White hair flew and blue eyes moistened as the ancient preacher pounded his pulpit. “It is the cross of Christ,” he said. “It is the gospel of grace alone!”
In that rustic mess hall, scented of knotty pine and the morning’s innumerable pancakes, I caught a glimpse of the fire in the belly that still burned in eighty-year-old preacher, Lance B. Latham.
“Doc,” as he was called, stood larger than life. He founded the Awana Youth Association, a ministry that reached around the world. On this day, he was speaking to camp counselors at Camp Awana, and I sat enthralled. Though his voice was soft and his diction slurred, Doc’s resolve was as strong as ever. He wouldn’t rest until every counselor could deliver the gospel of grace without messing it up.
Doc’s message still has a profound effect on me today. I’ve never budged from the mother of all premises that the heart of Scripture is Christ, and the heart of Christ is grace. In 36 years of pastoral ministry, I’ve preached my share of sermons that flog rather than forgive, hurt instead of heal. I wish I could go back and “unpreach” them.
I still grapple with my Inner Taskmaster whenever I preach.
Grace is that fearsome force flowing from God’s heart to deliver unmerited favor to train wrecks like me.
Grace is that fearsome force flowing from God’s heart to deliver unmerited favor to train wrecks like me. It stands forever as the most counter-intuitive force in the universe. The fall reversed our polarities.
Even we preachers need periodic whacks upside the laptop to jar the legalism out of our sermons. We need to learn and relearn the pure wonder of scandalous grace. And our people desperately need a break from the church’s relentless piling on of duties in the name of the One who preferred Mary’s choice over Martha’s.
How can our preaching inject some desperately needed grace into the lives of overwhelmed hearers?
Heal broken identities.
Doc insisted that youth leaders, “teach the kids their riches in Christ.” He wanted us to major in what Christ has done for us, not what we must do for him. For Doc, preaching Christ’s riches beat preaching the Christian’s duties any day. Over the years, I’ve come to see the wisdom in that. People act out of who they are. If you want a man to love his wife better, you can teach him to communicate, suggest he bring flowers, and offer ways to express affection in the daily routines of life. That’ll preach.
But what if he hates himself? What if he has never overcome early abandonment issues? What if the voice of dysfunction keeps screaming he’s a failure, or if all the programming inside defines him as a loser? In that case, there are no “practical steps toward being a better husband” that will work.
You’ve got to heal his sense of self first. You’ve got to show him what it means to be “accepted in the beloved” (Eph. 1:6). Persuade him from Scripture how justification has declared him righteous so he’s got nothing left to prove to that abusive, dead father who keeps hissing from his grave. Help him see how the Redeemer’s blood has set him free from every shackle slapped on him by his stoned-out mother or that bully who made school a living hell. Grace rehabs the identity first.
Peel off the cruel labels from his dysfunctional past. Help him accept his heavenly Father’s labels: beloved, cherished, valued, competent, rich … and maybe, two months down the road he might actually say a kind word to his wife because he’s finally feeling better about himself, in Christ.
You cannot expect broken people to live holy lives just because you tell them to. Fill up their impoverished spirits with the “unsearchable riches of Christ” and watch grace work its transforming magic.
Enable what you obligate.
Any preaching that decouples the Christian’s duties from the power of Christ will always make Christianity feel like running through quicksand. Be holy. Serve God. Get involved. Love your neighbor. Give. Give some more. Take a missions trip. Be a better person. Read your Bible. Pray. Join a small group. Be radical. Conquer your lusts. Beat your addictions. Obey. Do. Go. Serve. Harder. Faster. Better. Never enough!
The imperatives of the pulpit rise off the church like the wavy lines of cartoon stink from a road killed skunk. Most of our people are struggling just to get by. They’re overwhelmed. Then they come to church, for what? Another duty for their already backed-up to-do lists.
The bulk of Scripture is declarative. Who God is. What he has done for us. The wonders of Calvary’s cross. The incredible promises of God. Our riches in Christ. The writers of Scripture never tire of lifting the veil to offer a peek at the throne of all-sufficient grace.
I’m glad for this. It turns my preaching from a pep-rally for good works into a privilege of proclaiming “the things that have been freely given to us by God” (1 Cor. 2:12). The apostolic pattern was clear: declare grace first, beseech a grace-based lifestyle second. You can’t skip straight to Romans 12:1, expecting people to present their bodies as living sacrifices to God, unless you have stuffed their hungry gullets with the preceding eleven chapters detailing “the mercies of God.”
Any Christian activity energized by human power alone reeks of legalism. The power must be Christ’s—by his Spirit (Zechariah 4:6), his Word (Hebrews 4:12), his presence (Galatians 2:20), and his grace (1 Corinthians 2:12). Never let your hearers forget for even a nanosecond that Christ works in and through them. Grace means God works, God strives, God serves, God loves, God breaks the sweat. We are the vehicles, but it is God’s “working which works in [us] mightily” (Col. 1:29). Remind them. Under grace, whatever God obligates, he enables.
Run to the cross.
Paul Edwardson rarely preached without giving an altar call. Countless thousands across the world received Christ through his ministry. He’s with the Lord now, but I was privileged to work with him for a few years. He was a good friend and wise mentor to me.
Paul’s motto was simple: “Preach what you’re preaching, then run to the cross.” Stunning simplicity. Run to the cross. It’s hard to find a sermon by Spurgeon, Lloyd-Jones, the Puritans, or other preaching luminaries of days gone by that doesn’t relish the blood-accented language of the Savior’s death.
The apostolic marching orders are clear: “For I determined not to know anything among you except Jesus Christ and Him crucified” (1 Cor. 2:2). The apostle Paul’s sole boast was in the cross (Gal. 6:14). He called the message of the cross the saving power of God (1 Cor. 1:18) and made “Christ crucified” the heart and soul of his preaching. Review your sermons from the past month, and ask how much of Christ’s cross you find. The doctrines of the cross possess endless power to recalibrate your listeners’ hearts to grace. When you preach the cross, you lift burdens. When you preach the cross, you feed hope. You forge bonds of love.
So many times, your listeners come to church worn out by life. Many feel deep failure. The weight of adversity presses hard. Guilt and shame lurk at the door. The cross of Christ is what they need. Paint on the corridors of their imagination an indelible picture of all their failures and troubles being swept away in the tidal wave of Calvary’s love. If you don’t run to the cross in your messages, your people won’t run to the cross in their trials.
Rethink the “practical application.”
When my Chicago public high school inflicted trigonometry on my tender psyche, it wasn’t too long before I got lost. Like a mighty freighter, the class steamed ahead, while I raced behind in my rubber raft, paddling as hard as I could. Church feels like that sometimes.
Your listeners receive one or two items of “practical application” for their life’s to-do list. They might do them, partly, one or two times. By Wednesday, Sunday’s practical applications lie twitching on the trash heap of life’s unfulfilled responsibilities. Those applications, however, don’t vanish entirely. They still peck at the conscience, like angry birds. They create unease. They put grace on ice. The next week and the week after that, your listeners trudge dutifully back for yet more practical applications. It’s endless. They’re paddling hard to just fall behind. Where’s the grace?
If “practical” is code for “stuff good Christians should do,” quit being so practical. Or at least rethink that part of your sermon. After all, isn’t it practical for your frazzled listeners to simply be encouraged? To believe they can make it through another stormy week? Isn’t it practical when God rewires reverse polarized circuitry in their dysfunctional souls? Isn’t it practical when addicts believe they can overcome, and when the fatherless feel their Father’s embrace? It might take months to see fruit. But what’s the rush? Grace-preaching is patient preaching. Instead of a to-do item, how about a “to-think” item. Or a “to-believe” item. Or a “to-rest-in” item.
When Jesus forgave the woman taken in adultery, he left two messages ringing in her ears: “Neither do I condemn you” and “Go and sin no more” (John 8:11). These are important, not only for their content, but for their order too. Until “neither do I condemn you” gets hard-wired into your listeners’ souls, “go and sin no more” remains impossible. Good works God’s way can only flourish in the overflow of grace.
Teach them to abide in Christ.
When Jesus presented himself as the vine and his people as the branches, he left the enduring secret of fruitful living: “I am the vine, you are the branches. He who abides in me, and I in him, bears much fruit; for without me you can do nothing” (John 15:5). There are two sides in this equation: 1. Abide in Christ, and 2. Bear much fruit. Which side do you preach most?
I blush to think of the thousands of sermons I have preached, lashing God’s servants to produce more fruit, while ignoring the roots and vine. My hunch is not one in a thousand Christians can effectively explain what it means to abide in Christ. No wonder the fruit is so sparse. If you wish to see much fruit, quit preaching fruit. Instead, preach the cross of Christ, our identity in Christ, and our riches in Christ. Fill the gas tank with the glory of his matchless grace. You can’t flog the fruit out of a branch barely connected to the vine. A little less preaching on fruit, and a little more on what it means to abide in Christ—no matter your particular theology on how that looks—will change the face of your church.
I’ve come to realize that the only way to properly preach grace is to scandalize the hearer. To agitate the legalist. To make those who insist they can buy salvation at any price drop their flagellum and exit the premises. Nobody in the Bible ever “got” grace without an intervention. Some force had to pierce through the fallen heart’s resistance.
Someone had to say, “Yes, it sounds too good to be true, but it is true, because Christ is that good.” Why not become the church in your city that unburdens, unshackles, and de-stresses people? Keep shifting the burden to God. Build a bigger trust in a God more gracious than your people ever dared dream. Buy your Inner Taskmaster a one-way ticket to a permanent vacation.
Wise old Doc Latham taught, “Teach them their riches in Christ.” May our grace-filled preaching do the same.
Dr. Bill Giovannetti pastors the Neighborhood Church of Redding, CA, and teaches at A.W. Tozer Theological Seminary.
