Here’s what you do.
- Read a Bible story at some length, always picking something that involves a miraculous transformation. There are plenty of these available, enough for a whole year’s preaching or more.
- Here’s your main point: someone in the story met Jesus, or God if it’s the Old Testament, and their life was transformed. Tell this story with as much drama as you can muster.
- Salt your story with promises plucked from elsewhere in scripture, again, plenty to choose from.
- Tell some stories about yourself or your children that vaguely illustrate the same point.
- Repeat (that’s a sermon series). Or write down (that’s a book).
- Change the theme slightly, and repeat again. So instead of ‘secrets of healing’, you could branch into ‘living a life of victory’ or ‘total financial freedom’ or ‘being a person of power and authority’.
- On you go. Same talk. It’s a career.
There are consequences to this Christian populism.
- You are pointing people to Jesus, perhaps the best thing you can do for anyone.
- Unfortunately the Jesus you are pointing them to is a one-shot wonder worker, a stripped-down version of the real thing.
- You’re missing the slow. We not finished, in both senses. We are still being patched up, and we are still pressing on in our incomplete state. Blessed are those at the end of their rope, broken, mourning, hungering, thirsting. Every day we search our minds and hearts to conform them to God’s will. Through faith and patience we inherit the promises. Suffering produces character produces hope. Not a charge to victory, methinks, a patient plod.