“Don’t stray too far from the red letters,” is a piece of advice often given to new preachers. It means, stay close to the teachings of Jesus and you can’t go wrong. It sounds good, but it’s bad advice. Everything Jesus said was good, but not everything he said is good for you. Read the red letters of your Bible and you will find stories of unprecedented grace and merciless declarations of law. Mix these messages and you will end up confused and double-minded. And lukewarm. The solution is not to balance law and grace but to filter everything you read through the finished work of the cross. To make sense of what Jesus said, you need to understand what Jesus did and why. Jesus lived under law Jesus lived at the crossroads of two covenants. As humanity’s representative he came to fulfill the old law-keeping covenant in order that we might relate to God through a new and better covenant forged in his blood. Since the new covenant could not begin before he died, Jesus lived all of his pre-cross life under the old covenant of the law: But when the time had fully come, God sent his Son, … Continue reading The Greatest Law Preacher