Preaching Christ Alone (pt. 1)

I recently stumbled across the website for Modern Reformation Magazine. It bills itself as "a bi-monthly magazine dealing with theology, apologetics and cultural issues." Michael Horton is the Editor-in-Chief, and is also a professor at Westminster Seminary in California.

In an article titled Preaching Christ Alone Horton identifies what he sees as four chief problems with much of contemporary preaching. Since this is a subject I am thinking about right now, I'm going to interact with these in a four-post series. Michael identifies the first trap that sermons often fall into as Moralism:

Whenever the story of David and Goliath is used to motivate you to think about the "Goliaths" in your life and the "Seven Stones of Victory" used to defeat them, you have been the victim of moralistic preaching. The same is true whenever the primary intention of the sermon is to give you a Bible hero to emulate or a villain to teach a lesson, like "crime doesn't pay," or, "sin doesn't really make you happy." Reading or hearing the Bible in this way turns the Scriptures into a sort of Aesop's Fables or Grimm's Fairy Tales, where the story exists for the purpose of teaching a lesson to the wise and the story ends with, "and they lived happily ever after."

I can easily think of lots of sermons I've heard like this. I can also think of plenty of times when I have done this. This past school-year I had the dubious distinction of being the "AWANA Pastor". That meant I did a 15-minute talk for the kids at the end of the night. It's easy to moralize with kids. So the story about the lame man that was lowered through a roof to see Jesus became a lesson on "don't let anything stop you from coming to God" instead of "Jesus is willing to heal and forgive sin no matter how we come to Him." Joseph's time in an Egyptian prison was an example to "be patient in hard times" instead of "God was teaching Joseph patience through hard times."

I think the temptation to moralize comes from the desire to be practical. People want messages to be easy. The common refrain is: "Just tell me what I need to do." And so we come up with sermons focusing on practical things like reading the Bible, praying more, and being involved at church. The problem is that when you tell someone what to do you are setting up LAW instead of GRACE. The law is the very definition of practicality. It also has no power to really change us. Following Jesus isn't neatly summarized by any sort of three-step process. Rather, it is faith from first to last.

As I mentioned in my last entry, I'm preparing to speak soon on Genesis 23--the story of Abraham buying a small piece of land to bury his wife. Anything in the Old Testament is especially easy to moralize on. The temptation is to treat Abraham as the hero of the story and hold him up as an example to be emulated. This is easy to do because there is much to admire about Abraham. He followed God from his homeland to be a stranger and a pilgrim. He believed God in spite of many obstacles. He is our "father of faith". But if I let my message be "we need to have faith like Abraham" I have slipped into moralizing (even if I'm talking about faith!). Abraham's story isn't remarkable because of his faith, but because of God's calling. As Horton writes:

But in the biblical view, the biblical characters are not examples of their victory, but of God's! The life of David is not a testimony to David's faithfulness, surely, but to God's and for us to read any part of that story as though we could attain the Gospel (righteousness) by the law (obedience) is the age-old error of Cain, the Pharisees, the Galatian Judaizers, the Pelagians, Semi-Pelagians, Arminians, and Higher Life proponents.

The key question is: "Who is the hero of the story?"

If the hero of the story is a person, a principle, or a proverb then I will be moralizing. The True Hero of every story in the Bible is Jesus. He is the culmination of all that God has done in bringing lost people to salvation. Good examples don't have the power to change lives--only Jesus does.