Jared Wilson’s The Prodigal Church: A Gentle Manifesto against the Status Quo (Crossway, 2015) articulately points out problems in many “seeker churches,” aka “attractional churches.” He shows how some emphasize self-improvement or life-enhancement rather than God-enhancement: “If the purpose of worship is to feel good, we stop worshiping God.” He’s concerned when a church seems more like a concert, and he explains, regarding youth ministries, “what you win them with is what you win them to.”

Wilson also worries about pastors hired for rhetorical ability rather than biblical wisdom, and about eisegesis pushing out exegesis as Bible study leaders ask not, “What does this text mean?” but, “What does this text mean to you?” Some of Wilson’s pithy remarks: “Fortune cookie preaching will make brittle, hollow, syrupy Christians. … Preaching even a ‘positive’ practical message with no gospel-centrality amounts to preaching the law. … Don’t treat the Bible as an instruction manual. Treat it as a life preserver.”

Wilson understands that the gospel is good news, not good advice, yet he says within our ministry-industrial complexes, “we’re looking at how best to herd the sheep instead of how best to feed them.” When he looks at worship, Wilson asks, “Does this element exalt God or man?” And he notes that “both irreligion and religion are fundamentally self-salvation projects. They are equally self-righteous, even though the former is predicated on being automatically righteous and the latter aims to earn righteousness.”

Here we’re publishing Chapter 4, with Crossway’s permission. Please keep this in mind as you read: “Grace is what makes Christianity unique among all world religions and philosophies. Only the Christian face has grace. No human would have made this up. We love our merit badges too much. None of us would have come up with the concept of divine unmerited favor. None of us would have invented the notion that we cannot be good enough or smart enough, that we could not somehow become gods ourselves.”

Wilson, a former pastor, serves at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Kansas City and, among other tasks, manages the seminary’s website for gospel-centered resources. —Marvin Olasky

Chapter 4: The Bible Is Not an Instruction Manual

Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth.

Ever heard the Bible explained that way? It’s a handy mnemonic that certainly has some truth to it. But does it get at the heart of what the Bible really is?

While being trained in the ministry, I learned how to craft sermons from listening to a lot of messages from our youth ministry, and from asking some pastors to help me. The gist of the enterprise was this: I needed to come up with a spiritual topic or “felt need” to address, something practical that my audience would be interested in or otherwise just needed to know. After identifying the topic, I needed to draft three to four sermon points, and these needed to be points of application, things my audience could actually do. The emphasis was constantly on practical application, not merely on intellectual information. The sermon needed some handles.

When my practical steps were listed, I needed to find biblical support for them. Anything that could not be supported with Scripture had to be rewritten or abandoned altogether. Every sermon had to be, in the parlance of the times, “Bible-based.” (It is not uncommon now even to see on the websites of some attractional churches that their messages are “Bible-based” or that they offer “truth based on the Bible.”) So then began the work of digging through the concordance to find Bible verses that might match and support each point.

It was typically a good idea to find a verse that used wording similar to the message point, and if you found something close, you could always tweak the message point to match the language of the verse or, alternatively, look at the verse in other Bible versions to see if the wording in one of those versions better matched the wording of the message point. This work could sometimes take just as long as writing the original applicational outline because we didn’t use much Bible software back then, and of course the Internet (which today offers Bible Gateway and YouVersion and plenty of other resources) was not commonly used either. In the end, it was common to see a sermon that contained references from multiple Bible versions—the result of searching for just the right wording.

It took me many years to unlearn this approach to preaching. But in the end I began to discover that the approach was very much upside down. I had learned to preach by making the Bible’s words serve what I wanted to say rather than by making my words serve what the Bible says. To teach and preach in this way is implicitly to say that the Bible can’t be trusted to set the agenda, and that my ideas are better than the Bible at driving change in my audience. One prominent preacher says as much, as we’ll soon see.

I’ve also come to see the Bible in a different way. I’ve always believed it was God’s Word, of course, and that this makes it living and active (Heb. 4:12) and perfectly capable of making us complete Christians (2 Tim. 3:16–17). But I had been treating it more as a reference book than as a story, and more as a manual of good advice than as an announcement of good news.

So what is the Bible? The way so many of us trained in the attractional church came to see it—as God’s “how to” book—doesn’t seem quite right when we carefully look at what its own pages say. And I fear that the way we used the Bible actually accomplished the opposite of what we intended.

The Shrinking Message of the Enlarging Church

For those of us who have felt convicted about the upside-downness of all the applicational teaching we’ve done, it stings when influential preachers whom many of us deeply respect suggest, as Andy Stanley once did, that the alternative of expository preaching is lazy. In an interview conducted by our mutual friend Ed Stetzer, Stanley says,

Guys that preach verse-by-verse through books of the Bible—that is just cheating. It’s cheating because that would be easy, first of all. That isn’t how you grow people. No one in the Scripture modeled that. There’s not one example of that.[1]

I have learned quite a bit from Andy Stanley and have used some of his resources in my church. But I find these words very unhelpful. I also think he is wrong on his two major claims: (1) that preaching “verse by verse” directly from Bible passages isn’t how people grow; and (2) that there’s no example of that in the Bible itself—and we’ll see why, later in this chapter. For now, however, let’s consider another question: What has been the net effect of the last several decades of the applicational focus? What is the fruit of having treated the Bible like an instruction manual?

As suggested earlier, it’s my contention that when the church is run as a provider of spiritual goods and services, and slowly stops asking, first, “What glorifies God?” and begins asking more and more, “What do our customers want?” what the customer wants becomes more central in the life of the church. The functional ideologies of pragmatism and consumerism erode our theology, which becomes more flexible and less faithful.

The wider evangelical church is suffering terribly from theological bankruptcy. A recent Barna survey is particularly revealing. Their report reads in part,

Overall, the current research revealed that only 9% of all American adults have a biblical worldview. Among the sixty subgroups of respondents that the survey explored was one defined by those who said they have made a personal commitment to Jesus Christ that is important in their life today and that they are certain that they will go to Heaven after they die only because they confessed their sins and accepted Christ as their savior. Labeled “born again Christians,” the study discovered that they were twice as likely as the average adult to possess a biblical worldview. However, that meant that even among born again Christians, less than one out of every five (19%) had such an outlook on life.[2]

The Barna Group’s research goes on to reveal that 79 percent of those identifying as “born again Christians” firmly believe the Bible is accurate in all its teachings—which is pretty good, I guess—but it also reveals that only 46 percent of these “born agains” believe in absolute moral truth, only 40 percent believe Satan is real, and only 47 percent strongly reject the idea that you can earn your way to heaven. Further, only 62 percent of the born again Christians surveyed strongly believe that Jesus was sinless.

This data is very sobering. It indicts evangelicals, yes, but surely it also indicts the information centers they are learning from. It demonstrates that over the last generation, not only has America become less Christian, but professing Christians have become less Christian. I think this is the direct result of evangelicalism’s relentless prioritization of what seems useful over what is true. We have tended to favor the practical half-truth rather than the (allegedly) impractical whole truth.

Brothers and sisters, we ought to recover the roots of real Christianity before those who care are too few to do anything useful about it. Part of that recovery will involve identifying some of the factors that contribute to the problem. Some of these will be difficult to consider, but we ought to consider them anyway. Some of the problems we might explore are these:

1. Pastors are increasingly hired for their management skills or rhetorical ability over and above their biblical wisdom or their meeting of the biblical qualifications for eldership.

Our shepherds are increasingly hired for their dynamic speaking or catalytic leadership rather than their commitment to and exposition of the Scriptures, and for their laboring in the increase in attendance rather than the increase of gospel proclamation.

Now, of course, none of those contrasted qualities are mutually exclusive. Pastors can be both skillful managers and biblically wise; they can be both great speakers and great students of Scripture; and they can both attract crowds and proclaim the gospel. The problem is that, while they are not mutually exclusive, the latter qualities in each contrast have lost priority and consequently have lost favor. We have not prospered theologically or spiritually when we emphasize the professionalization of the pastorate.

2. The equating of “worship” with just one creative portion of the weekly worship service.

The dilution of the understanding of worship is a direct result of the dilution of theology in the church. The applicational, topical approach to Bible understanding has the consequence of making us think (and live) in segmented ways. The music leader takes the stage to say, “We’re gonna start with a time of worship.” Is the whole service not a time of worship? Isn’t the sermon an act of worship?

Isn’t all of life meant to be an act of worship?

One reason we have struggled to develop fully devoted followers of Jesus is that we incorrectly assign our terminology (equating worship with music only) and thereby train our people to think in truncated, reductionistic ways.

3. The prevalent eisegesis in Bible study classes and small groups.

“Eisegesis” basically means “reading into the Bible.” It is the opposite of “exegesis,” the process of examining the text and “drawing out” its true meaning. Many leaders today either don’t have the spiritual gift of teaching or haven’t received adequate training, and the unfortunate result is that most of our Bible studies are rife with phrases like, “What does this text mean to you?” as opposed to, “What does this text mean?” Application supplants interpretation in the work of Bible study, so it has become less important to see what the Bible means and more important to make sure the Bible is meaningful to us.

4. The vast gulf between the work of theology and the life of the church.

We have this notion that theology is something that takes place somewhere “out there” in the seminaries or libraries while we here at home are doing the real work of the Christian faith with our church programs. In many churches, theology is seen as purely academic, the lifeless intellectual work for the nerds in the church or, worse, the Pharisees.

5. Biblical illiteracy.

Our people don’t know their Bible very well, and this is in large part the fault of a generation of wispy preaching and teaching (in the church and in the home). Connected to this factor is the church’s accommodation and assimilation of the culture’s rapid shifting from text-based knowledge to image-based knowledge. I’ll say more about that in the next chapter, but when it comes to the text itself, I suspect that a lot of the superficial faith out there results from teaching that treats the Bible like Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations. Fortune-cookie preaching will make brittle, hollow, syrupy Christians.

6. A theologically lazy and methodologically consumeristic/sensationalistic approach to the sacraments.

The rise of the “scoreboard” approach to attendance reporting, some of the extreme examples of spontaneous baptism services, the neglect of the Lord’s Supper or the abuse of it through fancifulness with the elements or lack of clear directives in presenting it—these are all the result of evangelicalism’s theological bankruptcy. We don’t think biblically about these matters, because we’re thinking largely along the lines of “what works?” and consequently we might make a big splash with our productions but not produce much faith.

The source of all of these factors, if they may be reckoned accurate, is a fundamental misuse of the Bible by the leaders entrusted with preaching and teaching it. And the grand result of all of these factors is that as our churches get larger, our message keeps shrinking. We fill our buildings with scores and scores of people, but we’ve reduced the basic message to fit the size of an individualistic faith.

If the Bible is not essentially an instruction manual for practical application, then, what is it? If it’s not mainly about what we need to do, what is it about? If it’s not about us, who is it about?

The Bible Is about Jesus

About Jesus? “Well, duh,” you’re thinking right now. That goes without saying.

And I agree. It has been going without saying. But we need to keep saying it. We don’t “go” without saying this. The Bible is about Jesus. Front to back, page to page, Genesis 1:1 to Revelation 22:21, the written Word of God is primarily and essentially about the saving revelation of the divine Word of God.

Jesus himself said so, for instance, and here we find our first counterargument against Andy Stanley’s claim that there’s no biblical example of someone preaching through the Bible “verse by verse.” In Luke 24, we see two of Jesus’s disciples walking on the road to Emmaus and discussing the report they’d gotten of Christ’s resurrection. Suddenly Jesus himself sidles up next to them. He asks them what they’re talking about. They don’t recognize him at first, so they explain that they are discussing the matter of Jesus, expressing their confusion about his having been given up to be crucified when all along they thought he was the one sent to redeem Israel. And they also weren’t sure what to make of this astounding claim about his resurrection. Then Jesus does something very interesting: “And beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he interpreted to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself ” (Luke 24:27).

Basically, Jesus went through the entire Old Testament, step by step, and showed them how it all was about him. We don’t have the text of his sermon reprinted for us—I wish we did!—but we can see first of all that it was expository, because it began with the books of Moses (the first five books of the Bible) and systematically proceeded through the works of the Prophets; and we can see, second, that it was self-centered, by which I mean of course Christ-centered. He didn’t simply recite the texts; he “interpreted” them. He was preaching.

In 2 Corinthians 1:20, Paul tells us that all the biblical promises “find their Yes in him.” The book of Hebrews is a great sustained example of this truth, showing us how all that led up to Christ was preaching Christ from the shadows, as it were, even reminding us that the mighty acts of the great heroes of the Old Testament were not about themselves but about acting “by faith” in the promise of the Christ to come.

Indeed, everything the Bible teaches, whether theological or practical, and everywhere it teaches, whether historical or poetical or applicational or prophetic, is meant to draw us closer to Christ, seeing him with more clarity and loving him with more of our affections. The Bible is about Jesus.

Well, this may all be good and true, but how helpful is it? Does this kind of approach to teaching and preaching—Christ-centered expository preaching—actually help people grow? Does it effect any change? Or is it simply an intellectual exercise better for a fatter mind than a fitter life?

The response of the disciples to Jesus’s sermon on the way to Emmaus is intriguing. “They said to each other, ‘Did not our hearts burn within us while he talked to us on the road, while he opened to us the Scriptures?’” (Luke 24:32). Something happened to them by the preaching of the Word that runs deeper than an exciting experience, truer than an inspirational feeling. Their hearts burned within them. Their affections were stirred—for Christ! And in the ensuing verses we see how this motivated them out into mission, to go and tell about Jesus.

We have a similar biblical example of life-changing expository preaching in Nehemiah 8, where Ezra and his preaching team read the entire book of the Law to the gathered people, “and they gave the sense, so that the people understood the reading” (v. 8). The result? “[A]ll the people wept as they heard the words of the Law” (v. 9). They had fallen under Spiritual conviction from the preaching. In response, Nehemiah and Ezra proclaim the time of mourning over and the day of joyous feasting ready to begin.

What had happened? They preached directly from the Word of God, the people were moved by this preaching, and the result was gospel-fueled worship.

I won’t belabor the point, but I will restate it: The entire Bible is essentially about the announcement of the gospel of Jesus Christ, and this information ought to shape the way we preach, because the way we preach will shape the way our churches treat the Bible and how they will grow in the faith.

Coming to the Bible in this way, then, as if its words are better than mine, as if my words must serve to illuminate and explain its words, instead of the other way around, will require affirming that all my hard work in preparing a sermon is wasted if the sermon doesn’t end up preaching Jesus as the point of human existence and reflecting that the Word of God is more powerful than my helpful tips.

This isn’t cheating. It is in fact hard work, at least spiritually, because it always necessitates our dying to ourselves. The sermon prep may not take as long—thank God!—but the impulse to go first to Christ can be more difficult, and counterintuitive. We must have a stronger faith, to trust that a sermon mainly about Jesus will “help people grow” more than our set of tips will.

I will go so far as to suggest to you, actually, that not to preach Christ is not to preach a Christian sermon. If you preach from the Bible, but do not proclaim the finished work of Christ, you may as well be preaching in a Jewish synagogue or a Mormon temple. Ask yourself, as you look over your sermon outline or manuscript, “Could this message be preached in a Unitarian church?” Ask, “Did Jesus have to die and rise again for this stuff to be true?”

Getting to the understanding that the entire Bible is about Jesus is the first big step toward believing an even harder truth:

The Primary Message of the Bible Is That the Work Is Already Done

One night on the way home from small group, I listened to the guy on the local Christian radio station give a ten-minute presentation of what he had learned in church the previous day. It all boiled down to an appeal to make Jesus, in his words, our “role model.” It was all very nice and inspirational.

There is indeed no better role model than Jesus. You won’t find me arguing against that. And wanting Jesus for his benefits (in his gospel) but not for his cross (in our obedience) is a serious problem in Christianity. But the problem with this fellow’s recollection of his pastor’s sermon was that it showed no indication of actual gospel content.

It could have been delivered by the Dalai Lama. The Buddhist actor Richard Gere thinks Jesus is an awesome role model. So do many atheists. The majority of the thinking world acknowledges that Jesus is a good role model, and in fact, most of them wish Christians would act more like Jesus (or at least, more like their perception of Jesus).

This ought to hint at the inherent deficiency in the “Jesus as role model” message: “Be like Jesus,” by itself, is not good news. At one point in his gushing review, the radio dude appealed to Christians’ interest in self-help books and advice columns, but chastised them, saying, “We read all of those things, but we never think to go to the Bible for God’s advice!” As if the alternative to advice from the world is more advice, just from the Bible this time.

The gospel is not good advice; it is good news.

In the attractional church, the messages are predominantly of the “life application” variety, meant to make the Christian walk seem more practical or relatable or appealing. In other words, the attractional church is big on advice. Acknowledging, of course, that much applicational preaching contains proclamation and that good proclamational preaching ought to contain application, we nevertheless ought to trend more toward the proclamation. The best preaching contains both proclamation (what God has done) and application (what we should do), but the difference in Christ-centered expository preaching is that the trust for power in application is placed in the content of the proclamation. In Breaking the Missional Code, Ed Stetzer and David Putnam write,

We think that a common mistake many seeker-driven churches made early on was trying to communicate relevant messages that had little or no biblical content. It seemed that the sermons were basically explanations of common-sense wisdom, or perhaps biblical principles, but the Bible did not set the shape or agenda of the message.

We must always remember that “consequently, faith comes from hearing the message, and the message is heard through the word of Christ” (Rom. 10:17) and “the word of God is living and active. Sharper than any double-edged sword, it penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and attitudes of the heart” (Heb. 4:12). The Bible is not simply a tool for scriptural footnoting or common-sense wisdom.[3]

The typical applicational message tends to overemphasize our good works while a good proclamational message will emphasize God’s finished work. Let’s all agree: It’s only bad pastors who don’t want to see life change in their people. None of us doesn’t want to help people grow. But when it comes down to how people grow, to what actually catalyzes people toward change in their life toward obedience and service, we reach for answers. We provide a new set each week in handy outline form, inserted right there in the bulletin. But what if all this emphasis on steps and tips isn’t actually the best way to help people grow? Here are some challenging thoughts:

The preacher must courageously and ferociously believe that transformation occurs through the interplay of God’s Word and Spirit. He is simply a vessel, a broken jar of clay, spilling out before the people the water of life. The Holy Spirit always uses the revealed Word of God to open the eyes of both the unbeliever and believer to the wonders of the gospel. The preacher should not feel as if he is carrying the burden of life change; he merely carries the burden of faithful exposition and the robust proclamation of the text at hand, trusting that God’s Word will never return void (Isa. 55:10–11). This is the wonder and weight of preaching.[4]

The essential difference between applicational preaching and proclamational preaching ultimately depends on how much the preacher wishes to make of Jesus. Do you want people to walk away thinking Jesus is a big deal? Then you have to make Jesus look like a big deal. You cannot assume that simply telling people that Jesus is a big deal will work. People don’t believe what you tell them is important; they believe what you show them is important. So if in our preaching we spend most of our time emphasizing good works and then a little time saying, “But really, Jesus’s work is most important,” we’ve already shown them with our sermon imbalance what we really believe.

Proclamational preaching makes much of the gospel, believing that proclaiming the finished and sufficient work of Christ for salvation is, as Paul says, “of first importance” (1 Cor. 15:3). The applicational preacher either presupposes the gospel or relegates it to the conclusion of his message, believing that what’s of most importance is exhorting the congregation to live in more Christlike ways.

To be clear (again): We should be exhorting our congregations to live in more Christlike ways. But if the emphasis of our preaching is on being more like Jesus and not on the good news of grace despite our not being able to be like Jesus, we end up actually achieving the opposite of our intent. We inadvertently become legalists, actually, because we are more concerned with works and behavior than with Christ’s work on our hearts. The great irony is that, despite hoping to win the unchurched with the message of the good news, we end up enticing them with a Christian form of self-help or behavior modification, neither of which has ever saved anyone.

The proclamational preacher preaches the texts of Scripture with God as the subject and the gospel at the forefront, and he does so without shame, trusting not his words or his demeanor to win souls, but the work of the Holy Spirit.

This understanding clarifies a huge reality the attractional church must absolutely come to grips with: just because you dress casually, play edgy music, and talk a lot about grace, it doesn’t mean you aren’t a legalist. And in fact, it’s my belief that the self-professed “culturally relevant” churches are the chief proponents of legalism in Christianity today. They don’t think they are, because they equate legalism with stuffy fundamentalism, with rigidity and dourness, with suits and ties and organ-led hymns. They equate legalism with somber preaching of the thou shalt nots.

But “do” isn’t any less law-minded than “don’t.” Dos and don’ts are just flip sides of the same legal coin. The gospel isn’t “don’t,” but it also isn’t “do”; both are merely religion.

A church that is mobilized with a gospel of “do good” might make for good PR, but the gospel of “do good” cannot really scandalize (in the Galatians 5:11 sense) a lost and broken world, because most people know how to do good without the help of Christianity. They don’t need the church to act like good people, really; they need the church to point to Jesus as the only truly good person.

The attractional churches often believe they are railing against legalism and offering grace because they create culturally relevant, casual, innovative environments; because they make the message of the Bible one of practical stuff to do; and because they are cheerful and creative and take WWJD? seriously, while all the while they still don’t know the power of the gospel of Christ’s finished work, sufficient for salvation and fit for proclamation.

They give us instead the “gospel” of busywork. But the primary message of the Bible, as it heralds to us Jesus Christ, is that the work is already done.

Remember that the Pharisees were the religious leaders who missed the gospel because of their focus on dos and don’ts. Pharisaical legalism was just self-help without the cool clothes. This is why today’s Pharisees aren’t the concerned folks in the pews worried about their discipleship (as they are so often accused), but rather the preachers on many stages across the country whose messages are always full of helpful tips on how to get better at being a Christian but rarely gleaming with the satisfaction of Christ. Robert Capon reminds us that “Jesus came to raise the dead. Not to improve the improvable, not to perfect the perfectible, not to teach the teachable, but to raise the dead.”[5]

The Bible’s News Is Much Better Than Its Instructions

So we want to make the Bible practical. As we’ve already seen, the Bible is incredibly practical. We don’t have to make it that way. It’s already that way. There are lots of practical things in it, and we do need to teach them.

But we must never teach the practical points as the main points. The practical stuff is always connected to the proclamational stuff. The “dos” can never be detached from the “done” of the finished work of Christ in the gospel, or else we run the risk of preaching the law.

Here is a good focus text to help us see what we ought to be centering our Bible preaching and teaching on:

Now if the ministry of death, carved in letters on stone, came with such glory that the Israelites could not gaze at Moses’ face because of its glory, which was being brought to an end, will not the ministry of the Spirit have even more glory? For if there was glory in the ministry of condemnation, the ministry of righteousness must far exceed it in glory. Indeed, in this case, what once had glory has come to have no glory at all, because of the glory that surpasses it. For if what was being brought to an end came with glory, much more will what is permanent have glory. (2 Cor. 3:7–11)

In this passage, Paul is recalling the giving of the tablets of the law to Moses on Mount Sinai. As Moses would go up and commune with God, the glory of the Most High was so intense that it would continue to radiate off his face when he came down. The radiant glory was so intense that Moses covered his face with a veil to shield the children of Israel from the intensity.

But as stark and intense and awe-inspiring as that glory was, Paul says, it is eclipsed by the ministry of the Spirit, the ministry of righteousness, the ministry of the gospel of Jesus.

This helps us to see that the essential message of the Bible is the gospel, and that therefore the gospel needs to be central to all we say and do as a church, whether in the worship service or out. This means many of us need to wrestle with the reality that the gospel is not just for unbelievers. It is for the Christian too.

Perhaps we need to see how versatile and resilient the gospel is, how much deeper and more powerful than the dos and don’ts this message is. Maybe we need to see that the gospel does more than the law could ever do. It goes further than the law could ever go. If the instructions come with glory, Paul says, “will not the ministry of the Spirit have even more glory?” (v. 8).

Well, we might ask ourselves, what does the Spirit do now in and through the gospel that he didn’t do then and doesn’t do now in and through the law?

The law is good for what it’s designed to do—it’s good because it comes from God—but it cannot do what the gospel does to save and change us, and this work of the gospel is so much better than the work of the law. Where the law tells us what to do, it also reveals our inability to do it, thus condemning us. But where the gospel reveals our condemnation, it announces our freedom and forgiveness.

The foundational proof of this is in how endless the rituals of the law seemed until Christ put an end to them, in the recurring phrase of Hebrews, “once for all” (Heb. 7:27; 9:12, 26; 10:10), by becoming the sacrifice to end all sacrifices, by fulfilling every jot and tittle of the law, setting aside the ordinances and legal demands by nailing them to the cross (Col. 2:14).

The news is so much better than the instructions! It is better because the news actually saves us. “For if there was glory in the ministry of condemnation,” Paul writes, “the ministry of righteousness must far exceed it in glory” (2 Cor. 3:9).

It is interesting that Paul would refer to the gospel as “the ministry of righteousness.” You’d think that’s what the law should be called. But the law, which demands righteousness, cannot supply righteousness. Instead, the gospel is the ministry of righteousness, because it announces not just the blank slate of sins wiped out but the full credit of Christ’s perfect obedience credited to us!

The gospel does what the law cannot do. The law cannot give life. Its power is only for “the ministry of condemnation” (v. 9). It reveals what we must do, yes, but in doing so it also holds a measuring stick up that shows how short we will always fall.

As we look out at the world and into our churches, we think we know what will fix everything. We’ll just tell them to get their act together. Thus all the instructions.

But what will really save the lost world? Let me tell you: none of our complaints against it.

What will transform the hearts of the people in your church? No amount of your nagging.

What will motivate people to real life change that begins with real heart change? Not all the helpful tips in the universe.

In fact, I would venture to say that it’s very possible we may inadvertently increase the sin in our church by our inadvertent preaching of the law. It’s possible, actually, that all of our emphasis on the practical has only served to make things impossible.

I’m going to tread lightly here, but I fear we vastly underestimate the spiritual damage inflicted on our churches by “how to” sermons without an explicit gospel connection. The Bible is full of practical exhortations and commands, of course, but they are always connected to the foundational and empowering truth of the finished work of Christ. When we preach a message like “Six Steps to _________” or any other “Be a Better Whatever” kind of message—where the essential proclamation is not what Christ has done but what we ought to do or need to do—we become in effect preachers of the law rather than of Christ.

And I think the Bible shows us that this kind of preaching isn’t just off-center but actually does great harm, actually serves to accomplish the very opposite of its intention.

Preaching even a “positive” practical message with no gospel-centrality amounts to preaching the law. A list of things to do divorced from the “done” of the gospel is the essence of legalism. And as we have seen, the message of the law unaccompanied by and untethered from the central message of the gospel does not empower us but actually condemns us. Because besides telling us stuff to do, the law also thereby reveals our utter inability to measure up.

So a steady dose of gospel-deficient practical preaching doesn’t make Christians more empowered and more effective; it actually makes them more discouraged and less empowered. Primarily because the law has no power in itself to fulfill its expectations. Paul says in Romans 8:3 (NIV), “For what the law was powerless to do because it was weakened by the flesh, God did by sending his own Son …”

The Bible goes further to suggest, actually, that without the gospel of Christ’s finished work, the preaching of the law of works serves only to exacerbate disobedience. Consider Romans 5:20, where Paul says, “the law came in to increase the trespass,” or Romans 7, where in verse 5 he says that the law arouses sinful passions, and then goes on to discuss the inner stalemate he faces between good things he can’t do and bad things he can’t stop doing.

In other words, without the saving power of the gospel, we go one of two ways in having the law preached to us: either we end up being pushed to disobey (whether from anger at the law’s judgment or discouragement from our inability to keep up), or we end up thinking ourselves righteous apart from the righteousness the law really points to—that of Christ. (Don’t think that wanton hedonism is the only kind of sinfulness. Self-righteous legalism is in many respects worse.) And when we preach “how to” law sermons instead of the gospel, we may end up with a bunch of well-behaved spiritual corpses. We may end up creating despair in our people, who eventually realize that all the helpful tips aren’t effecting the deep heart change they really need. This is where Paul goes at the end of Romans 7, despairing of himself and launching into the wonderful gospel exposition of Romans 8.

I want you to consider whether the preaching of Christless, gospel-deficient practical sermons increases self-righteousness—because it is not focused on Christ’s work but on our works. Gospel-deficient practical sermons do not make empowered, victorious Christians, but self-righteous self-sovereigns. And the self-righteous go to hell.

Romans 7:10 says the law brings death. So the preaching of practical, relevant, applicational “do” messages aimed at producing victorious Christians is fundamentally a preaching of condemnation. On the other hand, it is the proclamation of grace, oddly enough and counterintuitive though it seems, that actually trains us to obey God (Titus 2:11–12).

The stakes are extremely high.

Let us preach the practical implications and exhortations of Scripture, yes. But let us not forget that the message of Christianity is Christ. It is the message of the sufficiency and power of salvation by grace alone through faith alone in Christ alone. Let’s not preach works, lest we increase the sinfulness of our churches and unwittingly facilitate the condemnation of the lost.

According to the Bible, only the gospel is the power for salvation (Rom. 1:16). But the gospel’s power for salvation extends beyond justification, as it grounds our sanctification and glorification as well. We must stop treating the gospel as though it were power enough for a conversion experience but falls short of empowering all the practical matters of faith that come after. As Tim Keller has said, “The gospel is not the ABC’s of the Christian life; it is the A to Z.”

Of course, all of us are ready to confess that we are saved by God’s grace received through our faith in Jesus Christ, and that this is apart from our own good works. Yet we still struggle so much in what Martin Luther calls the “muddling” of grace and law in the area of sanctification.

What helps people change and grow?

The implicit idea of the attractional church seems to be that the gospel is our entry ticket to the Christian life, but the law keeps us active once inside. But this assumption, Luther says, is “as though Christ were a workman who had begun a building and left it for Moses to finish.” Paul has this to say about such a concept, in Galatians 3:3: “Are you so foolish? Having begun by the Spirit, are you now being perfected by the flesh?”

No, what the Christian church needs today in its imperfect fumbling back to the beauty of gospel-centrality is a stubborn unmuddling of law and grace. We cannot continue to position the gospel as entry-level Christianity. Sanctification and justification are “events” suggested in the golden chain of salvation (Rom. 8:30), sure, but both are equally powered by the gospel of grace.

When it comes to how we “do church,” as it pertains specifically to how we teach and preach the Scriptures, we must make the same resolution Paul made: “I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified” (1 Cor. 2:2).

Don’t treat the Bible as an instruction manual. Treat it as a life preserver.

Excerpt from The Prodigal Church © 2015 by Jared C. Wilson. Published by Crossway. Used by permission.

ENDNOTES

[1] Ed Stetzer, “Andy Stanley on Communication (Part 2),” The Exchange blog (March 5, 2009), http://www.christianitytoday.com/edstetzer/2009/march/andy-stanley-on-communication-part-2.html.

[2] “Barna Survey Examines Changes in Worldview among Christians over the Past 13 Years,” Barna Group (March 6, 2009), https://www.barna.org/barna-update/21-transformation/252-barna-survey-examines-changes-in-worldview-among-christians-over-the-past-13-years#.U0Ba417Wd_k.

[3] Ed Stetzer and David Putnam, Breaking the Missional Code: Your Church Can Become a Missionary in Your Community (Nashville: Broadman & Holman, 2006), 95.

[4] Matt Chandler, Josh Patterson, and Eric Geiger, Creature of the Word: The Jesus-Centered Church (Nashville: Broadman & Holman, 2012), 123.

[5] Robert Farrar Capon, Between Noon and Three: Romance, Law, and the Outrage of Grace (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1997), 129. Emphasis original.