Shouldn't Christian pastors preach Christian sermons?
The Law is everything God demands of us. It includes His threat of punishment for disobedience.
The Gospel is the Good News of what God has done for us in Christ. It is the Gospel, and not the Law, that makes a sermon- or a person- Christian.
There is no Christian monopoly on the notion that you should be good, or that God makes demands on our behavior and threatens us with punishment if we don't comply. Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, Wiccans, Rastaferians, and just about anybody who doesn't worship either Satan or Cthulhu can go along with that. Even atheists and agnostics often acknowledge that ethics are good, and that it's better to be nice than naughty.
But God isn't Santa Claus, even though He does know whether you're naughty or nice, and even knows when you are sleeping and knows when you're awake. And the distinctively Christian message is forgiveness of sins through the life and death of Jesus Christ, not the kind of generic brow-beating you can get from almost any teacher or writer of any kind who isn't a sociopath.
An awful lot of sermons preached in Christian churches simply aren't Christian sermons. As Walther observed in Thesis XXV of The Proper Distinction, "...the Word of God is not rightly divided when the person teaching it does not allow the Gospel to have a general predominance in his teaching."
HT: Real Clear Religion
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