“For woe is me if I do not preach the gospel.” (1 Corinthians 9:16)

The apostle Paul claimed to have only one sermon topic—Jesus and His cross. Most preachers today don’t believe him. Either that or we find his diet insufficient and lacking flavor. Or maybe we fear that offering only Christ will lead to fewer mouths to feed because hearers tend to gravitate toward preachers who will tell them what they want to hear. Paul knew this, of course. He told his young protege Timothy to expect it. He warned that people would gather scratchers according to their itches.

 

Preach Christ or Nothing at All

Think of the various ways this can happen: A church loves doctrine. Red-blooded, masculine, hard-on-the-shins doctrine. Solid meat of the shoe-leather variety doctrine. No need to offer a sissy defense of free will there. They’re men. Even the women. They take their Calvinism black and thick. What kind of pastor will they tolerate? A man who preaches the good news of the sovereignty and glory and power of almighty God. Any talk of grace, cross, or love must be carefully balanced with and subservient to the awesome ferocity of God’s holy justice. They wouldn’t want to leave any room for a wimpy, emotional, caring God. God cares for His majesty. And He is most pleased when His people spend the majority of their time analyzing and re-categorizing His glorious attributes. Doctrine is to be preached, debated, and defended. That is the mission of God’s people.

I am being a bit facetious here, and I want to be careful. God is sovereign, glorious, powerful, almighty, and just. He is certainly not wimpy and must not be taken in a cavalier manner. No one knew this better than Paul. But he used the majesty of God’s character not as an end in itself, but to exalt the wonder of His grace in saving sinners. He marveled that the ferociously righteous Judge of heaven and earth would show mercy to a blasphemer and persecutor of the Church, that He would give His own life to extend forgiveness to the chief of sinners, and that He would go so far as to call such a vile offender into ministry. Paul understood that the gospel was not an exposition of systematic theology, it was the message of grace and hope for wicked people. Paul preached Christ because Christ is all.

Another church loves doing good, especially to the community around them. Their passions include providing food for the hungry, building homes for the homeless, sending clean water to poverty- and disease-stricken lands. They love to find creative ways to make others feel important and accepted. They are convinced that nobody wants to hear a story about Jesus unless they first see the story of His love lived out by His people. So, this church will seek a preacher who calls them to a relentless pursuit of sacrificial giving, and who leads by example. They want to know how to be better neighbors, better co-workers, and better friends. They want their teacher to teach them and show them.

Jesus did teach that the world would be able to identify His disciples by witnessing their acts of kindness . . . to one another. How easily we forget that it’s our selfless devotion to the family of God that will impact unbelievers more than our devotion to them. More to the point, however, we must remember that the gospel is about sin and our desperate need for forgiveness.

Who cares if we help a family avoid foreclosure so they can all go to Hell in a nice house? You may say that the family would care, at least in the immediate future. True enough. But what about the long-term? Do we care about that? To what degree? Moreover, there is nothing uniquely Christian or Christ-exalting or gospel-minded about helping the poor. A card-carrying atheist can do that. More moreover, Jesus did not come to eradicate trouble in this life but to deliver us from the eternal death we deserve in the next. We eviscerate the work of Christ by making it mostly about the temporal needs of vile, rebellious, God-haters. When Jesus cried out, “It is finished!” He wasn’t talking about food stamps.

 

Preach the Gospel at All Times . . . With Words!

Please don’t hear what I’m not saying. I’m not suggesting that believers should be unconcerned with trying to make the world a better place. I’m only asserting that our highest and most articulate concern must be Christ. The old adage, “Preach the gospel at all times and when necessary use words,” is nonsense. The gospel cannot be preached without words because it is a story, a report, a message. It’s not a lifestyle. Paul commanded Timothy to “preach the word,” not “fix the bicycle.” A faithful preacher will proclaim Christ to his audience relentlessly, incessantly, and unapologetically. If nobody wants to hear that message, so be it. There is no other.

I want to reiterate that the word to be preached is the gospel of Jesus Christ. Some might be lulled into thinking it’s Grudem’s Systematic Theology or Warren’s Purpose-Driven Life or Piper’s Desiring God. As good and helpful as some of these may be, the Christian preacher preaches Christ. On the Lord’s Day, we proclaim the Lord. When we utter, we make utterances about the wonders of God’s glory as revealed in and through Jesus Christ. We proclaim Him!

Having only one sermon does not require us to say the same thing every time we speak. Our task is to preach the gospel accurately and effectively, and it’s not very effective to leave one’s audience bored stiff. Exalting Christ is never a dull enterprise. We shouldn’t express it as such.

Effective preaching requires creativity, fresh insights and approaches, helpful illustration and application. We must preach with passion, as those who have been impassioned. We must be Christ-obsessed ourselves if we are going to stimulate others to be. We must know our audience and excite in them a thirst for the pure milk of the word of the cross. None of this is merely rote or routine, lifeless or limp, drab or dull. What could be more inspiring and invigorating than discovering new ways to call God’s people to praise the glory of His magnificent grace? Our message is always the same—Christ and Him crucified. If that’s insufficient or uninteresting to you, you have no business preaching.

Temptations for preachers are multifaceted and strong. We are easily attracted by our pet doctrines. They become our hobbies, our free-time reading and pondering. At first, they are scattered here and there in our sermons, but over time they become more prominent, dominant even. We also like to know that our preaching is making a difference in people’s lives. We feel the strong pull to make people feel good, useful, and encouraged, so we strive to make our sermons beneficial. Or maybe we want to make profound theological statements, spurring God’s people to reflect on the deeper, more mature things of God. Or maybe we so passionately desire holiness for our people that we give them a steady diet of rules and standards, making sure that they grasp just how far off the mark they still are. And then there’s the ever-present lure of application. We must figure out how to create that epiphanic, life-changing, aha! moment that will give our people a new way to look at things.

But our preaching exists for the same purpose as everything else—to exalt Christ. These other things must be secondary to and directly derivative of our presentation of His glory.

We preach that which interests us or that which we find in the text. Christ must be what interests us and what we find in the Bible. Anything else is distracting. If the gospel is not our greatest hobby, we shouldn’t be preaching. If we can’t figure out how to make the gospel relevant to people’s lives, we shouldn’t be preaching. If we don’t find the gospel to be the most profound theological concept in Scripture, we shouldn’t be preaching. If we don’t find the gospel to be enough motivation for righteous living, we shouldn’t be preaching. If the mercies of the gospel leave us the same two days in a row, we shouldn’t be preaching. If we get bored by, unimpressed with, or tired of the gospel, we shouldn’t be preaching. Preach Christ or don’t preach at all.

 

Preaching the Christian View of Same-Sex Sin

Does this mean there’s no place for preaching on practical issues, theological issues, cultural/societal/political issues, moral issues, etc.? Of course not. But all of these must be postured according to how they relate to exalting Christ.

Take the same-sex marriage issue, for example. There are two ways to oppose it: We can sound the alarm about the coming doom to civilization and culture as we know it. We can decry the breakdown of the family. We can pull out the statistical data showing the negative impact on children when both genders are not present in the home. Or, we can argue like Christians, declaring that marriage is intended by God to be a picture of Christ and the Church, a picture which cannot be pictured without a man and a woman.

Let me explain further. “Same-sex marriage” is a meaningless concept. It’s like two people holding only gloves and saying they’re playing a game of catch, or putting two nuts on a piece of metal and claiming to have bolted it down, or holding two halves of a bun and calling it a hamburger. Same-sex marriage is like that. Without both genders, something essential is missing. I’m not talking about reproductive organs (though that is certainly true), I’m talking about the essence of what makes marriage marriage. Although people of like gender are clearly capable of having orgasmic experiences and committed affection with each other, what they cannot have is marriage because its purpose requires more than sex and vows. Ultimately, it’s not a civil union or a state issue. It’s a Christ issue. God established it at the beginning of human existence not merely to lay the foundation for the family and society, but, far more importantly, to foreshadow the marriage between the Son of God and His Wife (Eph. 5:31-32). This is why there will be no marriage in the next age. The shadow will give way to the substance. Marriage will serve its intended purpose and then pass away. Therefore, the rationale for defining marriage as a relationship between a man and a woman is only secondarily about preserving civilization or the family. The primary reason is because marriage pictures Christ and His bride, the Church. The husband is to stand as the Christ-representative exercising headship, authority, cherishing, nourishing, and sacrificial love, thereby mirroring Christ’s responsibility; the wife is to represent the Church exercising submission, respect, admiration, honor, and devoted love, thereby mirroring the Church’s role. You cannot have this picture with two men or two women.

When preachers speak against it, we tend to fight more as human beings or American citizens or natural philosophers than as Christians. We argue that with same-sex marriage the family is at stake, or that a well-ordered society requires both parents in the home, and so on. But there is nothing uniquely Christian in those conclusions. A well-educated atheist might make the same claims. The Christian opposition employs an argument that unbelievers must deny because the true significance of marriage is something they must deny.

Like everything else, marriage was created for Christ, and we must debate as Christians rather than as Americans, conservatives, or philosophers. Otherwise, we fail our King, and we help unbelievers in their efforts to steal it away from Him.

 

Practical Christian Preaching

The same is true when it comes to sermons defending or denying eternal security, admonishing employees not to waste their employer’s time, describing whether wives may work outside the home, instructing believers on how to think about taxation, or explaining whether Christians may rightfully serve in the military. All of these things matter because they relate to Christ, His glory, His inheritance, and His people. When the New Testament speaks to them, it’s always in the context of the supremacy of Jesus Christ. Regardless of the subject, a sermon which fails to preach Christ fails to be a Christian sermon.

Some will probably object to this by suggesting that a Christian politician, for example, cannot simply rise on the Senate floor and reject a marriage bill on the grounds that it distorts the image of Christ and the Church. He would first be laughed at, then castigated for uniting church and state. He must be content to take incremental steps and to debate from the common ground we have with unbelievers. I appreciate the intent behind such thinking. But, in the final analysis, he would be merely speaking as an American politician who also happens to hold Christian values. If a person fails to claim Christ as the rationale for marriage, he is not positing a Christian argument. He may be arguing as a republican, a philosopher, a historian, or as a founding fathers advocate, but not as a Christian. As an American citizen, I am all for prohibiting homosexual marriage by any rationale, but the only thing that authoritatively rules it out is its relation to High King Jesus.

I recognize that according to its title, this chapter is supposed to be about preachers, not politicians. But there is overlap. Any congressman who claims to be a Christian will belong to a church and place himself or herself under elder authority. Preachers need to instruct them on how to live for Christ on Capitol Hill. The government has been telling us that we are (mostly) free to teach what we want in the privacy of our church buildings, but when we leave the parking lot we must leave our religion behind. We are free from religion in America. King Jesus didn’t vote for that. He claims the American king as His subordinate, and He’s asked us to reveal that to him. Who is in a better position than the Senator himself? And who will tell the Senator? The preacher.

 

Conclusion

The apostle Paul suffered every kind of oppression, affliction, and rejection because of his unwavering commitment to preaching the gospel. It cost him everything, humanly speaking. It gained him everything, heavenly speaking. After fighting the good fight of the gospel, he received his wreath from Jesus Himself. But before his Day of reward, he urged Timothy to fight the same fight for the gospel, to be ready in season and out of season, when the ground is soft and when it is hard, when people love to hear it and when they hate it. At all times and in all places, this one sermon is to be the all-consuming passion of the preacher. There will always be the temptation to be accepted, to be found clever and funny, to get a reaction from the hearers, to appear prepared and competent, to gain a following, and a million other things. Preachers must resist them all. The call is to proclaim Christ and to motivate others to love and live for Him.

 

A Final Note to All of Us as Hearers

What kind of preaching attracts us? What do we gravitate toward or push against? What kind of diet do we crave? By what standard do we critique preachers? If Christ’s glory and gospel are not the center of our attention and desire, we must re-align. Just as preachers should have only one sermon, so also hearers should seek only one sermon. Idolatry is never very far away from any one of us.