It is easy to make the text the key focus of preaching, after all it is being expounded and we are to preach the whole counsel of God. It is understandable to make people a primary focus of preaching too, application is the life of a sermon and lacking this it is a mere lecture. But the true focus of preaching rises above these things and must be kept constantly in view.
In a book called The Humbled Sinner Resolved Obadiah Sedgwick (member of the Westminster Assembly) explains what is the true focus of preaching.
If believing in Jesus Christ is the only way of life, then Jesus Christ should be the main scope and mark of all our preaching and studying. “I determined not to know any thing among you, save Jesus Christ and him crucified” (1 Corinthians 2:2). It was the main theme and subject on which that blessed apostle spent himself.
So whether ministers preach the knowledge of sin, or whether they strive to make men conscious of sin, or whether they let fire the arrows of God’s threatenings on the conscience of sinners, or whether they touch on the mercy seat. All the end and scope is, or should be, to bring men to Christ, to make Christ more glorious in the eyes of sinners, and to incline their hearts to accept and embrace Him. Christ may be preached two ways. Either explicitly, when He is in His person, or offices, or benefits, is the only subject matter which is handled and proclaimed. Or virtually, when He is the end of the subject matter that is delivered.
Do I meet with a broken and afflicted spirit, groaning under the load of sinful nature and life, panting after the Prince of life and peace, willing to yield up itself to all the conditions of God in Christ? Here now I am to lift up Christ on His Cross, to spread His arms, to show unto that broken spirit, the very heart blood of Jesus Christ poured out for the remission of sins, to be a propitiatory sacrifice for his soul.
Do I meet with an obstinate and proud spirit, which dares to defy justice,
and presumptuously to complain about mercy? Here I open the indignation
of God against sin on purpose to awaken the conscience, to cast down the high and lofty imaginations. Yet it is for no other purpose except that such a person being now come to the felt sense of their misery, may fitly be directed and seasonably encouraged to the sight and fruition of their remedy in Christ.
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