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

Adams asserts, "Application brings Christ into the center of a message as the One who makes the difference in life (1990, p. 41). In his chapter entitled, "Application Without Moralism," Chapell concurs: "[Christians'] primary power is the faith God has put in them….by virtue of their union with him they have power to do what God requires" (2005, p. 294).

Let's examine faith's impact on obedience in the following example: "Let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamor and slander be put away from you, along with all malice" (Eph. 4:31). To attack disobedience, we first attack unbelief. This means we attempt to point out the kind of unbelief that causes a professing believer to not put away anger. Any believer who does not put away anger, for instance, does not believe that s/he has been shown kindness and tender mercy from a holy God through the cross of Christ. The believer who doesn't put away anger doesn't believe that God has sufficiently dealt with sin on the cross and will deal with it in final judgment.

To foster obedience to this instruction, we must first foster faith in the sufficiency of Jesus' sacrifice to pay for our sin and the sin of the one toward whom we're angry. An attempt to apply Ephesians 4:31, then, involves the continual fight against unbelief and sin and the continual pursuit of faith and obedience on the part of a professing believer.

The Scope of Cross-Eyed Application

If the first appeal to parishioners is to faith in Christ, the scope of cross-eyed application is broad enough to include every listener, believer, and unbeliever. Let's first begin with a look at how this appeal to faith in Christ includes unbelievers. Take, for example again, an attempt to apply Ephesians 4:31, "Let all…anger…be put away from you…" This instruction was originally designed for every person in "church" that Sunday. An unbelieving listener may be confronted with his violation of this biblical instruction (i.e., he knows he's angry at times). He may even feel that he wants to control his anger; but as we've shown above, obedience is faith-based. If the application of this text does not begin with an appeal to faith in Christ, then this text which was designed for the Church only applies to the Christian.

However, when cross-eyed application is presented from Ephesians 4:31, the unbeliever will hear a call to faith in Christ. This application applies directly to his spiritual condition—he needs justification. The call to obedience in Ephesians 4:31 exposed his sin which is rooted in unbelief. Cross-eyed application calls him to believe, and that faith in Christ gives him the desire and ability to obey this biblical instruction. In this case the unbelieving listener has experienced justification and sanctification as a result of Ephesians 4:31 being applied cross-eyed.

Readers who are experimenting with or fully engaged in a seeker-sensitive approach to preaching should sense the applicability of cross-eyed application for their audiences. You are trying to reach non-Christians with messages that are relevant to their place in life. Putting away anger is certainly relevant to where many live, but the call of Scripture is not simply to put away anger for the sake of personal and relational health. God is calling every hearer of Ephesians 4:31 to put away anger because this type of anger is a mark of unbelief in the work of Christ, an unbelief that has eternal consequences. Therefore, on that basis, you can actually call unbelievers to repentance and faith.