Subscribe to feedWhat is the God-centered goal of preaching? To borrow language from Piper it is to make much of God. My goal in my ministry – preaching, teaching, visiting, etc – is to help people love God more each day. I do this by trying to help them see more about God, his incredible character, his holy nature, his boundless grace.
The more people love God the more they will desire to serve and obey him. Luther, quoting Augustine, said, “Love God, and do what you will.” (Could someone point me to where those quotes are found?) The idea behind this is not that if you love God then anything else you do is permissible. Luther understood that if you love God then what you will to do is that which is pleasing to God. This is similar to Psalm 37:4: “Delight yourself in the Lord, and he will give you the desires of your heart.” It is not that God says, “Oh, this person delights in me! I’ll give them anything they want!” rather it is that the person says, “I delight in God! The desire of my heart is to live for him, to enjoy him forever!” When you love God your heart and focus change to God himself.
The person who delights in the Lord does not desire a new car more than he desires God. He desires God more than he desires adultery or drugs or possessions or pornography or pride or power or a host of other worldly things. Preaching that focuses on doing rather than thinking and feeling gets at the symptom while neglecting the problem.
Consider Matthew 12:43-45:
43 “When the unclean spirit has gone out of a person, it passes through waterless places seeking rest, but finds none. 44 Then it says, ‘I will return to my house from which I came.’ And when it comes, it finds the house empty, swept, and put in order. 45 Then it goes and brings with it seven other spirits more evil than itself, and they enter and dwell there, and the last state of that person is worse than the first. So also will it be with this evil generation.” (ESV)
To empty a house of demons is all well and good but is ultimately a useless act of the house is left ready for reoccupation. If soldiers on the battlefield clear a stronghold they have done well, but if the stronghold is not secure the enemy will just return in even greater numbers and the problem will be worse than ever. If preaching leads people to change behavior without first leading them to be consumed with love for God then little good has been done. It has probably caused harm, creating people who seem moral on the outside but are dead and rotten on the inside. Teach people about God. Show them Jesus, the image of the eternal, invisible God, in all his glory. Pray for the Spirit to grow in them and for the first fruit of the Spirit, love, to grow wildly for God and then for others.
This is what I want to see happen through my preaching – people loving God, delighting in him, and becoming so filled with wonder at the glory of his goodness and grace that the things of this world grow strangely dim. Teach people to be filled with God. To desire him. To honor him and delight in doing so. That is how the Holy Spirit will work through us in the process of sanctification. That is how disciples are made.
