So you want to be relevant…
It has been the hip thing since Church 1.0 to try to be relevant. How can we be relevant to our audience – what sermon examples are hip, edgy and cool? What language can I add to my sermon to spice it up (within and without curses, depending on “who you are reaching out to?” Mark Dever’s recent post on the ever-excellent blog “Together for the Gospel” addresses this subject with admirable clarity:
One way would have been to update examples, or make the more edgy and catchy, to use some video clips. All of this would have been done to make the application even more powerfully evident to everyone present.
A second way of making the sermon more relevant would have been to have spent more time showing us that none of us HAVE been good enough, spoken well enough, kept our word enough, etc. AND then to have shown us that Christ did all of this FOR US.
Maybe I’m just becoming more “reformed” in my thinking, but I applaud this second perspective. To me, the scriptures are most relevant when we are most true to them. If the spice of our perceived relevance distances us from the scriptures than we have created the greatest irrelevance.