What is the gospel?
That question fuels the passion that has driven me all the years of my ministry. It is not merely an academic quest. I want to know what God’s Word teaches so that I can proclaim it with accuracy and clarity.
Above all, I want the doctrine I teach to be purely biblical growing out of Scripture itself rather than just con forming to some popular system of theology. A particular theologian’s view of this or that doctrine is only of incidental interest to me.
All that really matters is what God’s Word says. And nothing matters more than what Scripture says about the good news of salvation. Several years ago I began to study and preach through the gospel of Mat thew.
As I worked through the life and ministry of our Lord, a clear understanding of the message He proclaimed and the evangelistic method He used crystallized in my thinking.
I came to see Jesus’ gospel as the foundation upon which all New Testament doctrine stands. Many difficult passages in the Epis tles became clearer when I understood them in that light. This book grew out of seven years of study in the Gospels.
As I immersed myself in the gospel Jesus taught, I became acutely aware that most of mod ern evangelism both witnessing and preaching falls far short of presenting the biblical evangel in a balanced and biblical way.
The more I examined Jesus’ public ministry and His dealings with inquirers, the more apprehensive I became about the methods and content of contemporary evangelism.
On a disturbing number of fronts, the message being proclaimed today is not the gospel according to Jesus. The gospel in vogue today holds forth a false hope to sinners.
It promises them that they can have eternal life yet continue to live in rebellion against God. Indeed, it encourages people to claim Jesus as Savior yet defer until later the commitment to obey Him as Lord.
1. It promises salvation from hell but not necessarily freedom from iniquity. It offers false security to people who
1. Lewis Sperry Chafer, whose teachings helped generate the popularized gospel of today, held that “to impose a need to surrender the life to God as an added condition of salvation is most unreasonable.
God’s call to the unsaved is never said to be unto the Lordship of Christ.” Systematic Theology (Dallas: Dallas Seminary, 1948), 3:385. Cf. also Rich Wager, “Th is So-Called ‘Lordship Salvation,’ ” Confident Living (July – August 1987), 54 – 55.
Wager comes to the astonishing conclusion that it is a perversion of the gospel to invite an unsaved person to receive Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord. To present Christ as Lord to a non-Chris tian is “to add to scriptural teachings concerning salvation,” he declares.
19 The Gospel According to Jesus revel in the sins of the flesh and spurn the way of holiness. By separating faith from faithfulness,2 it teaches that intellectual assent is as valid as wholehearted obedience to the truth.
Thus the good news of Christ has given way to the bad news of an insidious easy-believism that makes no moral demands on the lives of sinners. It is not the same message Jesus proclaimed.
This new gospel has spawned a generation of professing Chris tians whose behavior is indistinguishable from the rebellion of the unregenerate.
Statis tics reveal that 1.6 billion people worldwide are considered Chris tians. A well-publicized opinion poll indicated nearly a third of all Americans claim to be born again.
Those figures surely represent millions who are tragically deceived. Theirs is a damning false assurance. The church’s witness to the world has been sacrificed on the altar of cheap grace. Shocking forms of open immorality have become commonplace among professing Chris tians.
And why not?
The promise of eternal life without sur render to divine authority feeds the wretchedness of the unregenerate heart.
Enthusiastic converts to this new gospel believe their behavior has no relationship to their spiritual status even if they continue wantonly in the grossest kinds of sin and expressions of human depravity.
It now appears that the church of our generation will be remembered chiefly for a series of hideous scandals that have uncovered the rankest exhibitions of depravity in the lives of some highly visible media evangelists.
Most troubling of all is the painful reality that most Chris tians continue to view these people as insiders, not as wolves and false shepherds who have crept in among the flock (cf. Matt. 7:15).
Why should we assume that people who live in an unbroken pattern of adultery, fornication, homosexuality, deceit, and every conceivable kind of flagrant excess are truly born again? Yet that is exactly the assumption Chris tians of this age have been taught to make.
They have been told that the only criterion for salvation is knowing and believing some basic facts about Christ. They hear from the beginning that obedience is optional.
It follows logically, then, that someone’s one-time pro fession of faith is more valid than the evidence of that person’s ongoing lifestyle.
