We Must Never Assume the Gospel

I'm certainly not the only Christian blogger who is excited about the fact that C. J. Mahaney has joined our ranks. I have a feeling that I'm going to have to put myself on some sort of Mahaney-rationing plan, or I'll be quoting his posts every day. Mahaney was one of the voices amidst all the Christian crowd-noise that calmly called my attention back to the cross, whispering quietly, "Did you forget something?"

I recall discussing a sermon with a friend of mine. I said, "Did you notice? There was nothing of Jesus, and nothing of the Gospel in all of that?" My friend replied, "Isn't the Gospel just assumed sometimes?"

C. J.'s latest post provides the answer to that question. I'm going to snip a large chunk of it here, but by all means go over there and read the whole thing:

We must never assume the gospel. We must always assume that those we serve need to hear the gospel yet again. Any sermon we preach is incomplete and insufficient until we explicitly reference Christ and him crucified.

In the book A Quest for Godliness: The Puritan Vision of the Christian Life, J.I Packer writes,

"The preachers’ commission is to declare the whole counsel of God; but the cross is the centre of that counsel, and the Puritans knew that the traveller through the Bible landscape misses his way as soon as he loses sight of the hill called Calvary."

Every sermon must have a sighting of the hill called Calvary, because each passage of Scripture points us to the cross. In Christ-Centered Preaching, Bryan Chapell writes,

"In its context, every passage possesses one or more of four redemptive foci. Every text is predictive of the work of Christ, preparatory for the work of Christ, reflective of the work of Christ, and/or resultant of the work of Christ."

And because every text of Scripture points us to the cross, every topic should likewise point us to the cross. Thomas Jones says, "No doctrine of Scripture may faithfully be set before men unless it is displayed in its relationship to the cross."

The message of the cross is central to the commission of the preacher, is to be on display in every sermon, is cultivated from every text of Scripture, and is embedded within every topic and doctrine intended to nourish the church.