How significant is the cross of Christ in my regular preaching? The following quote brings a great conviction and I pray an even greater intentionality and change:
This distinction between an “objective” and subjective” understanding of the atonement needs to be made clear in every generation. According to Dr. Douglas Johnson, the first general secretary of the IVF, this discovery was the turning point in the ministry of Dr. Martyn Lloyd Jones, who occupied an unrivaled position of evangelical leadership in the decades following the Second World War. He confided in several friends that “a fundamental change took place in his outlook and preaching in the year 1929.” he had, of course, emphasized from the beginning of his ministry the indispensable necessity of hte new birth. But after preaching one night in Bridgend, South Wales, the minister challenged him that “the cross and the work of Christ” appeared to have little place in his preaching. He went “at once to his favourite secondhand bookshop and asked the proprietor for the two standard books on the Atonement. The bookselller produced R. W. Dales’ The Atonement (1875) and James Denney’s The Death of Christ (1903). On his return home he gave himself to study, declining both lunch and tea, and causing his wife such anxiety that she telephoned her brother to see whether a doctor should be called. But when he later emerged, he claimed to have found “the real heart of the gospel and the key to the inner meaning of the Christian faith.” So the content of his preaching changed, and with this its impact. As he himself put it, the basic question was not Anselm’s “why did God become man?” but “why did Christ die.”
John R. W. Stott, The Cross of Christ, 15.
I would imagine that Dr. Stott sees the centrality of the cross as more than an altar call tag-line on a sermon. How does the cross saturate our calls to obedience? Where is the cross when we preach the Old Testament? How does the cross impact how we suggest applying biblical texts? Where is the cross in the whole of our preaching? Does my preaching require the atonement for understood, accurate, and applied?
