The term gospel, while it means good news, is in this connection used only of that specific way of salvation which God publishes in His Word by which a meritless sinner may be perfectly and eternally saved on no other terms than that he believe on Christ as his Savior.
The preacher is appointed the demanding task of an accurate presentation of that gospel
On the basis of the fact that God has made His greatest effort—the gift of His Son—that sinners might be saved, it is reasonable to conclude that any inaccuracy in preaching which misrepresents the truth and thus misleads the unsaved will be subject to divine censure. This is precisely the unrevoked warning given in Galatians 1:8, 9. "But though we, or an angel from heaven, preach any other gospel unto you than that which we have preached unto you, let him be accursed. As we said before, so say I now again, if any man preach any other gospel unto you than that ye have received, let him be accursed."
This anathema, which is wholly justified, should cause every preacher to tremble with fear. Over against the notion that any person with zeal— whether they have knowledge or not—can preach the gospel, is the fact that many of the greatest orthodox scholars of the world have given their lives to the task of a right understanding of that which enters fundamentally into the gospel.
Some common errors in gospel preaching are listed here:
A failure to emphasize the difference which obtains between the saved and unsaved. When exhorting the believers to a worthy manner of life and service, there is no statement made that such truths have no application to the unsaved, the result is that the unsaved are encouraged to believe that they need only to adopt the outward manner of life of the Christian to be a Christian. There is but one message to the unsaved and that does not concern his daily life, but rather his relation to Jesus Christ as Savior.
By careless language, giving the unsaved the impression that God is love and rich in mere}' and that He forgives sin directly as an act of kindness, generosity, or leniency.
God does forgive, but it is only on the righteous ground that the required penalty for sin is borne by the Savior. It is for this reason that the sinner must ^come to God by Jesus Christ and that salvation is conditioned on faith in Christ There is no need for Christ to die if God is free to make light of the sinner's sin by a mere attitude ofgraciousness apart from satisfaction because of outraged holiness.
By demanding repentance as a separate act in addition to believing on Christ This destructive error will not be committed by those who have given reasonable study to all that is involved. In the first place, repentance, according to the Bible, is a change of mind, which may, or may not, be accompanied with heart anguish.
In the second place, the repentance required— and it is required—for the salvation of a soul is included in believing. The sinner cannot turn to Christ in confidence from any other dependency without a change of mind which is repentance (cf. 1 Thess. 1:9, 10).
No measurement will ever be made in this world of the harm to souls that has been wrought by their having been told that they must first repent and then believe.
The preacher will do well to ponder three facts: (a) The Gospel by John, which is written that men may believe and be saved (John 20:31), never employs the word repentance; (b) that the Epistle to the Romans, written to provide the complete analysis of salvation by grace, does not use the word repentance, except 2:4, in relation to lost men;and (c) upwards of 115 times the salvation of a soul is made to depend upon believing, and 35 times on its synonym faith, apart from any other requirement whatsoever.
The one who insists that repentance is a separate act must face the question thus created as to whether the words of Christ and Paul which restrict salvation to believing, are misleading because of their inadequacy (cf. John 3:16; Acts 16:31). Since repentance is a part of believing, the term might be used as a synonym of believing, or it may be mentioned separately—as it is in a very few passages; but always as a subdivision of the one all-important theme of believing.
By the grace-shattering error of insisting that a public confession of Christ is required in addition to saving faith Only one passage is involved in this discussion; "That if thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised Him from the dead, thou shalt be saved. For with the heart man believeth unto righteousness; and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation" (Rom 10:9, 10).
A thoughtless use of this passage implies that the confession referred to is a confession to men; not remembering that a very considerable percentage of those who are saved accept Christ at a time and place where no public confession is possible. The confession is that of the soul electing Christ as Savior and is to God alone.
As Abraham said Amen (Gen. 15:6) to the promise of God and was by that faith counted righteous, so, in like manner, from his own heart and as the expression of his own confidence, the sinner acknowledges to God that Christ is his Savior.
A sinner, having accepted Christ, may confess Him as a testimony; but that is far removed from the notion that to be saved one must both believe and confess Christ before men. If this double requirement were really God's will. He could not have left out the idea of confession from any one of the 150 passages which condition salvation on faith alone.
By requiring one to believe and be baptized. Again but one text is in evidence (Mark 16:16), and but half of that, for, when the negative side of the declaration is presented, the word baptize is omitted.
In this consideration, the same arresting fact remains that if water baptism is essential to salvation, every other New Testament declaration is woefully inadequate and to that extent misleading, and the thief on the cross—saved directly by the authority of Christ—was a notable exception.
Certainly, according to human experience, the vast majority of people are saved before they are baptized with water and multitudes have never been thus baptized at all.
There is much, indeed, to commend the contention that the baptism referred to in Mark 16:16 is not water baptism but is the baptism with the Spirit
By requiring that one accept Christ and agree to a certain manner of life. The practice of confusing the gospel with the manner of life a person should live after he is saved, is calculated not only to distract the attention of the unsaved from the gospel, but to defeat the very power and effect of it
It cannot be too strongly urged that God is not calling on the unsaved to adopt a manner of life, but He is offering to them His gift which is eternal life.
Nor should the truth be overlooked that the unsaved have no spiritual capacity by which they can face the problems of a Christian's daily life. Those problems belong to a Spirit-guided mind and demand for their solution the presence of those new desires which come with regeneration.
By demanding that one believe and ask for salvation. Since God is propitious (1 John 2:2), it is wholly out of order to ask Him to save, as though He must be persuaded to do what He, at infinite cost. has prepared to do.
The incident of the publican in the temple (Luke 18:13) is too often assumed to be the norm for the sinner who would be saved under grace. The setting is before the death of Christ and reflects the relationships that existed in the Jewish era.
Though the English version makes the publican to say "God be merciful to me a sinner," he really said. God be propitiated to me the sinner. At no time, either in the Old Testament or the New, may one reach God on the ground of mere mercy as such apart from needful sacrifice. The publican asked for propitiation which was a justifiable request before the cross, but wholly unjustified now.
To ask for mercy as such is to assume that God may deal with sin apart from adequate sacrifice. To ask for propitiation is to discard what Christ has done and to ask that something more effective be provided.
Men are not saved by getting God to do something; they are saved when they dare to believe that God has done something.
2 EMPHASIZING WHAT GOD EMPHASIZES
One of America's greatest Bible expositors of a past generation was often heard to pray the prayer, "Oh God, enable me to preach Thy truth in its right proportions," and the prayer was answered to a marked degree, for he was able to cover the entire range of revelation and to be saved from fads of doctrine on the one hand, and from blank omissions on the other.
This thesis, however, is restricted to phases of the gospel and the right evaluation of them on the part of the preacher. Again the theme is to be limited to but three features of God's work in the salvation of a souL Upwards of thirty-three stupendous divine undertakings constitute the salvation of a soul and all of these make their claims on the gospel preacher.
Three Divine Undertakings
The three divine undertakings to be considered—
(1) the forgiveness of sin,
(2) the gift of eternal life,
(3) imputed righteousness—are of particular importance.
The Forgiveness of Sin
As it relates to the unsaved, this theme is stressed in preaching and in the popular mind out of all proportion to the place it occupies in the Sacred Text
In the great majority of gospel sermons, no more is held before the unsaved than the forgiveness of sin, the larger company of those who are saved think of nothing more than that their sins are forgiven—to them salvation begins and ends with this—and almost every gospel hymn that undertakes to describe that which enters into salvation conceive of nothing beyond the forgiveness of sin.
There is need at this point to be reminded that a Christian is vastly more than a forgiven sinner; that is, to remove sin from a sinner does not result in a Christian. There is also addition, and in this connection two features should be considered.
The Gift of Eternal Life
The Gospel by John was written for a specific purpose: "But these are written that ye might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God; and that believing ye might have life through His name" (John 20:31).
This gospel—one of the two great salvation books of the New Testament—gives but little emphasis comparatively (cf. 1:29) to the doctrine of the forgiveness of sin and but tentative recognition to imputed righteousness; but it does stress eternal life for all who believe on Christ And the preacher who would reflect in his message the emphasis which God places on truth, will be constrained to stress the gift of God which is eternal life and in such a proportion as is marked out by the prominence of John's Gospel in the soteriology [study of salvation] of the New Testament
Imputed Righteousness
The second book of the New Testament which is specifically of salvation is the Epistle to the Romans. In fact, this Epistle, being the divine analysis of the whole plan and scope of the saving grace of God, will indicate to every attentive student that which God constitutes the center of the whole scheme of saving grace.
The purpose of the Epistle to the Romans is set forth inl:16,17, which reads "For I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ for it is the power of God unto salvation to every one that believeth: to the Jew first, and also to the Greek For therein is the righteousness of God revealed." In the phrase "therein is the righteousness of God revealed," the Apostle is not referring to the indisputable fact that God is Himself a righteous Being; he is rather asserting that the glorious truth that God has a righteousness to bestow upon all who believe is disclosed as the central aspect of the gospel of grace.
The entire structure of this foremost salvation book is the development of the theme of imputed righteousness (cf. 3:21-26; 4:1-25; 9:31 to 10:4). There is reference in the Epistle to the gift of eternal life (6:23), but almost no recognition of the forgiveness of sin-By this process of reasoning—that Romans is the central treatise on salvation and that this book declares the glorious truth of imputed righteousness—it can be demonstrated that, so far as the divine emphasis goes, imputed righteousness is the primary theme of the gospel.
Over against this disclosure is the appalling fact that the truth of imputed righteousness is almost never included in gospel preaching and is not only not understood by preacher or hearer, but to all practical purposes, does not exist.
The necessary reality accruing to a memberin the body of Christ is the righteousness which the living Head is. It is impossible to be in Christ and not partake of what He is. All this, too, is made righteously possible by the sweet savor aspect of Christ's death; but these are unknown subjects today even though they stand first in the reckoning of God.
If it be asserted that sinners cannot be expected to enter into so deep a subject as imputed righteousness, it will be observed that of three truths which the Holy Spirit brings to the unregenerate person, according to the words of Christ the second is imputed righteousness (John 16:7-11). All this but enforces the truth that the one who assays to proclaim the gospel to lost men has a great responsibility to study to show himself approved unto God.
3 THE SPIRITS WORK IN EVANGELISM
A basic fact underlying all evangelistic effort is the incapacity of the unsaved to understand the gospel or to make a decision for Christ apart from the enlightening work of the Spirit A theory has prevailed for many generations, which is not only unfounded in the Word of God, but actually contradicts that Word, namely, that God has bestowed on all men a common grace by which they can accept the Savior if they will
Of many conclusive passages which deny this, three may be quoted here: "For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God" (Rom. 3:23); "For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God" (Eph. 2:8); "But if our gospel be hid, it is hid to them that are lost in whom the god of this world hath blinded the minds of them which believe not lest the light of the glorious gospel of Christ who is the image of God, should shine unto them" (2 Cor. 4:3, 4).
No declaration could be more decisive than the last quoted passage, which so clearly states that, because of a Satan-imposed blindness of the mind, those who are lost cannot receive or understand the gospel of Christ This incapacity, it will be observed, is not natural but is an imposition of Satan which human argument or eloquence cannot dispel
It is possible that by the dominating influence of an evangelist, men may be inclined to do outward things with a hope that thereby they may be right with God, but salvation does not depend on outward works; it rather must come as the sinner's own choice impelled by his own vision of his Savior. Such a recognition of Christ as Savior can be generated in the human heart only by the illumination of the Holy Spirit
What a mother, or a pastor, or an evangelist sees in Christ cannot become the actuating motive for the decision of another.
The divine provision for the overcoming of this Satanic blindness is stated in the following Scripture: "And when He is come. He will reprove the world of sin, and of righteousness, and of judgment of sin, because they believe not on Me; of righteousness, because I go to My Father, and ye see Me no more; of judgment because the prince of this world is judged" (John 16:8-11).
The word convict is better rendered enlighten. The result is not a crushing sorrow for sin, as is often supposed—in truth there is but one sin in view, "that they believe not on Me"; it is an illumination respecting three cardinal features of the gospel —sin, righteousness, and judgment The sin, as before said, is one only; the righteousness is imputed righteousness which is altogether available through the invisible Savior; and the judgment is that of sin which is past and perfectly accomplished by Christ, as substitute for the sinner. It is when the unsaved become aware of these things by the illumination of the Spirit that there can be an intelligent decision for Christ, and that vision and that decision will not fade from the heart and mind in all eternity to come.
It is evident that prayer is the most effective way to secure this illumination by the Spirit in the unsaved. And, after all, prayer is the most effectual method of all soul-winning work
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How God Saves Men
Believing Christ DIED, that’s HISTORY.
Believing Christ DIED for YOU SINS and Rose again that’s SALVATION.
Read Romans 1:16, Romans 10:9-10 and 1. Corinthians 15:1-4
Believing Christ DIED, that’s HISTORY.
Believing Christ DIED for YOU SINS and Rose again that’s SALVATION.
Read Romans 1:16, Romans 10:9-10 and 1. Corinthians 15:1-4
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