Preaching As Concept Creation, Not Just Contextualization

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By John Piper About Preaching & Teaching
Part of the series Taste & See

As we think seriously about contextualizing the message of the Bible, let’s remember that we must also labor to bring about, in the minds of our listeners, conceptual categories that may be missing from their mental framework. If we only use the thought structures they already have, some crucial biblical truths will remain unintelligible, no matter how much contextualizing we do. This work of concept creation is harder than contextualization, but just as important.

We must pray and preach so that a new mental framework is created for seeing the world. Ultimately, this is not our doing. God must do it. The categories that make the biblical message look foolish are deeply rooted in sinful human nature. “The natural person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned” (1Corinthians 2:14).

Part of what the Spirit does in overcoming human resistance is to humble us to the point where we can let go of ingrained patterns of thought. But the Spirit does this through preaching and teaching. “Since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom [that is, through its cherished ways of thinking], it pleased God through the folly of what we preach to save those who believe” (1 Corinthians 1:21).

God brings about this new seeing and understanding and believing. But he uses us to do it. So we should give as much effort in helping people have new, biblical categories of thought as we do in contextualizing the gospel to the categories they already have.

Here are a few examples of biblical truths that most fallen minds have no conceptual categories for conceiving. May the Lord raise up witnesses to his truth who don’t distort it by over-zealous contextualizing, but awaken a place for it in converted minds which have new Spirit-created categories.

1. All persons are accountable for their choices, and all their choices are infallibly and decisively ordained by God.

2. It is not sin in God to will that there be sin

3. What God decrees will come to pass is not always the same as what he commands that we do, and may indeed be the opposite.

4. God’s ultimate goal is the exaltation and display of his own glory, and this is at the heart of what it means for him to love us.

5. Sin is not primarily what hurts man but what belittles God by expressing unbelief or indifference to his superior worth.

6. God is perfectly just and orders the complete destruction of the inhabitants of Canaan.

7. The key to the Christian life is learning the secret of acting in such a way that our acts are done as the acts of Another.

8. Those who belong to Christ have crucified the flesh.

9. “The virgin shall conceive and bear a son.” (Matthew 1:23)

10. “Before Abraham was I am.” (John 8:58)

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