“a church that doesn’t preach Jesus isn’t a church at all.” ~ mark driscoll.
i heard this the other day in one of driscoll’s sermons… i couldn’t agree more with his statement. however, i do have to wonder, what does it look like to preach Jesus? i mean, we’ve got all sorts of different ideas out there as to what preaching Jesus is… a lot of times i think we call all sorts of things that we do “preaching Jesus” but in reality we couldn’t be further away.
if this, preaching Jesus, is the single most important point of the church–which i believe it is, and if this is what makes a church a church–which i believe it also is… then what does that look like?
preaching Jesus is not self-help. often times our idea of preaching and bible study revovles around self-help and life application, but in the midst of this we replace Jesus with the 7 habits of highly effective people…
preaching Jesus must be more than self-help and life application… it must be more than dealing with our petty problems because Jesus is more than that. when paul wrote of Jesus in colossians 1 he wrote of Jesus as larger and bigger than anything we could ever imagine him to be, the one through whom all things were created… to say that preaching Jesus is self-help reduces the power, the scope and the person of Jesus to a formula for making life a little more tolerable–if we’d only follow these 4 steps.
preaching Jesus must be more than the productions we put on every single Sunday. i’m firmly convinced that God works in big ways through the arts and the media that we present on a weekly basis through the Sunday morning gatherings of Christians around the country… but i think sometimes we rely on those productions too much to preach Jesus for us. in fact, i would go so far as to say that many Christians rely solely upon these gatherings to preach Jesus to their friends and family and don’t and won’t lift a finger to “preach Jesus” on their own. preaching Jesus must occur more than on a Sunday morning or a Wednesday night. the church needs to do more to preach Jesus than going to and producing gatherings. preaching Jesus is more than our mere words…. more than our productions, more than our sermons, more than our worship music, more than our videos and our drama’s. preaching Jesus should be who we are in our completeness because of our love for people and ultimately our love for God.
in the words of St. Francis of Assisi who taught us that preaching Jesus is a way of life: “preach [Jesus] always, and if necessary use words.”
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