Why Johnny Can't Preach: The Media Have Shaped the Messengers by Gordon T. David

Author:Gordon, T. David [Gordon, T. David]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9781596381162
Publisher: P&R Publishing
Published: 2009-02-12T16:00:00+00:00

4

A Few Thoughts about Content

EARLY ON, I DETERMINED that this book would be an assessment of Christian preaching in the generic sense. To that end, I have made a studied effort to avoid and evade the “hot-button” issues in preaching today. At the risk of running afoul of one or two of those issues, I wish to address the matter of the content of preaching, because in addition to the cultural matters that have concerned me throughout, I also believe that preaching today fails almost entirely in its content. Even when one can discern a unified point in a sermon, it is sometimes a point hardly worth making, and certainly not worth making in a Christian pulpit during a service of worship. So I wish to address briefly what I believe the content of preaching should be, and what its common alternatives are.

From about twenty-five years of wrestling with the question, I have come to concur with those who believe that the content of Christian preaching should be the person, character, and work of Christ. What we declare, with Paul, is not ourselves, but Christ crucified. Our message, like Paul’s, is “the message of the cross” (1 Cor. 1:18). The substance of our proclamation is the soteric fitness of the person and character of Christ, and the soteric competence of his work. With the old Puritan John Flavel, we wish to open up that “Fountain of Life” which consists of Christ’s “Essential [person of Christ] and Mediatorial [work of Christ] Glory.”[36] What is offered to the congregation, in rightly ordered Christian worship, is nothing less than Christ himself.[37]

Now, since Christ rescues us from both the guilt and the power of sin, one aspect of his work is the work of sanctification, whereby he renews us into the image of God and conforms us to his own likeness. So Christian proclamation properly includes the shaping of a Christian moral vision, and preaching Christ crucified does not exclude, but intentionally includes, such a vision. But it is never appropriate, in my estimation, for one word of moral counsel ever to proceed from a Christian pulpit that is not clearly, in its context, redemptive. That is, even when the faithful exposition of particular texts requires some explanation of aspects of our behavior, it is always to be done in a manner that the hearer perceives such commended behavior to be itself a matter of being rescued from the power of sin through the grace of Christ. When properly done, the hearer longs to be rescued from that depravity from which no sinner can rescue himself; and the hearer rejoices to know that a kind and gracious God is both willing and able to begin that rescue, which will be completed in glorification.

This focus on the person and work of Christ includes the character of Christ. Ordinarily, when people discuss “the person of Christ,” they refer to such matters as his human and divine natures, his sinlessness, and so on. Without excluding such matters,

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