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December 1, 2023 - August 8, 2024
One of the clearest lessons we learn from church history is that strong biblical preaching is absolutely vital to the health and vitality of the church.
over the past half century (or longer) evangelicals have devoted vast quantities of energy and resources to the invention of novel church-growth strategies that tend to discount biblical preaching. Such schemes sometimes even deliberately avoid any reference to the Bible altogether—especially when unbelievers are present. They aim instead at attracting people through marketing campaigns, entertainments, social activities, and other similar techniques. Many of today’s evangelical church leaders have borrowed their management philosophies from the corporate world; they have taken their fashion
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John A. Broadus, one of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary’s founding faculty, famously remarked, “Preaching is characteristic of Christianity. No other religion has made the regular and frequent assembling of groups of people, to hear religious instruction and exhortation, an integral part of divine worship.”
First, contemporary preaching suffers from a loss of confidence in the power of the word.
Ultimately, preaching will cease to be Christian preaching if the preacher loses confidence in the authority of the Bible as the Word of God and in the power of the spoken word to communicate the saving and transforming message of the Bible. The preacher must stand up and speak with confidence, declaring the Word of God to a congregation that is bombarded with hundreds of thousands of words each week, many of them delivered with a sound track or moving images.
The audacious claim of Christian preaching is that the faithful declaration of the Word of God, spoken through the preacher’s voice, is even more powerful than anything music or image can deliver.
Second, contemporary preaching suffers from an infatuatio...
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The effort is no doubt well intended, driven by a missiological concern to reach persons whose primary form of “mental transport” has become visual. Thus, preachers use clips from films, dynamic graphics, and other eye-catching technologies to gain and hold the congregation’s attention. But the danger of this approach is seen in the fact that the visual quickly overcomes the verbal. Beyond this, the visual is often directed toward a very narrow slice of human experience, particularly focused on the affective and emotional aspects of our perception. Movies move us by the skillful manipulation
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As God made clear, even in the Ten Commandments, He has chosen to be heard and not seen. The use of visual technologies threatens to confuse this basic fact of biblical faith.
Third, contemporary preaching suffers from embarrassment before the biblical text.
Fourth, contemporary preaching suffers from an emptying of biblical content.
Are today’s preachers actually studying for the content of the passage? In far too many cases, it seems that the text becomes a point of departure for some message—again, no doubt well intended—which the pastor wishes to share with the congregation. Beyond this, the text of Scripture is often emptied—evacuated—of biblical content when, regardless of a passage’s textual form or context, the content is uniformly presented as a set of pithy “points” that come together in a staple outline form.
the content of the passage is to be applied to life—but application must be determined by exposition, not vice versa.
Another problem that leads to an evacuation of biblical content is a loss of the “big picture” of Scripture. Far too many preachers give inadequate attention to the canonical context of the passage to be preached and of its place in the overarching story of God’s purpose to glorify Himself through the redemption of sinners. Taken out of context, and without clear attention to biblical theology, preaching becomes a series of disconnected talks on disconnected texts.
Fifth, contemporary preaching suffers from a focus on felt needs.
The sacred desk has become an advice center, and the pew has become the therapist’s couch. Psychological and practical concerns have displaced theological exegesis, and the preacher directs his sermon to the congregation’s perceived needs rather than to their need for a Savior.
Sixth, contemporary preaching suffers from an absence of gospel.
in the end, preaching devoid of this content-preaching that evades the biblical text and biblical truth—falls short of anything we can rightly call Christian preaching.
When rightly conducted, theology is the conversation of the people of God seeking to understand the Lord whom we worship and to know how He wills to be worshiped.
Thus we should be reminded that the purpose of the theologian—and the preacher—is to serve the church so that the people of God worship Him more faithfully.
Tozer takes his argument further: It is now common practice in most evangelical churches to offer the people, especially the young people, a maximum of entertainment and a minimum of serious instruction. It is scarcely possible in most places to get anyone to attend meeting where the only attraction is God. One can only conclude that God’s professed children are bored with Him, for they must be wooed to meeting with a stick of striped candy in the form of religious movies, games and refreshments.
Any objection to the carryings-on of our present golden calf Christianity is met with the triumphant reply, “But we are winning them!” And winning them to what? To true discipleship? To cross-carrying? To self-denial? To separation from the world? To crucifixion of the flesh? To holy living? To nobility of character? To a despising of the world’s treasures? To hard self-discipline? To love for God? To total commital to Christ? Of course, the answer to all these questions is “no.”2 These words were written several decades ago, but Tozer certainly saw the future.
Scripture makes clear that worship is something we do, not just something we attend. It is not merely an issue for the pastor and other ministers, nor for the musicians and those who plan the service. Worship is an issue for the entire congregation, for worship is something we do together. It is our corporate and common responsibility to worship God as He desires.
As we turn to this Word, we see a pattern of acceptable worship, a pattern that is repeated throughout the fabric of Scripture from beginning to end. Scripture is, as the Reformers confessed, norma ormans non normata, “the norm of norms which cannot be normed.” That is what we mean when we say “sola scriptura”— that Scripture is the norm of our worship. There is nothing external to Scripture that can “norm” or correct it.
HOW AUTHENTIC WORSHIP BEGINS: A TRUE VISION OF THE LIVING GOD
Isaiah 6:1–8, we are given a picture of authentic worship, one that teaches us what God expects of His people when they worship Him. First of all, the prophet Isaiah experienced a theophany, a vision of the true and living God. And if we are to worship God as He would have us to worship, we also must see God as He is. Right worship begins with a vision of the one true and living God.
The holiness of God refers to His separateness from His creation. He is what we are not. We are finite; He is infinite. In other words, God is transcendent, and His holiness reveals the difference and the infinite contrast between His nature and ours.
I wonder if the vision of God held by so many who come to worship is anything like what the seraphim are telling us here. Do we worship with the understanding that God is holy and that “the whole earth is full of His glory"? I fear not.
Do those who come to our services of worship come face-to-face with the reality of God? Or do they go away with a vision of some lesser God, some dehydrated deity? Worship is the people of God gathering together to confess His worthiness, His “worth-ship.” How can we do that if we do not make clear who God is? Our very pattern of worship must testify to the character of God.
if you want to know what a people really believe about God, don’t spend time reading their theologians. Watch them worship. Listen to what they sing and to how they pray. Then you will know what they believe about this God whom they worship.
Just look at the decline of majesty and awe in evangelical hymnody. There we see a surrender of conviction and accommodation to the culture, which is really nothing less than a “dumbing down” of the contents of our songs. We have gone from “Holy, Holy, Holy” to “God the Swell Fellow.”
quote Tozer again: We have simplified until Christianity amounts to this: God is love; Jesus died for you; believe, accept, be jolly, have fun and tell others. And away we go—that is the Christianity of our day. I would not give a plug nickel for the whole business of it. Once in a while God has a poor bleeding sheep that manages to live on that kind of thing and we wonder how.
WHERE AUTHENTIC WORSHIP LEADS: CONFESSION OF SIN
If we do not come face-to-face with our sin as individuals and as a congregation, we have not seen God, and we have not worshiped Him.
What Isaiah experienced was true conviction and repentance, the contrite and broken heart of one who knows he or she has done wrong and has insulted the one true and living God. Yet I fear that so much of what we think is confession is not confession at all. It is merely a hasty half apology, not the kind of brokenness we see in Psalm 51 or Isaiah 6. We must be brought face-to-face with our sin.
WHERE AUTHENTIC WORSHIP LEADS: PROCLAMATION OF THE GOSPEL
True worship always proclaims the gospel, the good news of what God has done in Jesus Christ. It proclaims the work of Christ, and it centers in the cross.
WHAT AUTHENTIC WORSHIP REQUIRES: A RESPONSE
Worship calls for an ongoing response seen in the proclamation of the gospel in personal evangelism and in missions. If our worship is weakened, our missionary witness will be weakened as well. We will forget the God who has sent us, and we will neglect the content of the message of redemption with which He has sent us.
Music is one of God’s most precious gifts to His people, and it is a language by which we may worship God in spirit and in truth. The hymns of the faith convey rich confessional and theological content, and many modern choruses recover a sense of doxology formerly lost in many evangelical churches. But music is not the central act of Christian worship—nor is evangelism, nor even the ordinances. The heart of Christian worship is the authentic preaching of the Word of God.
There seems to be a sense that people will be more affected by the gospel if it is presented in a slickly produced multimedia production, or even if we dispense with preaching altogether in favor of a purely subjective and emotional worship “experience.” Yet what was it that brought the Israelites to their God-honoring response of “Amen, Amen!”? It was the exposition of the Word. Ezra did not stage an event or orchestrate a spectacle. He simply and carefully proclaimed the Word of God.
Michael Green pointedly put the problem like this: “This is the age of the sermonette, and sermonettes make Christianettes.”
Preaching did not emerge from the church’s experimentation with communication techniques. The church does not preach because preaching is thought to be a good idea or an effective technique. The sermon has not earned its place in Christian worship by proving its utility in comparison with other means of communication or aspects of worship. Rather, we preach because we have been commanded to preach.
True preaching begins with this confession: We preach because God has spoken.
the Old Testament alone, the phrases “the Lord said,” “the Lord spoke,” and “the word of the Lord came” appear at least 3,808 times. This confession brings the preacher face-to-face with Scripture as divine revelation, for the authority of Scripture is none other than the authority of God Himself.
preaching is not an act of arrogance at all but rather of humility. True preaching is never an exhibition of the brilliance or intellect of the preacher but an exposition of the wisdom and power of God.
it is simply a matter of authority. Either the preacher himself or the text will determine what is said.
We speak because we cannot be silent. We speak because God has spoken.
All Christian preaching is unabashedly christological. Christian preaching points to the incarnation of God in Christ as the stack pole of truth and the core of Christian confession.
When Paul preached, his message was centered on the cross as the definitive criterion of preaching. He understood that the cross is simultaneously the most divisive and the most unifying event in human history.
