Con Campbell (Aussie NT linguistic, jazz musician, and evangelist extraordinaire) has a good blog post on what texts to use for evangelistic sermons. I agree in part with his warning of forcing texts to say something that they don't say. The old mantra "Christ in every sermon" works better in some texts than others. But I think there has to be a balance between respecting the context, content, and concern of an OT text and reading the OT canonically. After all, in our reading of the OT we bring the gospel story with us even if we have to be careful to avoid spiritualizing allegory and eisegesis. We don't preach or listen to Zechariah 5 from the vantage point of post-exilic Judeans, but as Christians. Well, that's my thoughts. But I agree with Con in the comments, Romans 5:8 is a great text to preach evangelistically!
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Hi Mike,
Thanks for the link, and for the opportunity to clarify myself. I totally agree with you. While I didn't say it in the post, I take it for granted that preaching from the OT needs to be done within a biblical-theological framework, and thus will lead to Christ. I might add, however, that the careful selection of OT text will be important since some texts obviously lead more directly to Christ than others. Cheers.
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