The Worship of Ideals

Where Even Jesus Isn’t Jesus Enough

🛡 1. The Crisis of Expectation

The complaint that expository preaching doesn’t preach Jesus enough is not really about Jesus. It’s about a projection—a desire for a Jesus who sounds like the preacher’s favorite pietist, revivalist, or modern psalmist. A Jesus who is always gentle, never confronts, and always speaks “gospel” in terms the listener prefers—namely, therapeutic affirmation.

But if Jesus doesn’t talk about Jesus the way you want Him to, who’s wrong—Him, or your expectation?

📜 2. The Platonic Spirit and Its False Gospel

What masquerades today as "Lutheranism" in this spirit is neither that of the Augustana nor of the Formula of Concord. It is instead a Platonic idealism—a longing for a pure emotional form of Christianity, full of lyric, empty of confession, and hostile to incarnation. It chases after feeling, not faith, and treats the real Jesus—the one who talks plainly, judges rightly, and fulfills the Law—as insufficient for spiritual nourishment.

This spirit flees from sin named and confessed, preferring instead sin redefined:

• From guilt to shame.

• From injustice to insecurity.

• From rebellion to trauma.

In doing so, it replaces repentance with sentimentality.

⚔️ 3. Law and Gospel Is Not Preaching What You Feel

When the preacher has preached the gospel. When he has walked through the red letters verbatim. When he has opened the words of the Christ, his parables, his declarations, his last words, someone will yet say of the cross and of forgiveness, “It was good to hear about Jesus again,” as if the Lord had been absent in all his other Words. This calls for wisdom: what is really meant is: “You finally gave me the feeling I wanted.”

But the Jesus of Scripture is not interested in pleasing our feelings. He comes to crucify the flesh—not just the sins we fear being caught for, but the deeper sins we don’t fear:

• The neglect of our neighbor.

• The mammon trust of our budgets.

• The comfort-worship of middle-class idolatry.

The fact that expository preaching—the simple reading and explanation of the text of God—can be called “not gospel enough” by people who claim to be confessional Lutherans is the smoking gun: They do not trust the Scriptures.

They trust a ghost. But not the Holy one.

✨ Sola Scriptura Means

Jesus is enough.
His words are enough.
His ways are enough.
If someone says otherwise, banging on another book as they go, shouting another man’s name as the solution, then they’re not arguing with the preacher.
They’re arguing with the Christ who spoke.

He will not change.