“Here’s your passage. Go ahead and prepare a sermon.”
The professor assigned passages like 1 Samuel 17 (David and Goliath), and Matthew 14:22–23 (Jesus and Peter walking on water). He set a trap for us, and many of us fell into it, preaching messages about slaying the giants of our lives and stepping out of the boat.
We’d fallen into the human-centred trap: making the text primarily about us.
“God reveals himself in the Scriptures,” writes Haddon Robinson. “The Bible, therefore, isn’t a textbook about ethics or a manual on how to solve problems. The Bible is a book about God. When you study a biblical text, therefore, you should always ask, ‘What is the vision of God in this passage?’”
A Substitute Product
Preachers need a God-centred focus in preaching. Through the regular preaching of God’s Word, we must model what it looks like to approach Scripture not as a how-to manual or a book of tips, but as a revelation of God himself.
“A huge religious marketplace has been set up in North America to meet the needs and fantasies of people like us,” warned Eugene Peterson. “There are conferences and gatherings custom-designed to give us the lift we need. Books and video seminars promise to let us in to the Christian ‘secret’ of whatever we feel is lacking in our life: financial security, well-behaved children, weight-loss, exotic sex, travel to holy sites, exciting worship, celebrity teachers. The people who promote these goods and services all smile a lot and are good looking. They are obviously not bored.”
If we’re not careful, we’ll make our churches about meeting market needs and we’ll have missed the entire point of ministry, and of life itself: the glory of God.
If we’re not careful, we’ll make our churches about meeting market needs and we’ll have missed the entire point of ministry, and of life itself: the glory of God.
“Without realizing it, we have during the past century bartered that gospel for a substitute product which, though it looks similar in enough points of detail, is as a whole a decidedly different thing,” says J.I. Packer. In many of our churches, this move has happened slowly, and few of us have noticed.
But the substitute product is defective. It doesn’t satisfy our deepest needs, and it doesn’t bring glory to God.
A Vision of God
We need to know God: to know about him, but more. We actually need to know him.
I’m amazed by how often God reveals himself in the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Bible. God wants Israel, Egypt, and the nations to know that he is the LORD (Exodus 6:7; 7:5, etc.).
James Hamilton argues that the centre of Scripture is the glory of God: “the weight of the majestic goodness of who God is, and the resulting name, or reputation, that he gains from his revelation of himself as Creator, Sustainer, Judge, and Redeemer, perfect in justice and mercy, loving-kindness and truth.” God reveals his glory in Scripture through both his judging and his saving work.
I have nothing against practical tips. I’ve benefited from them myself. But practical tips are not our greatest need. Our greatest need is a vision of the glory of God, so we understand who he is, what he requires, and what he has done to save us. As J.I. Packer put it, “Knowing God is crucially important for the living of our lives … Disregard the study of God, and you sentenced yourself to stumble and blunder through life blindfolded, as it were, with no sense of direction and no understanding of what surrounds you. This way you can waste your life and lose your soul.”
Our churches and our pulpits can’t be about ourselves and our needs. They must be about a greater message: about who God is, what he requires, and what he has done. It’s the message the world is dying to hear.
