Why I Preach

                The reasons I preach are many.  Some of them are mildly selfish.  For example, I preach because it helps to hold me accountable.  I preach because I believe it will help me obtain eternal life.  There are other reasons, however, that center upon who God is and who we are as human beings.  These reasons will be the subject of this paper.

                Preaching, at its simplest, is speaking—usually in public—for God.  We speak His message and when we do we become “co-workers” with Him (1 Corinthians 3:9) in accomplishing His purposes.  Therefore, any Theology of Preaching must begin with God since it is His work.  One must ask, “What is God up to?”  Whatever God about is what men ought to be about doing.  Consequently, if men are good men then they will preach for the right reasons, that is, for God’s reasons.  Of course, I consider myself to be a fairly good chap—an honest one at least—so my reasons for preaching will be those of the good man which we have shown are God’s reasons for giving us the message.

What Is God Up To?

                God created Man.  His reasons are His own.  We may never know them entirely but we must learn as much as we can because God’s intentions for us in the beginning are His intentions for us today.  Whatever He wanted us to be doing when He created us is the thing He wants us to be doing now.  The first thing we must know is that God did not create us out of necessity.  Some have argued, “God is Love.  Therefore He needed something to love and that’s why He created Man.”  There are at least three problems with this.  One, were not the angels created before Man?  Job records that the angels rejoiced when the foundations of the earth were laid (Job 38:4-7).  Would not these creatures have satisfied God’s apparent need for something to love?  Two, to say an all sufficient Being needs anything is self-contradictory.  God is not now, nor has He ever been, compelled by need.  God says to Man, “If I were hungry, I would not tell you, for the world and its fullness are mine” (Psalm 50:12).  He needs nothing to eat.  He lacks no wisdom or any such thing.  “For who has known the mind of the Lord, or who has been His counselor?  Or who has given a gift to Him that He might be repaid?” (Romans 11:34, 35).  God has no need.  Third, to think that God needs something because God is Love is to misunderstand all together what the words mean.  “God is Love” is a statement about God’s very nature, not His action (although actions flow out of His nature like heat flows from a fire).  Before Man was created, or the world was, or there were angelic beings or any such thing God was alone and God was Himself.  Even at that time—though it is improper to speak of God as “in time”—God was Love. 

All sorts of people are fond of repeating the Christian statement that ‘God is love.’  But they seem not to notice that the words ‘God is love’ have no real meaning unless God contains at least two Persons.  Love is something that one person has for another person.  If God was a single person, then before the world was made, He was not love . . . Christians . . . believe that the living, dynamic activity of love has been going on in God forever and has created everything else.  (Lewis, Mere Christianity, pp. 174, 175).

                Scripture affirms Lewis’ clever “unpacking” of the phrase.  Jesus Himself says to God, “You loved me before the foundation of the world” (John 17:24).  So, when answering the question, “What was God up to when He created us?”  the thing we must not say is that He needed to create us.  It was by choice, by God’s own will.  John records, “You created all things, and by Your will they existed and were created” (Revelation 4:11b, italics mine).

                The second thing we need to know also flows out of the fact that God is love.  Being Love does not mean necessity, but it certainly does mean joy, beauty, and life; all three of which are best enjoyed by increasing them.  It is like a husband and his wife.  They have each other to love and such love brings joy and beauty to their lives, so their life increases and abounds.  It is this love—ideally—that moves them to create a child.  Not because they do not have enough love but because they have so much!  They want to give it away.  They want to share it and increase it.  They do not need a child in order to be themselves or to love one another.  Rather, they choose to have a child to expand themselves, to share their love and give it away.  The illustration break downs of course because men, being wicked, often have very wicked reasons for producing a child, but this is as near as we can get.  We do what we can.  God calls Himself a Father and we are His sons and daughters.  God did not create us out of necessity but as a free choice bounding forth from His overflowing Love.

                The third thing we need to know is that we were created for God’s glory. God speaks of His sons and daughters saying, “Everyone who is called by my name, whom I created for My glory” (Isaiah 43:7).  When Adam extended himself by having his third son, the Bible records, “He fathered a son in his own likeness, after his image, and named him Seth” (Genesis 5:3).  Seth was a bearer of Adam’s image.  There was something of Adam in Seth and therefore Seth pointed back to his father.  Anytime one saw Seth he also saw something of Adam.  The same is said of God and His children.  “Then God said, ‘Let us make man in our image, after our likeness . . .’ So God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created Him; male and female He created them” (Genesis 1:26, 27).  In that we are created in God’s image we point back to Him.  But we are like slanted mirrors, pointing in two directions.  We reflect God’s image into the world—which we will soon see involves ruling over God’s world—and we reflect the glory of creation back to God.  We are the place where God intersects with the world He made.  We are His Kings (to rule over creation) and His priests (to sum up creations’ praise back to Him).

                The fourth thing we need to know is this: part of being God’s image means that Man is to rule the world under the sovereignty of God.  Having made Man in His own image, God says, “And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth” (Genesis 1:26).  Men were made lords of the earth.  God is, of course, the true LORD. “Behold, to the LORD your God belong heaven and the heaven of heavens, the earth with all that is in it” (Deuteronomy 10:14).  But he made Man a kind of vice-regent.  “The heavens are the LORD’s heavens, but the earth He has given to the children of man” (Psalm 115:16).  Who can forget the beautiful Psalm 8 which epitomizes Man?  “Yet You have made him a little lower than the heavenly beings and crowned him with glory and honor.  You have given him dominion over the works of your hands; you have put all things under his feet, all sheep and oxen, and also the beasts of the field, the birds of the heavens, and the fish of the sea, whatever passes along the paths of the sea” (8:5-8).  God created the world with the intention that it would be ruled rightly by Man under His direction.

                There is one other thing we need to know about why God created us and what it means to be His image-bearers.  When God made Man He specifically mentioned two duties: One, to have dominion over the world.  Two, to be fruitful and multiply.  God not only wants us to be image-bearers but He wants us to make more image-bearers.  As image-bearers are multiplied God extends Himself through the agency of Man.

                Everything we know about Man and the universe must start here.  God created us by free choice and Man is gifted with free choice.  God is love and our free will makes it possible for men to love.  God is the ruler of the world and He made men to rule over His creation under His direction.  God is the Father of children who bear His image and we are to father other image-bearers.  We are His slanted mirrors, reflecting His image into the world and summing up the world’s praise back to Him.  But this is only the beginning of the Story.  It is not long before something goes horribly wrong.  Man breaks the mirror.

Broken Mirrors

                God’s image-bearers, Adam and Eve, His very own slanted mirrors, were placed in the garden of Eden.  They were to go about the work God had set for them to do i.e. willingly ruling the world under God’s direction as prompted by their love for God and Man.  Indeed, what does love mean but the free decision to give one’s self to another?  This is what the Three-persons of the Godhead were doing before time and eternity; One freely giving Himself to the other and so on forever.  But what does free choice mean except the ability to choose evil as well as good?  The ability to give as well as to take?  The ability to love as well as to hate?  The ability to submit in love or rebel in pride?  The sad commentary of Man is that he so often makes the wrong choice.

                Now enters a third character into our Story, the serpent (Genesis 3:1), “that ancient serpent who is called the devil and Satan” (Revelation 12:9).  God had withheld nothing from His children except the fruit of one tree, the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil.  Satan’s asks, “Did God actually say, ‘You shall not eat of any tree in the garden’?” (Genesis 3:1).  The heroine of our Story seems to fair well at first.  “And the woman said to the serpent, ‘We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden, but God said, ‘You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the midst of the garden, neither shall you touch it, lest you die.’”  (3:3).  Eve knew what awaited her and all who ate of the Tree: death.  But Satan was not deterred from his scheme.  “But the serpent said to the woman, ‘You will not surely die.  For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.’  So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eye, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate, and she also gave some to her husband who was with her, and he ate” (3:5, 6).  And so our world was broken.  The mirrors, intended to reflect God’s image perfectly, were shattered.  Death, from which Man had been immune, now passed into the world.  “Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sinned” (Romans 5:12).  Just chapters later we read words that were never intended to be written: “And he died” (Genesis 5:5, 8, 11, 14, 17, 20, 27, 31).

Though the mirrors were broken they did not cease to reflect God’s image, only now it was distorted.  Man continued to exercise his freedom of choice (a reflection of God’s image) but he has consistently chosen what it wicked (not a reflection of God).  Man has continued to rule the world (a reflection of God’s image) but he rules it with tyranny instead of tenderness (not a reflection of God).    Man continues to give his life in love (a reflection of God’s image) he also begins to take life by violence (not a reflection of God).  It is not long before men learn murder.  “Cain spoke to Abel his brother.  And when they were in the field, Cain rose up against his brother Abel and killed him” (Genesis 4:8).  The mirror exists, but it is broken.  God’s image is reflected, but distorted.

The Good News

What Satan put into the heads of our remote ancestors was the idea that they could ‘be like gods’—could set up on their own as if they had created themselves—be their own masters—invent some sort of happiness for themselves outside God, apart from God.  And out of that hopeless attempt has come nearly all that we call human history—money, poverty, ambition, war, prostitution, classes, empires, slavery—the long terrible story of man trying to find something other than God which will make him happy.  (Lewis, Mere Christianity, p.49).

                This is obviously bad news.  But thankfully this is not the whole Story.  God has not given up on Man.  He has not abandoned His original intent.  He still wants to have a world full of sons reflecting His image into the world and summing up its praises back to Him.  He still wants His sons to rule the world under His sovereignty with justice, wisdom, self-control, and courage motivated by faith, hope, and love.  He intends to fix the broken mirrors.  The show must go on.  Though the Play has taken a terrible turn, God knows exactly how to fix it.  Because the intent was through Man so must the solution be.  God peers down from heaven and chooses one such creature.  “Now the LORD said to Abram, ‘Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you.  And I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing . . . and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed” (Genesis 12:1-3).  There you have it.  God will save Man, through Man, a descendant of Abraham.  But the way He does it is not something any of us could have guessed.

                The long history of Abraham’s descendents, later known as the Israelites, is punctuated with failure over and over again.  God intends for them to reflect His image and be “a light to the nations” (cf. Isaiah 42:6; 49:6).  They repeatedly come up short.  Still, God sticks to the project and does something beyond imagining.  God becomes Man.

                “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.  He was in the beginning with God.  All things were made through Him, and without Him was not anything made that was made.  In Him was life, and the life was the light of men . . . And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen His glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth” (John 1:1-4, 14).  God’s glory was finally reflected perfectly into the world when God Himself became Man, the man Christ Jesus.  Scripture constantly draws attention to this fact.  Christ is “the image of the invisible God” (Colossians 1:15).  “He is the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of His nature” (Hebrews 1:3).

                Remember how we said that God intended to fix what was broken?  When Adam was created he must have reflected God’s image perfectly; his mirror was not yet broken.  It is no mistake that Christ is called the Last Adam (1 Corinthians 15:45; cf. also 1 Corinthians 15:21, 22; Romans 5:14-19).  Christ is Ideal Humanity.  He is the Unbroken Man.  Do you see now why this is so important?  It takes an Unbroken Man to fix men who are broken.  A drowning man cannot save another drowning man, for he too needs rescuing.  It takes someone firmly planted on the shore to help them both.  

                If you think this Story very strange, it is about to get even more curious.  Part of Man’s brokenness is death.  Knowing that, it seems very odd indeed that the way in which Christ heals death is by dying.  (I told you before, this is not something that any of us could have guessed).  “Since therefore the children share in flesh and blood, He himself likewise partook of the same things, that through death He might destroy the one who has the power of death, that is, the devil” (Hebrews 2:14). 

                How Christ’s death overcomes death itself, I do not know.  We are not told.  Though we may think of it this way.  Christ has “life in Himself” (John 5:26).  When Christ died on the cross all of Death—past, present, and future—converged upon Him; but in so doing He exhausted the power of Death.  Death has been worn out.  All of its resources were spent on the cross.  On the third day, Christ was brought to life again.  That life which is in Himself came welling up and burst forth into the world again.  Death has no more power, but Christ has life to share. 

Of course, we are speaking of things which we have not been told.  This is just a guess.  If it helps you, fine.  If not then you need not think of it again.  The Bible does not ask us to believe any particular theory about how Christ’s death and resurrection defeated the devil; only to believe that they have.  Indeed, Paul says this Story is of first importance.  “Now I would remind you brothers, of the gospel I preached to you, which you received, in which you stand, and by which you are being saved, if you hold fast to the word I preached to you—unless you believed in vain.  For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, that He was buried, that He was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures” (1 Corinthians 15:1-4).  The word which he uses to describe this message is immensely important.  Our English word “gospel” translates the Greek word εὐαγγέλιον (euangélion) which literally means, “Good news.”

Mysteriously, through Christ’s life, death, and resurrection He has overcome Death itself.  He has saved us.  He has healed the world’s brokenness.  And that is good news indeed.

Good Infection

                It is just here that someone may raise an objection.  “If Christ defeated Death, then why do we still die?”  This is simply a misunderstanding of what we mean when we say that Death has been defeated.  We do not mean that men have ceased to die.  That men continue to die is very obvious.  We do not mean that Death has ceased to exist anymore than Cornwallis ceased to exist when defeated by Washington.  We mean, rather, that Christ has rendered Death without power.    Think of it this way.  If some doctor was to discover a cure for cancer the headlines might read: “Dr. Smith Defeats Cancer.”  Now, no one reading paper would think that there was no one without cancer, only that Dr. Smith had found the cure.  What is left is for the cure to be administered.  But it is right to say that by the discovery of the cure cancer had been defeated for it was the discovery that defeated the power of cancer.

                In the same way, sin is the spiritual cancer that brought Death to the world and Christ has defeated it.  We only need to be healed.

Good things as well as bad, you know, are caught by a kind of infection.  If you want to get warm you must stand near the fire: if you want to be wet you must get into the water.  If you want joy, power, peace, eternal life, you must get close to, or even into, the thing that has them.  They are not a sort of prize which God could, if He chose, just hand out to anyone.  They are a great fountain of energy and beauty spurting up at the very centre of reality.  If you are close to it, the spray will wet you: if you are not, you will remain dry.  Once a man is united to God, how could he not live forever?  Once a man is separated from God, what can he do but whither and die?  (Lewis, Mere Christianity, p.176).

Euangelizō

                Recognizing that in order to live a man must unite with Him who has life, Lewis goes on to ask the question, “But how is he to be united to God?” (Lewis, p.177).  I preach because the message I bring is the answer to that question.  Euangelizō is the verb form of the word euangélion.  It means “to proclaim the good news.”  It is the word from which we get our English word “evangelize.”  When we evangelize we are—to join Scot McKnight in coining a new verb—“gospeling” (McKnight, The King Jesus Gospel, p.60).   I preach because there is good news to share.  Something happened 2,000 years ago that changed the world forever.  Christ defeated Death.  God fixed what was broken. 

                Remember that God’s original intent was for men to bear His image and to rule the world under His direction.  But remember also that He wanted men to multiply.  He wanted His image-bearers to make more image-bearers.  If I am to be an image-bearer myself I must go about the work of telling men how God can fix the image they have distorted into their own likeness. 

                We said before that if a man wants life he must get near or into the One who has it.  We must unite with Him.  Now uniting with Christ means following Him and doing what He did, and that means death and resurrection.  We must walk the same path, and the message I preach tells men just how to do that.  “Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into His death?  We were buried therefore with Him by baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life.  For if we have been united with Him in a death like this, we shall certainly be united with Him in a resurrection like His” (Romans 6:3-5).  Christ died and was resurrected.  To unite with Him we must do the same.

                This only begins our new life.  Just like an infection, this good infection takes time to spread.  There is a sense in which death is put away and we are alive already.  But there is another sense in which we must continue to die every day.  It seems to be a law of God that the way to life is always through death.    Each day we must die a little more so that we can live a little more.  Christ says, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me” (Luke 9:23).  Do not miss His point.  We do not merely carry a cross daily.  We are to die upon it.  This is why Paul writes, “I am crucified with Christ” (Galatians 2:20).  And again, “Those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires” (Galatians 5:24).  Just like Adam and Eve’s rebellion against God brought death, so each time we rebel against God we invite death into our lives.  Therefore, we must crucify our rebel desires every day.  We must lay down our arms.  It is only by this kind of dying that we are united with Christ, that we are infected with life and “have it abundantly” (John 10:10). 

God built us and He knows which things run the human machine well and which things will cause the machine to crash—to die. 

God made us: invented us as a man invents an engine.  A car is made to run on petrol, and it would not run properly on anything else.  Now God designed the human machine to run on Himself.  He Himself is the fuel our spirits were designed to burn, or the food our spirits were designed to feed on.  There is no other.  That is why it is just no good asking God to make us happy in our own way without bothering about religion.  God cannot give us happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there.  There is no such thing.  (Lewis, Mere Christianity, p.50).

The message I preach tells people which desires admit death into their lives.  The message I preach tells them what things need to die so that they may live.  This dying is what we call morality, or ethics, or good conduct.  It means living rightly.  And living rightly means living.  If being united with Christ fixes the broken mirror, right living ensures that dust does not settle on it.  We must clean it every day to make sure God’s image still shines brightly.

                Daily dying the death of Christ by crucifying all our desires which rebel against God is only one part of reflecting His image. There is another part that we must not forget: summing up the praises of the world and reflecting them back to God.  This part of our duty is what we call worship.  Our daily dying, what we call morality or right behavior, is one hand with which we wipe the dust from our mirrors.  The other hand is worship.  It is a rule of God that we become like what we worship.  N.T. Wright calls this “the first of two golden rules at the heart of spirituality” (Wright, Simply Christian, p.148).  He draws, of course, from the Psalms.  “Their idols are silver and gold, the work of human hands . . . Those who make them become like them; so do all who trust in them” (Psalm 115:4-8).  Certainly we have witnessed this, if not in our lives at least in the lives of so many we admire on television.

When you gaze in awe, admiration, and wonder at something or someone, you begin to take on something of the character of the object of your worship.  Those who worship money become, eventually, human calculating machines.  Those who worship sex become obsessed with their own attractiveness or prowess.  Those who worship power become more and more ruthless.  (Wright, Simply Christian, p.148).

                When we worship an idol, with no life in it, we are less alive which you will notice is the same thing as being more dead.  But the good news moves men to worship the living God.

So what happens when you worship the creator God whose plan to rescue the world and put it to rights has been accomplished by the Lamb who was slain?  The answer comes in the second golden rule: because you were made in God’s image, worship makes you more truly human.  When you gaze in love and gratitude at the God in whose image you were made, you do indeed grow.  You discover more of what it means to be fully alive.  (Wright, Simply Christian, p.148, italics original).

                The world is full of brokenness and everyone wants it to be fixed.  The message I preach says that God has already fixed it.  The message I preach tells men that God can fix them too.  It tells men how to unite with Him who has life in Himself.  It tells men how to walk the path of Christ and die His death every day.  It tells men who to worship and how to worship so that they can continually become more of what they were created to be—more fully human.  I preach because every man loves getting good news.

Only a Line

                I have said much in this paper, but only because my simplest answer would not have been a paper at all, only a line.  I preach because “It pleased God through the folly of what we preach to save those who believe” (1 Corinthians 1:21b).