Whited Sepulcher Theology

There's a lot of what I like to call "virtue preaching" going
around these days. Virtue preaching is when a preacher gets up and tells
his audience to stop doing something, start doing something, or both.
It's always very basic; typically involves things like "stop
stealing," or "stop lusting," or "start praying more," or
"start going to church." As you can see, they're usually things
that nobody can disagree with. Occasionally you'll get the "girls
shouldn't wear pants" message or "mixed swimming is of the
devil" message, but for the sake of this argument we'll forget
those propositions. There is, however, a very subtle problem with this
popular method of preaching. I'll lay it out for you. Let's say
we're doing a message on making excuses. Immediately everyone is
thinking about Moses at the burning bush so we'll choose that as our
main text. Typically these messages are predictable as well. You're
audience will have the proposition and three points figured out by the
end of the introduction. This is a good thing. It means everyone will
get it. In our message, we'll read the text and give our proposition,
"Stop making excuses." We will then proceed with out first point,
followed by a story and continue that pattern through to the conclusion.
Then at the end we will again tell everyone to stop making excuses. You
have an invitation. Everyone raises their hand. Everyone comes forward.
You're feeling good about yourself. You just got a crowd of a few
thousand to stop making excuses. Congratulations. Guess what you just
created. A few thousand Pharisees. If you remember anything about your
Bible, Jesus wasn't particularly fond of these people. What went
wrong? Didn't we have good intentions? Didn't we preach the Word? Of
course we had good intentions, and of course we preached out of the
Bible. We just missed the point of it, that's all. What we should have
done however is tell people there's a reason Moses made his excuse.
It's because he didn't believe that God would keep His promise that
Israel would be delivered from Egypt. This is where we start with our
message. That's the point of the passage. This approach deals with the
heart. The other deals with externals. Paul David Tripp would call it
"fruit stapling." We don't want to have any part in this, for
ourselves or for others. Jesus dealt with the heart in His sermon on the
mount. In fact, His entire ministry was and still is keyed in on this
one thing. He wants to change lives from the inside out. Let's start
participating in this beautiful plan.