Why Modern Sermons Are Starving the Church
A message can be true in every sentence and still leave the room hungry.
There is a test that takes about ten seconds, and any sermon will submit to it. Take the resurrection out and see whether anything falls down. Does the message still hold together in a world where Jesus stayed dead? If it does, then whatever that was, it was not a Christian sermon. It was a good idea delivered in a sanctuary.
I have been running that test on purpose for a while, with a notepad open, listening to preaching from churches with a great deal more reach than mine. What I was listening for was the announcement. What I kept finding was competence. The talks were well built, the illustrations were sharp, the delivery was better than mine, and the subject was almost always focus, or distraction, or habits, or a healthier marriage.
The verses were there in nearly every one of them. They were decorating an argument that would have stood up perfectly well without them, which is another way of saying the resurrection could have been quietly lifted out and the talk would still have worked. Something true was said in each of those rooms. Something essential went unannounced.
Proclamation Traded for Presentation
The shift is in the verb. Proclamation announces something already finished: Christ has completed the work, and you have been made righteous. Presentation offers you something to do about your week, how to focus, how to stay disciplined, how to try harder. One is news. The other is advice. A church can run on advice for a very long time before anybody notices that the announcement quietly stopped being made.
Paul described his own preaching in a way that leaves no ambiguity about the subject matter.
For we do not preach ourselves, but Christ Jesus the Lord, and ourselves your bondservants for Jesus' sake. (2 Corinthians 4:5, NKJV)
Paul allows himself two subjects and only two. Christ, and his own servanthood to the people sitting in front of him. Your self-improvement does not make the list. So what is a pulpit actually for? It is the place where Someone else gets announced, which is why the man standing in it gets described in the same breath as a bondservant. He is furniture in that sentence. The Lord is the point of it.
Why a Sincere Man Preaches It This Way
How does a man who loves Jesus end up preaching everything except Him? Three pressures push in the same direction, and anyone who has stood behind a pulpit knowing what Sunday costs knows how each of them feels from the inside.
The first is fear. Preach grace without qualifiers and somebody will hear permission, stop giving, quit serving, drift. So the message gets hedged just enough to keep the machinery running, and the hedge always goes in the same place, right where the finished work would have gone.
The second is the scoreboard. When attendance and views decide whether a week went well, sermons get shaped by what gathers a crowd instead of by what reveals Christ. The third is subtler and does the most damage. The story gets recentered on you. Your decisions, your intensity, your consistency this month. Jesus stays in the room as the One who makes your improvement possible, which quietly puts Him in service of a story about you.
It takes a tired man to preach that way, not a dishonest one, and the tiredness comes from a decade of being rewarded for saying the second thing instead of the first.
What It Does to the Person in the Pew
Sit under that for a year and something specific happens to your assurance. You start measuring your standing with God by how focused you were this week, how intentional you have been, how much you felt during worship. On a good week you are close to Him. On a bad week you are not sure. What kind of good news leaves you checking the weather every seven days?
That is not the gospel. That is bondage with better branding, and from the outside it looks exactly like commitment. Paul watched the same thing take hold in Galatia, and the question he put to those churches still lands on the modern one.
Are you so foolish? Having begun in the Spirit, are you now being made perfect by the flesh? (Galatians 3:3, NKJV)
The Galatians kept Jesus and added to Him, which is the more respectable way to lose Him. They began by receiving and moved on to achieving, and Paul called that foolish out of alarm rather than contempt, because he could see where the road ends. It ends with sincere people who work hard all year and cannot tell you whether God is pleased with them today.
The Only Food That Satisfies
What does a church have to say on a Sunday morning that nobody else in town can say? Only one thing, and it was said once, out loud, from a cross. John gives it to you as the last words Jesus spoke before He died.
So when Jesus had received the sour wine, He said, "It is finished!" And bowing His head, He gave up His spirit. (John 19:30, NKJV)
The word behind it is the word a merchant wrote across a bill when the final payment cleared. Account closed. Nothing further owed, and no further requests to follow. That is the last public statement Christ ever made about your debt, and He made it in the past tense, in front of witnesses, and then died so that nobody could accuse Him of adding a condition afterward. A church with that to say has bread on the table.
When Paul reached for language to describe what a believer actually has, he reached straight past improvement.
When Christ who is our life appears, then you also will appear with Him in glory. (Colossians 3:4, NKJV)
Christ who is our life. The whole of it, the thing itself, so that a believer's future and Christ's appearing turn out to be one event with two names. Hand out tips instead of that and you are serving cotton candy. It is sweet, it is real, people walk out with something in their hands, and it will not keep anybody alive. Crowds get drawn and souls go hungry, and the hunger is hard to name afterward, because the room was full and the music was good and everyone around you looked fed.
If you have sat through a service lately with an ache you could not explain, that ache is worth trusting. It is what a person feels who came in hungry and got handed something sweet. The bread is still on the table where it has always been, in three words spoken from a cross and never once revised.
