As I prepare to do another 9Marks interview with David Wells while I'm up at Gordon-Conwell this week, I'm looking through his latest book, Above All Earthly Pow'rs again.  What a good book!  David makes a statement early in the book about the centrality of the Word in the weekly congregational setting which is worth pulling out and considering.

How central was God's Word to your service this past Sunday?  How central was it in the sermon?

Here's what David says:  “This Word of God is the means by which God accomplishes his saving work in his people, and this is a work that no evangelist and no preacher can do.  This is why the dearth of serious, sustained biblical preaching in the Church today is a serious matter.  When the Church loses the Word of God it loses the very means by which God does his work.  In its absence, therefore, a script is being written, however unwittingly, for the Church’s undoing, not in one cataclysmic moment, but in a slow, inexorable slide made up of piece by tiny piece of daily dereliction.” David Wells, Above All Earthly Pow’rs (2005), p. 9.