The Relationship of the Gospel to Christian Living

One of the dynamics of preaching involves the selection of a limited amount of text that can be reasonably dealt with in the short time available for any one sermon. Preachers with a taste for expository preaching will often have recourse to series of sermons in which the longer text is divided up into manageable portions. Preaching through a New Testament epistle is frequently done on this basis, even if not every single part of the text is engaged. The individual parts become separated into the distinct sermons, and the separation is magnified by the fact that a whole week elapses between each one of them.

The potential danger of this method is for the isolation of texts about Christian living from those texts that explicitly expound the nature of the gospel.

The potential danger of this method is for the isolation of texts about Christian living from those texts that explicitly expound the nature of the gospel. Thus, in preaching from Ephesians, for example, the bulk of the ethical matters arise in the last three chapters of the book while the first three chapters have dealt mainly with the theological issues that underpin Christian living. The logic is obvious when the epistle is read as a whole, but can be obscured by a lengthy process of fragmentation.

If eternal life is not the reward for meritorious living but the gift of grace, then all ethical imperatives are given as implications of the gospel and should be clearly seen as such.

One of the gains of biblical theology in preaching is that it helps us to appreciate the inner structure of the apostolic testimony and its relationship to Christian living. In Pauline theological terms we are concerned with the relationship of sanctification to justification. In broader biblical-theological terms we are concerned with the relationship of law to grace. If eternal life is not the reward for meritorious living but the gift of grace, then all ethical imperatives are given as implications of the gospel and should be clearly seen as such. The alternative is to preach law and to leave the impression that the essence of Christianity is what we do rather than what God has done. Legalism easily creeps in even when we think we have avoided it. The preacher may well understand the relationship of law and grace, but the structure of the sermon program may undermine it in the thinking of many in the congregation.

The alternative is to preach law and to leave the impression that the essence of Christianity is what we do rather than what God has done.

 ~Graeme Goldsworthy, Preaching the Whole Bible as Christian Scripture, 59.