by Jason Wredberg
Brother pastor, please consider the importance of preaching Christ from Genesis to Revelation. It is not only a matter of following the pattern of Jesus’ own teaching, but it is essential to the health of the congregation you pastor and the ultimate effectiveness of your preaching ministry. Please mediate on the follow excerpt from Michael Wilcock as he comments on Luke 24:44-46.
“The nascent church has been shown that it must have a biblical theology. Its spiritual dynamic is inseparable from this, for when the Son tells us that the power of the spirit is ‘the promise of my father,’ he is speaking of a promise made not only through his own lips but also through those of his predecessors the prophets. Its apostolic authority is under pinned by this: while it’s doctrine is, as the rest of the New Testament will show us, built solidly upon the teaching of the apostles, they in turn are deeply grounded in what for them is already Scripture, that is, the Old Testament.
It’s evangelistic program is derived from this: ‘it is written… that repentance and forgiveness of sins should be preached in his name to all nations’; indeed, Jesus says that all these great New Testament matters are to be found ‘written’ in the Old Testament, not proof texts in its obscure corners, but as the very warp and woof of it.
Christ and his gospel are the new hope promised in Genesis, the new life typified in Exodus, and the new law foreshadowed there and in the books that follow; they are the ideal which all the judges, all the kings, either felt towards or rebelled against; they put flesh on the insights of David, they bring to life the pattern of Jonah, they fulfill the visions of Isaiah. The two Testaments are one, and the theology which is the sap of the church can rise only from roots which run thus deep and wide through the whole of Scripture.”
Michael Wilcock. The Message of Luke in The Bible Speaks Today, ed. John R. W. Stott (IVP, 1979) pg. 214.
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