Keith McCrory from MCC has a brilliant blog and he’s currently doing a series on “Rediscovering the Gospel”. Here’s my response to his post about the decline in the Irish church:
Hi Keith,
Good post today, no sugar-coating.
I agree with you. Many in the church (and I’m guilty of this myself from time to time) have forgotten the Gospel. We no longer pursue God because we think the orthodoxy we possess is enough. This isn’t anything new though, A.W. Tozer wrote about it just over 50 years ago, I think he puts it well:
“Current evangelicalism has (to change the figure) laid the altar and divided the sacrifice into parts, but now seems satisfied to count the stones and rearrange the pieces with never a care that there is not a sign of fire upon the top of lofty Carmel.”
But what steals our joy? What turns Christians into Pharisees? Religion is good at teaching us we are sinners and it is good to be aware of our sinfulness but religion is not enough. Even the Pharisees, when left alone with their thoughts, must have been aware of their failure to always meet their many standards. We know we are sinners but we forget that we, as Christians, are forgiven and redeemed sinners, we forget the love of God. So we are left with religion but not the Gospel, with the knowledge of our sins but we forget the One who has freed us from the power of sin. Whether we realise it or not we live as though we have to handle sin ourselves. We end up experts at spotting sin in ourselves and in others and we use our morality and religion to try to manage it. We lose our joy and turn, without even realising it, into Pharisees.
The only thing that can motivate us enough to live full Christian lives, loving God with all our hearts, souls, minds and strength and loving our neighbours as ourselves is the love God has for us. As conscious as we may be of our sin we must preach the Gospel to ourselves – our sins have been atoned for, we are forgiven and set free. God loves us! Nothing but the love of God can empower us to live the Gospel. This is such a great gift that it is hard to accept at times, especially for the religious who all too well know that they are sinners.
We must preach the Gospel to ourselves. We are more sinful than we could ever imagine, but Jesus Christ is greater than we could ever imagine. The love God has for us is greater than we could ever imagine. Even typing this out helps me to preach the Gospel to myself, to remind me of God’s love for me. My question for you is how do you preach the Gospel to yourself? How to you remind yourself of God’s love for you?
Keep blogging!
John.
1 response so far ↓
1 Keith // Apr 29, 2008 at 3:34 pm
John,
Have finally got back in the harness so wanted to say thanks for your comments on my last blog entry.
I think you are absolutely right that we are so often left with religion but not the gospel and that we must be those who hear the good news before we can ever share it with others. The problem , of course, is that the only world we know is the world we have seen and so many have never seen grace, have never really experienced the freedom the gospel brings. Thus, even though we hear of these things and rejoice in them, we are left still unsure of what they mean and uncertain on how to actually respond to them. It is into this vaccuum that I think the yeast of legalism so easily creeps and quickly flourishes. Because it is hard to believe that God would offer us his love so unconditionally (who else has ever done that for most of us?), we like to both assure him that we deserve his gift and assure ourselves that we are worthy of it. Before we know it, we are living as if our response to God is the reason we have been offered his love and as if our continued response is the way to keep it.
Maybe, then, our greatest need is not just to preach the gospel to ourselves, but is to believe it, to receive it ourselves. I wonder if what we need to do is to focus more on responding to what Jesus has done for us on the cross than on understanding it? I think my son knew that I loved him long before he would have been able to articulate it. Maybe we, too, need to explore the reality before we worry too much about the theory. I’m pretty sure we can figure out our theology along the way!
K
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