You. Are not. Good enough.
I abandoned the epistles last week to get back into the gospels. I know that Jesus is the Word, and I love finding Him in new places, but sometimes I don’t want to analyze. Sometimes I just want to sit and listen to Him speak. So I turn back to the gospels. This time I went to John’s.
And I was reading through chapter five recently, when I fell on verse 23:
“He who does not honor the Son does not honor the Father who sent Him.”
I suddenly found myself thinking about an atheist friend of mine who puts a lot of value on being, “a pretty good person.”
It’s a pretty common exit route:
“I’ve never killed or raped anyone, never stolen large sums of money, never cheated on my spouse. I don’t know if I believe in God – or if I believe that Jesus is the right one – but if I’m wrong I think it’ll be okay. I’m a pretty good person. God will understand.”
I used to think that. I know scores of atheists and part-time “Christians” who think that.
Who wouldn’t want to think that, really? It’s comfy. No one wants to think about death. No one wants to believe in Hell. And we’ve heard countless times that God is love, and Jesus loves us, so if God is real, it will all be fine.
But some of the stuff Jesus says makes that difficult. Like John 5:23.
I can’t help but feel that if a former atheist showed up at Heaven’s proverbial gates with a near-spotless “record,” that he wouldn’t still tremble in complete fear at the revelation that he dishonored the Creator he was about to meet.
How good is good enough to dishonor the King of kings, and still expect to be in His favor?
I don’t think it’s possible.
I don’t think anyone can get by on dishonoring God (which seems to be how He takes dishonoring Jesus), because he was, otherwise, “pretty good.”
I know,/ i> its not possible. (How good is good enough to dishonor the King of kings, and still expect to be in His favor?) The message is not ambiguous, it is crystal clear. Everybody has heard it, very few have accepted. Its a hard statement but there it is.
I actually kind of wonder how many people HAVE heard it in our society. They’ve heard that Jesus loves them and that God is good, but I wonder how many have heard a Christian or a preacher say, “You are not good enough.” We often hear, “God made you and He loves you,” but do we as often hear, “You need to change.”? No one likes to preach that sermon, and I understand why, but it seems to me that the gospel is only as good as we recognize we are bad.
Do you think the hard truth gets preached enough? Or do you think the Church should focus more on God’s love, and let people come to that realization later?
I have my own thought about what the Church should be preaching. And when I say “the Church” and “preaching” I refer to Sundays in the pews, as I know there are other ways God’s body of believers spreads the Word. But one particular church we attended, where my wife at one time was church secretary, and we both were in the choir, and headed a Sunday School class, all we heard in the pews was the Gospel. Quite fundamental, quite evangelical, but just the Gospel. Here’s how you get saved. Sunday after Sunday. It wasn’t a very large church and was soon to shrink. But attending there and hearing all those sermons, it made me think – the Church is the Church because it already knows the Gospel! It really isn’t the Church that needs to be evangelized. Yes, revivals are a good thing, used to awaken and stimulate. But the Church needs to be fed. It needs nourishment, it needs to grow in the word. The writer of Hebrews said: “For though by this time you ought to be teachers, you have need again for someone to teach you the elementary principles of the oracles of God, and you have come to need milk and not solid food.” Meaning only babes in Christ are fed milk. There is so much more in God’s Word than milk, it is jam packed with meaty things. But so much of the preaching I’ve heard from pulpits has been directed at the unsaved, and the Church sitting in the pews has been forsaken. The best worship services I’ve enjoyed were one particular Sunday School class taught by the first stated clerk of the Evangelical Presbyterian Church, because he dug deeply from the Word, so deeply did he discuss the things of God that He was immensely glorified. That Sunday School class was the best worship service.
I guess what I’m getting at is that preaching should have at its objective revealing the glory of God, telling the truth about the state of man, the state of grace, and how we can live in it. The Holy Spirit can do the rest – with the Church and with the unsaved in the pews.
I agree.
And I think it’s possible to do both. Some of the best preachers that I have heard, have been able to mine the Word of God for some serious teaching, and then bring that same subject back around to the simplicity of the gospel at the conclusion. If we’re teaching the Word, and Jesus is the Word made flesh, we should be able to dig deep for good theology, and still be introducing any new people who may be present to Jesus!