No longer totally depraved

I wrote a short article which you can read here: https://waytruthandlifeblog.wordpress.com/2016/07/09/no-longer-totally-depraved/

Enjoy, and God bless!

-Ezekiel

Christians Need the Gospel

For the benefit of my readers, here is the full blog post.

You can also read it here: https://waytruthandlifeblog.wordpress.com/2016/07/04/christians-need-the-gospel/

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In this day and age, we have a generation of Christians who are, at large, cowards. They feebly attempt to preach the gospel, but with all the offensive parts removed.  They are afraid to give others the truth, and they are afraid of the truth themselves.  They would like to fashion themselves a Jesus that never offends anyone, a Jesus that tolerates sin, and a Jesus who thinks as they do.

I frequently stress that we must preach law before Gospel – that is, showing people how they have failed to follow God’s law and showing them that they are condemned as sinners before we can show them how Jesus died to save them. (See Galatians 3:24 – the law is a ‘schoolmaster’ to bring us to Christ) To do otherwise is essentially to try to give medicine to a person who is unaware of his sickness.

When Christians fail to tell sinners of their sin, Jesus cannot be presented as the remedy for sin.  Thus, when the gospel is not preached properly, Jesus becomes little more than one who can give you ‘purpose in life’ or feely-goody feelings of peace in your heart. Feelings and experience are trumped above the Word of God -feelings of ecstasy and euphoria, for example, may be taken to be the Spirit bearing witness with one’s spirit that he or she is a child of God.

As a result, we have a whole lot of ‘Christians’, many of them false converts, and some of them true converts with little understanding of what Jesus actually did for them.

It is of this second group that I would like to speak.  These persons, despite their lack of knowledge of the gospel, came to a saving faith in Jesus Christ.

Now, prepare for a story.

When I was a child (even in the years following my conversion to Christ), I was afraid of death or Christ’s return. Why?  Because I feared that perhaps there was one sin I forgot to repent of, which Christ would surely hold against me at the judgement, causing me to be damned forever.  A good read-through of Romans would have prevented this misunderstanding. I do not discourage repentance in the least, but the Christian life is not a “now-I’m-saved/now-I’m-not-saved” type of affair – we are not constantly losing and regaining our salvation.

I know my story is not unique – many Christians are starving for lack of the gospel.  They have heard parts of it, insomuch that they were made “wise unto salvation”, but at the same time, they did not hear or understand it fully.

Read 1 Corinthians 15. Paul is preaching the gospel … to a church.  Look at verse 1:

“Moreover, brethren, I declare unto you the gospel which I preached unto you, which also ye have received, and wherein ye stand”

Why is this?   Should they not have already knew it?   After all, Paul spent a year and six months at Corinth with them, teaching them the Word of God (Acts 18:11)  However, if you have read the first Epistle to the Corinthians, it becomes very apparent that the Corinthian church had some serious problems.  He literally spends the whole epistle prior to chapter 15 dealing with these problems.  Then, here in chapter 15, he shows them what their problem is. They had forgotten the gospel.  Let’s proceed on to verse two:

“By which also ye are saved, if ye keep in memory what I preached unto you, unless ye have believed in vain.”

They had not kept in memory what Paul had preached to them.  Thus, they were not living in obedience to God.  They had ‘believed in vain’ – that is, they had forgotten the gospel.  The results of this were evident (see chapters 1 through 14 – they were dealing with division, sexual immorality, drunkenness, conflict, and complete disorder and chaos.)  And no wonder – it is when we take our eyes of the goal that we become distracted.

If a church which had the Apostle Paul himself within their midst for a full year and a half could so soon forget the gospel, how much more could we, in this present day?

Preach the gospel.  It is needed by believers and non-believers alike.  Preach it as if those to whom you preach it have never heard it before.  We can not think too much of Christ and what He did do save us. We cannot be too thankful to Him for it.