Of all I would wish to say this is the sum; my brethren, PREACH CHRIST, always and evermore. He is the whole gospel. His person, offices, and work must be our great, all-comprehending theme. The world needs to be told of its Savior, and of the way to reach him . . . Blessed is the ministry of which CHRIST IS ALL . . . No Christ in your sermon, sir? Then go home, and never preach again until you have something worth preaching.
(HT: Darryl Dash)
A bit of advice for preachers, just my 2 cents, take it or leave it:
If you preach the gospel consistently and "thickly" for any sustained period of time, at some point someone will get tired "hearing the same old thing" and ask you to preach something else for a change: steps to this, tips for that, lessons on tithing or honoring our parents or what-have-you.
Your response to this objector should be to preach the gospel to them.
2 comments:
Jared,
You make a great point here. I do think that it is a good idea to help believers understand how to apply the Bible to their lives, but we have thousands of books available on every subject matter.
The only lesson for life that a preacher needs to preach is Christ. Lovely post. Thank you!
Glad to hear the blog tour is going well Jared.
The issue with many of those books Dan is that so many are gospel deficient (not all of course, but I'd say a vast majority from my observations of reading and looking over piles of them--don't mean to sound like a brainiac but I do like to read and review books).
The point isn't so much to not talk about money or sex or exercise (or name it)--but those things should be presented in light of the gospel and so often we just talk about them in a moralistic tone... these are to be tools, and life's struggles are wonderful occasions to preach the gospel and not get all caught up in the topics but to present Christ in the so doing. Now Jared may disagree but that's my not so humble opinion. Paul constantly preached the gospel, but that's not to say he didn't employ every day life and story into his efforts to share the good news. More than applying the bible to our lives we need to have the bible show us Christ, who, as the CHS quote so beautifully puts it, "is the whole gospel."
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