ROUGHLY EDITED COPY CUENet AUDIO TRANSCRIPTION DOGMATICS 2 LESSON 76 Captioning Provided By: Caption First, Inc. 10 E. 22nd Street Suite 304 Lombard, IL 60148 800-825-5234 *** This text is being provided in a rough draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings. *** >> We've emphasized the cross a lot in this course, especially as we've talked about the atonement. Does that mean we always have to preach about the cross? >> DR. DAVID MAXWELL: Well, David, I mentioned before that if you always say just "Jesus died for you" as the Gospel, your sermons get kind of boring. And I think your question relates to that concern, that we don't want to have to say the Gospel the same way every Sunday or have the same sermon structure every Sunday. So I think it's helpful for us to consider other ways that we might approach sermons to prevent that kind of repetition of structure. And I have to say that the law of Gospel distinction itself can sometimes trap people into having a sermon where it's always Part 1 is the law and then you get this but and then Part 2 is the Gospel. And then maybe have a Part 3 on the third use of the law. Or maybe you don't. But there's a lot of sermons that get preached with that basic outline. And I think if you do that, people are going to be on to you. They are going to tune you out when you are preaching the law because they know that the but is coming and they can pretty much ignore everything you said in the first part of the sermon. So I don't want -- the law-Gospel distinction means you have to adopt a law-Gospel sermon outline so that Part 1 is law, Part 2 is Gospel. What you need to do in a sermon is to preach the text that's assigned for that day. And maybe that text will include references to the cross. And maybe it won't. Now, I'm not opposed to talking about the cross a lot in sermons. Because as we've said often in both sections of this course, the cross is really the center of what Christ did for us. Which is not to exclude his life. It's not to exclude his resurrection. But that's kind of the focal point. And even in the scriptures we see this. St. Paul says in I Corinthians 2, "I have resolved to know nothing while I was with you except for Jesus Christ and him crucified." So the problem is not I don't think an overemphasis on the cross. The problem is a predictable sermon outline and a predictable way of articulating the Gospel. Now, in our previous discussion about the atonement, I hope maybe that has helped a little bit to give you some other ideas of ways in which to describe the Gospel. But let me give you another one. And this is perhaps -- consider this to be a subset of the vicarious satisfaction view. And that goes by the name of blessed exchange. And this comes from Luther. Luther will often describe the Gospel as simply Christ taking our place. And that's not limited to the cross. I mean, it's almost like a marriage. And so that everything that is mine becomes his. And everything that is his becomes mine. So it's a marriage between Christ and the church. He's the groom and the church is the bride. And there's this exchange of property, so to speak. So that we get everything that's Christ's and he gets everything that's ours. He takes our sin upon himself. He takes our death upon himself. And he gives us his life and his righteousness. And I think if you keep that kind of in your arsenal of homiletical resources or ways of describing the Gospel, that's going to be very helpful. As you encounter different texts you can think about "How is it in this text that Christ is taking what is ours and giving us what is his?" And I would say perhaps the paradigmatic scripture passage for this view would be II Corinthians 8 Verse 9, "Though he was rich, though for your sakes he became poor so that you through his poverty might become rich." So there you have -- you know, he gets our poverty. He gives us his riches. That's a pattern in the way that God works. And I think that as you do sermon preparations, you will be able to employ that pattern to provide sermons that are not so predictable and so that you're not always -- the high point of the sermon is not something that your congregation could have predicted before they even came to church that Sunday. *** This text is being provided in a rough draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings. ***