“BEGATS” AND RELEVANCY
Robert Meyers

It may be useful to share a conviction in this place about what is, and what is not, “Biblical preaching.” It is felt in some churches that a sermon is Biblical only if the topic is traditionally religious (i.e., how should baptism be performed? how often should one take communion?), or if Scripture is quoted often with chapter and verse citations, or if the name of Christ is invoked frequently in the tones of special reverence reserved for the pulpit.

The truth is that all these things may be present in a sermon that is quite out of harmony with true religion. The ability to name the twelve apostles or the sons of Jacob or the titles of Old Testament books (in order), and the ability to quote hundreds of verses, may be about as useful in Christian life as memorizing every street sign in Dallas is useful for good citizenship. Yet human nature being what it is, the man who can rattle off 2,000 street names will amaze some people with what they consider erudition.

I had a professor once by the name of N. B. Hardeman who told us in preaching class that if we went into a new church there was a sure-fire way to impress audiences during the first few Sundays. “Name all the kings of Israel,” he said, “or memorize the genealogy of Christ and give them ‘Judas begat Phares, and Phares begat Esrom, and Esrom begat Aram’ until they are dizzy. It won’t be worth a plugged nickel, but from then on everybody will think you know everything there is to know about the Bible.”

He knew, despite his surface cynicism, that real Biblical preaching can be identified. It does what Christ did when he spoke of the Old Testament like this: “It has been said … but I say…”. That is, Biblical preaching takes old truth and puts a new dress on it, so that people will hear it seriously. Jesus said that instead of destroying the law by such language, he was actually fulfilling it by showing how its enduring truth could be appropriated by the men of his own time.

He might have destroyed it, however, by going on to say the same things in the same old ways, if life had not moved on, as if language had not changed, as if men knew nothing they had not known millenniums ago. But he knew better than that. The word of God, for Him, was a spring of “living” water, welling up ceaselessly from the deep places of devotion. It was not a stale drink hauled up in buckets from a reservoir where everything had been the same for four thousand years.

As for “Biblical preaching,” it is difficult for anyone who accepts Christ as Lord of life to preach a sermon which is not Biblical, since the Bible finally engages almost every issue known to mankind. Those who wrote the Bible had no thought of being “Biblical.” They were simply responding with passion and honesty, in the love of God, to human situations.

Some of them wrote lovely little sermons to make their friends less prejudiced (Ruth, Jonah). Some made histories, to give their friends a sense of God’s care for nations (Kings, Chronicles). Some wrote lyrics that ranged from exuberant joy to bitter anguish, from tenderness to extraordinary cruelty (Psalms). Some collected lessons taught in school on subjects like bad table manners, cheating in business, when to spank children and how to pick friends (Proverbs).

So one could hardly fail to be Biblical in his preaching, no matter what human concern he touched upon, so long as he related those concerns to the enduring principles set forth in the Bible, and so long as he involved himself, as Christ did, with how those principles can be translated into modern speech and made useful to modern man.