Church Voices

A few months ago I did something stupid. I washed my cell phone. I liked that cell phone too. I had just gotten it how I liked it with all my totally sweet ringtones, and wall papers. It was all Detroit Pistons inside and out. Needless to say it was a total loss. So I hit up ebay and bought a used phone that did the job, and in a lot of ways was better. Recently the battery had been really not working well. Eventually it got down to less than a ½ hour of charge at a time. So I went out and bought a $20 pre-pay phone, swapped out the SIM cards so it was on my normal account and have been running with that.

Think about the kind of phone you get for $20. It’s basic. There’s no customizing the ring tones, or the wall paper (in fact all the built in ringers sound like some sort of hand held football game from the 70s). There’s no browsing of the internet, or instant messaging. It makes calls and text messages, and nothing else. And I love it. It does exactly what I need it to do, and it does it well. In fact, it holds a charge forever. Longer than any other phone I’ve had. It can go for over 7 days before needing to be recharged. In other words, it sticks to the main thing cell phones are supposed to do. All of its shortcomings are made up for the fact that it keeps the main thing the main thing and it does it well.

About a year ago a friend of mine suggested to me that every sermon needs to explicitly include the gospel. Of course, there is much of scripture that doesn’t explicitly contain the gospel. Proverbs jumps immediately to mind, and if a sermon is expositional in nature it can become so fixated on such a small portion of scripture even New Testament passages can get so caught up in the trees that the forest isn’t seen.

But the question still is, should every sermon preached explicitly contain the gospel? After all, if we’re going to be faithful to a historic reading of scripture there are times when some scriptures won’t contain the gospel, at least not obviously, and not on its face. That means if we answer “yes”, the preacher has to direct in some way every subject, every verse, and every story found in scripture to Christ. But here’s the thing. If the church is going to be useful, she has to keep the main thing the main thing. And the main thing is the gospel. This became even more obvious to me recently when I re-read the forward Rich Mullins wrote for The Ragamuffin Gospel. In it Mullins recounts hearing a tape in which the gospel was presented, and he had to pull over the truck he was driving because of the tears in his eyes. He then writes that he had regularly attended church since he was two weeks old and most of the sermons he had heard were of the moralizing variety, completely missing the gospel.

Should every sermon explicitly contain the gospel? Absolutely. The church, at her best, is a $20 cell phone. She keeps the main thing the main thing, and the main thing is the gospel.