Presenting the Gospel
How faithful preachers bring every text to Christ: Tim Keller first, with Clowney, Chapell, Greidanus and the older voices beside him. A primer for anyone who writes or teaches from Scripture.
Every passage of Scripture belongs to one story, and that story is about Jesus. He said so himself on the Emmaus road (Luke 24:27). The hard part is not believing that. It is finding the road from this particular text to him without forcing it, and without stopping short at advice.
The preachers gathered here disagree on details, but they agree on that task. Their methods give us tools; none of them gives us a formula.
Part one
What the gospel is
Keller liked to say the gospel can be told two ways, and a healthy church needs both. Told as an answer, it is about God, sin, Christ and faith: how a guilty person is made right with a holy God. Told as a story, it runs from creation through fall and redemption to restoration: how God is putting the whole world right. The first keeps the cross personal. The second keeps it as large as the world.
In his 2008 essay "The Gospel in All Its Forms" he went further. The New Testament writers do not all use the same vocabulary. Each form is the same gospel in a different register, and each reaches a different human longing.
| The register | Strongest in | The longing it answers | Texts to start from |
|---|---|---|---|
| The kingdom | Matthew, Mark, Luke | A world put right; justice; a true king | Mark 1:15; Luke 4:18–21 |
| Eternal life | John | Life that does not fade; light in darkness | John 3:16; 10:10; 17:3 |
| Justification | Paul | Guilt removed; a verdict we cannot earn | Romans 3:21–26; Galatians 2:16 |
| Adoption | Paul, John | Belonging; a Father; an inheritance | Romans 8:15–17; 1 John 3:1 |
| Exile and homecoming | The prophets, Hebrews | Home; an end to wandering | Isaiah 40:1–11; Hebrews 11:13–16 |
| New creation | Paul, Revelation | Renewal; rest; all things made new | 2 Corinthians 5:17; Revelation 21:1–5 |
The point is not to rotate words for variety. It is to let the passage choose. A psalm of exile should be answered with homecoming, not with a courtroom.
Part two
How we miss it
Keller's 1996 article "Preaching Morality in an Amoral Age" named two errors that look like opposites and are really the same mistake. Everyone in the room is drifting toward one of them.
Religion. Be good, try harder, and God will accept you. The elder brother in Luke 15. It produces pride in those who succeed and despair in those who fail.
Irreligion. Be true to yourself; no one has a claim on you. The younger brother. It promises freedom and delivers a new master.
A third error, the preacher's own. The sermon makes its point, then turns to Jesus with a stock phrase that could close any sermon. The text never actually led there.
The gospel is not a midpoint between the first two. It is a third way that undoes both: we are more sinful than the moralist admits and more loved than the relativist imagines. Bryan Chapell calls the first error "the deadly be's": sermons that end with be like this hero, be good, or be disciplined, with no grace that makes any of it possible.
Part three
The models
Tim Keller
- Core idea
- Preach the gospel every time, from every text, to the heart and to the culture at once. A sermon should edify the believer and make sense to the skeptic in the same breath.
- Signature moves
- Finds the turn to Christ in the passage's own image or word. Names both lost brothers. Voices the listener's objection better than the listener could, then answers it. Diagnoses the heart's false gods (approval, control, comfort, power) and shows how Christ alone can bear the weight they cannot. Enters a culture's hopes, challenges them where they fail, and shows Christ fulfilling them.
- Christ in all Scripture
- In Preaching he traces the road through every major theme, figure, image and deliverance story in the Bible. This is where his well-known "true and better" lines come from: Jesus as the true and better Adam, Abraham, Moses. In his own sermons, though, he almost never used the phrase (see part four).
- Borrow
- The two brothers. The gospel in all its forms. The objection voiced and answered. Idols as the diagnosis.
Edmund Clowney
- Core idea
- The Old Testament is not a book of moral examples. It is the unfolding of God's one plan of salvation, and every part points forward.
- His rectangle
-
Go round the rectangle in order. Jump straight from the event to us and you get moralism. Jump straight from a detail to Christ, skipping what it meant then, and you get allegory.1 · The eventWhat happened in the text2 · Its meaning thenWhat God was showing his people4 · For usWhat it means now, through Christ3 · Fulfilled in ChristHow Jesus completes that meaning
- Borrow
- Ask what a text meant to its first hearers before asking what it means in Christ.
Bryan Chapell
- Core idea
- Every passage was written because of some aspect of our fallenness, which he calls the Fallen Condition Focus. Find it, and you have found what the grace in the text is for.
- Four ways a text shows Christ
- It may be predictive (it foretells him), preparatory (it readies the way), reflective (it mirrors a truth about him) or resultant (it flows from his finished work).
- Borrow
- Name the brokenness before you write. Avoid the deadly be's.
Sidney Greidanus
- Seven roads
- Redemptive-historical progression; promise and fulfilment; typology; analogy; longitudinal themes; New Testament references; contrast. Most texts open onto two or three of them.
- Borrow
- A disciplined menu that keeps the turn to Christ honest. If none of the seven fits, the turn is probably forced.
The older voices
- Augustine
- Read Scripture by the rule of love for God and neighbour. A preacher should teach, delight and move. The heart is restless until it rests in God. (Confessions; On Christian Teaching)
- Jonathan Edwards
- True faith lives in the affections. Preach for light in the mind and heat in the heart together. (Religious Affections)
- Spurgeon
- His well-known counsel: as every village has a road to London, every text has a road to Christ, so find it and take it. Plain words and urgency.
- Lloyd-Jones
- Preaching is theology set alight, reasoned and on fire. (Preaching and Preachers)
- Richard Sibbes
- Christ does not break the bruised reed. Tenderness toward the weak believer. (The Bruised Reed)
- Pascal
- Humanity's greatness and misery together, and only Christ explains both. (Pensées) Catholic
- C. S. Lewis
- Our deepest longings point past this world. Find the desire, then show what it was for. (Mere Christianity, The Weight of Glory)
- Jack Miller
- His summary of the gospel, paraphrased: we are worse than we ever dared admit and more loved than we ever dared hope. Keller learned it from him.
- Read with care
- George MacDonald Not Reformed and Julian of Norwich Not Reformed write with rare tenderness about the Father's love, but both lean toward universal salvation. Their warmth is worth having; their conclusions are not.
Part four
Keller in the pulpit
What Keller taught about preaching and what he actually did are not quite the same, so we checked. We read 175 of his sermon transcripts and counted how often each move appears. The bars show the share of sermons that make each move at least once.
Out of 175 sermons. In a closer reading of 12, every one found its turn to Christ in the passage's own noun, image or absence, and 8 put a named non-Christian thinker in the room to answer.
What the count teaches
The slogan was for the classroom. "True and better" summarises the method; it was never the method. In the pulpit Keller reached Christ through the text's own words every time.
He quoted people to answer them. His witnesses were often skeptics, novelists and philosophers, brought in so the gospel could reply. Quoting only those who already agree with us is a different habit.
"Idol" was one diagnosis among many. He spoke more often of identity, of being justified, and of hope than of idols. The heart has more than one way to go wrong.
He almost always ended at the cross and in prayer. Structure varied; the destination did not.
Part five
One text, start to finish
Exodus 17:1–7: Israel at Rephidim with no water, the people quarrelling with Moses, and God's command to strike the rock. Here is how the tools work together. This is our own worked example, not a summary of anyone's sermon.
Chapell's question first. The people do not just thirst; they put God on trial: "Is the LORD among us or not?" (v. 7). We do the same whenever a need goes unmet and we conclude God has failed us.
Clowney's second corner. Moses is told to take the staff he struck the Nile with, the rod of judgment, and walk ahead of the elders as if to a courtroom. God says, "I will stand before you there on the rock" (v. 6). The people deserve the verdict. The rod falls instead on the rock where God stands.
Paul says plainly, "the Rock was Christ" (1 Corinthians 10:4). This is Greidanus's New Testament road and the text's own image. Jesus takes the blow of judgment that a grumbling people deserved, and from him flows living water (John 7:37–39).
Justification, the courtroom, is right here, because the passage is literally a trial. Eternal life is close behind through John 7. Kingdom or adoption would be forced.
The moralist says, "I would never grumble like that." The drifter says, "Why trust a God who lets you thirst?" The struck rock answers both: you did grumble, and he was struck for you anyway.
"Isn't it cruel that God let them get that thirsty?" Answer it honestly: the thirst exposed what was already in their hearts, and the answer was not a lecture but water.
When the need is unmet, do not put God on trial. He has already stood in the dock in our place. Come and drink.
A short prayer at the struck rock.
Part six
A working checklist
For anyone writing a devotion, a lesson or a sermon. Not every box every time, but the first four nearly always.
- I can name the brokenness this text addresses.
- I know what it meant to its first hearers before I bring it to Christ.
- My turn to Christ uses a word, image or gap that is actually in this passage, and I can name which of Greidanus's roads it travels.
- I chose the gospel's register (kingdom, life, the courtroom, family, home, new creation) because the text asked for it.
- Both the moralist and the drifter would feel addressed.
- I have voiced the strongest objection a thoughtful skeptic would raise, and answered it.
- If I quote someone who disagrees, I reply to them.
- The application comes from grace received, not from "be like, be good, be disciplined."
- It ends at the cross, or in prayer, or both.
- Timothy Keller: Preaching (2015); Center Church (2012); The Prodigal God (2008); Counterfeit Gods (2009); "The Gospel in All Its Forms" (2008); "Preaching Morality in an Amoral Age" (1996); 175 sermon transcripts from Gospel in Life.
- Edmund Clowney, Preaching Christ in All of Scripture; The Unfolding Mystery. Bryan Chapell, Christ-Centered Preaching. Sidney Greidanus, Preaching Christ from the Old Testament.
- Augustine, Edwards, Spurgeon, Lloyd-Jones, Sibbes, Pascal, Lewis and Jack Miller as cited above.