Relevance without relevance

We do not preach only passages we believe will be relevant, but the whole council of God.  He is the authority we seek, not our own ideas.  Similarly, we do not change the meaning of the text to fit particular niches.

Yet, in avoiding the trend of relevancy in preaching, we do not want to give the impression that the text is irrelevant.  What is in the text but, "The Spirit says," present-tense?  Kaiser, in Toward an Exegetical Theology, points out one way preachers do this without knowing it.

The main pitfall to avoid in formulating these main points of the message is that of using dated statements. The tendency is to merely transfer from the text all proper names, places, incidents, and descriptions. This of course immediately makes more difficult a modern audience’s efforts to hear God’s “new” word to their generation from an admittedly old text. Therefore, the teacher or preacher will be well advised to delete all proper names from his main points (except for God’s names). Likewise, anything that would tend to focus the listeners’ attention more on the “then-ness” of the text than on the “now” of God’s new challenge must be studiously avoided. At the same time each new proposition must be so worded as to preserve the abiding, permanent, and fixed teaching of the text (157–58).

And, also consider:

If exegetical theology is worth anything, it must aid the student and pastor/teacher in bridging the gap between the original situation and the present-day audience (186).