Note: I originally wrote this article a few years ago for my personal blog, but it came from the gut and is one of my favorite pieces I’ve ever written. I’m re-sharing it now, leading up to Resurrection Day.
After some church upheaval, we decided that we needed to seek where the Lord may have us go. So we’ve been trying some new churches in our area. Between my husband and me, we have checked out over a hundred churches, either online or in person in a six month time period.
I wish I could say it’s been an encouraging process, but on the contrary, it’s been incredibly discouraging. The root of my discomfort hasn’t been unfamiliar service styles or anything to do with the people in these churches. So many have been friendly and welcoming. The part that has grieved me most is the content of some of the sermons we’ve been hearing.
One illustration we heard at a church that shall not be named particularly bothered me. See if you can spot anything wrong after you read the sermon illustration below. I understand that every illustration is imperfect and falls apart when you try to take it too far, but I was concerned with this one.
This is roughly what was said in one of the sermons we heard.
“Let’s imagine that a man gets called into his boss’s office one day. His boss tells him that he needs to sell a million dollars worth of product. He needs to do it in six months, or he’ll lose his job.
The man works to sell the company’s product. Six months later, he gets called into the boss’s office again. He sits down, and his boss looks at him. The man sweats a little bit in nervousness. He doesn’t think he did well enough. He is fearful that he’ll have to go home tonight and tell his wife that he’s out of work.
His boss announces that he only sold $7 worth of product in the last six months.
The man hangs his head. He knows he’s going to lose his job. He didn’t do enough.
But his boss looks at him, and tells him that no, he didn’t sell enough. But because he cares about him so much, he’s going to give him another six months to sell the million dollars.”
“That,” this pastor announced proudly, “is grace.”
Okay.
The only problem is, that is not the gospel.
I’m going to give that pastor the benefit of a doubt and assume he was merely trying to explain the general concept of grace and not a gospel presentation, but this illustration was representative of alot of the teaching we’ve heard in our church hunt. Let’s just be clear:
The gospel is not that God gives us grace to do better.
The gospel is not that Jesus is our example. He is, but He’s so much more than just that.
The gospel is not even about God changing lives. That is the result of the gospel, but not the gospel itself.
The gospel starts with understanding that we have a sin problem. Not “messiness”, not “mistakes”, not “brokenness”. A pervasive, indwelling sin problem that we can never make up for because we are always piling on more sins.
No, nobody is perfect. And that’s the problem, because we are talking about a perfect, holy God, full of goodness and light. And we have sinned against Him (Psalm 51:4). We have broken His laws. God must punish sin, or He would not be perfectly just nor good. We have earned for ourselves death and eternal punishment in Hell (Romans 6:23). With every disobedience. With every grumbling or unclean thought. With every “white lie”.
That is not a message that some pastors want to focus on. That is not a feel-good message. That is bad, bad news. It might even be offensive to some, because we all have a tendency to think we aren’t “that bad” (guilty here). But even that attitude is the sin of pride! All our good deeds are like filthy rags (Isaiah 64:6). We’re in trouble.
You have to understand the bad news to understand the good news.
God, out of the richness of His loving-kindness, didn’t leave us in our sin and death. He sent His Son, Jesus. And this might be where you tune out, thinking you already know all this - but even if you do, take a minute to marvel with me.
Jesus is fully man and fully God, and He is perfect. He did everything we couldn’t, and lived a life without sinning even once. Because He was perfectly righteous, He was able to take the punishment we had earned. He died in our place, and He rose from the dead, conquering our sin and death itself. He took our sin upon Himself, suffered the wrath against sin that we deserved, and in exchange He gave us His righteousness (2 Corinthians 5:21).
When we recognize who we are, and who Christ is and what He has done, the only thing we need to do is to repent and believe. We need to turn from our sin and turn to Christ with faith that He will save us. With faith that He has done everything required for our salvation if we will merely turn and trust in Him.
We don’t have to be a “better person” to earn His favor. We don’t have to “clean up our lives” to earn forgiveness. We don’t have to strive to do things “God’s way” in hopes that we’ve done enough to make up for our wrongs. We can do nothing to deserve His mercy; we can’t do enough to pay for our wrongs. But Christ did.
“But when the kindness and the love of God our Savior toward man appeared, not by works of righteousness which we have done, but according to His mercy He saved us, through the washing of regeneration and renewing of the Holy Spirit, whom He poured out on us abundantly through Jesus Christ our Savior,”
Titus 3:4-6
If we understand that and turn to Christ, God takes our hearts of stone and gives us hearts of flesh. We respond in loving obedience, because when we understand Jesus died to save us from the punishment of our sin, we will start to hate our sin. We want to turn our back on it and turn to Jesus because He already saved us from that. And He enables us to now live for Him (2 Cor. 5:15) through the Holy Spirit working in us, sanctifying us.
(The steeple from my childhood church.)
So if we were going to take that illustration at the beginning of this article and make it represent the gospel more truly, it would be something like this.
Your boss comes to you one day and says you have to sell a million dollars in six months or you will lose your job. Worse, you have been embezzling from the company for years, so you have to pay that money back before you can start earning the million dollars. The total is astronomical. You will never be able to earn it back. You are in trouble.
In six months your boss sits down to look at your accounts. He looks at the papers, and then looks up at you. You are sweating. You’ve done nothing that has decreased what you owe. You know you deserve to lose your job and be thrown in prison for what you’ve done.
But he looks at you with eyes filled with compassion. And he smiles.
He leans forward and tells you he knows what you’ve done. He knows what you owe, and that you can never do enough to repay it, no matter how many years he might give you. But he cares for you like his own child. You have fallen incredibly short, but his son sold enough to cover everything you owe. He has credited what his son has earned to your account, and he won’t be pressing charges against you for the embezzlement because his son has paid your fine.
You don’t have to do anything. You are overcome with sorrow for your crimes and gratitude for what your boss has given you. Your debt is payed, your way has been earned, though not by you. You can keep your job forever.
That is mercy. That is grace.
That is the gospel.
If you have not trusted in Jesus for your eternal salvation, I urge you, please be reconciled to God. Trust in the One who has done everything necessary to give you eternal life. Turn away from your sin and turn to Him.
And if you are a believer already, please get this right. And get yourself in a church that gets this right.
It does little good for church pews to be filled each week, it does little good to hear superficially inspiring sermons, if the message doesn’t point us back to Christ and the pure, beautiful truth of what Christ has done to save us - that we couldn’t do for ourselves. Understanding and believing this truth is what brings about actual life change, through God’s grace and His Holy Spirit.
I have seen the “gospel” taught wrongly so many times in the past few months. I don’t think I realize the burden of discouragement I was carrying until a few weeks ago, when we finally sat again in a church that preached the gospel rightly.
Tears rolled down my cheeks as I sat in the pew. It was such a relief, even as someone who is already a believer, after months of “do better” sermons, to hear again from the pulpit the beautiful truth of the gospel preached clearly. To marvel again at what Jesus did for me.
We believers still need to hear the gospel too.
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