Since the day the church was born, there have been Christian preachers with deep convictions about preaching who proclaimed abiding themes that have informed, ordered, and sustained the church's life. These convictions can be summarized as a theology of preaching and a theology to preach. If we do not have a viable theology of preaching, we have nothing to sustain us as preachers; and if we do not have a theology to preach, we have nothing to sustain our hearers. The purpose here is to address the second concern: a theology to preach.

Preaching the Christian message is a continuing process that requires constant study of the Scriptures and a growing maturity in discerning the wisdom which is from God.1 Further, the best way to restore passion to the pulpit is for preachers to rediscover the freshness of the biblical message and to pass that discovery on to their hearers. Unless the pulpit is on fire, it is nearly impossible to get the pew to burn.

Rediscovering our message means emphasizing several key themes. The first one has supreme priority. When we preach, we are to preach Christ. Paul wrote in 1 Corinthians 2:2, "I determined to know nothing among you but Christ and him crucified." Count Zinzendorf, the founder of the Moravians, exclaimed, "I have one passion in life. It is he, it is he!" Martin Luther declared, "We preach first Christ and last Christ and always Christ. It may seem like a monotonous theme but we are never at the end of it." Preaching Christ is essential because we are Christian preachers.

But proclaiming Christ has two sides to it. On the one hand, it is imperative that we know Christ and help people to know Him. As James S. Stewart put it: "To be 'in Christ' means that Christ is the redeemed man's new environment," and we make contact with Him through surrender."2 We are under divine orders simply to preach Christ.

On the other hand, it is imperative that we know as much as possible about Christ. New converts may only need to have been introduced to Christ and to what He has required of them to become His followers. Much more is needed, however, for those of us who are going to be Christian leaders and spokespersons for Christ. We often hear people talking about the simple message of Jesus, but the message of Jesus is not simple. It consists of profundity on top of profundity and mystery on top of mystery.

If we cannot know all about Him, we need to know as much about Him as possible. When we encounter a Jehovah's Witness or a Mormon or a Muslim, we had better know something about Christology, and only a biblical Christology can counter the New Age counterfeits and other forms of secularized Christianity so popular in the culture today.

There is an incident in Acts 8 which illustrates this point. The evangelist Philip has been invited into the chariot of the Ethiopian eunuch to explain the meaning of the passage that the eunuch was reading in Isaiah 53. The Bible says that Philip began at that same Scripture and preached Jesus to him (8:35). But what did he say about Jesus? What are we to say about Jesus? The answer is that there is a flexibility about the presentation of the basic message about Christ in the New Testament, and scholars vary the ways that they give their litanies of the Kerygma.3