Preachers need to preach the extremes. (HT: Rob Rayburn)
When preaching free grace, make it as radically free as you can make it. Make grace amazing, astonishing, marvelous. Pour on the love and mercy. Give them comfort and consolation. Give them peace and assurance.
When preaching human responsibility and obedience, ratchet it up as much as possible. Hold nothing back. Make them tremble. Call on them to obey the commands.
That’s what the biblical authors do. It’s what the great preachers have done.
When preaching a comforting passage, pile on the comfort as thick as possible. Wrap people up in gospel blanket.
When preaching repentance, turn the screws. Call on people repent of their particular sins particularly. Attack the sins of the people in the pews in front of you, relentlessly. Call them to pass through the narrow gate and walk in the hard way.
To illustrate: When a pastor is preaching the end of Romans 8, he should make his congregation feel loved with an unbreakable love. He should immerse them in God’s love. He should give them security in the most absolute terms he can muster. They should walk out of church that day feeling like more than conquerors, knowing no suffering, no accusation, and no sin can pry them apart from the love of God in Christ Jesus. The Father has given them his Son; surely he will give them all things needful.
When the same pastor preaches Romans 11, he should unpack Paul’s threats and warnings in the most direct way possible. He should not cut corners or sand down the rough edges of the text. He should really get his people to consider the kindness and severity of God. Yes, they have been grafted into the tree of the convent. But they can be broken out if they do not persevere. His sermon should scare the crap out of them. He should not hold back from saying what the text actually says. He should warn them, even as the text warns them. How can people work out their salvation with fear and trembling if the pastor never says anything fearful, if he never says anything that makes them tremble?
This is what it means to preach the extremes. It means conforming the rhetoric and theology of our sermons to the rhetoric and theology of Scripture.
This kind of preaching is faithful to the Westminster Standards. WCF 14.2 describes how faith responds to different portions of God’s Word:
“By this faith a Christian believeth to be true whatsoever is revealed in the Word, for the authority of God himself speaking therein; and acteth differently upon that which each particular passage thereof containeth; yielding obedience to the commands, trembling at the threatenings, and embracing the promises of God for this life and that which is to come.”
Preaching should do all these things in the hearts of those who hear: the sermon should call people to obey what God commands, tremble at God’s threats, and find comfort in embracing God’s promises.
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