What Has Happened To Our Baptist Preaching Heritage?

As I was sitting in church today listening to my pastor deliver a sermon based of Romans5:8ff about the sufficiency of the blood of the cross in anticipation of the coming Easter celebration next Sunday I began to reflect on the primitive gospel of the first century and the men who preached it as compared to the preaching we hear so often from pulpits, if they even have a pulpit, in our day. 

I just realized I wrote the words "my pastor."  I think the last time I was able to say those words was 1972. Ever since then I was "my pastor." During most of those years all I knew was what I was preaching and how I was preaching it. I really wasn't listening too much to the other preachers because we were all speaking at the same time in different places. Oh, to be sure there were those times during revival meetings when an Evangelist would fill the pulpit. There was also the annual meetings where some brother pastor would preach his "convention" sermon. The point is, there just wasn't a lot of opportunity to do any real comparisons between what I was doing and what my preacher colleagues were doing. I just assumed we were all "preaching the whole counsel of God" with an emphasis in every sermon of Christ and the salvation He offers. 

However, since my heart attack induced retirement I have had ample opportunity to hear what was being preached in our churches and by the television preachers. I was rather surprised by what I discovered. First, I have discovered there are a lot of really gifted preachers out there when it came to preaching ability. 

I also discovered that many of these guys had never been exposed to the basic style of building a sermon I learned from Dr. H.C. Brown and Dr. Jesse Northcutt when I was in seminary.  I heard everything from the old time hard preaching that I grew up with to the very laid back and casual conversational style sermon. Some were formally structured and others seemed rather serpentine and loosely tied together. But all in all, with the exception of a few, these men could hold my interest.  

That's when I realized, how they preached wasn't the issue. I realized that what I was missing in much of this preaching had to do with content. Now don't get me wrong. I am not suggesting that any of these preachers are preaching heresy. To the contrary, while there are always differences between theologians, in general I had no axe to grind with the content of most of what I was hearing. In fact, as I analyzed what I was hearing much of it was consistent with much of what I had taught all my life. 

Something was missing in all this fine preaching but I just couldn't put my finger on what it was. That where something "my" pastor said clarified my thinking. Essentially he said something about the fact that we don't hear much preaching anymore about the blood of Christ. When I heard those words I immediately recalled Paul's words to the Corinthians when he said: 

And when I came to you, brethren, I did not come with superiority of speech or of wisdom, proclaiming to you the testimony of God. For I determined to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ, and Him crucified . . . and my message and my preaching were not in persuasive words of wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power, so that your faith would not rest on the wisdom of men, but on the power of God. 

I thought, That's it! It is not what I am hearing that is the problem. It is what I am not hearing.  

All these sermons about building better relationships, marriages, families, etc. are right on target about what they say. However, like so much of modern medicine they are addressing the symptoms of our problem and not the cause. We are helping people deal with their headache but we are not curing what is causing their headaches.  

Apparently in our effort to become relevant and user friendly we have forgotten to become healers. We have married theology and psychology into a distortion of both called Psychotheology.   Not only have we ceased to sing "There is Power in The Blood" but we have  also stopped preaching it. In our effort to be "seeker friendly" we have ceased telling people what they need to hear and started telling them what they want to hear. Instead of preaching our powerlessness to resolve our issues we lay out five points to successful living.  Unless point one includes the shed blood of Jesus the rest will only make them feel good but it will not make them the "righteousness of God." Unless we are telling them of the cross how can we expect them to meet God's standard of "be ye holy as I am holy." 

Paul reminded the Corinthians that when he came to their city his preaching was not in persuasive gems of wisdom. He deliberately laid aside his academic achievements and his ecclesiastical standing and preached a simple message of Jesus Christ and his sacrificial death at Calvary and how that shed blood paid the price for sin.  

I can hear the naysayers now . . . Preacher people today don't want to hear all this death, blood and sin business. You'll run them off if you give them a steady diet of that. I remember an evangelist of my childhood saying about that, "Where we going to run them . . . to Hell number two?"   

God has not called us to tickle their ears but to proclaim Jesus and him crucified. That is the preaching that will result in a demonstration of the Holy Spirit in which sinners are converted, the saints strengthened and God glorified. God has called us to point out that we are all sinners and that we stand under the judgment of almighty God; That God has loved us beyond anything we can imagine and sent His Son, Jesus, to shed his blood for our sin; and has offered to freely forgive our sin, deliver us from judgment and empower us by His Spirit when we by faith declare in the depth of our heart that Jesus Christ is Lord. 

I fear that our failure to stress the doctrine of salvation as expressed in the New Testament has led to a spirit of secularism and the reliance upon political processes has become rampant in the churches of America and as a result we are fearful and powerless to reach out to our broken world. Instead, we stand in our little church fortresses and cast stones at a lost world for their sinful behavior.  Have we forgotten what it is like to be unsaved?  Friends we need to remind ourselves daily from whence we have come and how we got from there to where we are today. Paul reminded the Ephesians of this when he said: "And you were dead in your trespasses and sins, in which you formerly walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, of the spirit that is now working in the sons of disobedience.  Among them we too all formerly lived in the lusts of our flesh, indulging the desires of the flesh and of the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, even as the rest."

Those outside of Christ, like we before them, are doing what people who do not possess the Spirit of God do. Instead of calling them names, ridiculing them, and generally showing disgust for their behavior we should be declaring to them the basic Gospel of the cleansing blood of Jesus. We have forgotten that every one is outside until they are invited inside and then walk through the door.

 

I remember sitting at a table in the Student Center at Southwestern Baptists Theological Seminary with a group of student and Dr. Rainey, who had become pastor of the James Avenue Baptist Church just adjacent to the seminary campus was with us. In fact, he joined us weekly, just to fellowship over coffee. One of the students was just railing strongly against pastors of rich church with their big salaries (I suspect some jealously was at work here) not knowing that Dr. Rainey was among that group.  Dr. Rainey quietly said to him, "Well, God has called some of us to minister to the down and out and others of us to minister to the up and out."  The point is "the whole world is lost in the darkness of sin" but "the light of the world is Jesus."  Our job is to preach Jesus Christ and Him crucified who is "a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those who are the called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength."

Stumbling block or foolishness; culturally acceptable or reprehensible; politically correct or incorrect; pleasant to our sensibilities or offensive matters not. We are to preach, teach and sing about Jesus Christ and Him Crucified because no matter how wonderful  all the other things we preach may be only the shed blood of Jesus is the power of God unto salvation and it applies equally to all peoples.

That's why Paul, one of the sharpest minds of his time said to the Corinthians, " I determined to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ, and Him crucified." When I was a young preacher we had a thing called "Lifestyle Evangelism" where we trained people to share a little tract called "How to have a Full and Meaningful life."  In that training one of the things we told that participants  again and again was that witnessing is "Sharing the Gospel of Jesus Christ in the Power of the Holy Spirit and leaving the results to God." I would say that real preaching is preaching that Jesus Christ and Him crucified is power of God unto salvation to all who believe. There must be a return to a strong priority to preaching that places great emphasis on the shed blood of Jesus for our sin and not ours only but for the sins of the whole world.

Robert Lowry said it all in his Hymn, Nothing But The Blood: 

What can wash away my sin?
Nothing but the blood of Jesus;
What can make me whole again?
Nothing but the blood of Jesus.

For my pardon, this I see,
Nothing but the blood of Jesus;
For my cleansing this my plea,
Nothing but the blood of Jesus.

Nothing can for sin atone,
Nothing but the blood of Jesus;
Naught of good that I have done,
Nothing but the blood of Jesus.

This is all my hope and peace,
Nothing but the blood of Jesus;
This is all my righteousness,
Nothing but the blood of Jesus.

Now by this I’ll overcome—
Nothing but the blood of Jesus;
Now by this I’ll reach my home—
Nothing but the blood of Jesus.

Glory! Glory! This I sing—
Nothing but the blood of Jesus,
All my praise for this I bring—
Nothing but the blood of Jesus.

Refrain:
Oh! precious is the flow
That makes me white as snow;
No other fount I know,
Nothing but the blood of Jesus.

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