Preaching to preachers was a famous theologian named Oswald Beyer. He was trying to convey the truth that for preachers all we have to offer is the Gospel, the good news about Jesus. There are word structures that simply and beautifully and I would say breathtakingly present the love of God for us in Jesus. One example would be Jesus words in Matthew that He would be with us to the end of the age. Words like these teach us that when we address people with the gospel, “we should not tie them down to themselves and their relationships, we should not demand anything of them, but we should promise them something unexpected, undeserved, something that they are not and do not have, something impossible, at least not possible for them. Through such a promise, they belong to Jesus through the faith that it creates. And we can appeal to this same Jesus because he is the Lord, the one who has the first and last word. Most of all, we should appeal to him if ever we are asked “by what authority” we perform a speech act of the said kind. For we have no authority to claim anything for ourselves but our authority comes from the Lord (see 2 Cor. 3:5).
