The most urgent need of the Christian Church

The late great preacher Dr. D. Martin Lloyd-Jones observed in his book, Preaching and Preachers,“…I would say without any hesitation that the most urgent need in the Christian Church today is true preaching; and as the greatest and the most urgent need in the Church, it is obviously the greatest need of the world also.” This quote came to my attention in the context of a class that I took at Louisiana College taught by Dr. Jason Meyer on preaching, more specifically expository preaching. Expository preaching defined simply is when the main point of a passage in the Bible becomes the main point of the message being delivered by the preacher, with the supporting points of the passage providing the supporting points of the same message.

At its core expository preaching is biblical centered preaching with a strong emphasis on the centrality and sufficiency of the Holy Scriptures. With most of our society, moving toward greater conveniences could the idea of the difficult work of expository preaching with the expectation that parishioners think long and hard about the point of biblical passages with application that will regularly challenge and alter the way lives are lived really be the greatest need of the world as Dr. Lloyd-Jones suggest?  The answer is a resounding “Yes!” I come to this conclusion after being a participant in churches for years, and have come to realize that there is no substitute for the centrality of the proclamation of the Word of God.

Certainly in every tradition there are aspects of the worship service that we all enjoy, they, like the people who enjoy them are diverse. Music, liturgy, and expressions of the arts may all serve to enhance worship experiences but the moment these expressions overtake, or worse yet, replace the preaching of the Bible, the worship service looses the true object of worship descending into idolatry. The preaching of the Bible, the totality of Scripture, in a systematic, consistent, clear custom is indeed the greatest need of the Church and the world today. I believe this for several reasons; I’ll list three of them here.

  First, Jesus based everything that He did on the centrality and sufficiency of the Scripture. This is demonstrated consistently in the New Testament, and the principle is articulated clearly in Luke 16; here Jesus is telling the story of a rich man and a beggar named Lazarus, in the course of their lives the rich man lived a decadent lifestyle ignoring Lazarus who laid out side his gate, both Lazarus and the rich man died. The rich man found himself in torment, while Lazarus enjoyed paradise after they died. After a request for a drop of water to relieve his suffering was denied, the rich man requested that Lazarus be allowed to return from the dead to warn his brothers, believing that the supernatural would certainly convince them to repent. The response to this request as told by Christ is amazing, it is recorded for us in Luke 16:31 “…If they do not hear Moses or the Prophets, neither will they be convinced if someone should rise from the dead.” This illustrates that our pursuit should not be novelty, sensationalism or even the supernatural, but rather the Word of God should be our relentless pursuit because it is there that we find God reveled in Christ. As Jesus points out to the religious leaders of His day in John 5:39 “You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that bear witness about me.”

Next, as Mark Dever points out in Nine Marks of a Healthy Church, “Many pastors happily accept the authority of God’s Word and profess to believe in the inerrancy of the Bible; yet if they do not in practice regularly preach expositionally, I’m convinced that they will never preach more than they knew when they began the whole exercise.” Among preachers and parishioners there is a great famine of the Word of God, this can only be remedied by an intentional return to the Bible as the center of our worship experiences. This must begin with the pulpit, because invariably how pastors preach is how their people learn to regard and study Scripture. If our churches are to grow and flourish it begins and ends with an embracing of the Bible as the final arbiter and source of truth, a truth that must be proclaimed from the pulpit.

Finally, in a day when many have capitulated to the culture, the proclamation of God’s Word stands as a beacon of hope in the land of hype. As my previous pastor, David Kimsey, pointed out one Sunday, referencing First Peter 3:15 which admonishes us to “…Sanctify the Lord God in your hearts: and be ready always to give an answer to ever man that asketh you a reason of the hope that is in you…” The reason for the hope, Pastor Kimsey pointed out, can only be found in Christ as revealed through the Gospel as proclaimed by the Holy Scripture. Indeed it is the hope of the world and the greatest need of the Church.