Category Archives: The Gospel

When did it change?

Posted by Dan C. on

When did the Gospel message change from telling others of the need to ‘personally’ recognize one’s sinful condition and believe in Christ as savior to telling them they need to ‘accept Him as their ‘personal’ Savior? One concept is founded in and specifically presented in scripture and the other is not. One focuses on God and what He has done to save sinners and the other on a person’s decision. One presents the sovereignty of God while the other makes the individual’s decision the final event in the chain of events leading to salvation, which would mean that God shares His sovereignty with man (even if it’s just a decision).

No scripture here yet, just the question “When did it change?”, followed by the next logical question “WHY did it change?”

There are NO true Atheists!

Posted by Dan C. on

I say again…there are NO true atheists, and add that the religion of atheism is Humanism. ‘Self’ is the god of atheismn.

If you are reading this as a ‘professing’ atheist, listen closely. Sir/Madam Atheist, you are your own God. I do compliment you for your sense of morality. Where did you obtain it, by the way? Where did any sense of morality come from? It came from the God of the Bible. Your sense of morality is based on ‘borrowed capital’. You borrow from God’s moral law to have a moral system, yet you desire to deny His existence. You either make it up as you go along, deciding what is ‘moral’ based on your own desires, or you claim the moral values of the system of humanism that denies God.

The only difference between the two sources of morality is the amount of self-pride resident in choosing of one over the other!

Here is a bit of Scripture for you:

Why do the nations rage and the peoples plot in vain?  The kings of the earth set themselves, and the rulers take counsel together, against the LORD and against his Anointed, saying, “Let us burst their bonds apart and cast away their cords from us.”He who sits in the heavens laughs; the Lord holds them in derision. – Psalm 2:1-4

Unlike God’s attitude toward those who “take counsel against God and His Anointed” I am not laughing.

I pray that God will pour out His mercy and grace upon you, draw you to Himself, and bring you into His glorious kingdom! If my flesh rises up in anger against you personally, I pray that God will accuse me of my own self-righteousness, and pray that He will replace that anger with tears – and He does. I pray that my zealousness in this matter is for His Kingdom and not for MY thoughts or opinions – they don’t amount to a hill of beans.

One last bit of Scripture for you, and for those who might believe in a god, but not the God of Scripture:

“Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God.” – John 3:18, from Jesus’ own lips. . .

Give Me Doctrine or Give me Death – Part IV

Posted by Dan C. on

Excerpted from this article at 9 Marks, concerning man’s response to to the message of the gospel:

THE GOSPEL

Response

All this of course requires a response from people. Jesus said it this way: “The time has come. The kingdom of God is near. Repent and believe the good news!” (Mark 1:15)

Repent and believe. Turn away and trust. Renounce sin and rely on Christ.

Relying on Christ means embracing the fact that salvation has nothing to do with works performed or not performed, words said or not said. It means renouncing every other possibility for appealing to God’s mercy. It means jumping empty-handed off a cliff and crying, “Jesus, if you don’t save me, then I am lost,” and then trusting by faith that he will save. Relying on Christ means putting away the instinct to stand before God and point to all your good words and works for why he should save you. When he asks why he should declare you righteous, you only point to Jesus and say, “God, justify me because of what he did on the cross. I have no other plea.”

Renouncing sin—repentance—is not merely turning over a new leaf. It is not an über-New Year’s resolution. It is a comprehensive, wholesale change in a person’s life. And it is possible only by regeneration, the life-giving work of the Holy Spirit in a believer’s life.

Repentance is a change of orientation: from death to life, from darkness to light. And it has repercussions in every area of a believer’s life. It means, first of all, turning away from sin and toward God. Not that a believer will never stumble into sin again—at least not until heaven (1 John 1:8). But a believer will count himself dead to sin and alive to God. He will refuse sin the right to reign. He will not offer his body to sin, but to God as an instrument of righteousness (Rom. 6:11-13). He will orient himself to live in harmony with God’s law.

Indeed, the repenting believer does even more. He determines to live in such a way that restores relationships, keeps peace, and gives people around him the sense and smell of Jesus Christ in his life. He determines to join God’s work in redeeming the world, caring for the poor and oppressed, and rolling back the effects of the Fall. Repentance is both vertical and horizontal, God-ward and people-ward.

Again, both these directions—vertical and horizontal—are important, and to neglect either one of them leads to a distortion of the gospel. For example, the revivalism that characterizes large segments of evangelicalism tends to neglect the horizontal aspect of repentance, focusing almost solely on the believer’s individual relationship with God. Far too often, revivalistic sermons call people to believe in Christ, repent of sin, and be baptized—but that’s about it. And the result is that thousands of people are “won and baptized” in America’s biggest churches every year, and then never seen again. There is no change of life, no union with Christ’s church, no repentance toward other people, nothing at all of what the Bible describes as newness of life. They are won one minute, and lost the next.

On the other hand, there is also a danger of over-emphasizing the horizontal, of pressing Christians in the work of restoring earthly relationships so hard that the most important relationship of all is neglected. Many new books—perhaps especially Brian McLaren’s—major on alleviating this world’s oppression and overturning this world’s injustices. They press believers, often compellingly, to join God’s work in “redeeming” the world. But their gospel becomes so socially oriented, so focused on the present, that “redemption” comes to take on a different meaning entirely. The great biblical themes of salvation from sin and its consequences for God’s people get lost. Yet those ideas lie at the very heart of the gospel’s meaning. To be sure, the horizontal aspects of responding to the gospel are crucial. God will one day create a new heaven and a new earth, and God expects us to work, even here, even now, toward that goal. But that cannot be all. We cannot de-emphasize the doctrines of salvation and eternity, or pretend that they are somehow not important to the Christian life. For as Paul once wrote, “If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are to be pitied more than all men” (1 Cor. 15:19)

CONCLUSION

Some people will argue that subjecting the doctrines of the gospel to interpretation, making them flexible and even expendable, would result in a freer, more open, more mysterious, and thus more compelling Christianity. I just don’t believe that is true. In fact, I believe it would result in a tragic distortion and even fatal falsehood in our understanding of both ourselves and God.

John Calvin once wrote that a person cannot truly know himself until he has come to a knowledge of God. And you see, people can only know God and themselves truly—who they apart from Christ, who they are in Christ, and who they are becoming through his work in their lives—through the doctrines of the gospel revealed in Scripture. The gospel is the divinely-revealed key to our own story, and therefore every part of it is crucial if we are to see ourselves or God clearly. Take out any part of it, subject any line of it to your own re-imagining, and you blur your own vision. That’s not freedom. It’s more bondage.

Real freedom is seeing clearly. It is knowing beyond doubt who you are and what God has done for you in Christ. It is being able to live your life with full assurance that God will do what he has promised and that one day you will see his face. That kind of freedom doesn’t come from having the ability to remake the gospel in your own image. It comes simply from trusting what God says about you, about himself, and about his Son. In short, it comes from believing the gospel.

_______________________________________________________

Greg Gilbert is the 9Marks lead writer on the topic of the gospel. He is also the director of theological research for the president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and an elder at Third Avenue Baptist Church in Louisville, KY.

September 2006
Greg Gilbert

©9Marks

Permissions: You are permitted and encouraged to reproduce and distribute this material in any format, provided that you do not alter the wording in any way, you do not charge a fee beyond the cost of reproduction, and you do not make more than 1,000 physical copies. For web posting, a link to this document on our website is preferred. Any exceptions to the above must be explicitly approved by 9Marks.

Please include the following statement on any distributed copy: ©9Marks. Website: http://www.9Marks.org. Email: info@9marks.org. Toll Free: (888) 543-1030.

Give Me Doctrine or Give Me Death – Part III of IV

Posted by Dan C. on

By Greg Gilbert

Excerpted from this article at 9 Marks.

THE GOSPEL

Christ

The coup de grace came ultimately in the person of Jesus Christ, who was fully God and fully man. He fulfilled that tiny flicker of hope God gave to Adam, and realized all that God promised to the chosen nation of Israel—the great prophet, the highest priest, the most exalted king.

He was the Savior, who brought life to that which was dead. And he did it by dying. Actually, he did it by living, then dying, then living again.

Here’s how Jesus himself described his work:

“God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him” (John 3:17).

But how? Paul says it like this:

“Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us—for it is written, ‘Cursed is everyone who is hanged on a tree’—so that in Christ Jesus the blessing of Abraham might come to the Gentiles, so that we might receive the promised Spirit through faith” (Gal. 3:13-14).

And again,

“God made him who knew no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God” (2 Cor. 5:21).

In that one moment on the cross at Calvary, all the horrible weight of the sin of God’s people was placed on Jesus’ shoulders. And the curse that God pronounced in Eden and the curse of the law promised through Moses—the sentence of death—struck. Jesus cried out in agony as his Father turned his back and forsook him. And then he died.

Jesus did not suffer for his own sin; he didn’t have any. He suffered for his people’s sin. They should have died, not him. And yet he died for them, in their place. Just as Isaiah prophesied so many centuries before,

“Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows; yet we esteemed him stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted. But he was wounded for our transgressions; he was crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and with his stripes we are healed” (Isa. 53:4-5).

My transgressions, his wounds.
My iniquities, his chastisement.
My sin, his sorrow.
His punishment, my peace.
His stripes, my healing.
His grief, my joy.
His death, my life.

If doctrines were springs, this one—the penal substitutionary death of Jesus Christ on the cross—would be one of the most frequently stretched, twisted, and disconnected of them all. People are uncomfortable with the idea of Jesus being punished for someone else’s sin. More than one author has called the idea “divine child abuse.” And yet to toss this doctrine of substitution aside is to cut out the heart of the gospel. To be sure, there are other pictures in Scripture of what Christ accomplished with his death: ransom, example, reconciliation, and victory, to name a few. And yet the story of the Gospel demands this idea of substitution, too. You can’t leave it out, or else you litter the landscape of Scripture with unanswered questions. Why the sacrifices? What did that shedding of blood accomplish? How can God have mercy on sinners without destroying justice? What can it mean that God forgives iniquity and transgression and sin, and yet by no means clears the guilty (Ex. 34:7)? How can a righteous and holy God justify the ungodly (Rom. 4:5)? He can because in Christ, mercy and justice were reconciled. The curse was executed, and we were freed.

And then Christ rose. If any doubt remained whether sin was defeated and death destroyed, that doubt was erased when the angel said to the women, “Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here; he has risen!” (Luke 24:5-6).

If Christ had remained in the tomb, humanity would remain without hope. Death would have washed over him just like every other human. Every claim he made while living would have sunk into nothingness. But when breath entered his lungs again, when resurrection life electrified his glorified body, everything Jesus claimed was fully, finally, irrevocably, and unquestionably vindicated.

Once again, the whole of the Christian faith stands or falls on the doctrine of the resurrection. Disconnect this, re-imagine it to be anything less than the whole person of Jesus, body and all, rising from the dead in resurrection life, and everything is lost. If the resurrection did not happen and Jesus’ desiccated bones lie somewhere in a lost grave, then the entire Christian faith crashes to the ground. But if it did happen and he is alive, then the whole thing stands. And it stands unassailable. Indestructible. Unconquerable. Forever.

__________________________________________________

September 2006
Greg Gilbert

©9Marks

Permissions: You are permitted and encouraged to reproduce and distribute this material in any format, provided that you do not alter the wording in any way, you do not charge a fee beyond the cost of reproduction, and you do not make more than 1,000 physical copies. For web posting, a link to this document on our website is preferred. Any exceptions to the above must be explicitly approved by 9Marks.

Please include the following statement on any distributed copy: ©9Marks. Website: http://www.9Marks.org. Email: info@9marks.org. Toll Free: (888) 543-1030.

Give Me Doctrine or Give Me Death – Part II of IV

Posted by Dan C. on

By Greg Gilbert

Excerpted from this article at 9 Marks.

THE GOSPEL

God

The beginning of everything is God. Any complete understanding of the Christian gospel must begin with him and nothing else. “In the beginning,” says Genesis 1:1, “God created.” There is no more foundational truth than that, and the implications are staggering.

Especially so in our day. The idea that the world itself is not ultimate, but that it sprang from the mind, word, and hand of Someone Else is nothing short of revolutionary. It means that everything in the universe has a purpose, including us. Far from being the result of random chance, mutations, re-assortments, and genetic accidents, human beings are created. Every one of us is the result of an idea, a plan, and an execution—a fact which brings both meaning and responsibility to human life (Gen. 1:26-28).

One implication of this is that no one is autonomous. Despite all our talk about rights and liberties, we are not as free as we would like to think. We are created. We are made. And therefore we are owned. God makes claims on each one of us, one of which is the right to tell or command us how to live (Gen. 2:16).

Yet God’s claim on our lives also includes the grand privilege of ruling over his creation under him, a kind a vice-regency over the entire world. “Fill the earth and subdue it,” God told Adam. “Rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and over every living creature that moves on the ground” (Gen. 1:28). Had humans obeyed, the world would have been a paradise and we would all be princes—creation bringing forth its fruits, with Adam and Eve ruling over all of it, in perfect relationship with God, the world, and one another.

God’s plan was “very good” (Gen. 1:31), so good that the stars sang together and the angels in heaven shouted for joy (Job 38:7). All creation looked at God’s establishment of the world and its order, and they rejoiced. All of them, that is, except humans.

Man

It is often noted that Adam’s sin—violating God’s command by taking fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil—sprang from pride. Adam wanted to be, and thought he could be, “like God.” That’s what the serpent promised Eve, and both Adam and Eve jumped at the chance to shed the vice-regency and take the crown itself. I’m sure their sin was rooted in pride, but surely there was more than pride at work in Adam’s sin. There was discontent, too. Adam did not just look at God’s position on the throne and wish he could be there. He also looked at his own situation—his own exalted position over creation—and wished himself not there.

In all the universe, there was only one thing that God did not place under Adam’s feet: God himself. Yet Adam decided that this arrangement was not good enough for him. So he rebelled.

The consequences were disastrous for Adam and Eve, their descendants, and the entire creation. Adam and Eve themselves were cast out of the idyllic garden of Eden. No longer would the earth willingly and joyfully present its fruits and treasures to them. They would have to work hard to get them. Even worse, God had promised them that death would follow disobedience (Gen. 2:17). They didn’t physically die right away. Their bodies continued to live, lungs breathing, hearts beating, limbs moving. But their spiritual life—the one that matters most—ended immediately upon their removal from the garden. Their fellowship with God was severed. And thus their hearts shriveled, their minds filled with selfish thoughts, their eyes darkened to the beauty of God, and their souls became sere and arid, utterly void of that life God gave them in the beginning, when everything was good.

Still worse, this spiritual death did not stop with Adam and Eve. They passed it on to the rest of us. As Paul wrote to the Romans, “Many died through one man’s trespass.” And again, “Because of one man’s trespass, death reigned through that one man” (Rom. 5:15, 17).

This doctrine of original sin—that Adam’s guilt was imputed to all humanity and his corruption passed from one generation to the next—is probably one that many people would rather disconnect from the trampoline. “What difference does it make?” they might ask. Yet it seems to me that if the author of a passage of Scripture—not to mention the Author—found those words worth including, there must be some reason for them. They must explain something, illumine some problem, or somehow enable worship.

So it is with the doctrine of original sin. This is not something that is dispensable to the gospel. In fact, to disconnect it or leave it out would create a gaping hole in the story. After all, the doctrine of original sin explains why one hundred percent of human beings are less than perfect. It illumines why we distrust biographies that say nothing negative about their subjects. If humans know anything beyond a shadow of doubt, it’s that everyone, even our most exalted moral heroes, have flaws. Human beings are not basically good at all, and that is something we need to know in order to understand the gospel of Jesus Christ. Until you have a sober understanding of the problem, you will not see the need for a solution.

If the story of history ended with a dismissal from Eden, the future would hold nothing but darkness and despair, pain and separation, hell and judgment. But the story doesn’t end there. God acted.

In the darkest moment, even as he pronounced his curse against Adam and Eve, God let fall a word of hope. It wasn’t much more than a word, either. It was just a hint, just a phrase tacked onto the end of God’s sentence against the serpent. One misplaced sob, one distracted second, and Adam and Eve might have missed it. But it came—the tiniest flicker of light: “He shall bruise your head,” God declared, “and you shall bruise his heel” (Gen. 3:15).

The story was not over. Here was some gospel, some good news in the midst of the cataclysm.

The rest of the Bible tells the story of how the tiny seed of hope God planted on that day germinated, sprouted, and grew. For thousands of years, God prepared the world for his stunning coup de grace against the serpent. When it was all over, the sin Adam inflicted on his entire race would be defeated, the death God pronounced over his own creation would be dead, and hell would be brought to its knees. In essence, the Bible presents the story of God’s counter-offensive against sin. It presents the grand narrative of how God made it right, how he is making it right, and how he will one day make it right finally and forever.

__________________________________________________________

September 2006
Greg Gilbert

©9Marks

Permissions: You are permitted and encouraged to reproduce and distribute this material in any format, provided that you do not alter the wording in any way, you do not charge a fee beyond the cost of reproduction, and you do not make more than 1,000 physical copies. For web posting, a link to this document on our website is preferred. Any exceptions to the above must be explicitly approved by 9Marks.

Please include the following statement on any distributed copy: ©9Marks. Website: http://www.9Marks.org. Email: info@9marks.org. Toll Free: (888) 543-1030.

Give Me Doctrine or Give Me Death – Part I of IV

Posted by Dan C. on

By Greg Gilbert

Excerpted from this article at 9 Marks.

In recent years, a number of books have been published that urge Christians to rethink a traditional understanding of “doctrine.” The discussions surrounding this question are many and varied, and they take place on every level of theological sophistication. At the highest levels, the questions probe whether doctrine is even possible given postmodern ways of thinking: How capable are we of formulating any objective statements at all, given that we are all products of a culture? Is the idea of propositional truth even valid? Does the Bible contain doctrine as we have defined doctrine in the past?

These types of questions have begun to filter down into more popular works as well, so that they are becoming a part of the collective evangelical consciousness. At the more popular level, though, they are not articulated in terms of whether objective, propositional doctrines can exist in a postmodern world. They are stated like this: if I want a Christianity that is authentic, real, textured, and alive, can I possibly have that within the narrow constraints of a structured system of doctrine?

A growing number of books argue that the solution is to do away with the system altogether. Christians need to recognize, the argument goes, that the notion of a solid, objective doctrinal framework is a hold-over from the Middle Ages, or from the sixteenth century at best. There is no well-defined system of doctrine, and there doesn’t need to be. Christianity is more beautiful, more compelling, if we don’t try to clarify it and define it. To insist on this doctrine or that set of propositions is stultifying and restrictive. Better to leave the faith more mysterious, more open to interpretation, more free for people to arrive at their own understanding of the Christian faith.

One author to call for such rethinking is Rob Bell, who devotes a chapter of his book Velvet Elvis to the idea of doctrine. In the chapter he calls “Springs,” Bell paints a picture of a child jumping on a trampoline. He draws an elaborate—and initially compelling—analogy between that trampoline and the Christian faith. Doctrines, Bell says, are like the springs of the trampoline. They are necessary, but they are not the point. Far from it. No child who jumps on a trampoline thinks about the springs, and he certainly doesn’t call his friends to come and stare with him at the springs. No, he calls them to jump. He calls them to climb up on the canvass and leap and flip and fly . . . and live. No one argues about the springs of a trampoline. No one is excluded from jumping because they do not understand how the springs work. The point is the jumping, and the springs play only a secondary role in accomplishing that one main goal.

So it is, Bell argues, or at least so it ought to be, in the Christian life. Far too many Christians have placed far too much emphasis on the springs—on the doctrines. And in the process, they have made the gospel of Christ a cold, metallic, and logical thing, instead of the breathing, moving, adapting, living gospel that Christ taught and the apostles preached.

As I said, this vision of a living, jumping Christianity is compelling at first. In fact, we should not be too quick to dismiss what Bell is saying. So far as it goes, he’s right: The doctrines of Christianity are not the final and ultimate end. The doctrines point us to Christ. They help us to savor and love him more, and to understand better what God has accomplished in him. In this regard, Bell’s analogy is helpful.

But Bell actually pushes his playful analogy further. Consciously or not, he ultimately calls us to re-think the nature of doctrine more radically than is suggested by the affirmation that doctrines are not ends in themselves. As it turns out, the individual springs on Bell’s trampoline are expendable. You don’t like one spring or another? Alright, just disconnect it and keep jumping. It’s possible you’ll lose a little bounce, but on the whole, you ought to be fine. For example, people jumped for thousands of years, he says, without the “spring” of the Trinity. It was added to the trampoline later. And what about the Virgin Birth? What would happen if that spring were disconnected? Could you still jump? Bell implies that you probably could.

That kind of thinking throws the entire gospel up for grabs.

But is this really how we are to understand the role and place of doctrine? If so, the doctrines of the gospel have become something (or rather somethings) that can be tweaked and rearranged, connected or detached, depending on one’s own preferences and sensibilities. Bell’s analogy was fun at first; but as he continues to press it, it becomes evident that saying that the doctrines of the gospel are just so many springs on a trampoline fails to observe how all those doctrines are inter-related with one another, how they all fit together, how they grow into and out of one another and form one integrated whole. It makes the doctrines of the gospel unrelated, unconnected, isolated, individual bits. It robs them of their organic beauty.

No analogy is perfect, but people used to talk about the “body” of Christian doctrine. It strikes me that the analogy of a “body” is much than a trampoline. For one thing, a body can’t be divided into pieces. It’s not a collection of bits. Each part affects and is affected by all the others, and the result is an integrated and organic whole in which the many are and act as one. Moreover, no part of the body is expendable. You can’t decide that you don’t like this or that part and simply disconnect it.

Finally, a body is not designed simply to lie dead and immobile on the ground. It is meant for living—for allowing a person to walk and run, to touch and see and smell and taste and hear. In short, a body allows a person to engage with the world around him.

All of this is true of the doctrines of the gospel. Understood rightly and framed within the entire storyline of the Bible, the gospel is a perfect and beautiful whole. It is not merely a set of isolated statements; it is a story in which every part contributes to and is inseparable from the whole. Therefore, you can’t simply remove one element of that story and expect it to stay the same. Above all, the gospel is not meant to lie dead, cold, and hard on a sheet of paper. It is meant for…living. The story of what God has done in Christ, the narrative of how he has redeemed and is redeeming the world, is meant to lead us to know him, to worship him, and to be reconciled both to him and to other people.

______________________________________________________________

September 2006
Greg Gilbert

©9Marks

Permissions: You are permitted and encouraged to reproduce and distribute this material in any format, provided that you do not alter the wording in any way, you do not charge a fee beyond the cost of reproduction, and you do not make more than 1,000 physical copies. For web posting, a link to this document on our website is preferred. Any exceptions to the above must be explicitly approved by 9Marks.

Please include the following statement on any distributed copy: ©9Marks. Website: http://www.9Marks.org. Email: info@9marks.org. Toll Free: (888) 543-1030.

What is the Emerging Church Movement?

Posted by Dan C. on

Chris Rosebrough over at Extreme Theology offered the below concerning the Emergent church over two years ago. His views are as valid now as then.

Technically speaking, the Emerging Church Movement is a re-packaging and re-imagining of liberal and Neo-Orthodox theology and thinking in a post-modern context. Put more simply, it is a reaction by liberal fringe theologians against the mass marketing and commercialization of Christianity by the mega-churches and the church growth movement.

Emerging is a great term for them because in reality they never arrive anywhere. In fact, one of the primary leaders within the movement is Brian McClaren. He is the author of one of the main books in the Emerging Movement called, A Generous Orthodoxy. One of McClaren’s key ‘talking points’ is that certainty and faith are mutually exclusive concepts.

It would not be an overstatement to say that Mclaren is vehemently hostile to the idea that we can claim any degree of certainty about any point of truth. (And this hostility is mirrored by many followers of the Emergent Movement)

McClaren states over and over and over in his books and lectures that he despises every hint of certainty or assurance. He claims that it is arrogant and unspiritual to speak dogmatically about any point of spiritual truth.

I don’t know how anyone can miss the blatant contradiction in McClaren’s position. On the one hand, he despises anyone who seems sure that the doctrines they believe are true. Yet, McClaren is absolutely certain that his doctrine of uncertainty is absolutely true.

It is precisely this principle of uncertainty that makes the Emergent Movement so seductive and dangerous. On the one hand, the Emergents appear loving, tolerant, and open minded to all religious views. On the other hand, this uncertainty robs Emergents of the promises held out to us in the scriptures for our salvation.

The saddest and most dangerous example of this is seen in how the Emerging Church deals with Christ’s Death on the Cross.

Emergent leaders and followers openly attack the doctrine of Christ’s sacrificial atonement for the sins of the world in their writings, lectures and websites. The Emergents argue that, the penal substitionary theory of the atonement is only one of many explanations for Jesus’ death on the cross. Because Emergents value uncertainty, anyone making the exclusive and certain claim that Jesus died for our sins, is rejected and ridiculed.

When I’ve tried to discuss the scriptural support and evidence for Jesus’ death on the cross as a sacrifice and atonement for our sins with Emergent followers, I was told that, “Scripture simply does not propose a theory of cohesive theology of atonement.” That “it’s only one theory and only one aspect of the atonement.” While other Emergent followers were openly hostile to the idea that Jesus died for them by saying things like, “I don’t want to have the guilt of having someone die for me” and, “the idea that God punished Jesus for my sins is repugnant to me because it sounds like cosmic child abuse.”

The Bottom Line: The Emergent Movement claims to be a church movement, but the fruit of this fad is utter uncertainty and an absolute denial of the atoning sacrifice of Jesus death on the cross for our sins.

These two facts alone are enough to brand the Emerging Movement as heretical and anti-Christian. People in the Emerging Movement need a real alternative to the lies and uncertainty that they’re being fed . . .

For those within the Emerging Church, I would assure them that scripture offers humanity a sure and certain faith in Jesus Christ. The scriptures tell us plainly and clearly that God is offering all of humanity salvation and peace with Him through the victorious death and resurrection of His Son Jesus Christ. These promises are true, these promises can be believed with certainty and these promises can set you free from the tyranny of uncertainty. In short, Jesus Christ died for YOU. Repent and believe the Gospel!

NOTE: Chris Rosebrough holds a degree in Religious Studies and Biblical Languages from Concordia University, Irvine a Masters Degree in Business Administration from Pepperdine University and teaches at Capo Valley Church in San Juan Capistrano, California. He also is a regular contributor to The Christian Worldview Network.

Why do we believers hesitate to evangelize?

Posted by Dan C. on

Have you ever met someone who just got a great deal on a new car (the one they REALLY wanted to buy) who didn’t tell everyone they knew about it? Not only do they tell everyone about it, they usually broadcast the news with a tremendous amount of enthusiasm. What’s going on with believers who find it hard to share the gospel? Wouldn’t being spared the wrath of a just God and having received the gift of eternal life toss having bought the car of our dreams under the bus?

Mark Dever, in The Gospel and Personal Evangelism, presents 12 reasons believers hesitate in sharing the gospel, summarized below:

1. Pray.
Our weakness is evangelism is often related to an absence of prayer. When we neglect praying about evangelism we see the task as too big for us, or opportunities too scarce. Mark says if we pray for opportunities we’ll be amazed at the ways God answers.

2. Plan.
Because we don’t plan to evangelize it generally doesn’t happen. Many of us tend to think we are presently too busy, and think time will materialize later. It will not. Make time, develop a plan.

3. Accept.
We have to accept that God has given us the responsibility of sharing the gospel. It is not the calling of a few, not limited to the “gifted.” Mark says, quite dodging your responsibility and make the necessary adjustments.

4. Understand.
Part of the problem for many is a misunderstanding of what makes our evangelism effective. Success in evangelism is related to faithfulness, not fruit. Fruit is the work of God, not man.

5. Be Faithful.
Mark says, “Maybe we are too polite to be faithful to God in this area. Maybe we are more concerned about people’s response than God’s glory.” For many the desire to be polite and not offend people (or in my case, not wanting to come off like a salesman) is an excuse to remain unfaithful to the call of God.

6. Risk.
Some people are shy. We often do not know what a person’s response will be when we present the gospel. In my own recent experience, I fear losing a potential relationship by throwing out the gospel too soon, or too awkwardly. We will often have to risk (a relationship, embarrassment, etc.) in order to be faithful to God.

7. Prepare.
Give your evangelistic work some thought. What potential objection or question might your hear? You are more likely to engage if you have prepared yourself in advance.

8. Look.
Apathy, laziness and busyness can keep us from seeing the opportunities God provides. So can unbelief. Pray for opportunities and then anticipate God’s provision.

9. Love.
If we love people we will seek their good, and this of course includes sharing the gospel with them.

10. Fear.
– of God, not man. When we refuse to share the gospel with others we “are not regarding him or his will as the final and ultimate rule of our actions.”

11. Stop.
Mark says, “We should stop excusing ourselves from evangelism on the basis that God is sovereign. We should not conclude from his omnipotence that our obedience is therefore pointless.” We must affirm both God’s sovereignty and man’s responsibility as it relates to conversion and evangelism.

12. Consider.
Pointing to Hebrews 12:3 Mark points us back to the gospel itself. He says that when we aren’t considering the cross of Christ we lose the heart to proclaim the good news. True gospel-centeredness will compel us to evangelize.

I have only one item to add, but not to the above list. These reasons for hesitation in sharing the gospel assume one has a saving relationship with Jesus Christ.  There are many who claim to know Christ and bear His name, but have never met Him. You don’t share what you don’t have.

NOTE: I found the above summary at a Web site here and might need to find the book.

Evangelism – The Method

Posted by Dan C. on

The Message of the gospel is specific and clear – Christ died for our sins. God’s designated Means of transmitting the message is ‘preaching’, or ‘telling’ others the message – it requires words. What about the Method, or ‘process’? Guess what? There isn’t ONE! There a multitudes of ‘tools’ like the ‘Romans Road’, ‘The Four Spiritual Laws’ (Campus Crusade for Christ), ‘The Bridge’ diagram (The Navigators) and countless evangelism pamphlets and tracts. There are also different approaches from the ‘cold’ approach used in door-to-door and street evangelism, group evangelism in a corporate setting, to one-on-one relationship based evangelism. I would also offer that although there are those are called and gifted for the ‘office’ of evangelist in the church, we are all called to ‘be ready to give an account for the hope that is within us’ (2 Peter 3:15).

Although there is no single method that is to be used for sharing the good news, we can examine the growth of the church in the New Testament and find some invaluable guidance concerning ‘how’ we are to share the good news.  The following two sections of this post are excerpted from The Stewardship of God’s Truth Through Evangelism, by J. Hampton Keathley, III , Th.M.

Oikos Evangelism

What is oikos evangelism? Oikos is the Greek word most often translated house or household in the New Testament. But let’s be careful and not assume we know what that means. In the culture of New Testament times, oikos described not only the immediate family, but it included servants, servants’ families, friends, and even business associates. One’s oikos was one’s sphere of influence, his/her social system composed of those related to each other through common kinship ties, common tasks, and common territory. The New Testament oikos included members of the nuclear family, but extended to dependents, slaves and employees. The oikos was the basic social unit by which the church grew.

An oikos was the fundamental and natural unit of society, and consisted of one’s sphere of influence—his family, friends and associates. And equally important, the early church spread through oikos—circles of influence and association. With only a moment of reflection, we begin to realize a significant difference of thrust, tone, and tenor between much contemporary evangelism and early church outreach.

As we turn to the New Testament, Scripture focuses us on the household (family, friends, and associates) in the spread of the Gospel to mankind. The Gospels, Acts, and Epistles illustrate that the link of communication from person to person was the oikos. Here was the bridge used regularly as a natural means for spreading the message of Jesus Christ.

The following passages are illustrations of Oikos evangelism

· Mark 5:19. “Go home to your people (oikos) and report …”

· Luke 19:9. “Today salvation has come to this house (oikos).”

· John 4:53. “… and he himself believed, and his whole household (oikos).”

· Mark 2:14-15. We can’t be certain, but “his house” probably refers to Levi’s. If so, Levi invited his friends to come and meet and hear Jesus. Here is a typical household bridge—the inclusion of associates within the confines of Levi’s own home.

· John 1:40-45. The Apostle Peter came to Christ as a result of someone in his oikos. And Nathanael came to Christ because his friend Philip told him about the Savior.

Following Christ’s resurrection and ascension, it was this same pattern of the Gospel moving through the oikos which caused the early church to explode. Noted church historian Kenneth Scott Latourette has observed that, “the primary change agents in the spread of faith … were the men and women who earned their livelihood in some purely secular manner, and spoke of their faith to those whom they met in this natural fashion.”

· Acts 10:22f. Cornelius invited his relatives and close friends (his oikos) to come to his own home to hear Peter tell about the Lord.

· Acts 10:15 and 31. Here two households came to know the Savior through the influence of Lydia, a business woman, and the jailer at Philippi. When most people read about these two incidences, they normally think of just the immediate family. It was probably much more.

It seems that Oikos evangelism is the God-given and God-ordained means (method) and key for naturally sharing our supernatural message. This is the way the early church spread and it is the way the Gospel is most naturally shared today. Research and statistics back up this claim. (75-90% of new believers come to Christ because of a family member, friend, or associate having shared the ‘good news’).

The Spiritual Principles at Work in Evangelism

As the Bible uses analogies to teach spiritual truth, so it also uses analogies to portray the process of reaching men for the Lord. These include pictures taken from the harvest—the seed, the sower, the soil, and reaping the harvest. The soil is the human heart, the seed is the Word of God, the sower is the believer with the seed of the Word, and the reaping is when a person comes to Christ by faith. Based on this analogy, there are four things involved in the process:

Preparing the Soil

The soil of the human heart must be prepared. This is done through:

(1) Walking by the Spirit (Acts 1:8; 4:31; Eph. 5:18)

(2) Praying for four things: (a) for laborers for the harvest (Luke 10:2); (b) for open doors or opportunities (another analogy) for the Word (Col. 4:3); (c) for courage to share the Gospel at the right time (Eph. 6:18; 4:29); and (d) for clarity: the ability to make the Gospel clear (Col. 4:4)

Living to Demonstrate the Power of Christ

Simply put, the problem is this: You can’t give away what you don’t have. If we as Christians lead lives of frustration, neurosis, moral lapse or failure, strife and division, we cannot expect to be too effective at convincing others of the truth of the Christian faith. (Cf. Col. 4:5-6; 1 Pet. 3:15-17.)

Sowing and Watering the Seed

We have the responsibility to share the message, to communicate the truth of Scripture in accord with specific needs knowing and believing that the Word is alive and powerful and will do the work God has sent it to do (Isa. 55:8-11). While a good testimony is essential and is often used by God to give an open door for the Gospel, no one can be saved without hearing the Gospel message. (Cf. Mk. 4:1-20, 26-29; John 4:35-42.)

Reaping the Harvest

The harvest is people receiving Christ by personal faith. Evangelism is a process that brings a person to a decision to trust in Jesus Christ, but evangelism is not just a decision. In our work with people, we become a part of the process of preparing, sowing, watering, or reaping, but we can’t hurry the process. We must learn to care about people just as did the Lord. Then, when the right time comes, as led by the Spirit, begin to tell them about the person and work of the Savior. We must remember that, in the final analysis, God uses the Word and the transformed life, but it is the Spirit of God alone who can break through the barriers of the blindness and hardness of the human heart to bring a person to faith in Christ. (Cf. John 4:35-42.)

I don’t think there is much I can add to that except ask you to read through the above post again and highlight all of the references to the work of God in salvation, whether it is the Father, the Son, or the Holy Spirit. When you have done that, with a ‘here I am send me’ heart, seek God concerning His specific plan for you in sharing His Good News.

“Salvation is of the Lord.”—Jonah 2:9.

Evangelism: The Means

Posted by Dan C. on

While there are many ways of spreading the gospel in the larger context of everything that might take place leading up to sharing the specific message that Christ died for our sins, Scripture provides us with God’s designated means for transmitting the message from one person to another:

“Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.” How, then, can they call on the one they have not believed in? And how can they believe in the one of whom they have not heard? And how can they hear without someone preaching to them? And how can they preach unless they are sent?“ – Romans 10:13-15

In a few brief sentences, the Apostle Paul describes the ‘process’ by which anyone is saved! He tells us that the message must be ‘preached’.  Somebody has to ‘tell’ somebody something.

We are all quite familiar with the axiom “Actions speak louder than words.” Some of us are also familiar with a famous quote attributed to St. Francis of Assisi “Preach the gospel at all times and when necessary use words.” While there is certainly practical truth in both the axiom and the quote, how can you convey the specific message that “Christ died for our sins.” without words?

What does it mean ‘to preach’ the Gospel?  I submit to you that although a kind word spoken, a loving deed done, a physical need met (or any other non-verbal communication) can, and many times does, pave the way for sharing the specific message, all of them are ‘done’ every day, by every sort of person, and often for the vilest of motives, and none of them can save a single soul!

What is the example of New Testament Scripture?

“In those days John the Baptist came preaching in the wilderness of Judea,” – Matthew 3:1

“Now after John had been taken into custody, Jesus came into Galilee, preaching the gospel of God, Mark 1:14

“From that time Jesus began to preach,. . .” Matthew 4:17a

“They (the disciples) went out and preached that men should repent.” – Mark 6:12

“The gospel must first be preached to all the nations.” Mark 13:10

“Then Peter stood up with the Eleven, raised his voice and addressed the crowd: “Fellow Jews and all of you who live in Jerusalem, let me explain this to you; listen carefully to what I say.” – Acts 2:14

The Apostle Paul again:

“But we preach Christ crucified, unto the Jews a stumbling block, and unto the Greeks foolishness;” – 1 Corinthians 1:23

“Now I would remind you, brothers, of the gospel I preached to you, which you received, in which you stand, – 1 Corinthians 15:1

“For we preach not ourselves, but Christ Jesus the Lord; and ourselves your servants for Jesus sake.” – 2 Corinthians 4:5

“Yet when I preach the gospel, I cannot boast, for I am compelled to preach. Woe to me if I do not preach the gospel!.” – 1 Corinthians 9:16

Strip away all the non-verbal activity involved before specifying what must ‘believed’ in order to be saved, and all that is involved in the making of disciples after someone has believed, and we have the message that Christ died for our sins and the need for it’s proclamation by word of mouth.

Furthermore, not only did God designate preaching as the means through which He would save men, it pleased Him to do so!

“It pleased God by the foolishness of preaching to save them that believe“ -1 Corinthians 1:21

Have people been saved without hearing the ‘spoken’ proclamation? Of course they have, but as the exception, not the rule. I am not saying that every believer is supposed to be a ‘called by God’ pastor, teacher, or evangelist. I am saying that ‘preaching’ is God’s designated means of getting the message on the streets. In other words, if I can open my lips and speak, I can tell somebody something about my Jesus! And ‘woe is me’ if I don’t!