Is Our Preaching Christian?
GARDNER C. TAYLOR is Pastor Emeritus of Concord Baptist Church of Christ in Brooklyn, New York, where he served for 42 years, before retiring in 1990.
The New Testament carries in John 14:26 the words credited to Jesus in which he set forth the Christian doctrine of the “Trinity: Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.” There he said that “the Comforter, which is the Holy Ghost, whom the Father will send in my name, he shall teach you all things, and bring all things to your remembrance, whatsoever I have said unto you.”1
The first of the seven ecumenical Christian Councils, out of which we get the Nicene Creed and in which 220 Bishops came together at Nicea in A.D. 325, asserted belief in Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. In the fourth century, following the New Testament and Nicea, there was begun the Trinitarian Benediction taken directly from the closing verse of Paul’s second letter to the church at Corinth: “The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Ghost, be with you all. Amen.”
2 From the fourth century forward, this has been the benediction most frequently used in Christendom.
Now there is an heretical preaching which falsely calls itself Christian and which practically ignores the Person of Jesus in the Trinity. Entire so-called Christian sermons are palmed off on unsuspecting, unenlightened congregations with little or no mention of our Lord Jesus. This is “binitarianism”; it is certainly not trinitarianism.
Any attempt, for whatever reason, to eliminate the “Jesus Presence” from the New Testament eviscerates the Faith and makes of Christianity a vague and pale vestige. Our Lord’s life here among us is an enactment in time of what is forever true and inevitably true to the Divine Nature. It was he who told us, “He that hath seen me hath seen the Father.”
3 Jesus is in time what God the Father is in eternity.
Our preaching is spurious and spiritually criminal when it does not exalt Jesus. There may be a solid reason why spurious contemporary preaching is afraid to speak of Jesus. This preaching makes the Father All Glorious a “cash cow.” You can have anything you want. The God of all creation exists to cater to your whims. This is “slot machine religion”—put in a prayer, pull the lever, and out pours the goodies. And poor gullible people will fall for this scam.
Such preaching dare not indicate that our Lord’s life among us was rife with disappointment and rejection. He said, “foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have nests; but the son ofman hath not where to lay his head.”
4 To be sure, there is victory and reward, without number, but they follow “hard trials and great tribulation.”
Jesus’ experience established that true Christian preaching pictures him as “Heaven’s Champion” in a life and death struggle with evil—no, a life and death and life struggle. In prelude to crucifixion, Jesus snatched the mask from false claims of religious purity and spurious political assertions of authority. There near the last, Jesus stood alone; but he forced the High Priest, successor to Aaron, to repudiate his own claim to spiritual authority by producing two lying witnesses, in direct violation of a paramount edict of his faith: “thou shalt not bear falsewitness.”
5 Jesus also unmasked the counterfeit claims of government to be just and above connivance and sleaziness. Pilate, representative of the supposed supreme power and justice of Rome, was reduced to a dastardly act of washing his hands and cravenly surrendering to the mob, though he found no fault in Jesus. At the end of Friday’s crime against God and with a shout of victory, Jesus said he was in “safe hands.” The tidings of Resurrection Sunday were announcement for all time that the victory lies in and beyond Calvary, not in the absence of it. Taking precedence over all of that is the salvific work of Calvary where Jesus returned our souls to God from the fiendish grip of sin. So much for a cheap caricature of the Gospel called “name it and claim it’’ or “blab it and grab it.”
There is another “Binitarianism,” which makes the spurious claim to being Christian preaching. It is the exaltation of the Holy Spirit to the center of worship. Did not Jesus make it clear as to the work of the Third Person of the Trinity:“.…he shall glorify me.…”
6 There it is! The Third Person glorifies the Son! The Holy Spirit’s work is to lift up Jesus Christ. There is no “free standing” Holy Spirit in the New Testament.
Therefore, the Holy Spirit is not self-honoring and is in service to the Father and to Jesus. True Christian preaching will test the authority of the claim about the work and gifts of the Spirit by the Person and work and manner of Jesus.
No wonder that Paul under the direct influence of the Lord Jesus said, “He that speaketh in an unknown tongue edifieth himself.”
7 Is this Christian? Besides, in the
glossolalia of the book of Acts—in the speaking in tongues, there were multiple translations so that they were heard by every man “in our own tongue, wherein we were born.”
8 Anything else is not consistent with Pentecost in the New Testament.
Likewise, true Christian preaching in the New Testament and beyond was never acrobatics and gymnastics. That is pulpit vaudeville. Of course, such antics excite “silly people,”
9 but do not edify the people of God. Preaching which is not biblical is not Christian—maybe motivational, popular perhaps; Christian, No!
He or she who would preach a true and faithful Gospel must beware of garish costumes, a gaudy jewelry, and all manner of antics designed to dazzle a gullible populace rather than to exalt Jesus and feed the people of Christ. Any preacher so tempted ought to read Acts 12:21-23: “And upon a set day Herod, arrayed in royal apparel, sat upon his throne, and made an oration unto them. And the people gave a shout, saying, It is the voice of a god, and not of a man. And immediately the angel of the Lord smote him, because he gave not God the glory: and he was eaten of worms, and gave up the ghost.”
Let those of us who preach remember what Paul Scherer said long ago: “Worship is the time when we bring the gods we have made before the God who has made us,” including the gods the preacher has made.
“The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Ghost, be with you all. Amen,”
10 After 71 years as a preacher, the above is sent forth as my final attempt to “contend for the faith which was once delivered unto the saints.”
11
NOTES
1. All Scriptures quoted in this sermon are from the King James Version of the Bible.
2. 2 Corinthians 13:14.
3. John 14:9.
4. Matthew 8:20.
5. Exodus 20:16.
6. John 16:14.
7. 1 Corinthians 14:4.
8. Acts 2:8.
9. See 2 Timothy 3:6.
10. 2 Corinthians 13:14.
11. Jude 3.
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