by Bret Capranica | Mar 26, 2010 | Preaching, The Gospel
How significant is the cross of Christ in my regular preaching? The following quote brings a great conviction and I pray an even greater intentionality and change: This distinction between an “objective” and subjective” understanding of the atonement needs to be made clear in every generation. According to Dr. Douglas Johnson, the first general secretary of the IVF, this discovery was the turning point in the ministry of Dr. Martyn Lloyd Jones, who occupied an unrivaled position of evangelical leadership in the decades following the Second World War. He confided in several friends that “a fundamental change took place in his outlook and preaching in the year 1929.” he had, of course, emphasized from the beginning of his ministry the indispensable necessity of hte new birth. But after preaching one night in Bridgend, South Wales, the minister challenged him that “the cross and the work of Christ” appeared to have little place in his preaching. He went “at once to his favourite secondhand bookshop and asked the proprietor for the two standard books on the Atonement. The bookselller produced R. W. Dales’ The Atonement (1875) and James Denney’s The Death of Christ (1903). On his return home he gave himself to study, declining both lunch and tea, and causing his wife such anxiety that she telephoned her brother to see whether a doctor should be called. But when he later emerged, he claimed to have found “the real heart of the gospel and the key to the inner meaning of the Christian faith.” So the content of his preaching changed, and with this its impact. As he himself put it, the basic question was not Anselm’s “why did God become man?” but...
by Bret Capranica | Mar 2, 2010 | The Gospel
John Stott suggests our approach to worship, and thus the cross, may be filled with too much levity. What do you think of his comments: Unhappily, even in the church we seem to have lost the vision of the majesty of God. There is much shallowness and levity among us. Prophets and psalmists would probably say of us that “there is no fear of God before their eyes.” In public worship our habit is to slouch or squat; we do not kneel nowadays, let alone prostrate ourselves in humility before God. It is more characteristic of us to clap our hands with joy than to blush with shame or tears. We saunter up to God to claim his patronage and friendship; it does not occur to us that he might send us away. It must be said that our evangelical emphasis on the atonement is dangerous if we come to it too quickly. We learn to appreciate the access to God that Christ has won for us only after we have first seen God’s inaccessibility to sinners. We can cry “Hallelujah” with authenticity only after we have first cried “Woe is me, for I am lost.” As Brunner put it, “where the idea of the wrath of God is ignored, there also will there be no understanding of the central conception of the Gospel: the uniqueness of the revelation in the Mediator.” Similarly, “only he who knows the greatness of wrath will be mastered by the greatness of mercy.” If we bring God down to our level and raise ourselves to his then of course we see no need...
