We can preach the Bible without preaching the gospel
Many churches claim to be “Bible teaching churches”. And many churches do indeed have sermons based on the Bible or which work through a single Bible text. (If any church doesn’t even claim this, we should avoid it!) Yet it more than possible to preach from the Bible and not be a gospel preacher.
I once received a phone call at the church from a potential visitor. He asked what kind of sermons we preach at our church. After I explained, he told me that he hoped we didn’t just have a series of illustrations linked together with a Bible verse here or there taken out of context. I am sure there was significant history behind his comment, though we didn’t have time to have a long conversation about it. I assured him that we worked carefully through passage and preached the good news about Jesus every week.
When I visited a church recently, I was reminded that you can preach a sermon and not preach the gospel. The Bible passage read was one of my favourites, Joshua 24 where Joshua gives his address to the elders of Israel after the Conquest. The preacher focussed in on the phrase, “As for me and my household, we will serve the Lord”. He then skipped around a range of passages, saying essentially the same thing in a number of ways: choose God. Every day, decide to follow God. Make godly decisions, work harder at being a good person. It was a ‘Biblical’ sermon in the sense that he took information from the Bible in preaching it. Yet the message had no grace in it at all, no encouragement that Jesus has died in our place, and left me angry. If you read Joshua 24, there is a long section where Joshua outlines the great grace shown to the people of God over many generations, things they received that they did not deserve. Only after this does he tell them to serve the Lord. In other words, grace first, then response. If you focus only on the response, and skip the grace, you no longer have the gospel. You have works.
We do need to preach instructions for how people are to live; lots of Bible passages have these things in them. We need people to understand God’s call to honour him with our lives. Yet the gospel must be in the preaching. If the same sermon could be preached in a mosque or a synagogue and the hearers would agree with everything, it is not a gospel sermon. We need to preach Christ and him crucified, as Paul put it. We need to present the great gift of salvation in Jesus.
If a sermon could be summed up as “work harder”, that is not the gospel. Jesus says that his yoke is easy and his burden is light. The gospel message is that Jesus has done what we cannot do, so we don’t need to work to impress God. We need to worship the One who saved us and only then act in a certain way in response.
Those in our churches do need challenging about our sin, as we all do. Yet what they need most is to hear the gospel. We need the challenge of our sin and the wonder of being saved from our sin. Without grace, we only become a self-help TED talk. The message of Jesus is so much better than that!