God is love. (1 John 4:8)
God demonstrates his love for us in this: while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. (Romans 5:8)
God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish, but have everlasting life. (John 3:16)
In this is love – not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins. (1 John 4:10)
We love because he first loved us. (1 John 4:19)
Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or danger, or sword? As it is written, “For your sake we are being killed all the day long; we are regarded as sheep to be slaughtered.” No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. (Romans 8:35-39)
There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. Whoever fears is not made perfect in love. (1 John 4:18)
The Word of God.
All Christians love these verses for what they tell us about God and what he has done through Jesus Christ. We love these verses for the assurance that they give.
If, however, you take these verses and a few others like them, ignore ten thousand others, refuse to consider the audience to whom they were written, and absolutize them as a message for all people for all times, then four things, among others, will follow. (1) You will contradict other passages of the Bible; (2) You will preach a false gospel that dishonors Christ; (3) You will give false assurances to the damned, and (4) You will find no obstacle whatsoever to the prospect of becoming a prominent voice in modern evangelicalism.
I will give you now a one-paragraph summary of the gospel as I frequently hear it in evangelical hotspots. That would include places like WMBI radio, Wheaton College, and I think the vast majority of megachurches.
"God loves you. He loves you unconditionally. Nothing you can do can make God love you more. Nothing you can do can make God love you less. It’s not about what you do. All other religions of the world tell you what to do. Christianity tells you what God has done. He has forgiven all your sins by putting them on Christ. God is not mad at you. Don’t be afraid of him. Perfect love casts out fear. Your biggest problem is that you don’t realize how much God loves you. You are always trying to do good things and not do bad things in an effort to earn God’s love and try to get him to like you. He already likes you. He loves you. And he invites you into a personal relationship with him."
Before getting into specifics, I would like to submit that paragraph to a smell test. This is for those of you who have actually read the Bible. Not “heard a sermon about the Bible” from a megachurch preacher or a professor of evangelism at Wheaton College. No, if you have read the Bible on your own, this one is for you. Does the paragraph I just related sound like any sermon, any sermon at all, implied or explicit, on the pages of Holy Scripture?
That is, would Noah have said to his contemporaries, “God is not mad at you – he loves you unconditionally”? Would Lot have said to his neighbors in Sodom, “Stop thinking you can earn God’s favor by doing all these good works – you just have to accept God’s free grace”? Did Jonah say to the Ninevites, “Fear not! I bring you good news. Nothing you can do could possibly make God love you more”? Is that the kind of thing that Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel or any of the minor prophets said to their fellow Israelites when preaching to them?
Now switch over to the New Testament. Did John the Baptist say to his contemporaries, “All the other religions of the world tell you what to DO. Not me – I bring you the gospel, I’m telling you what God HAS DONE (or will do pretty soon, anyway.)”? Did Jesus preach like that in the Sermon on the Mount? Did Peter’s sermon have that flavor when he addressed the crowd on the day of Pentecost? Did he say, “God loves you, his love is unconditional, your biggest problem is that you don’t get how much he loves you, and he invites you into a personal relationship with him”? Is that what his sermon in Acts chapter 2 sounded like? Did Stephen speak that way in the sermon he gave in Acts 7 just before he was executed? I don’t think he would have been executed if only he had had the sense to speak like a modern evangelical. Does the book of Hebrews - the first 12 chapters of which sound like an extended sermon - have that relentlessly sunny, warm, encouraging, unthreatening flavor to it?
I’ll provide the answer to my all rhetorical questions. No, no, no, no, no, a thousand times no. Much of what passes for evangelistic preaching today miserably fails the Scriptural smell test. And people whose minds are bathed in Scripture get that right away. But such people are getting harder and harder to find. That was part of what I had to say last week.
What I hear presented as the gospel in countless evangelical forums today reminds me of fake movie trailers. I don’t know if you have seen any of those. They’re fascinating. They’ll take a horror movie like The Shining and splice together a few clips, put in some uplifting music and inspiring narration, and make it look like a feel-good family film. Or they’ll take a broad comedy like Back To The Future and make it look like a deep melodrama of forbidden love between Marty and Doc. Those can be very funny. The humor is crucially dependent upon the assumption that you have seen the movie and you know its tone, but the trailer deliberately takes you in a completely different direction despite the fact that it is showing accurate short clips.
What I would like to do now is take you through just four of the slogans and soundbites that have come to dominate evangelical preaching. I started with a lot more but for time’s sake had to whittle it down to four. I hope I picked the right ones.
1. “God’s not mad at you.”
I remember the first time I heard that from a pulpit. It was 1988. My immediate thought was, “How do you know that? How do you know that God is not mad at me, or at anyone else seated here?” Since that moment I have heard that phrase spoken to general audiences many times. There is even a daily speaker on WMBI, Steve Brown, who has made a career of saying it. If you go to his website “Key Life,” you will see that its subtitle is, “God’s not mad at you.”
But if you read the Bible, you will see that no less than 600 times it speaks of the wrath of God. And that wrath is not only upon the damned but sometimes upon his saintliest saints. Three times Moses says, “The Lord was angry with me.” (Deuteronomy 1:37; 3:26; and 4:21). If someone claimed, “God is never angry with me,” I would want to say, “Do you think you are better than Moses?”
Someone might respond, “Yeah but Moses is Old Testament. In the New Testament God stopped getting angry, because, you know, Jesus.” That is not correct. Colossians 3:5-6 says, “Put to death, therefore, whatever belongs to your earthly nature: sexual immorality, impurity, lust, evil desires and greed, which is idolatry. Because of these, the wrath of God is coming.” Is coming. That is not past tense. Sin still provokes the wrath of God. In Revelation 14:10 worshipers of the beast “drink the wine of God’s fury, which has been poured full strength into the cup of his wrath.”
Many people can quote John 3:16, which speaks of God’s love. Far, far fewer people can quote John 3:36, which speaks of his wrath. John 3:36 says, “Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life; whoever does not obey the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God remains on him.” If you do not obey Jesus Christ, God’s wrath remains on you.
2. “Don’t be afraid.”
Something I have noted that evangelical preachers love to say is that the most often-repeated commandment in the Bible is “Fear not.” I don’t know if that is true. It may be. I haven’t counted all the commands of the Bible and sorted them into categories. Such an attempt strikes me as intrinsically impossible because of all the overlap. (For example, does a commandment against slander count as a command against deception or are those two different commands? You can go on with that forever.) But for the sake of argument, let us suppose that the Bible has a most common commandment, and that it is in fact, “Fear not!” I still would find that datum spectacularly uninteresting and uncompelling because I know that that command is always bound to a particular situation and even to a particular person.
For example, an angel said to shepherds in the field on the night of Jesus’ birth, “Fear not!” (Luke 2:10). But no angel said that to Herod the Great that night. Herod the Great was a butcherer of toddlers and other innocents. He would not have been told “Fear not!” but rather “Fear yes! This is a good time for you to start fearing.” Jesus said to his followers, “Fear not, little flock, for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom.” (Luke 12:32). But he certainly didn’t say that to Caiaphas, or Herod Antipas, or Pontius Pilate, or a host of other bad people. It seems clear to me that commandments like, “Don’t make idols, don’t be greedy, don’t covet your neighbor’s wife, love the Lord your God” apply across the board to everybody at all times. But you can never generalize “Fear not.” That command always depends crucially on whom you’re talking to and what the situation is.
Of particular concern to me is that many evangelical preachers are absolutizing the verse “perfect love casts out fear” (1 John 4:10) and instructing us to apply it to God - don’t be afraid of God. But Jesus explicitly commands us to fear God. Luke 12:4-5: “Do not be afraid of those who kill the body and after that can do no more. But I will show you whom you should fear: Fear him who, after your body has been killed, has authority to throw you into hell. Yes, I tell you, fear him.”
The Bible says the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom (Proverbs 9:10). Romans 3:18 says about sinners, “There is no fear of God before their eyes.” That’s a bad thing. The penitent criminal on the cross next to Jesus rightly challenged his scornful counterpart with the question, “Don’t you fear God?” (Luke 23:40). Since Jesus commanded the fear of God, the refusal to fear him is disobedience to Jesus Christ.
Allow me to go outside the Bible for an illustration of the humble believer’s appropriate attitude and posture before God. This is from The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame, a passage cited by C. S. Lewis in his book The Problem of Pain. Mole and Rat are about to appear before the god Pan. Mole speaks: “‘Rat.’ He found breath to whisper, shaking, ‘Are you afraid?’ ‘Afraid?’ murmured the Rat, his eyes shining with unutterable love. ‘Afraid? Of Him? O, never, never. And yet – and yet – O Mole, I am afraid.’ Then the two animals, crouching to the earth, bowed their heads and did worship."
3. “All your sins have been forgiven.”
Easter Sunday morning, April 20, 2014. The church I was attending, Bethany Chapel in Wheaton, had a guest speaker, a professor noted for his intellect and for his zeal in evangelism. He alarmed me when he said in the course of the sermon, “I have yet to see an apologetic more powerful than these two: The God of the universe loves you, and he forgives you.” Now an apologetic is a defense of the faith whose purpose is to persuade unbelievers to believe. It seemed that this professor was saying that a powerfully persuasive point was to tell unbelievers that they were already forgiven. But he could not have meant that, right? It turns out that is exactly what he meant. Because he gave an example from his own life where he was trying to evangelize a young man, and he said to him, “It boils down to this: the God of the universe knows you. He knows all about you. And he loves you. And all the goofy stuff you’ve got clogged in you – he has forgiven every bit of it. He’s forgiven your every sin. And he welcomes you into a relationship with him.” Then he asked him, “Is there any reason why you wouldn’t want to trust him right now?”
Had I been that young man, knowing my penchant for precision and rigor and contentiousness, I would have said, “Yes, I have a very good reason for not trusting him now. I don’t have to. I’m already forgiven. You said so yourself. You didn’t say I had to confess my sins or turn from them or trust Christ or anything like that to be forgiven. You said he has forgiven my every sin. Well, good. Thank you for that great news. I think we’re done here.”
The speaker then proceeded to generalize his approach for all of us and said, “The world needs to know that they’re loved and forgiven.” No they don’t. It is not true. The world is not forgiven yet. That is a false gospel. The people of the world need to know that they now stand under condemnation. Jesus said in John 16:8 that the Holy Spirit would "convict the world of sin and righteousness and judgment.” Not “acceptance and love and forgiveness” - but sin and righteousness and judgment. And the Apostle Paul said in 1 Corinthians 14:24-25 that if unbelievers or seekers came into our worship services he wanted them to be convicted of sin and brought under judgment by all so that they would fall down and worship God saying “God is really among you.”
But though people stand condemned for their sins by God and their own conscience, they can be forgiven if they confess, repent, and trust in Jesus Christ. The Bible says “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins” (John 1:9). Note the condition if we confess. The Bible also says, “Whoever believes in him (Jesus) 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). That text does not say that unbelievers are forgiven already but rather that they are condemned already. That is the starting point for humanity. Not forgiven, but condemned. People need to be saved. They don’t start out saved. They need to be forgiven. They don’t start out pre-forgiven.
After Jesus’ resurrection he told his disciples that repentance for the forgiveness of sins would be preached in his name to all the nations (Luke 24:47). Please hear those words. “Repentance for the forgiveness of sins.” Again, Jesus did not say, “Tell them they are already forgiven,” but rather, “Tell them that upon repentance they will be forgiven.”
From what I have observed, the heresy that everyone is already forgiven has so overtaken my alma mater, Wheaton College, that I would not recommend that a young person seeking a Bible-based education go there. You can’t imagine how much it pains me to say that.
Of course, it’s not just Wheaton College. I mentioned earlier Steve Brown, who has a daily one-minute devotional on Christian radio. This past Friday, September 24, his devotional involved a story about a little boy who shot his grandma’s duck with a slingshot. (I guess it must have been on a farm.) When some days later he confessed to her she said. “I know. I was standing by the window. I saw the whole thing. I forgave you then.” Brown concludes by saying, “Run to Jesus. You’re already forgiven.”
“Run to Jesus” is very good. “You’re already forgiven” is a heresy that holds the Bible, including Jesus’ own words, in contempt. You are not already forgiven. Trust in Jesus Christ. Confess, repent, and you will be forgiven.
4. “God loves you unconditionally.”
For many years now, it seems to me that the majority of evangelical preachers have been saying that God’s love is unconditional. They keep using that word “unconditional.” I do not think it means what they think it means. With some preachers, the conviction is so powerful that they seem unable to speak of God’s love at all without specifying that it is unconditional.
About 10 years ago a related line of rhetoric caught on like wildfire in popular evangelicalism. It goes like this: “Nothing you can do can make God love you more. Nothing you can do can make God love you less.”
I actually heard that line from three different megachurch pastors over the course of just a few days. Here are the exact quotes.
J. D. Greear: “In Christ there is nothing I can do that would make You love me more, nothing I have done that makes You love me less.”
Pete Briscoe: “There’s nothing I can do to make him love me more, there’s nothing I can do to make him love me less.”
Andy Stanley: “Do you what the root, the heart, the pull-back-the-layers is when it comes to following Jesus? This is uncomfortable, but it will change you. And it will change us. I think it will change the world. God could not love you more. And there is nothing you will do and nothing you could do that will cause him to love you less. And the corollary is this: Every person you’re ever eyeball-to-eyeball with God could not love more. And there is nothing they could do to cause God to love them less. Nothing.”
Perhaps this will sound shocking, but I suspect that these megachurch preachers do not read the Bible at all. I know for a fact that if they read it, they don’t pay attention when they do so. Because if they did pay attention they would not be regurgitating astoundingly unbiblical slogans and clichés that they have plagiarized from one another. I would like to think that somewhere along the line one of them would scrutinize the rhetoric and say “Wait a minute! The Bible doesn’t say that. It says the opposite!” But I’m afraid that such scrutiny is not happening in our megachurches.
And not just the megachurches. Many of our mid-sized and smaller ones too. About that time, a decade or so ago, I was in the process of joining a church. In a group meeting with the pastor one of the other prospective members said, “I’m so glad to find a church where they teach the true gospel, that nothing you can do can make God love you more, nothing you can do can make him love you less.” I almost spoke up, but the moment passed, and they went on to other things. But I thought, Well, she will soon find out otherwise. I’m sure they don’t teach that nonsense here.
Boy was I wrong. In a short period of time, the former pastor of the church said just that in a sermon. Then the current lead pastor of the church said it. Then an elder (who later became executive pastor) also preached that from the pulpit. Then a few years later, (after my wife and I had left because we couldn’t stand it any more), the church hired a new lead pastor, and I listened online to a few of his sermons and, yep, he said it too.
Can it get worse? Yes it can. My wife and I looked for a new church, and for a few weeks we attended a small start-up church plant. That pastor, bless his heart, had us stand together and recite in unison, as though it were the Lord’s Prayer or Apostles’ Creed, “Nothing I can do can make God love me more...” etc.
Such experiences make me sympathize with sincere, devout followers of Jesus Christ who love the Scriptures and who wind up saying, “I don’t know where to go to church anymore.”
Let me take you through some Scripture passages that overtly specify the conditionality of God’s love.
Psalm 5:5-6. King David says to God: “The boastful shall not stand before your eyes; you hate all evildoers. You destroy those who speak lies. The LORD abhors the bloodthirsty and deceitful man.”
David did not believe in a God who loved everybody unconditionally. David believed in a God who hated evildoers - who abhorred bloodthirsty, deceitful men.
Psalm 86:5: “You are forgiving and good, O Lord, abounding in love to all who call upon you.” Hear the words “to all who call upon you.” That is a condition. If God’s love were unconditional, the verse would need to say something like, “you abound in love to all who call upon you and equally to all who don’t call upon you, because you love everybody just the same and nothing they do can make you love them more or less.” That is SO ridiculous. To read unconditionality into that verse and many others like it renders all such verses senseless and absurd.
Psalm 103:11: “For as high as the heavens are above the earth, so great is his love for those who fear him.” There is a condition. And ultimately it is a very comforting one! Fear God, and he will love you to the heavens. (Refuse to fear God, and I’m afraid we can’t say that about you.)
Psalm 146:8: “The Lord gives sight to the blind, the Lord lifts up those who are bowed down. The Lord loves the righteous.” I don’t know how that can get much clearer. God’s love is not unconditional. The Bible says, “The Lord loves the righteous.”
Proverbs 15:9: “The Lord detests the way of the wicked, but he loves those who pursue righteousness.” I must admit I like that verse a lot better than the one that says that the Lord loves the righteous. Because I would never say that I am righteous - except insofar as there is credited to me an alien righteousness that belongs to Christ. But perhaps I can say that I (sort of) pursue righteousness, and that I honestly hunger and thirst for it. And if that is true of me, then I have Jesus’ assurance that God blesses me (Matthew 5:6), and Solomon’s assurance that God loves me.
The verses I have cited are from the Old Testament. But the conditionality of God’s love is repeated many times in the New Testament as well. Here’s a few:
2 Corinthians 7:9: “God loves a cheerful giver.” That verse can only make sense if God loves a cheerful giver in some way or to some degree that he does not love a grumpy giver, a cheerful non-giver, or a grumpy non-giver. I have had many many pastors tell me that nothing I could do could make God love me more, and one of them even tried to get me to say that out loud. But the Bible says – awfully clearly, I think - “Give cheerfully, and God will love you more.” I mean it’s right there.
Jude 21: “Keep yourselves in the love of God.” What??? Keep yourselves in the love of God??? If God’s love were unconditional, it would be impossible not to keep yourself in the love of God. Jude does not tell us there how to keep ourselves in the love of God. But that's ok because Jesus already told us how in John 15:10: “If you obey my commands, you will remain in my love.” Again, the condition is just siren-blaringly explicit.
Two more, quickly, before I summarize and wrap up this point.
John 14:21: [Jesus said] “He who loves me will be loved by my Father.”
John 16:27: [Jesus speaking to his disciples] “The Father himself loves you because you have loved me and have believed that I came from God.”
That last verse is interesting because elsewhere we learn that we love because he first loved us. So which is it? Do we love God because he first loved us, or does God love us because we have loved Jesus? The answer is both. In physics, light is both a particle and a wave, and we just have to learn to affirm both, deny neither, and live with the paradox. Likewise, the Bible says both that we love because God loves us and God loves us because we love Jesus. It just plain says both, so we have to accept that and deny neither proposition.
In the meantime, the Bible affirms the conditionality of God’s love so often, so relentlessly, and so explicitly that only someone who isn’t reading it could possibly say, “God’s love is unconditional - nothing we could do could make him love us more or less.” That demonstrates jaw-dropping ignorance of the Bible, and I shake my head in disbelief over the number of times I have heard it from evangelical brothers and sisters over the past 10 years.
I began this series four weeks ago by saying that evangelicalism is in crisis and in desperate need of reformation both in its practice and its preaching. In the opening message I outlined just a small portion of the scandals that have swept through evangelicalism like a category 5 hurricane. In the next two messages I focused on just two of the vices that have plagued our community of faith, pride and greed. That list could have been a lot longer - I capped it at two. Last week I talked about the lack of focus on the Bible, biblical illiteracy, and a failure to cite Scripture that characterizes our most influential churches and institutions. And today I have tried to show how that ignorance of the Bible in pew and pulpit has spawned a skewed, truncated, twisted version of the gospel that I don’t think our forerunners in evangelicalism would have tolerated, and that goes a long way toward explaining why so many of our leaders have behaved so badly. Why not? They know that God loves them unconditionally. They have drilled that into our heads and they have drilled it into their own heads.
What we have today is what I am calling a fundamental misdiagnosis of the human condition. All people are being addressed now as though they are saved saints who are in no peril, who need not fear, who will be loved unconditionally, and who primarily need hope and encouragement on a Sunday morning so they can leave the house of God feeling refreshed.
To this end, believers and unbelievers alike are fed a steady diet of, “You’re accepted, you’re loved, you’re forgiven, your problem is trying too hard to be good in an effort to get God to love you when he already loves you to the max and couldn’t love you anymore. It’s not about what you do, it’s about what God has done” and so forth.
But the Bible more typically describes the natural human condition as lost and needing to be found, condemned and needing to be saved, sinful and needing to be remade in the image of Holy Jesus. The good news of the gospel is that you do not have to remain condemned, unforgiven, under the shadow of God’s wrath that in your most honest moments you know you deserve. There is a pardon available, there is a welcome that God offers into his fearful presence, and a love from God that grows – it does NOT stagnate, it GROWS to the extent that your obedience creates room for it. That is available for you because Jesus, God’s Son, died for you – you wretch, you sinner, you rebel against the good will of God. Bow the knee to him, he who died for sinners and rose from the dead, beg his forgiveness and renewal, and you will have it forever. And some day you will see the face of God.
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