Summer series. Some years ago, we asked Sinclair Ferguson to write a brief paper for us on preaching Christ from the Old Testament. Over the next week or so, we’re going to publish an edited version online as part of our summer series. It’s worth some time.

For us as preachers, this whole issue is a much bigger one than how we preach Christ from the Old Testament, for at least two reasons.

1. First, because (if my own assessment is correct) many sermons from the Gospels —where the focus is explicitly on the person of Jesus—never mind from the Old Testament are far from Christ-centred.

How is this possible? The preacher has looked into the text principally to find himself and his congregation, not to find Christ. The sermon is consequently about ‘people in the Gospels’ rather than about Jesus Christ who is the gospel. The real question the preacher has been interested in asking and answering, is not ‘How do we find Christ in this Gospel?’ but ‘Where am I in this story? What have I got to do?’ Even although an entire series of such sermons on a Gospel is preached (as in the lectio continua method), we will not necessarily have communicated the basic life of Jesus. Instead we have been given an exploration of the human condition.

So there is a confused mindset here that raises a deeper question than, ‘Is there a formula that helps us to preach Christ from the Old Testament?’ The more fundamental issue is the question, ‘What am I really looking for when I am preaching on any part of the Bible? Am I really looking to tell people what they are like and what they must do—that is, am I really stressing the subjective and the imperative—or am I talking about Jesus Christ himself and the gospel? Do I stress the objective and the indicative of the gospel in the light of which the subjective and imperative are to be considered? After all it is not the subjective (my condition) or the imperative (respond!) that saves or transforms people’s lives, but the objective and the indicative of God’s grace received subjectively in the light of the imperatives of the gospel.

2. A second observation worth noting in this connection is that many (perhaps most) outstanding preachers of the Bible (and of Christ in all Scripture) are so instinctively. Ask them what their formula is and you will draw a blank expression. The principles they use have been developed unconsciously, through a combination of native ability, gift and experience as listeners and preachers. Some men might struggle to give a series of lectures on how they go about preaching. Why? Because what they have developed is an instinct; preaching biblically has become their native language. They are able to use the grammar of biblical theology, without reflecting on what part of speech they are using. That is why the best preachers are not necessarily the best instructors in homiletics, although they are, surely, the greatest inspirers of true preaching.

Most of us probably develop the instinct for biblical-theological and redemptive-historical preaching best by the osmosis involved in listening to those who do it well. It is always wise to listen to such preachers and their preaching as though we had two minds—one through which the preaching of the word nourishes us, the other through which, simultaneously or on later reflection, asks: ‘Why did this exposition nourish me in that way? What dynamics and principles were operative?’  Seeing how the hidden principles work out in practice is the best way to make those principles our own so that they become the grammar of our preaching.