Today's Preaching

Extraction from Daily Preaching:
Today's Preaching Insight...

Preaching God's Story, asks: "What would it mean to let the gospel be your guide in preaching? We must come back to the question, what is the gospel? First and foremost, the gospel is God's action, God's story, God's saving initiative toward the world which he has created. It bears repeating: the gospel is God's story.
To preach the gospel, then, means sentences in which God is the subject of active verbs. Beginning with accounts in Genesis and moving through the book of Revelation, it's easy to make quite a list of all that God does: God speaks, creates, judges, calls, sends, saves, delivers, feeds, clothes, promises, loves, shows mercy and kindness, does justice, and so on. To preach the gospel is to proclaim the accounts of the Scriptures in light of the fact that their central character is God, and that the gospel is from God and about the God who is Father, Son, and Spirit.

On John 11, the raising of Lazarus. The story is the climactic "sign" in the Gospel of John testifying to Jesus' identity as the resurrection and the life. Jesus' sign of raising the dead bears witness to the glory of God, that is, to the power of God to give life to the dead through Jesus. The preacher told the story, leading up to the dramatic moment when Jesus calls out, "Lazarus, come forth!" This story is one that embodies the gospel in all its simplicity—the power of Jesus, the one sent by God, and his word to give life. But, apparently feeling it inadequate, the preacher added, "And now Lazarus had to make a decision." It is, of course, a ludicrous picture: a dead man deciding whether or not to obey the word of Jesus! But the turn of this sermon illustrates something pernicious in much modern preaching: it is so easy to make the most powerful of Gospel stories center on human action and not on God, to think that somehow our actions, our decisions, are the heart and center of the gospel story. To make that move is to sell out the gospel."