========================================================================
  RETHINKING CROSS CENTERED PREACHING
  by John Piper
========================================================================

Summary: This sermon challenges the common approach of making every text
a pathway to the gospel, emphasizing the importance of diving deep into
the actual words and phrases of the inspired text. It encourages
preachers to build sermons on the cross rather than just towards it,
highlighting the power of imputed righteousness in enabling obedience to
biblical imperatives. The focus is on wrestling with the text to reveal
its true reality and offering it as a blood-bought gift to the listeners
for understanding, embracing, and obedience.

Duration: 5:55 Topics: "Deep Understanding of Scripture", "Imputed Righteousness and Obedience"
Scripture References: Psalm 1:2, 2 Timothy 3:16, Hebrews 4:12, Colossians 3:16, 1 Peter 1:23

------------------------------------------------------------------------
DESCRIPTION
------------------------------------------------------------------------

This sermon challenges the common approach of making every text a
pathway to the gospel, emphasizing the importance of diving deep into
the actual words and phrases of the inspired text. It encourages
preachers to build sermons on the cross rather than just towards it,
highlighting the power of imputed righteousness in enabling obedience to
biblical imperatives. The focus is on wrestling with the text to reveal
its true reality and offering it as a blood-bought gift to the listeners
for understanding, embracing, and obedience.

------------------------------------------------------------------------
CONTENT
------------------------------------------------------------------------

So, I don't think that the controlling question, how can I preach the
gospel from this text, has, over the last 40 years or so, produced the
kind of preaching that makes for strong, Bible-saturated, doctrinally
rich, mature, stable, counter-cultural churches with a passion for
radical obedience to God's word. I don't think it has served us well.
So, I'm gonna offer you an alternative to those who think that preaching
Christ or preaching the gospel from every text means dealing in some
general comments about what the text says, hovering just above the text,
seldom explaining the very words and phrases, and then moving on to the
real concern of making a gospel crescendo with Christ and his atonement
and the forgiveness of sin so everybody can walk out relieved.

I think that kind of preaching tends to dull the expectations of the
people that they might actually see fresh, new, beautiful, tough, deep,
scary, wonderful things in the text. I think it tends to treat the
actual words and phrases and logic of the inspired text as having minor
significance by giving the impression that they don't need to be treated
with any particular rigor or care. They're just preparations for the
main thing that's coming.

I think it tends to train people in bad habits of how to read their
Bibles by diminishing the rigor and earnestness of meditating on the
words of God day and night. I think it tends to weaken the seriousness
of practical biblical imperatives on how to live the Christian life in
all holiness and purity and love by inserting the substitutionary
atonement at critical moments when the emphasis should be falling on the
urgency of obedience because that's the urgency of the text. So I want
to commend to you an alternative to making every text a pathway to the
gospel, to having the driving question in your sermon preparation be how
can I preach the gospel from this text? I want to wave a yellow flag in
front of the saying that is so often attributed to Spurgeon.

Take your text and make a beeline to the cross. Nobody knows if Spurgeon
said that. At least I can't find any Spurgeon scholars who can show that
he did, but that doesn't matter.

It's not the point. Here's the point. Instead of taking your text and
making a beeline to the cross, I think you should take the cross and
make a beeline to your text.

Instead of building your sermon toward the cross, build your sermon on
the cross. Instead of preaching biblical imperatives as pointers to
Christ's perfection and imputed righteousness, I think we should preach
imputed righteousness as the power to obey biblical imperatives, or to
put it another way, standing on the power and the promises bought for
God's elect by the blood of Jesus, wrestle, wrestle with the words and
phrases and sentences and flow of thought in the text. Wrestle with them
until you see the reality that's really there in those words, and then
show it to your people, and show them how you saw it, and then offer it
to them.

Offer it to them as a blood-bought gift, urging them with all your might
to see it and understand it and embrace it and be glad in it and obey it
and share it. Let the reality of the text be the crescendo of the
sermon.

========================================================================
Video: https://sermonindex2.b-cdn.net/xeh_zQZ6NME.mp4
Source: https://sermonindex.net/speakers/john-piper/rethinking-cross-centered-preaching/
========================================================================