Relevance

* This was really helpful for me to read. The references here to Clarence Thomas come from a statement in Thomas’ biography about walking out of church when he was younger because what he was hearing all seemed irrelevant to him.

“As a preacher, I think a lot about relevance. Why should anyone listen to what I have to say? Why should anybody care? Relevance is an ambiguous word. It might mean that a sermon is relevant if it feels to the listeners that it will make a significant difference in their lives. Or it might mean that a sermon is relevant  if it will make a significant difference in their lives whether they feel it or not.

That second kind of relevance is what guides my sermons and my writing. In other words, I want to say things that are really significant for your life whether you know they are or not. My way of doing that is to stay as close as I can to what God says is important in his word, not what we think is important apart from God’s word.

So in any given worship service a dozen young, idealistic, Clarence Thomases might be present, full of anger about racism, or global warming, or abortion, or limited health care for children, or homelessness, or poverty, or the war in Iraq, or white-collar crime, or human trafficking, or the global AIDS crisis, or rampant fatherlessness, or the greed behind the sub-prime mortgage crisis, or the treatment of illegal aliens, or the plight of Christians just coming out of prison. And then they hear me announce that today we are going to talk about the way a person can be born again. And they might react like Clarence Thomas did and simply walk out and say, ‘That has nothing to do with the real problems this world is facing.’

They would  be wrong – doubly wrong. They would be wrong, in the first place, in failing to see that what Jesus meant by the new birth is supremely relevant for racism and global warming and abortion and heath care and all the other issues of our day. We will see in the coming chapters what the necessary fruit of the new birth looks like.

And they would  be wrong, secondly, in thinking that those issues are the most important issues in life. They aren’t. They are life-and-death issues. But they are not the most important, because they deal with the relief of suffering during this brief earthly life, not the relief of suffering during the eternity that follows. Or to put it positively, they deal with how to maximize well-being now for eighty years or so, but not with how to maximize well-being in the presence of God for eighty trillion years and more.

My job as a pastor is to deal in what matters most, and to stay close to the revealed will of God in the Bible (so you can see it for yourselves), and to pray that, by God’s grace, the young, idealistic, angry Clarence Thomases in the crowd, and everyone else, will see and feel the magnitude of what God says is important.” – John Piper in Finally Alive.