I love to preach.

I’m not entirely sure how good at it I am – the general consensus seems to be that you need to preach about 100 times before you figure out your own approach, find your voice, and so forth. In my particular situation, though, the opportunities aren’t all that frequent; between seminary classes, my internship as an ordination candidate, occasional chances to fill the pulpit while raising support, and my actual work on the field, I’d estimate that I’m somewhere in the low to mid-20s by now (two-thirds of those sermons having been prepared and preached in German).

On a recent trip to participate in a multi-church missions conference, I was invited to preach at a partner church the Sunday before the conference started, then again the following Sunday as part of the conference itself. I’m fairly sure that was the first time I’ve preached on consecutive Sundays since I was ordained.

My first delivery of the sermon I used has been posted online here, so I thought I’d share. Again, I don’t put myself forward as a homiletic black belt or anything (and I suspect that the following week’s delivery of the same sermon was probably improved by the tweaks I was able to make during the week), but the subject matter really is near and dear to my heart.

Shaphan the scribe reads the newly discovered book of the Law to King Josiah

The disciples’ befuddlement at Jesus’ predicting his sufferings – not to mention, of course, his actual suffering and death – show that they had an entirely mistaken notion about what sort of king he was sent to be. That’s a fairly familiar reading of passages like Peter’s “Get behind me, Satan” moment, and it’s an accurate one. But it’s often accompanied by the implicit sense that when Jesus says, “You are not setting your mind on the things of God, but on the things of man,” what he means is: “You are not setting your mind on the things of the New Testament, but on the things of the Old.”

What I mean is that we tend to assume that first-century Jews like Peter were basically right to see the promises of the Old Testament as pointing toward a king who would come and seize power by the sword and drive the Romans back into the sea, and that their only mistake was in not seeing that God was doing something completely new and different this time. But this just doesn’t hold up: Jesus was and is the Christ, which means the anointed king of Israel, the one the law of Deuteronomy 17:14-20 (my sermon text) is meant to regulate. To say that Jesus came to fulfill the Law for his people means that he came to do what God required of anyone who would be king over His people.

And if that’s the case, then we need to be digging deep into the Old Testament to see what exactly Jesus thought he was up to, going about being Israel’s king the way he did. I hope this sermon gives a little snapshot into how I try to do that in Germany, whether it’s in my seminary classes or from the pulpit. It is endlessly profitable to me, and I hope it’ll be of some benefit to some of you as well.

-Ben