Powlison on Preaching

I was blessedly chastened this evening reading an article by David Powlison, called "Who is God?"  This is in the Journal of Biblical Counseling, volume 17, number 2, winter 1999.  In it he is speaking of how we counsel from Ephesians, but his words apply equally well to preaching.  He describes two ways we might teach from Ephesians.  Method #1:

#1: The doctrine of election says that God chose a people to belong to Himself. Ephesians 1:7 teaches that sins are forgiven by the atoning work of Jesus Christ. Those who have trusted the good things promised in the indicative should then live out the implications of the imperative.

And, method #2:

#2: “God chose you to be His. In Christ we have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, by the riches of His grace, that He lavished on us. I plead with you, live worthy of your calling.”

Both speak truth, one reaches hearts. 

He compares this with two different ways of speaking about waves.

This from a textbook for an oceanography class:

A wave is nothing more than a disturbance that moves from place to place in some medium, carrying energy with it. The common waves of the ocean, as well as the greater ones occurring during storms, are oscillations of the sea caused by the frictional drag of the wind on its surface. For such waves, a general equation is where C is the velocity of the waveform, l is the wavelength, tanh means the hyperbolic tangent, d is the depth, and g is the gravitational constant.

And then we have this description of the properties of waves from Patrick O'Brian's book The Far Side of the World:

At the beginning of the graveyard watch, the southwest wind came in with a shriek. The shriek rarely lessened in the days and weeks that followed. The sailors suffered cruelly from the ice on deck, ice on the rigging, ice on the yards, the sail cloth board-hard with frozen, flying spray. The enormous rollers sweeping eastward grew more monstrous still, their white, windtorn crests a quarter mile apart with a deep greygreen valley between. The scale of the rollers was so vast that the frigate, opposing them, behaved more like a skiff: one evening, in a lull between two storms of sleet that came driving horizontally with the force of bird-shot, the lines parted. The maintopsail was shaking so furiousl that the masthead must have gone had not the bosun, Warley the captain of the maintop, and three of his men gone aloft, laid out on those icecoated yards and cut the sail away. Warley was on the lee yard arm when the footrope gave way under him; and he fell plunging far clear of the side and instantly vanished in the terrible sea. Striving harder one would have said than it was possible for men to strive, they succeeded in the end, and then they began knotting and splicing the damaged rigging: they also carried their hurt shipmates below. Captain Aubrey came down to the sick-bay when the ship was reasonably snug. “How is Jenkins?” he asked. “I doubt he can live,” said the doctor. “The whole rib cage is…and Rogers will probably lose an arm. What is that?”—pointing to the Captain’s hand, wrapped in a handkerchief. “It is only some nails torn out. I did not notice it at the time.”

Again, both accounts convey truth but one brings the properties of waves to life and the other doesn't  When I say I was blessedly chastened it is because there is something within me that likes to do it the first way, a just the facts ma'am type of approach.  But there is a way of being faithful to the Word of God that can apply it far more deeply to the hearts of man and I hope to do the same.