The Jesus Paradigm in Preaching

Jared at Gospel-Driven Church hits a homerun:

The logic is simple but somehow evasive for so many pastors. If week in and week out you are feeding your congregation a steady diet of self-help, of personal improvement, of application for someone’s walk with Jesus as their “personal” Lord and Savior, you may not exactly be stirring the desire in them to be connected to other believers. If your preaching is consistently of the “How to Win at Work” or “How to Be Your Best You” variety, you are only feeding and coddling the insidious individualism of the average evangelical churchgoer and the consumerist culture he is the product of.

So to continue my discussion yesterday of the Jesus Paradigm in Scripture: Preaching that does not reveal the Jesus paradigm, that uses Scripture self-servingly to promote subjectively defined values that are not the fruit of the Jesus Paradigm, that focuses on someone other than Jesus(i.e. you, the listener, 0r me, the preacher, or so-and-so, the model Christian/Biblical figure) and how he thought, related to the Father, interacted with a desperate world, conducted himself towards the salvation-agenda that God is inexorably committed to, embraced suffering and death; in the end can be defined as self-righteous, performance-rooted, unBiblical preaching, and can do nothing but produce non-disciples. As Jared says elsewhere in the post, there is no magic bullet, though evangelicals insatiably hunger for it. It's just the Gospel, it always has been, and it always will be.

Never Read the Bible Without the Jesus Paradigm

Scripture looks like Jesus. If it doesn't your not reading Scripture.

There are lots of prophets that came before Jesus. They told Israel certain things about what the living God was like, where Israel stood in regard to his plan and work. These prophets point forward to Jesus, and can be fully understood only when you have seen Jesus, "gotten" him, and then looked back and dealt with the prophets under the new paradigm that Jesus has inaugurated, with his person and character at the center.

There are also lots of laws and rules that came before Jesus. These were so that Israel would have a picture of the living God, and be able to bring their corporate identity under the character, work, and plan of God. So to speak: God[subscript]Israel. These laws, and this character, cannot be understood or applied without first re-calibrating your understanding to the paradigm that Jesus presents to you.

There were a bunch of letters written after Jesus lived. They were written to groups of people trying to follow Jesus, by followers of Jesus. These letters cannot be read properly without a clear, rock-hard agenda to affirm and walk out....Jesus.

There was also this one prophecy written by a follower of Jesus, the source of much debate and agonizing among Christians ever since. It's really a lot simpler than they have made it. The prophecy, called The Revelation of John, is simply a vision of Jesus. His return, and his establishment of an eternal Kingdom in which he reigns. This prophecy cannot be understood(and it certainly wasn't written) without an unshakable commitment to the paradigm through which Jesus understood God, the Church, and world events. The paradigm makes the interpretation.

The paradigm, people, the paradigm....It's Jesus!

Live Like the Gospel Is True

If Jesus said that the Kingdom of God is at hand, and I believed it, would it be possible for me to proceed upon ambitions and desires that were more important to me than the ushering-in of that Kingdom?

If God loved me so much that he sent his only son to die for me, and I believed it, would it be possible for me to live in fear of God's or man's opinions about me?

If Jesus rose from the dead and showed his followers that death has no hold on him, and I believed it, would it be possible for me to be afraid of dying, or of suffering, to manipulate my life so as to delay the one and minimize the other?