It should come as no surprise that, at this point in time, the enemy of men’s souls—God’s archenemy, Satan himself—has cranked up his efforts to prevent the spread of the gospel. One of his primes tactics is to make the church confused about what the gospel is. It doesn’t do any good to have this fantastic contemporary communication technology, or wealth, manpower, and passion to take the gospel message to the ends of the earth, if you don’t know what the gospel message is. So it’s certainly a wise strategy on the part of the enemy of men’s souls to confuse the church about the message.
Along with many others, I’ve been preaching, teaching, and writing to try and clarify for Christians what the gospel is. They’re not really sure whether Jesus is Lord or not, or whether He needs to be Lord or not. It doesn’t seem to be important these days that people understand the true biblical doctrine of justification by faith alone, through grace alone, in Christ alone. It doesn’t seem to matter to some people that there be repentance of sin, and that we preach repentance. In fact, some people think the idea of repentance is intrusion into grace. They fail to comprehend the doctrine of substitution and imputation, which is the true understanding that God imputed (meaning ascribed or assigned) our sins fully to a substitute who died in our place, and that we contribute nothing to our salvation but lay hold of eternal life by faith in that substitute.
In spite of the absolute clarity of the gospel, even so-called evangelicals can end up with a fuzzy view of their faith because of all the confusion in the air. I’ve heard the pastor of a very large evangelistic church claim, “The Reformation was overrated as to its importance.” No. What the Reformation did was define the gospel and rescue it from its corrupters. Not only do we seem unsure what the gospel is sometimes, we’re not even convinced it’s important to get it right. That is a tragic mistake. Here we are, with all this awesome potential to spread the gospel to the ends of the earth, and we’re not sure what the gospel is!
In the process of stewing about the issue, the church has gotten shallower and shallower. One reason is because churches have proliferated everywhere in which the pastors are personality-driven leaders, men who don’t have the theological grounding to define issues biblically with any depth. Another reason is this tragic and misguided concern not to offend anybody, to make church fun and entertaining, resulting in some kind of synthetic gospel that doesn’t have enough truth in it to save anybody.
No comments:
Post a Comment