The gospel-centered movement is pretty constantly beating the “preach the cross” drum. I’m not going to try to defend that sentence, because I don’t think I need to. “Cross-centered” and “gospel-centered” are everywhere, and at GCYM, we think that’s a good thing.
We should constantly preach the cross because the Bible says stuff like, “I determined to know nothing among you except for Jesus Christ and Him crucified.” Also because our students need to know the fullness of their forgiveness. Also because we want to make disciples who pursue Jesus, not just moral performance.
Those are great reasons to preach the cross. They are probably also the reasons we think about most often. This post is about yet another reason we should preach the cross, one which perhaps we think about less often: we should preach the cross because the cross shows us what God is like.
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Obviously, we want our students to know what God is like. So our usual approach to teaching them this is to line up a preaching series or a Bible study where we teach the attributes of God by teaching propositional definitions: God’s “omnipotence,” for example, is His “ability to do all that he pleases.” Term. Definition. Verses. Illustration. Application point. Next attribute.
Theological propositions fell out of style there for a bit, but I’m not anti-propositional in the slightest. I learned the attributes of God in this way, I teach them this way, and I would encourage any other youth pastor to teach them this way. While you’re at it, buy your students Erik Thoennes’s Life’s Biggest Questions
But while you do all that, notice this also: the Bible’s primary way of showing us what God is like is by interpreting events rather than laying out context-less propositions. And the climactic event of God’s revelation of Himself in Scripture is the cross. Put another way, one of God’s great purposes in the cross is to show us what kind of God He is.
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There are a lot of Biblical texts that make this point, but John’s Gospel is what got me thinking about it. It is in John’s Gospel that Jesus repeatedly refers to the cross as the place where he is glorified (12:23; 13:31; et. al.).
So what does it mean for Jesus to be “glorified” then? I like Piper’s (completely propositional) definition of God’s glory: God’s glory is “the beauty of God’s manifold perfections.” That is, everything good about God (His “perfections”), taken all together (“manifold”), on display for us to delight in (because they are “beautiful”).
While neither Jesus nor John likely had that exact definition of “glory/glorify” in their minds when they said and wrote those things, it seems fair to say that Jesus is “glorified” on the cross in John in part because it is there that we see the fullest picture of what kind of Messiah He is. As we look upon the cross, therefore, we don’t just see an event; we see a person.
That is why when we see the bloodied body of Jesus of Nazareth lifted up on the cross, our response isn’t horror, but worship. Why is it worship? Because we know that Jesus of Nazareth is the Son of God, and that therefore the bloodied body is the ultimate display of the fullness of God’s extraordinary, incomprehensible, beautiful-beyond-all-words love for sinners. So much so, in fact, that any time Christians say that “God is love” or that “God loves us,” well, we just can’t help but to talk (and sing!) about the cross.
And that is the key idea I am trying to express: the attribute (God’s “love”) is expressed in the interpreted event (the New Testament accounts and explanations of the cross). Of course, it doesn’t only tell us about His love, either. It also tells us about His wrath, justice, wisdom, independence, omniscience, mercy, grace, Trinitarian nature, and so on.
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So what’s my point for youth ministry? It’s this: when we stop giving our students a regular diet of cross-centered preaching and teaching, we don’t just leave them starving for grace. We leave them starving for God.
If we mostly preach topical, felt-need based Biblical counsel (“How To Stay Pure In A Pornified Culture”) or Old Testament “moral-of-the-story” lessons (“How to Slay the Goliaths in Your Life”) or Gospel stories where Jesus is mostly our example to follow (“Learning to Love Like Jesus”), well, then, we end up telling our students about everything but God Himself. I bet most of our advice is decent. But it won’t give our students God. And nothing can satisfy the heart of a junior high or high school student besides God Himself.
So there it is: one more reason to constantly preach the cross. Let’s help our students grow in their discipleship to Jesus by showing them a God whose nature and character are such that He really is worthy of their worship.And let’s do that by preaching the cross.
God-Centered Youth Ministry 