the grace and power of Christ so that we, being satisfied in that, might not look anywhere else.
47:17: I think in those terms, every time I get in the pulpit, to use the language of Paul in 1
47:24: Corinthians 2, I seek to know nothing among you other than Christ and Him crucified. I want to herald and extol the mercy, the power, the grace, the sufficiency of Christ.
47:33: The prayer, of course, is that everybody who's hearing the sound of my voice would trust in Christ alone.
47:39: And so that, I think, and other people may frame it and they're in words, but I think that, if we're going to talk about Christ -centered preaching, that's the heart behind it.
47:49: That's the motivation, and that's the goal, is that everybody would trust and rest in Christ and know the peace that is ours in Him.
47:59: The goal, really, if you're a Reformed confessional, preaching is a means of grace, and so we understand that as we hear
48:06: God's word given to us, it should increase our faith. So the goal of preaching is to help people rest in Christ.
48:13: So if you were to ask me what the goal of preaching was before I got into seminary, basically, I was a puritanical preacher.
48:19: The goal was to whip people into shape, man, get them to stop being laxadaisical, get them to start reading their
48:25: Bibles and praying. That was the goal of preaching.
48:32: So we'll talk more about angry preaching and what is the purpose of preaching in the members' podcast.
48:40: Thank you for listening. We hope this is encouraging to you. If it has been encouraging, please reach out, let us know, leave us a voicemail.
48:46: You can find the number on our website, and we would be happy to hear from you, also to answer your questions.
48:53: Coming down the line, we probably have already announced it by now, but we have a new podcast coming your way called Ask Theocast. It's just another way for us to help answer quick questions that we get from you.
49:02: They're about two to three minutes long, and if you don't know what a membership is, it's our way of helping fund what we do.
49:09: It's how we print books. It's how we produce educational classes, and it's how we fund this podcast so more people can hear about the message of resting in Christ.
49:17: You can learn more about that on our website. For those of you who are members, buckle up. I'm telling you right now, Jimmy, he's about to unleash, so it's good to have you come join us over in the members' podcast.