Dennis E. Johnson on Apostolic Preaching

I'm nearly finished reading Dennis E. Johnson's Him We Proclaim, one of the meatiest and most clarifying books I've ever read. There's a little nugget on page 331, where Johnson states that even when sermons are based on New Testament passages, they are not necessarily "apostolic." He defines that term with these four elements:

• Christ-centered
• attentive to redemptive history
• grace-driven
• missiologically articulated

I suspect that those four descriptors, taken together, make for about as perfect a definition of real preaching as one will ever find.

Me, I heard a sermon yesterday about how if you keep on sowing you will eventually reap (based on Galatians 6:7-10), so don't stop sowing sowing sowing, people! It was not remotely Christ-centered, not the least attentive to redemptive history, driven only by the expectation of one day "reaping," and only vaguely missiologically articulated. I left quietly when I couldn't take any more of it.