Proclaimer Blog
Context and power
I preached at the London City Mission thanksgiving service last week, on 2 Cor 5.21-6.2; not a straightforward passage at all, but I hope I did it justice. Preaching it is complicated by the fact that the passage is jam packed (or ram packed, per Corbyn) of well known texts: “Christ’s love compels us….”, “If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation…”, “We are therefore Christ’s ambassadors….”, “God made him who had no sin to be sin for us…” and so on. In fact, per column inch, there are more “poster verses” here than almost any passage I’ve preached recently.
It’s easy to get distracted by these, especially as we have often ripped the texts out of their contexts. We thus often end up conveying Bible truths but hanging them on verses that Paul (in this case) intended for a different meaning – what some people call “the right message from the wrong text.”
I am convinced that, under the sovereignty and power of the Spirit, the power in preaching lies in allowing the text to say what the text says. In other words, using the text to say something it was not intended for, even when that something is a glorious Bible truth, must rob the sermon of something. After all, I could equally shoehorn something that was wrong onto a text and make it sound genuine. Where’s the difference? – only that one is a truth and one a falsehood, neither is using the text as it was intended. The only guard therefore against falsehood and imposition is to use the text, in its context, as it was intended. That’s where the power lies.