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Are you really preaching Christ?

Preaching the Word

"Making Known the Son,
 In the Presence of the Father,
 Through the Power of the Spirit,
 According to the Revelation of the Word."

A POOR SERMON

"A poor sermon!" said the preacher, "It took me a long time to study it, my explanation of the text was accurate, the illustrations were appropriate, and the arguments conclusive! Will you tell me why you think it a poor sermon?"

"Because," said Jonathan Edwards, "there was no Christ in it."

"Well," said the preacher, "Christ was not in the text; we are not to be preaching Christ always, we must preach what is in the text."

"Then don't take a text without Christ in it," Edwards replied. "But you will find Christ in every text if you examine it. From every text in Scripture there is a road to the metropolis of the Scriptures, that is Christ. And my dear brother, your business is, when you get to a text, to say, 'Now, what is the road to Christ?' and then preach a sermon running along that road. "I have never yet found a text that had not a plain and direct road to Christ in it; and if ever I should find one that has no such road, I will make a road. I would go over hedge and ditch but I would get at my Master, for a sermon is neither fit for the lord nor yet for the peasant unless there is a savor of Christ in it."

Marks of a Powerful Preacher
1. He has faith in God, simple, childlike, mighty trust, which never falters.
2. He is always praying.
3. He has faith in the truth, reading and expounding of the Scriptures.
4. He reads the Bible as if he believed every syllable and comma to be inspired of God.
5. He dwells much upon the historical parts of the Old Testament.
6. His aim is to set the unadorned truth before the mind.
7. He conscientiously suppresses everything which would divert from the clearest and most impressive exhibition of divine truth.
8. He reminds the listeners of the Law and its penalties.
9. He fearlessly proclaims the painful, and hence neglected truths of the Gospel.
10. His appearance draws reverent attention.
11. He plainly forgets himself, and soon the listeners forget the man, and are engrossed with the truths he is proclaiming.
12. He is thoroughly earnest.
13. He has sympathy for souls which often melts him into an agony of tears.
14. He operates under the full control and power of the Holy Spirit.
15. There is a directness in his preaching, which makes the hearers feel that they were the persons addressed.

PREACH CHRIST!

"A man cannot be a faithful minister until he preaches Christ for Christ's sake­­until he gives up striving to attract people to himself, and seeks only to attract them to Christ." (McCheyne)

"Read all the prophetic books without seeing Christ in them, and what will you find so insipid and flat? See Christ there, and what you read becomes fragrant." (Chrysostom)

"If the highest heavens were my pulpit and all the world my parish, Jesus alone would be my text." (Early Church Father)

"He who follows the Lamb in His way comes at last to where the Lamb Himself is." (Steinberg)

"The excellency of a sermon lies in the plainest discoveries and liveliest applications of Jesus Christ." (Flavel)

"It is not opinions that man needs: it is Truth. It is not theology: it is God. It is not religion: it is Christ. It is not literature and science; but the knowledge of the free love of God in the gift of His only-begotten Son." (Bonar)

"The best sermons are the sermons which are fullest of Christ.  A sermon without Christ as its beginning, middle and end is a mistake in conception and a crime in execution."  (Spurgeon)

"Preach Christ vs. Hell:  When they feel the heat, they will see the Light." (Darst)

"The ambassador (preacher) is not a mediator charged to bring peace between the King and the King's enemies; the ambassador is a messenger obligated to convey the entirety of the Word of the King." (Manley)

"Those who would preach Christ, must first learn Christ, and learn of Him.  Those who would get an acquaintance with Christ, must be diligent and constant in their attendance on Him."  (Church)

"God is honored in all powerful preaching. 'He makes God look big!' was the remark of a plain parishioner of one of the old style of New England divines."

"Strong preachers have ever been Bible-preachers. The sermons of Bunyan, and Baxter, and Flavel, and men of their stamp, were full of God--instinct with living doctrines." (Fish)

"No Christ in your sermon, Sir? Then go home and never preach again until you have something worth preaching." (Spurgeon)

 

"'Thine eyes shall see the King in His beauty.'  The more you know about Christ, the less will you be satisfied with superficial views of Him.  And the more deeply you study His transactions in the eternal covenant, His engagements on your behalf as the eternal Surety, and the fullness of His grace which shines in all His offices, the more truly will you see the King in His beauty. 
Be much in such outlooks.  Long more and more to see Jesus.  Meditation and contemplation are often like windows of agate and gates of carbuncle through which we behold the Redeemer.  Meditation puts the telescope to the eye and enables us to see Jesus after a better sort than we could have seen Him had we lived in the day of His flesh."  (Spurgeon)

WHEN you are to preach, you should go directly from your knees in your study to the pulpit. Your sermon must also be such, that, you may hope to have the blood of your Saviour sprinkled on it, and His good Spirit breathing in it. Among all the subjects with which you feed the people of God, I beseech you, let not the true bread of life be forgotten; but exhibit as much as you can of a glorious Christ unto them : yea, let the motto upon your whole ministry be, CHRIST is ALL. The Holy Spirit of God for ever aims at nothing more, than, what our Saviour has declared in that word, "he will glorify me;" and that Holy Spirit withdraws from the ministry which has in it little concern to glorify him ; and it is, therefore, an unsuccessful ministry. What I wish for, and urge to, is this : that your knowledge of the mystery of Christ may conspicuously shine in your sermons ; and that it may be esteemed by you as a matchless grace given you, if you may preach the unsearchable riches of Christ unto the world ; yea, reckon that the truth is not well discerned, nor the word of truth well divided, until you have "the truth as it is in Jesus." Whatever point you are upon, think, what is there in my Saviour which this point leads me to think upon'? When you preach on the duties of a godly, and sober, and righteous life, still carry your hearers to their Saviour, as not only affording a pattern for all those things, but also as offering to live, and act, and work in them, as a principle of life, by which alone they can live unto God. Be a star to lead men unto their Saviour, and stop not till you see them there.
(Dr. Cotton Mather)

"Two men went to hear Dr. Joseph Parker in London.  As they came away from the church, they said, 'My, what eloquence!  he know how to choose the right words and say them!  His oratory is simply irresistible!'
The same two men went to hear Spurgeon on the following Sunday.  They left the service silently and reverently.  One said, 'My, what a Christ!'"

"There are evils brethren...But we have only one remedy for them; preach Jesus Christ, and let us do it more and more.  By the roadside, in the little room, in the theatre, anywhere, everywhere, let us preach Christ.  Write books if you like, and do anything else within your power; but whatever else you cannot do, preach Christ."   (C. H. Spurgeon)

Solitary Hours with the Lord Jesus Christ, Ambrose Searle (1815)

    “Considering Christ, which indeed we ought, as Jehovah; His Name is like ointment poured forth (where did that come from?), in all the Scriptures; because all the Scriptures, as Himself hath showed (Lk. 24:27), might be expounded concerning Him and His Name.  They are every way full of Christ; and, if we were full of Him too, we should see more, and enjoy more of Him and of them.  His Name is excellent in the Scriptures; and if we had made greater attainments in the excellency of His knowledge, we should be ready to say of Him, with David, ‘Oh Jehovah, our Adonai, how excellent is Thy Name in all the earth!’” 
                                                                       Preaching, G. Campbell Morgan (1960)

     "The word Logos is used in the New Testament in two ways, the suggestiveness of each never being wholly absent from the other. It first and perhaps simplest meaning is that of speech and language, the expression  of truth for the understanding of others. Its second and perhaps deeper meaning is that of the absolute truth itself. As Thayer indicates, in that sense the Greek word Logos is the exact equivalent of the Latin word Ratio, from which we obtain our words rational and reason.  Note the significance of that. Thus Logos is speech, and the truth spoken, or reason, and the explanation of its expression. The inter-relation of ideas in their use is that the Word incarnate was the truth of God, but being the speech of God, was the expression of eternal truth.
     Itr will be granted that preachers are to preach the Word. You say that means the Bible. Does it? Yes. Is that all? No. Yes, it is all there. But you want more than that, more than all. The Word is truth as expressed or revealed. The Word is never something that I have found out by the activity of my own intellectual life. The Word is something which my intellectual life apprehends, because it has been expressed... It has in view the truth, the essential truth, and the truth as God makes it known. All that is focussed in Christ for us as preachers; and Christ is revealed to us through this literature.
     But it may be asked; Is there not an experience of Christ? There is, but the literature tests the experience.
     ...what then have we? Truth in germ, which needs apprehension, development, application. That is the work of the preacher. But we also have it in the norm. This means that we are to test our own thinking by it finally, and not it by our own thinking. Consequently the preacher is to be held by the Word, truth, as it is in God, and as God has made it known. How has He made it known? We are assuming without any argument that God has made it known finally in His Son, and that in the literature, the Biblical literature, we have the full record of preparation, of historic fact, of initial interpretation.  Follow the line of that. Preparation, all the Old Testament. Historic fact, the four Gospel narratives. Initial interpretation, all the twenty-one letters. There we have all the literature around this one great Person, Who is in that sense for us the Word.
     And that is what we have to preach. God's revelation, the truth, as it has been expressed. We must enter upon the Christian ministry on the assumption that God has expressed Himself in His Son, and that the Bible is the literature of that self-expression.
     The teaching of Christ is not the final fact about Christ, and His Person is not the final fact about Christ. We find that fact in Jesus crucified, risen, and ascended. We must approach Christ thus and we must cling to that Christ. That is the Word of God in all its fullness.
     Every sermon, then, is a message out of that sum totality of truth. Any sermon that fails to have some interpretation of that holy truth is a failure. That totality is not a small thing. In Him are summed up all things. In Him dwells the fullness, the pleroma, of the Godhead corporeally. The man who beings to preach Christ as the Divine revelation, interpreted to him through the literature, is beginning a thing that will never end (editor: the unsearchable riches of Christ). He can never be at the end of his message, because his message is the infinite and full and eternal truth. Preaching is the declaration of truth (editor: Truth), as truth has been revealed to men by God, in Christ."
    
 

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