PREACHING CHRIST
By Charles P. McIlvaine
Banner of Truth. 86 pages. £4.50
ISBN 0 85151 831 1
Buy this for your minister. It won't cost much more than two coffees and it might do him more good. It is brief enough that he will actually read it and straightforward enough that he will grasp its message. The message is that Christ is the message.
McIlvaine was a 19th-century Episcopalian calling American preachers to return to the centrality of Jesus Christ, his person, office and saving work. To this short book is added an apposite Spurgeon sermon on Acts 5.42. Both are biblical and relevant, although the Spurgeon piece packs the more punch.
The pity is that we have to go back to the 1860s for something like this. Today's postmodernism cries out for this story of a living Christ, not a doctrine but a real person. The language, however, is dated and the context not our own. Our preachers need to be told not merely that they should preach Christ from the Old Testament, but shown how the thrilling flow of biblical theology enables them to do it. Our congregations need more of this soul-stirring stuff to excite the saints and to give them good reason to drag their friends along to hear it.
Alan Gibson,
a preacher for 47 years, now helping to promote Wycliffe Bible Translators
