After 2000 years you would have thought that we christians would have at least agreed on what our message is by now! But perhaps our disagreements are precisely because of the glorious riches of the gospel which DOES in my view both give us a sense of purpose AND deal with our sin, both remove our guilt AND heal our wounds, produce the fear of God whilst destroying the fear of man, and many more things. So as The SHEEP'S CRIB notes I delight in our gentlemanly discussions about what exactly the gospel is and what preaching should be like. Incidently, I loved his emphasis on the fear of God- I think he is absolutely right that God needs to bring us to the end of ourselves before we can trully come to him.

I suspect that part of the reason for our discussions is a differing view of what preaching is. To me essentially preaching is proclaiming the word of God. Thus, (and allowing for the context of Romans 10) I do feel fairly comfortable about stating that it is preaching that is needed for people to hear, and hearing for people to have faith. But Eph 2 makes it clear that faith is a gift of God. Thus, whilst some form of preaching is normally essential for saving faith to arrise (even if it is only a snippet), it is not sufficient in itself- we need a touch of God's Spirit to bring our preaching to life and to produce faith in our hearers. Sometimes I think the blogging medium is not the best way to get our ideas across, so I would commend those who are interested in this discussion that has been simmering on a low heat for some while on this and other blogs to have a listen to the sermon I preached recently on Romans 10. It was a delight to me to discover today a brand new blogger who has done just that. He also shared his sermon on how the gospel relates to marriage with us, which I caught the beginning of earlier- it sounded great and I intend to listen to the rest sometime soon.