The Problem With “Christ-Centered” Preaching
When “Christ-Centered” Preaching Misses Christ
The disciples on the road to Emmaus did not misunderstand Christ because they had ignored the Bible. They misunderstood Christ because they had believed only the parts of the Bible that matched the Christ they wanted.
And it is possible for our preaching to do the same thing.
As we begin to consider Luke 24, Jesus did not rebuke the disciples because they had ignored the messianic prophecies; He rebuked them because their despair revealed that they had misread the basic shape of the entire biblical story.
“O fools, and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken.”
The emphasis here falls on the word all.
These disciples had believed some of what the prophets had spoken, yet they had failed to receive the prophetic witness in its fullness, because they had separated the promised glory of the Christ from his necessary suffering.
They did not lack a doctrine of the Messiah, but they had constructed a theology of glory from which the theology of the cross had been removed.
The Problem Beneath the Problem
Although we often seem to think otherwise, Christ’s rebuke was not directed first at the disciples’ behavior; rather, He addresses their reading and believing.
Ultimately, His rebuke was that they had read and received the Scriptures selectively rather than submitting themselves to the unified testimony.
This is the problem beneath the problem.
As is our bent, we are naturally drawn toward texts that promise glory, while remaining considerably less eager to believe those texts that speak of suffering. The problem is not that the texts that we want to believe are false; the problem is that truths separated from the full witness of Scripture can be arranged into a theology that Scripture itself condemns.
The disciples were not wrong to expect redemption, but they were wrong to define redemption in a manner that suited or made sense to them.
Jesus not only exposes this selective faith; he corrects it by giving the disciples the logic.
“Ought not Christ to have suffered these things, and to enter into his glory?”
The emphasis here in this verse should fall upon the word ought.
Although the fullness and mode of the suffering of Christ belonged to the eternal counsel of God, Scripture taught that the Messiah would enter his glory through suffering. The prophets had borne a witness to the suffering and glory of the coming Christ.
With these things in mind, and with the way that we find Jesus handling the scriptures, Luke records something that should govern all the instincts of Christian preaching.
“Beginning at Moses and all the prophets, he expounded unto them in all the scriptures the things concerning himself.”
The Bible is not just a warehouse from which preachers may grab Jesus-shaped objects whenever they are writing a sermon. Rather, it is the unfolding history of God’s covenantal purpose, moving through promise and type, toward fulfillment in the incarnate, crucified, risen, and reigning Son.
Scripture possesses this direction as well as God’s work in history possesses direction. Its center is God’s accomplishment of redemption, and this is where supposedly Christ-centered preaching can still miss Christ. A sermon may contain the name of Jesus or even preach Him from a text, while it remains structurally governed by something other than Christ.
The preacher may begin with a biblical character, develop several practical steps, and then attach Christ to the conclusion as the one who forgives us when we fail to follow those steps, and then call it Christ-centered, but the governing logic of this sermon remains moralistic. Christ simply functions as the one who fixes our unsuccessful performance rather than the one in whom the text’s redemptive purpose is fulfilled.
In other sermons, Christ becomes the answer to a need identified before the passage has been allowed to establish its own categories. The text turns from Christ to address anxiety, marriage, or ______ (fill in the blank), and then Jesus is presented as the resource for resolving the selected problem.
Once again, Christ is included, but he is subordinated to a question whose terms were established by the writer of the sermon.
When Christ is merely included in this way, the sermon could remain largely intact without him. The preacher could remove the final gospel invitation, replace it with a general appeal, and preserve the sermon’s point.
However, the method of preaching that Jesus does in Luke 24 does not merely arrive at Christ after the text has already been explained on other grounds. It demonstrates that the text belongs to a redemptive history that was always advancing toward him. Christ is not merely the final point of the sermon because he is the one who gives coherence to every point that precedes it.
He is not an application added after the text has been interpreted. He is the fulfillment within whom the text’s promises and patterns reach their appointed end.
To be clear, this does not mean that every sermon must force a reference of Christ into every verse, nor does it authorize allegorical creativity detached from grammatical and historical meaning. True Christ-centered preaching does not require the preacher to abandon the text’s original context, because the original context itself belongs to the larger history of redemption authored by God.
The preacher’s task, then, is not to leap over history, genre, and authorial intent to reach Jesus more quickly. The task is to read those realities deeply enough to understand how they participate in the movement of promise and fulfillment that culminates in Christ.
A sermon may therefore be full of references to Jesus while remaining exegetically shallow, just as a sermon may carefully explain the historical context while remaining canonically blind.
Faithful preaching must resist both errors. It must honor the passage in its immediate setting while locating that setting within the unfolding purpose of God fulfilled in Christ.
Christ the telos
To say that Christ is the telos of Scripture means more than saying that he appears near the end of the biblical narrative.
The word telos means a goal or appointed end. Thus, to say that Christ is the telos means that He is the one toward whom the movements of Scripture are directed and the one in whom they receive their final coherence.
He is not simply later than Moses, David, and the prophets in the chronology of redemption. He is the fulfillment toward whom their expectations were moving.
The Law, the Prophets, and the Writings are distinct yet coordinated movements within one economy of revelation. Moses, Isaiah, the Psalms, the historical narratives, and the wisdom literature speak with genuinely different voices, but those voices belong to one canonical witness that anticipates the humiliation and exaltation of Christ.
This is why the familiar question, “Where is Jesus in this text?” is helpful but is simply insufficient.
By itself, the question may encourage superficial typology, or the assumption that Christ must be hidden somewhere inside every passage just waiting to be discovered. The larger question is where the text is going within the redemptive story that reaches its fulfillment in him.
The question must be asked, “Where does the passage stand within the movement from creation to new creation?” And once that question is asked, Christ ceases to appear as an addition imposed upon the passage and emerges as the one in whom the passage’s tensions are resolved and its purpose becomes clear.
The Task of Christian Preaching
The disciples’ hearts burned within them because Christ opened the Scripture and disclosed its true coherence.
They understood that the cross was not the contradiction of God’s promises, but the means of their fulfillment, and that remains the task of Christian preaching.
The preacher must do more than mention Jesus, avoid obvious moralism, or identify a handful of messianic connections.
He must preach the Scriptures in such a way that Christ is displayed as their covenantal center, redemptive fulfillment, and eschatological goal.
The task is not to attach Christ to the text; the task is to expose how the text participates in the unfolding purpose of God that finds its fulfillment in him.
The aim is not merely that hearers would know where Jesus appears in the Bible. It is that, through the opening of the Scriptures, they would perceive the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ, understand the fullness of the salvation accomplished in him, and learn to interpret both suffering and glory according to his cross and resurrection.
The greatest danger facing Christ-centered preaching is not that Christ will be absent; the greater danger is that He will simply be present while another message governs the sermon.
A sermon may get to Jesus and still miss Christ, but Luke 24 teaches us that faithful preaching must do more: it must open the Scriptures so that the crucified and risen Christ is seen as the one about whom they have been speaking all along.