Theocentric Preaching

Which gospel will you live? Which gospel will you preach? Which needs will you awaken and address in others? Which Christ will be your people’s Christ? Will it be the christette who massages felt need? Or the Christ who turns the world upside down and makes all things new?

Christianity is not about moralism, and Christian fiction shouldn’t be either. Christianity revolves, not around good behavior, but around God’s mercy shown to man in the death and resurrection of Christ. However, even though we know this to be theologically true, I think we struggle to remember this as we go about our daily lives…

You see, when God enters our lives by his grace, he isn’t working to make our kingdom work so much as he is calling us to an excitement with, and dedication to, a much greater kingdom.

So much of our religion is packaged to address our felt needs - and these are almost uniformly anchored in our pursuit of our own happiness and fulfillment. God simply becomes the Great Being who, potentially at least, meets our needs and fulfills our aspirations. We think rather little of what he is like, what he expects of us, what he seeks in us. We are not captured by his holiness and love; his thoughts and words capture too little of our imagination, too little of our discourse, too few of our priorities.

In the biblical view of things, a deeper knowledge of God brings with it massive improvement in the other areas mentioned: purity, integrity, evangelistic effectiveness, better study of Scripture, improved private and corporate worship, and much more. But if we seek these things without passionately desiring a deeper knowledge of God, we are selfishly running after God’s blessings without running after him. We are even worse than the man who wants his wife’s services - someone to come home to, someone to cook and clean, someone to sleep with - without ever making the effort to really know and love his wife and discover what she wants and needs; we are worse than such a man, I say, because God is more than any wife, more than the best of wives: he is perfect in his love, he has made us for himself, and we are answerable to him.

Too often when we study scripture, we start with the wrong question: “What does this say to/about me?” If we start our study asking, “What does this tell me about God?” then we really get down to the deep riches of the Word. After all, if we are called to conform to the image of Christ, shouldn’t we be learning more about him and less about us?

When this way of looking at things is ported into Christianity, then the gospel of Jesus becomes the better way to meet your needs. Perhaps your sin is that you look to your girlfriend/boyfriend or spouse to meet your need for love, when Jesus is the one who lives to meet that need. In this way of looking at things, God’s chief purpose is often portrayed as merely giving us what we deeply desire, gratifying our deepest instinctive longings.

This way of describing how God interacts with our desires is a “therapeutic gospel.” It offers to heal the woundedness we feel because our needs weren’t met. It offers to fill those empty places inside with Jesus.

I think that the therapeutic gospel gets it wrong. It gets God wrong. It gets people wrong. It gets suffering wrong. It gets the gospel wrong.