In his book, The Deep Things of God: How the Trinity Changes Everything, Dr. Fred Sanders wrote something that made me stop and think about how I go about communicating the message of the gospel. On page 16 he writes:
When evangelicalism wanes into an anemic condition, as it sadly has in recent decades, it happens in this way: the points of emphasis are isolated from the main body of Christian truth and handled as if they are the whole story rather than the key points. Instead of teaching the full counsel of God (incarnation, ministry of healing and teaching, crucifixion, resurrection, ascension, and second coming), anemic evangelicalism simply shouts its one point of emphasis louder and louder (the cross! the cross! the cross!). But in isolation from the total matrix of Christian truth, the cross doesn’t make the right kind of sense. A message about nothing but the cross is not emphatic. It is reductionist. The rest of the matrix matters: the death of Jesus is salvation partly because of the new life he lived after it, and above all because of the eternal background in which he is the eternal Son of the eternal Father. You do not need to say all of those things at all times, but you need to have a felt sense of their force behind the things you do say.
It’s all too easy for us as Christians to emphasize one aspect of the gospel over and above other important aspects of the gospel and therefore reduce the message to that one key point. For instance, only stressing the importance of receiving the message of the cross for forgiveness of sin can easily lead people toward “easy-believism”. I “believe” that Jesus died for me, and boom! I get to go to heaven when I die. I don’t have to think about it all that much or change the way I live after I pray the “sinner’s prayer” because I was told that I’m forgiven and going to heaven. Divorced from an equal emphasis on the Lordship of Jesus Christ, the message of forgiveness can become convoluted and misunderstood.
The problem is that any singular key point of the gospel message is not really the gospel…it’s only part of a larger picture. As a young pastor, I’ve caught myself emphasizing certain points over and over again in my preaching. It’s not that my teaching in those moments has been incorrect. It’s just that it’s probably not robust enough to minister to God’s people and any non-believers who may be present in the way that I would hope.
Next week I plan to finish writing on this subject with some practical strategies for teaching, preaching, and sharing the whole gospel without being reductionistic. Hopefully those strategies will be good reminders for me as I grow in my experience as a teacher and preacher of God’s word.
CONTINUE READING: Go to The Whole Story: Avoiding a Reductionistic Gospel (Part 2)