When We Don't Know Our Real Needs

Listening to an archive from the White Horse Inn radio program, I was reminded today of a refrain I heard a bunch of times during my six years of pastoral ministry.

Folks tiring of my "too doctrinal" preaching sometimes hinted and sometimes were rather bold about how I should stick to "real world" subjects. Why did I never give sermons like the old pastor did - you know, stuff like how to improve their marriages or raise their children? Why on earth would I spend an entire year trudging through Romans when they already knew all that stuff? (Or so they claimed)

In this program, an interview and discussion with Rev. Dick Lucas of The Proclamation Trust, the group goes after the sad state of preaching in the UK and USA today - how moralism and moralizing have replaced the proclamation of Christ. It's an old interview (from 1995) but startlingly applicable to where our churches are today. While many evangelicals might nod their heads thinking these guys must have the mainline in mind, the fact is that the idea of preaching to felt needs has about as much currency in self-styled evangelical churches today as it does in the liberal mainline.

With that background, I especially appreciate a comment Rev. Lucas makes about the account in Matthew 9:1-8 of Jesus and the paralyzed man. We all know the scene: the man's four friends are determined to get him to Jesus so Jesus can heal him, crowd or no crowd, so they make a hole in the roof and lower their friend, bed and all, with ropes. And most of us are able to get the real point of the account: that Jesus is demonstrating his (invisible) authority to forgive sin by his (visible) authority over sickness and disease.

But look at Jesus' first words to the paralyzed man from the point of view of so many who have been raised in our churches on a steady diet of felt needs. Jesus says, "Take heart, my son; your sins are forgiven." To which we might expect the man to reply, "Thanks for nothing! I'm PARALYZED, and I need to be healed. Don't talk to me about doctrine!"

When we don't know our first and greatest need, we'll prefer the temporal over the eternal every time. Jesus was well aware of the man's desire for healing (and of his four friends' faith that Jesus could make him well) but He refuses to deal with the felt need until the true need of a man dead in trespasses and sins is resolved.

Rev. Lucas continues, inviting us to consider what this saved man might say if he were to join the group in the recording studio after having spent the last two thousand years in the presence of Christ in heaven. It's worth thinking about. Yes, he was greatly blessed to be given the use of his legs. Yes, he was able to raise a family and provide for it. He was given twenty or twenty-five years more to live, with new purpose. These are not small things. Yet in comparison to the forgiveness of his sins, and his union with the Savior ...

Which brings us back to the sort of proclamation we settle for, as preachers or preached-to, in our churches. Whenever the mercies of God in Christ Jesus are not first and foremost (actually talked about! every week, in one aspect or another!) then we stand in danger of becoming like the child of the slums in C. S. Lewis' famous illustration, who prefers to go on making mud pies in the street gutter because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the seashore.

And what is terrifying, that we become hardened and complacent in our sin, preferring temporal help to eternal rescue, all the while the day of judgment looms.

The interview is worth a listen.