Cross-Eyed Application: Equipping Preachers to Urge Faith-Based, Text-driven Obedience

Let's take another look at Mark 2:1-12. A possible application of this story might be: "When you are in need of physical healing, go to Jesus who will heal you." While the possibility is certainly there that Jesus may physically heal someone, we can't say absolutely that Jesus will do that if they go to Him. In this kind of application, the possible is posed as the absolute or necessary one.

Both of these dangers consistently threaten pastors' attempts to accurately apply the Scriptures to their lives and the lives of their hearers. We're proposing that avoiding these pitfalls can be accomplished through faith-based (combats the first danger), text-driven (combats both forms of the second danger) application. What follows is our attempt to combat the first danger of applying the Scriptures in such a way that we may be moving ourselves and our folks away from dependency on the power of God.

Cross-eyed Interpretation: The First Look of Application

The first step in avoiding the danger of moving ourselves and God's people away from dependency on His power in the application of Scripture is to begin to understand the connection between our application and our hermeneutic. While it may be true that heresy is verbalized at the level of application, it is conceptualized at the level of interpretation.

The first assurance that application will be sound is to build application on a solid foundation of cross-eyed (Christ-centered) interpretation. We believe that in order to discover what God is saying to us from a particular preaching portion of the Bible (Old or New Testament) we need to ultimately identify how that preaching portion connects to and is interpreted by the grace of God in Christ. McCartney and Clayton write, "Individual verses must be understood in their immediate historical and literary context, and may as individual verses have little to do with the messianic expectation. But as part of the whole, they do relate in some way to the Christological goal of this redemptive history" (2002, p. 48).

Let's go back to Ephesians 5 for a moment and ask how that preaching portion (vv. 25-33) connects to and is interpreted by the grace of God in Christ. A Christ-centered interpretation does not simply point out the fact that Christ and His sacrifice for the Church is contained in the paragraph. A Christ-centered interpretation does not simply utilize Christ as our example (which is the way in which He is portrayed in the preaching portion: "just as Christ also loved the church…").

Because our preaching portion is itself an application of Paul's theological statements contained in chapters 1—3, we will interpret 5:25-33 in a way that reflects a life transformed "according to the power that works within us" (cf. Eph. 3:20b; cf. also Eph. 3:7, 16). This means that husbands who have been transformed through faith by the grace of God in Christ have the supernatural desire and ability to obey or apply that text: "Husbands, love your wives…" (Eph. 5:25a).