When Obedience Costs Too Much

One of the things I really tried to do in this sermon was to preach the gospel. In fact, the latter part of the sermon, where I preached the gospel—namely how Jesus essentially became this woman and took our place of sin—took as much time to prepare as the rest of the sermon.

Though not my intention at all, I've preached many sermons without the gospel because, firstly, I didn't know how to, and secondly, because I needed to learn all the other elements of preaching such as exegesis, application, structure, and theology. Now that I feel like I have somewhat of a grasp on the different elements of a sermon, I was able to really focus on preaching the gospel—which some might argue should have come first. The only problem was, I didn’t know how to do it. But I was determined that I wouldn’t let another opportunity go by to preach the gospel in my sermon.

So, I spent several hours trying without much success. Then, I decided to reflect on who I’ve heard that preached the gospel with every sermon. The preacher that came to mind was Timothy Keller. So, I actually fast-forwarded to the latter part of Timothy Keller’s sermons where he presents the gospel and listened to about ten of them to try to find some pattern. And I did.

The pattern ultimately came down to substitutionary sacrifice, meaning Jesus taking our place of death so that we can be saved. And my hypothesis is that given that the sermon follows a general sermonic flow from the problem in the text to the grace in the text, there is always some character that faces a sort of death which reflects our spiritual death.

From there, the job of the preacher is to show how Jesus becomes this character and takes upon Himself the death the character should have died. And it is only when we see Jesus as the substitutionary sacrifice, our hearts melt to obedience.

Upon reflection, when I hear or preach sermons without the gospel, it just feels like moralistic teaching and looks like a beautiful exterior without real substance. I really hope that moving forward from here, I aim to preach the gospel in everysermon that I preach. Pray for me.