What's needed most? The Gospel, Straight-Up

Both Transforming Sermons and Swap Blog are commenting helpfully upon Brad's challenging post over at Broken Messenger. Brad writes:

But where is the concern over a lack of preaching a complete Gospel? Better still, why is it not being preached? It is almost as if the church has become a shop of curiosities where the real treasure is tucked away in the little backroom to be shown to those few who take the time to wade through the trinkets of political discourse and church culture long enough or be deemed "ready enough" to be shown it. Are we not to put that best treasure up in the front window to be proudly displayed for all to see: Jesus Christ and Him crucified?

Today, few in the church have taken the cause and led a charge of returning to the fundamentals concerning a walk with Christ. But even the well-known few who have, have struggled to preach the Good News in its totality. Instead, the Gospel has been wedged and force-fit into acceptable, comfortable slots alongside human wisdom, rather than being the superseding wisdom that it is: that great testament of the Cornerstone whose truth falls upon them all and grinds them to powder.

Our lack of effectiveness in society is one thing. Our lack of faith in preaching a complete Gospel to a seeking society is another. But it should trouble us deeply that a society that is quickly descending into the morass of sin that renders it blind to the only Savior that can free it from its bonds; is being ministered to by a church that seems far more focused on critiquing the descent of that society, instead of providing the Good News of Jesus Christ that leads it to freedom from its destructive course.

Brad is saying important things here, things that must be heard. This morning in my D. A. Carson devotional I read these similar sentiments:

There is nothing that our generation needs more than to hear the Word of God--and this at a time of biblical illiteracy rising at an astonishing rate. Moreover, it needs to hear Christian leaders personally submitting to Scripture--not in veiled ways that merely assume some sort of heritage of Christian teaching while actually focusing on just about anything else, but in ways that are reverent, exemplary, comprehensive, insistent, persistent. Nothing, nothing at all, is more urgent.