Hungry for Intimacy⤒🔗

Standing on the boundary between a fading century and a dawning millennium, modern man appears to be starving from a lack of meaningful, enduring relationships. With his new technologies he can get information without getting personal; he can chat without getting close. Institutions once thought to be as durable as creation itself — marriage and family — are gasping for air and fighting for their lives. As the nuclear family becomes a statistical exception and a social oddity, state-sponsored programs and community support groups eagerly promise to satisfy the needs once met by the family. Without the self-discipline nurtured within family relationships, our streets and schools become war zones, and people retreat into the privacy of self. Without the security nurtured by attentive parents through effective household government, our judicial system becomes politicized to serve the needs of the socially immature, and people lose trust in others. Fences of every kind restrict access to personal familiarity. Intimacy is endangered, on its way to becoming a museum relic, caught for posterity by Norman Rockwell paintings.

As churches we must open our eyes to see the opportunity coming our way. It may well be that the church of Jesus Christ will become the only context for satisfying this hunger for human intimacy. The church of Christ may well become the only source providing human intimacy among people who are trustworthy and genuine.

Hungry for Intimacy with God←⤒🔗

This hunger for intimacy yearns for more than human relationships. The last decade has seen an explosion in popular and academic literature dealing with spirituality of all varieties, running the gamut from Buddhist spirituality to New Age spirituality to Reformed spirituality.

Many people hunger for a relationship with Someone above themselves and beyond this universe. This is a hunger for intimacy with God.

Among Christians, conferences are sure to draw numbers if their theme includes spiritual growth and spiritual disciplines. Recall the phenomenal attractiveness of Promise Keepers, a men's movement with many defects, yet designed to meet an intense hunger that still needs to be satisfied among us.

As Christian believers we hunger for intimacy with God and co-believers. Ours is an appetite that craves a life lived fully in the presence of God. It yearns to walk intimately with God. It longs to delight fervently in God. All of this our fathers described as living coram Deo, before God.

Intimacy and Knowledge←⤒🔗

Knowing God and knowing the Bible are mutually dependent. We need not try to figure out which one is more important — to know God or to know the Bible. That's as silly as asking a war bride, whose husband is fighting thousands of miles away, to choose between her lover and his love letters.

Anyone hungry for intimacy with God is hungry also to know His Word, God's love letter to His beloved people.

That, really, is what we've been writing about these last few months, as we've been considering the congregation's role in preaching. Our concern has been to explain how God meets His people in the preaching of the Word. Knowing how God meets us in preaching should arouse a hunger that rumbles through our pews, through our councils, through our church classrooms, a hunger to know the Bible and thus to know God.

For the ultimate goal of preaching is not that we know the Bible, but that we know God. In fact, knowing God must be the goal of all Bible study and teaching. You cannot know God intimately apart from knowing the Bible, His love letter. But you can know God's love letter without knowing God intimately. Knowing the Bible without knowing God is to have communication without communion — something that is spiritually sterile. On the other hand, trying to know God without working to know the Bible ends up in spiritu­al speculation, guessing and imagining what God is like, but never knowing.

God, Bible, And Sermon←⤒🔗

Underlying all of our discussion thus far about the Bible and preaching is the unspoken and unexamined premise that an essential link exists between (1) the kind of God we worship and (2) the kind of Bible He gave us and (3) the kind of preaching we covet.

Let me try to unpack that premise.

What kind of God do we hear in church? Who is our God? Answer: He is the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ who in grace has made covenant with us. To make covenant is to enter a rela­tionship, and to live in communion with, and to talk with, and to extend promises and expect responses. It is to marry some­body! Our God is a covenanting God. Full of grace, mercy, and truth. Overflowing in lovingkindness, holiness, and righteousness. Our God brings all of these characteristics into His relationship with the church, His bride.

And His book, the Bible, is a covenant book. This book tells us a living story about our living God whose relationship with His people makes up the living history of salvation. The Bible is the church's God-breathed diary of His love relationship with His people, beginning with Israel in the OT and continuing with the church in the NT. Not everything is recorded in this diary. Selections have been made, but with a common thread and theme. That thread and theme is God's purpose to enjoy fellowship with those who are created in His image, fallen into sin, chosen for redemption in Christ, and brought to glorious perfection at the last day. To believe this book is to live in love with the God of this book.

Because our God is a covenanting God, and because the Bible is a covenant book, all preaching that is truly the voice of God and truly biblical must be covenantal preaching. The preaching we covet is the kind that brings us into this covenant book to encounter our covenant God. As we sit together in public worship, we crave not first of all important moral lessons or memorable apho­risms. We hunger for God, the liv­ing God. We yearn for sermons that draw us to the heart of God.

The Heartbeat of God←⤒🔗

We hunger for sermons that throb with our Father's heartbeat. His pulsating heartbeat we have felt and heard in His very flesh-born Son, Jesus Christ of Nazareth. Since Pentecost, their energizing Spirit now pumps divine life through the church (and thereby through individual believers); their Spirit regulates the rhythm of our own hearts, purges our impurities, strengthens weak members for the work of faith-obedience.

This, for now, is as close as we can come to describing covenantal preaching.

By way of preview, let me attract your attention for the articles yet to be written, with the following serious, provocative claims.

• First, only covenantal preaching is fully biblical preaching.
• Second, only covenantal preaching is biblically evangelistic preaching.
• Third, only covenantal preaching is healthy experiential preaching.
• Finally, only covenantal preaching is edifyingly pastoral preaching.