For certain persons have crept in unnoticed… ungodly persons who turn the grace of our God into licentiousness and deny our only Master and Lord, Jesus Christ.” – Jude 1:4
The Gospel of Jesus Christ is being trampled violently underfoot in pulpits all across America. It is being spat on in “biblical” counseling sessions and mocked by contemporary worship music – song after song. More still, those who have been entrusted with the task of shepherding souls have so denigrated the grace of God in Jesus Christ and so watered down (or nuanced to the point of irrelevance) the gospel message that there are, as Leonard Ravenhill put it, countless individuals being “launched into a Christ-less eternity and are in orbit forever in the regions of the damned.” In other words, many evangelicals are going to hell when they die, not because they have willingly rejected the unerringly heralded message of the cross after finding it wanting, but because they think themselves Christian while blatantly ignoring the call to follow Jesus and pursue holiness by the power of His spirit. They have duped themselves, and their hearers, into a perpetuity of trauma and torture fiercely clinching onto what Dietrich Bonhoeffer would call “cheap grace”. These issues are not limited to any one denomination or theological persuasion; rather, they constitute an ideological, even theological, epidemic plaguing the Western Church as a whole.
If any of this be true, and it certainly is, then It is not enough to sit idly by and hope for a better tomorrow. Nay, we must bloody our knees in prayer, soak our face with tears, wet our pens with ink, and preach our throats raw, in the hope that God would show our generation a supernatural grace that has scarcely been seen this side of eternity. We must clarify not only the person and work of Jesus Christ, but the cost associated with following him.
In short, todays church is in peril but she doesn’t need a viciously emotive anti-intellectualism, a modern pop psychology, or a cold, dead orthodoxy to save or satiate her – she needs a beautifully robust, God-glorifying, Holy Spirit honoring, Jesus treasuring and exulting, lordship embracing, cost and cross cherishing, abrasive, yet life-giving understanding of the Gospel.
This simple blog then, as far as it is able, will attempt firstly to lovingly hasten the church’s recovery in her understanding of the gospel message by offering a simple, clear, yet vital presentation of its key and essential truths. For The Bride of Christ will not be revived apart from the knowledge of, and a radical trust in, the supremacy and sufficiency of God’s Christ. Secondly, It will seek to unpack the necessity of an experiential knowledge of that message. Learning the oracles of God without resting in them, and living and loving out of them, is a fools errand. Thus, collectively, the posts herein will exist not solely to instruct the mind, but to inflame the heart as well.. May God give you the grace to tarry with him in watchfulness, revealing more deeply the mystery and glory of God, which is, Christ crucified.
Amen brother!