Don't get me wrong. I believe that God delights in answering the prayers of his people. But I believe the prayers we need to pray, and the ones he grants, are the prayers where we ask his help to know and do his will.
I believe in a God who offers grace to all who come to him, regardless of what we have done. But that isn't a call to celebrate in sin and remain who we were before we were saved.
I am troubled by a faith that preaches that Jesus is "Love" but ignores the presence of sin. It is this sin that caused him to come and demonstrate his love by being crucified in my place.
I've been going to church my whole life. I have heard hundreds if not thousands of sermons over the years about Jesus and his love for us. But I can probably count on one hand the number of sermons I have heard about sin in the last several years. I have heard thousands of sermons on grace, but I can't remember the last time one of those called me to repent.
I am troubled because all of these sermons about love and grace yet devoid of sin and repentance offer a watered down version of Jesus. I am troubled because in a world riddled with people who need to know God we are offering less than half of the Gospel, and we are losing souls who might otherwise be saved.
You see, I believe in a God who created us and loves us. But he doesn't love us the Barney the Purple Dinosaur, "I love you, you love me," kind of way. I believe in a God, who like a parent who is concerned for the future of a child, loves us enough to put down boundaries and rules for our good and disciplines us to protect us. Anyone can give a child whatever they want just to shut them up. That's not love. A true parent teaches and trains. A true parent says no and isn't afraid to spank when it's called for, but then wipes away the tears and offers a hug. And so it is with God and us.
I believe in a God who told us that the wages of sin is death. This isn't a punishment, but a warning. He is grieved by sin.
I believe in a God that was so grieved by sin and the death that sin brings that he came to us and faced it head on. He was tempted by it, he suffered because of it. He was crucified and bore the penalty and death that sin brings so that we wouldn't have to. And then he was raised from death and declared his victory over sin and the death that it brings.
He is the God who calls us to believe in him. But believing isn't passive. Believing in Jesus is first and foremost a call to look in the mirror at the ugly truth, that I am a sinner. That even my good works are but filthy rags because they are tainted by my sinful nature. Believing in Jesus is a call to look at my life and repent.
Neither am I saying that I am all of a sudden a new person who is righteous on my own. I'm not. I'm the same sinner that I was. But now I can stand before God, knowing who I truly am, and fall on my face before him and ask for his grace and mercy. I understand that sin matters. That what I do in this world matters and I need God's grace and mercy and love to pay the debt that I owe because of my sin.
That's why Christianity in America today bothers me. Ignoring the specter of sin makes God's grace cheap and worthless. It doesn't transform us the way a costly grace does.
I said before that the call to believe isn't passive. The call to believe is simultaneously a call to follow Jesus. Jesus was a rabbi, when he called his disciples to "Come Follow Me" he was telling them to come, do what I do, and learn to be what I am.
I know that I'm tainted by sin. I know I can't be like Jesus. But with the grace of God I will never stop trying to follow. That too is a call to repent.
It's time we stop trying to reduce the Gospel to the complexity of a bumper sticker or a slogan. It's time we stop watering down the Gospel. It's time we start looking at the whole Gospel.
My prayer today is that we will each of us remember the reason Jesus came to us and the cost he paid for our sin.
John 3:16-21 NIV
[16] For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. [17] For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him. [18] Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe stands condemned already because they have not believed in the name of God's one and only Son. [19] This is the verdict: Light has come into the world, but people loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil. [20] Everyone who does evil hates the light, and will not come into the light for fear that their deeds will be exposed. [21] 21 But whoever lives by the truth comes into the light, so that it may be seen plainly that what they have done has been done in the sight of God. …
