I recently ran across a copy of The Cathedral Messenger, the weekly newsletter of Westwood Hills
Christian Church, from July 2, 1995. At the time, Dr. Myron J. Taylor was the
minister of the church and reading his weekly comments in The Cathedral Messenger could be akin to a weekly seminar on
ministry.
In this particular issue Dr. Taylor said, “I always try to
give priority to the gospel as it is set forth in Scripture as it is
interpreted and proclaimed by the church. My job is not to preach the Bible,
but preach the gospel. Just explaining a passage of scripture, or even worse,
just commenting on it can be terribly boring and irrelevant. Preaching is
rooted in the biblical message and made meaningful to the lives of people.”
When I talk about the Bible in my classes, I often say that
it is written by God, written about Jesus, and written through the Spirit. In
some ways I think that is exactly what Dr. Taylor meant when he said he gave
“priority to the gospel as it is set forth in Scripture . . .” It is the gospel
that reminds us that that personal salvation and individualism are not our mission.
Our mission isn’t merely to be the source of every moral platitude imaginable
to mankind or to discover a kind of private approach to life that takes us out
of the mix of what is happening in the world around us.
It is the gospel that won’t allow us to become so withdrawn
from the world around us that we can never hope to change it and so legalistic
that we become irrelevant. After all,
one can be so biblical that no one will listen or so relevant that there is
nothing to say. In both cases, the gospel hasn’t been proclaimed.
It is the gospel that reminds us the Jesus story is not just
about dying and going to heaven, but about “life, and life more abundant.”
(John 10:10) It is the gospel that has the power to transform us into kingdom
people out in the world living kingdom lives in ways that create kingdom
outposts all over the world. At least that seems to be the result of the
preaching of the Gospel as recorded in Acts.
To think that Scripture is more important than Jesus – which
is what inevitably happens when we are satisfied with “preaching the Bible” and
not “the gospel” – is to become guilty of a kind of idolatry that means we
replace God the Creator with something from creation.
Don’t misunderstand – the Bible is our primary resource when
it comes to the gospel. But we can’t fail to let that resource point us to
Jesus, the one who in His incarnate life embodied the gospel in ways that
invite us to walk with him in this abundant life as we anticipate the day of
His reappearing.
If you ever heard Myron Taylor preach, you heard the gospel.
Today I am grateful that my life crossed paths with his. Good preaching points
us to Jesus. His preaching did exactly that.
In that article mentioned above, Dr. Taylor also said, ”We
dare not be ingrown, irrelevant, trivial in a time like this. The world is
loved by God and is the object of his action in behalf of our salvation. The
gospel is for the world. It takes courage sometimes to declare the gospel to
the age. It is much easier to discuss the past or speculate about the future.
Our need is to hear the biblical gospel intelligently interpreted and
persuasively proclaimed to our time – now.”
If he thought that is what the world needed on July 2, 1995,
I’m guessing he would think that and then some about “what we need these days.”
