Good morning. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to speak today. Let’s start with a word of prayer.
Oh Father, I ask you my Lord and King, to pour out your Spirit upon the men and women here today. I pray that you would give us eyes to see and ears to hear and that you would lavish us with grace and mercy that we may become more like Jesus in every area of life. In Jesus’ name we pray, amen.
The topic given to me was: The gospel never fails the church but the church sometimes fails the gospel. I want to begin by asking: What is the good news anyway? I don’t think most people that go to church have a clue. From my perspective, I think the best place to get a decent definition of good news is Isaiah 61. Let me read verses 1- 3: The Spirit of the Lord GOD is upon me, Because the LORD has anointed me to bring good news to the afflicted; He has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to captives and freedom to prisoners; to proclaim the favorable year of the LORD and the day of vengeance of our God; to comfort all who mourn, to grant those who mourn in Zion, a garland instead of ashes, the oil of gladness instead of mourning, the mantle of praise instead of a spirit of fainting so they will be called oaks of righteousness, the planting of the LORD, that He may be glorified.
And then jumping down to verse 10: I will rejoice greatly in the LORD, my soul will exult in my God; for He has clothed me with garments of salvation, He has wrapped me with a robe of righteousness, as a bridegroom decks himself with a garland, and as a bride adorns herself with her jewels. For as the earth brings forth its sprouts, and as a garden causes the things sown in it to spring up, So the Lord GOD will cause righteousness and praise to spring up before all the nations.
That, my friends, is good news.
Song writer and performer Randy Newman in his song, “I’m dead, but I don’t know it” sings: “Dear God, Sweet God protect me from the truth.” Brothers and sisters: That is the unspoken prayer of the majority of the American church.
I don’t know about you, but I grew up with a very limited view of what good news was. It was pretty much limited to the forgiveness of sins. Now that is not a bad thing, if you really understand the fullness and depth of what sin is, but most evangelicals believe in the forgiveness of sins because it’s easy.
Let me explain: Do you remember the story of the paralytic who was let down through the roof of a house by some of his friends so Jesus could heal him? Jesus said to the man “your sins are forgiven you.” Now the Pharisees got all bent out of shape over that statement and said that Jesus was blaspheming because no one but God could forgive sins. Jesus’ reply was: Which is easier to say to the paralytic: your sins are forgiven or arise take up your bed and walk?
Had the Pharisees answered they would have probably said ‘take up your bed and walk’. We, however, find it much easier to say: ‘Your sins are forgiven,’ not because we can forgive sins, but because we can say it and no one can prove whether it’s true or not. With our words we say: Your sins are forgiven; but at the same time we also have an unspoken rule that says: Don’t talk about your problems. We have, in effect, limited the good news to the intellectual concept of forgiveness of sins. We have neutered the gospel.
Now, we will allow God to give us religious truth. We love religious truth; but like the good humanists we are; we don’t believe God is really big enough to do anything about things on this side of heaven. So we end up saying, ‘Jesus saves’ on the outside while on the inside we suppress the truth in unrighteousness because our God isn’t big enough to save us from ourselves.
I learned by example that God could do anything he wanted to do; he just didn’t want to do anything in this world except take us home to be with Jesus. You see, all of the people I grew up with in church believed in God with all their heart when it came to salvation in the here after, but they suppressed the truth in every other area of life because they thought if they faced up to what was going on in the real world; they’d have to put a bullet in their head. They wanted to get as far away from the truth of their lives as possible and they mistakenly thought that the gospel was supposed to help them do that.
I spent the first 30 years of my life knowing my sins were forgiven but I was crippled on the inside, broken, battered, and captive, a prisoner to fear, shame, pain and a hundred other things. I tried to muster the faith to believe that everything was ok, but I had all this deep dark stuff in my life that I wasn’t allowed to talk about. So I learned to just push that stuff down and hope that Jesus would come back before I exploded. He didn’t and I did. But that was what everybody I knew called the good news so I went along for the ride.
I was so good at suppressing the truth that I had no clue that I was broken until I was thirty. I knew Jesus had taken care of my sin, I just figured he had done all he was going to do and that I had gotten all the salvation I was going to get until after I died. I mean I had as much salvation as anybody else I knew. It was pretty clear from looking at the people I knew in the church: You come to Jesus, you get saved and then you spend your time in hell until Jesus comes back. That was the essence of the good news that I believed, that everybody I grew up with in church believed. Nobody ever dared to believe that the gospel could change our secular lives, our home lives, our inner lives.
Now, if you have accepted Christ as your personal savior but you still hurt like hell inside, you remain just as broken after saying the sinner’s prayer as you were before saying it, what are you supposed to do? How are you supposed to get by in the real world? I did what any desperate person would do; I turned to idols. But I was in a real predicament as a Christian because I couldn’t bow down to alcohol or drugs because those things were actually recognizable as sin. So I turned to the Christians favorite invisible idol - Lust.
Did you know a recent survey shows that there are more people inside the church struggling with pornography than there are outside the church? I can tell you why that is: It’s free, it has no odor, it doesn’t dilate your pupils, it is for the most part undetectable and yet the endorphin rush it brings can numb pain just as well as drugs or alcohol. Lust is the church’s drug of choice. It is our idol of choice.
Why are we worshipping at the foot of idols, especially this idol, so readily? The answer to that is found in second Timothy 3:5 where Paul says: They have a form of godliness denying the power. Welcome to American Evangelicalism where God isn’t big enough to save you from yourself.
In my own struggle with the good news, I have found that I turn to idols whenever I think my problems are too big for God to handle. These idols are the sins that I use to cover the pain and problems in my life. You see, a person is born and then the stuff of life happens, pain comes, sin is manifest, life hurts and most of us don’t deal with life very well so we stuff it down. We suppress the truth in unrighteousness. It begins to accumulate, and pretty soon we always know that it’s there. It begins to gnaw at us. Everybody deals with that gnawing in different ways. Some of us drink, some of us lust, some of us work, some of us clean, some of us nag, and some of us go to church. You can fill in your own blank here. All of us bow down to an idol of our own making.
As the gnawing inside gets worse we need to worship our idol of choice more and more to be able to ignore the pain. Eventually, even the idols we use to numb our pain become problematic and our lives self-destruct. However, the things we bow down to in order to numb our pain aren’t our main problem. The real problem is that we haven’t let the good news be the good news. We haven’t let the gospel get under our skin.
This is the condition of the church in our day and age: We come to Jesus and get our sins forgiven and then stand around going: What do I do with all this stuff? It may be forgiven, but it’s still there. To deal with it we do the only thing we know to do: We push it down, we suppress the truth. Unfortunately, most Christians call that the good news. But that is not the good news; that is sin. Thank God it doesn’t have to be that way.
Let me tell you about the real good news. Jesus came and shed his blood not just to forgive your sins; he came to save you. The word for salvation in the New Testament is Sozo. It is the same word that is used for healing. Isaiah 61 gives us a glimpse of what Salvation/healing should look like. Jesus came to bind up the broken hearted, forgive the debts of the poor, give liberty to captives, open the prison doors to prisoners, comfort the mourning, give the oil of gladness instead of ashes, a garment of praise instead of faintness of heart, to rebuild the ruins of lives, to raise up the devastation, and instead of shame and dishonor to give the highest honor a double portion, and everlasting joy.
Jesus Christ shed his blood to pay for all that stuff you carry around. He knows those deep dark things you try to hide better than you do and he has paid the price for them. They are already dealt with. You can begin to let go of them. You do not have to be in bondage to those things.
You may ask: But how do I get free? I am so afraid of these things and of the consequences of letting them out. Well, first of all, you don’t get yourself free. You are set free. Getting free is just as much a gift of grace as getting saved. Justification – being forgiven of your sins and being declared righteous is a gift of the grace of salvation; so too is learning to walk in righteousness. Sanctification is by grace alone and it is included in the good news package for no extra charge.
Look at verse 10 of Isaiah 61: My soul shall exult in my God for he has covered me with the garments of salvation, he has clothed me with the robe of righteousness. What a beautiful picture of God’s gracious salvation. God dresses me in salvation and righteousness. He forgives my sins and imputes Christ’s righteousness to me. I am holy and blameless in Christ Jesus by the grace of God.
But it doesn’t stop there look at verse 11: For as the earth brings forth its sprouts and a garden causes what is sown in it to sprout up so the Lord God will CAUSE righteousness and praise to sprout up. That is the result of you being clothed in salvation and robed in righteousness. God’s grace will cause righteousness to spring forth in you.
That doesn’t happen by magic. By that I mean, saying the right words doesn’t make everything in your life better. More often than not we treat the word of God as if it is a magic spell. Just repeat the words and everything will work out alright. If you have a problem I’ll just shove scripture down your throat until you choke that will make everything alright.
No it will not! Christianity is reality based. The word of God is meant to be applied to every area of your life, not just spoken over it like some magic incantation. First Timothy 1:8 says “But we know the law is good if it is used lawfully. That statement applies to the whole word of God. The word of God is good if it is used lawfully, if it is used according to its purpose. The Pharisees knew the word of God backwards and forwards but it did them no good because they used the word unlawfully. Jesus said: ‘Do the word and live’. He didn’t say: have the word in your head or speak the word; he says do it.
The word of God is not meant to be a magic incantation to overpower your problems and put you on easy street. Its purpose is to teach you how to live in righteousness by God’s grace; being rooted and grounded in love which is the keeping of the commandments. We are to be rooted and grounded in the commandments of God. Jesus was pretty clear about this: Do the commandments and live. You see grace and righteousness go hand in hand. They are like opposite sides of the same coin; you can’t have one without the other.
Let me try to explain all that I have been saying out of my own life. By the time I was 30 I had been a Christian for nearly 20 years, but I had been pushing down all this stuff for so long that something had to give. My life became out of control. I came to the place where I just couldn’t push anything else down. There were too many balls to juggle and I began to drop them. My life began to fall apart. At the time, I thought it was the worst thing that could ever happen to me, but now I see that it was the spade of God breaking up the fallow ground of my life so that righteousness could begin to sprout. It was God beginning to keep his promises and cause righteousness to grow.
Until that point in my life I had used the law unlawfully. I was saved. I was in the word night and day. I was redeemed but I was burying the things I had been redeemed from. I was raising up idols to try and take care of my problems. I hid the sins and the dark things. I pretended to the rest of the world that they didn’t exist. I prayed to my idols to make me comfortably numb.
I was lying. I was bearing false witness about myself to others. I was saying everything was alright, but it wasn’t. God in his wonderful mercy forced me into righteousness by taking away all other options. I had to start speaking the truth about myself. There was nowhere else to go; except death. So I began to speak the unspeakable. I began to break the no tell policy I had been taught. It was not easy. When scripture says work out your salvation with fear and trembling, it means fear and trembling. I was going against everything I had ever been taught at both home and church. No one that I knew had ever told the truth about their inner condition. That was forbidden territory and I was sure entering there would destroy me. But I did it anyway because I was out of options if I was going to stay in the land of the living.
When my life crashed and burned God led me to some wonderful brothers and sisters who stood with me and bore my burdens with me. Mostly they just sat beside me and let me uncover the stuff that I had buried for 30 years. The things I had kept hidden for so long didn’t scare them, it didn’t make them hate me or reject me. They didn’t try to shove scripture down my throat. They also didn’t let me run away. They stood beside me and helped me take these things one by one and put them under the blood of Jesus. The body of Christ was doing what the body of Christ is supposed to do; it was building itself up in love.
Throughout that process the grace of God was forcing righteousness out of me. God was lavishing me with grace upon grace. What did grace look like? It looked like anger and hatred, cursing and crying, fear and arrogance spewing from the depth of my heart. It looked like the truth. Someone asked me awhile back if it was ok to be angry with God. The answer is: no it’s not. But; it’s also not ok to lie and say you aren’t angry at him when you are. He already knows if you’re angry. He is strong enough to be able take the truth from you. He already knows what the truth is. He knows the truth about you better than you do. Realizing that was one of the biggest blessings of my life. God is never afraid of the truth. I was given the freedom to let out the things that I had been bottling up inside me and I did. I was afraid the tirade wouldn’t stop once it started, but after a couple of years it did. The result was the beginning of freedom from bondage for the first time ever.
God continued to lavish me with grace and I found that once I started to speak the truth bondage began to fall away. I didn’t work harder at not sinning. I worked harder, by God’s grace alone, at doing righteousness. I worked hard at beginning to tell the truth about every area of my life. I lived for 30 years learning and perfecting the art of lying. God forced me to begin to tell the truth and once I started I couldn’t seem to stop. The weird thing was that the more truth about myself I told the less lust began to have a hold me. Bondage that had held me since I was 5 years old began to fall away.
That was and is wonderful but there is another side to salvation and the freedom it brings. You see being in bondage is to be without responsibility. Let me give you an example – the lame man in the temple. Peter and John came up and the Spirit of God used them as instruments to heal a lame man. His life was changed. He could now walk, but the next day he realized that he could no longer beg for a living. Here he is an adult, and he now has to learn a new trade because of grace. Grace, in some ways, made his life much harder; it forced him to become more responsible. Grace took away his excuse.
There’s a scene in the movie Monty Python’s The Life of Brian that shows lepers on the street begging. The camera goes by one, two, three lepers and then you see this guy who looks perfectly healthy begging and you hear him say “alms for an ex-leper, alms for an ex-leper.” In the movie we find out that Jesus had come by and healed this man and in the process taken away the only job he’d ever known. He said he went back to find Jesus to see if he could just partially heal him maybe just give him a slight limp on Tuesdays and Thursdays or something like that.
You see, there are people out there who don’t want to be well. Freedom means increased responsibility. To be free in Christ means to be responsible in Christ. Thank God he gives us grace upon grace. The grace to deal with the new responsibilities that grace brings into our lives.
What is the point of all of this? Simply stated the point is this: redemption is so much bigger than your sin and bondage. Christ has come to set you free from all of it. Did you hear that? Christ has come to set you free from all the bondage in your life. He has come to mend your broken heart and he is not going to wait until heaven to do it. If you want to be saved, to be sozo’d – to be healed of your broken heart just ask. Whosoever calls upon the name of the Lord will be saved. That doesn’t mean that you will like the way God answers your prayer.
Sometimes the healing process can be more painful than the brokenness but know that it will not always be this way. God knows about all those secrets you hide in your heart. He is not afraid of them. He is mature love and mature love casts out fear. God wants to lead you down the path of gracious obedience. He wants to make righteousness sprout forth in your life. Guess what – what God wants he gets. He who began a good work in you will be faithful to complete it until the day of Christ Jesus. God is not going to stop lavishing you with grace until the job is done: Justification, sanctification, glorification – all by grace alone.
As Isaiah wrote: I will greatly rejoice in the Lord; my soul shall exult in my God, for he has clothed me with the garments of salvation, he has covered me with the robe of righteousness, as a bridegroom decks himself like a priest with a beautiful headdress and as a bride adorns herself with her jewels. For as the earth brings forth its sprouts, and as a garden causes what is sown in it to sprout up, so the Lord God will CAUSE righteousness and praise to sprout up before all the nations.
If you have humbled yourself at the feet of King Jesus then you have been redeemed by the son, adopted by the father and sealed by the Holy Spirit. The enemy has been defeated. No one can pluck you out of the hand of the father, not even you. You are holy and blameless in Christ Jesus. You are a new creature in Christ. You are a saint. Old things HAVE PASSED away. Rest in the mighty redemption wrought by the blood of Christ that will not, cannot let you down. Nothing – not even your secrets - can separate you from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus; Nothing.
The true good news is wonderfully powerful - powerful enough to change you from the inside out. We may have the form of the good news but the form without the power to heal broken hearts and set captives free from bondage is not the good news of scripture. The Vigilantes of Love sing: There’s a little bit of truth left out there but it may not be enough to save a world where everyone’s demons are their best friends. If you cannot cast them out you learn to live with them.
The god of the American church may not be big enough to deal with the crap that you keep hidden inside but the God of Scripture is. The one True God of the whole bible doesn’t make peace treaties with sin and death; He crucifies it and replaces it with righteousness and life. On the cross Jesus Christ became that thing in your heart that you are so afraid of. He became that sin. He already took the blame for it. He already paid the price for it. Whatever it is, it is not too big for the blood of Christ to handle. Let go of it. Let the blood do what the blood is supposed to do and that is set you free from the bondage of sin and death. Quit trying to micromanage your sin and let the god you serve be the God of Scripture. If the God you serve isn’t big enough to save you from your life, he isn’t big enough to save you at all. Let your God be the all powerful, almighty God of scripture. Repent of your idolatry and ask God to give you the power of godliness that is supposed to be attached to the form.
May God give us the grace to experience real good news in the church once again.
Let’s pray. Most Holy Father, have mercy on your church. Bring us to our knees. Pour out the good news, the fullness of the good news upon our lives before the rottenness that is in our hollow words kills us. In the powerful and authoritative name of our King and savior Jesus the Christ we ask these things, So be it.
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