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February, 2021 (Vol.55-No.2) |
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Preached by Dr. Gene Scott on March 29, 1987 For it is God which worketh in you both to will and to do of his good pleasure. Philippians 2:13 THE APOSTLE PAUL HAD TO CONTEND WITH LEGALISTS in his day. He called them “perverts” because they preached “another gospel,” which is not the gospel. The gospel is the good news! They preach bad news: they want us to believe that God will not accept us unless we are perfect. I am not ashamed of the gospel, but I am ashamed of those perverts. Paul opened his letter to the Galatians with the words, “Grace be to you and peace . . .” The Greek word translated “grace” is charis, spelled using English letters. “Grace” means “unmerited favor.” God’s grace is unmerited, but the perverts preach a “gospel” based on merit. These same preachers, in order to reaffirm their sense of superiority, actually lay down two different standards: they condemn us for being sinners, while they themselves pretend to be sinless. They think, “There’s a higher standard for us leaders than for the rest of you! You can be a Christian and still sin, but we perfect ones cannot.” What they are really saying is, “We may have needed grace at one time in our lives; however, we don’t need it anymore. For if we were to admit that we needed grace, that would lower us to the same level as the rest of you!” I did my doctoral dissertation on the theology of Reinhold Niebuhr. Not long ago, Time magazine featured an article on Niebuhr and said that both the “religious right” and the “religious left” would do well to listen to him. Niebuhr pointed out that sin, in essence, is the centering of one’s self on anything that falls short of God and His will. Niebuhr used the word “self” to describe the aspect of our nature that occupies both time and eternity. Man is unique in his ability to use his mind to float back through memory and to travel ahead in vision, while still being anchored to a fleshly crock of clay. The “self” is the part of us that our faith declares is destined to live with God throughout eternity and find its fulfillment in God and His purposes. The sensual sins are the easiest to recognize and deal with, because anyone can see that we were created to be something higher than a slave of some sensual impulse in this decaying crock of clay. And yet, as Niebuhr pointed out, the church has spent 2,000 years condemning people for the simplest of sins to deal with. The next level of sin occurs when man worships something a little larger than the self, such as the family, the church, the city, or the nation. Nazi Germany personified this sin at its worst. Man deifies something that is lower than God. In other words, man pulls God down from His throne and identifies Him with that little center of worship. It is not always easy to rationalize worshipping yourself, but you can easily identify with a higher cause or entity and make that into your god. Then you can rationalize sinning against everyone else in the name of that perverted, subordinated center of worship. This sin is harder to free people from, because they have trapped themselves in their own rationalizations. Niebuhr pointed out, quite rightly, that the sin of all sins is spiritual pride. When someone is suffering from spiritual pride, they identify their own performance as God’s performance. It is the one sin that God cannot crack. God, in His book, puts this sin at the top of the list. Sins of the flesh are relatively easy to be delivered from, but the church has inverted the relative terribleness of sin. Most fundamentalist preachers don’t even associate spiritual pride with sin, because they are so spiritually proud. A self-righteous preacher loves to condemn everyone else for their sensual shortcomings. If you wish to see proof of this, all you have to do is listen to the news and watch those pompous preachers when one of their own kind is caught in some transgression. They wield their sword of perfectionism like the Pharisees of Jesus’ day or like a new Inquisition. They elevate their view of the Mosaic Law, and instead of putting people into the stocks in the public square of a Puritan New England city, they publicly excoriate the poor sinner on television. The world is in the grip of its own self-rationalizations. As Niebuhr pointed out, we cannot persist in any kind of behavior without convincing ourselves that it is right. There is no such thing as a universal definition of sin, but there is a universal sense of “ought.” Everyone has the desire to be better or to be right. Even a crook wants to be a good crook. So the world that seeks its own way must ultimately rationalize its behavior. And one of the easiest ways to rationalize our behavior is to say, “It must be okay, because everyone else does the same thing.” Jesus said, “If ye were of the world, the world would love his own.” The Greek word translated “world” is kosmos, which means the world’s frame of reference or its worldview. Jesus was not talking about the world in the sense of geography, trees, dirt, and sky. He was saying that if you viewed things the way the world views them, then the world would love you; “but because ye are not of the world,” Jesus said, “but I have chosen you out of the world, therefore the world hateth you.” Jesus is not looking for man-pleasers who only perform to please a bunch of self-righteous fools who say that their way is the only way to get to heaven. Each person ought to have the right to follow Christ and work things out with Him. And if you gain enmity from the world, it is because you have done what you have done to please God, and not to please man. Whenever one of those hypocritical preachers of condemnation gets caught in some kind of transgression, the world loves the opportunity to throw stones back at him, and I don’t blame them. For too long, those preachers have been looking down on the world while trying to save the world. They have been telling all of us sinners that God will not accept us unless we matriculate through their program according to their pea-brained view. I am neither condemning the world’s reaction nor defending the self-righteous preachers. There is a real Christian message, and it is not the perverted message of “Thou shalt not!” I am ashamed of all that garbage that is peddled in the name of Christianity. So with that introduction, I am continuing on the subject of Basic Christianity and teaching from Paul’s letter to the Romans. Paul said in Romans 1:16, “I am not ashamed of the good news of Christ.” The word translated “Christ” is the Greek word for “Messiah,” which also means “Deliverer.” Paul was saying, “I am not ashamed of the good news of the “Deliverer.” The perverts don’t teach us our need of Christ; they want to be the ones who deliver us. But the good news is that there is a Deliverer. Paul was not ashamed of the good news, “for it,” that is, the good news itself, “is the power of God unto salvation.” I have repeated in this series that the Greek word translated “power” is dunamis, from which we get our English word “dynamite.” The gospel is the dynamite of God unto salvation! God proved throughout the Old Testament that He could threaten us with the law and save no one. You cannot save people with a whip. I am not ashamed of the good news of the Deliverer, for it is the power that saves. The self-righteous preachers don’t really believe it. It seems I am one of the few preachers who truly believe in the born-again experience. The born-again experience simply means that God gives us a deposit of His life that has the power to change us. Paul said, “If there be no Resurrection, then our faith is vain.” I lost my faith while I was in college because I could not believe in the Resurrection. I spent more than three years studying the evidence until I ultimately became convinced that there was no other explanation: Jesus really did come out of that tomb. And if I could believe that He came out of that tomb, passed through the rock that sealed it shut, passed through a locked door, appeared to His disciples, and ascended into heaven, then I might be considered crazy by my academic peers. But if I could believe it, then I could believe the rest of the message. The Bible says that this same power that raised up Christ from the dead shall also dwell in you. God can put His life into you. When man tries to displace atomic particles that he cannot see, he can cause a nuclear explosion. But moving atoms around is easy for God: the Bible says that Christ, as God’s agent, spoke and everything was formed. Once I could cross that mental hurdle and believe that a God exists who raised up Christ from the dead, then I would have no difficulty crossing the next hurdle and believe that God could place a living, invisible substance into us that can change us. When God’s Spirit comes in, Galatians 5 says that warfare is engaged. New life has come into us, but our old nature is still there, and these two are contrary to one another. If you handle radioactive material long enough, it will change your very cell structure, though you cannot see what causes that to happen. By analogy, in the born-again experience, God places a substance of His life in you, and if it stays, it will change your nature. I have never asked anyone in my congregation to change. Yet I have warned you that if you start doing things God’s way and have faith in His promises, He will put His nature in you, and you will change. When I say that you will change, I don’t mean you will change the way some preacher says you have to change. You and God will work things out. But changes will start to occur in your life. As Paul says in Philippians 2:13, “For it is God which worketh in you both to will and to do of his good pleasure.” Every other method to change man, save man, and put man in right standing with God had failed. All the law could do was condemn man, whether we are speaking of God’s law given to Moses on Mount Sinai or the law conceived in the minds of modern fundamentalists. Like a mirror or a schoolmaster, the law could only tell you, “You have fallen short.” The law could not bend down to redeem you without compromising itself. That is the message of Romans 7. The modern legalists are also incapable of bending down to redeem us without compromising themselves. I heard a newscaster interview a television preacher and ask him, “Have you ever committed a moral sin?” And this preacher actually replied, “No, I have not,” though he didn’t sound very convincing. Jesus would have said to him, as He said to the Pharisees, “Ye have heard that it was said by them of old time, Thou shalt not commit adultery: but I say unto you, That whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart.” Legalism puts preachers into a position where they imagine themselves to be above you, and they are not able to help you without bending. That is all the law could ever do. Paul was ashamed of the law as a saving instrument, because it is ineffective: there is no life or power in it. But Paul said, “I am not ashamed of the good news of the Deliverer: for it,” that good news itself, “is the power of God unto salvation.” The Greek word translated “salvation” is soterian. It is one of the hardest Greek words to translate. It embraces health, it embraces knowledge, it embraces completion, it embraces destiny. If I were to attempt to define this word in one sentence, I would say that if God had a purpose in man’s creation, then salvation is the fulfillment of that purpose in its entirety. Paul said he was not ashamed of the good news of the Deliverer, for that good news is the dynamite of God unto soterian. The gospel will get the job done! Now Paul said that this gospel is the power of God unto salvation “to every one” who does a certain thing. But “every one” who does what? Everyone who has never had an affair? Everyone who doesn’t smoke a cigar or use words like “damn” and “hell?” No, the Bible is very clear: the gospel is the power of God to “every one that believeth.” The Greek word translated “believeth” is a form of pisteuo, which is an action word. That is why I say that the gospel is the power of God to everyone who faitheth, that is, to everyone who acts on the promises of God. What does this word “faith” embrace? Faith is Action, based upon Belief, and sustained by Confidence. Those are the ABCs of faith. It is not enough to merely “believe.” If you want to know what God wants from you, ask yourself a simple question. If you are a parent, what do you want from your children? Do you want perfection, or do you want trust? If you get trust, you can lead them toward perfection, though it would probably be an inadequate concept of it. What does God want from us? Trust! Why is this “good news?” Because the law of God cannot save anyone. All it can do is measure us, show that we fall short, and condemn us. I don’t ever, as a preacher, want you to use my life as your example. If anything, be amazed that God can even save someone like me! We cannot be perfect, and may God rebuke every voice that tells us we have to be. But we can take a promise of God, such as “I am the LORD that healeth thee,” and trust God to keep His word. Someone might say, “I have been trusting for years that God would heal me, yet I am still in this wheelchair.” God is sovereign. I have had enough of so-called healing evangelists who make people in wheelchairs feel like “second-class” Christians if they don’t get healed instantly. You can still claim God’s promises of healing every day, while sitting in a wheelchair. Every morning you can say, “One of God’s names is ‘I am the LORD that healeth thee,’ so today could be the day!” You might finish the day still in the wheelchair, but you can start and finish the day with trust. If you die in that wheelchair with faith on your lips, you will wake up in the land where there are no wheelchairs. Though you may or may not see the results horizontally, you must keep the vertical faith-connection. Keep your trusting grip on God’s promise and say, “Today’s wheelchair is not the last chapter of my life. God has promised that it is His nature to heal, and that promise is forever settled in heaven.” That grip of faith causes the implant of His nature to come into you, which is the power of God unto salvation. The act of faith is something that anyone can do. You might say, “But I’m going bankrupt tomorrow.” Put God first, and trust His promises of provision. God’s word says, “I am the LORD that provides.” No matter how dark your circumstances may be, there is a promise that fits your need. When you need strength for the day, God’s promise is “As thy days, so shall thy strength be.” When you have anxieties about the future, you have the promise that the God who gets to the corner before you get there is your refuge. In failure, the promise is “underneath are the everlasting arms.” The self-righteous preachers would pull away their arms and let us drop. There is a difference between the kind of preacher that condemns us with God’s laws, “Thou shalt do this and thou shalt not do that,” and the preacher of God’s promises such as “the LORD is my Shepherd.” Even a child can understand the difference between a promise of God’s goodness and a command for perfection. Paul finally had enough of the legalists. He wrote to the church at Rome, the center of the world in his day, and proclaimed, “I am not ashamed of the good news of Christ: for it is the dynamite of God unto soterian.” Thank God I can have God’s life in me by simply trusting Him. Christ willingly went to the cross and died trusting God’s promise to raise Him from the dead and give Him a name which is above every name, and to give Him a kingdom that He could share. His faith linked to my faith allows me to come to Him, because God has said that “whosoever will” may come. The power of God is available to everyone who faitheth. Paul says concerning the gospel of Christ, “therein is the righteousness of God revealed from faith to faith.” From Christ’s faith to my faith, like links in a chain, the gospel reveals a righteousness of God that bypasses the legalists. I don’t have to undergo the scrutiny of some self-righteous television evangelist. There is the good news! There is a way into God’s righteousness that is His gift of unmerited favor. He puts His life in me; but it is a paradox. Jesus said you live by dying, you go up by going down, you become first by being last, and you become righteous by not trying to be righteous. What has killed the church is Christians trying to be Christians. And what has also killed the church is Christians letting non-Christians tell them what they must do to be Christians. All God says is, “If you trust Me, if you go this way of faithing, I will surprise you with My life.” Get busy faithing and you will start to encounter people who say, “What has happened to you? You are different!” There are many people in my congregation who never expected that they would change, but they started to change by simply faithing. I have never told anyone in my congregation that they had to stop smoking, stop dancing, or stop living. I have simply said, “Trust God’s promises, and stop letting the legalists beat you to death with their message of condemnation.” I am not ashamed of the good news of the Deliverer, for it is the dynamite of God unto salvation to every one that faitheth. “For therein is the righteousness of God revealed from faith to faith: as it is written, The just shall live by faith.” My message has not changed: the good news of the gospel remains. Hope is alive and faith presses on. Thank God that He gave us the good sense to trust Him, which moves us under the covering of Christ and sets us free from bondage! Reprinted with permission from Pastor Melissa Scott | December, 2021 Wingspread | November, 2021 Wingspread | October, 2021 Wingspread | September, 2021 Wingspread | August, 2021 Wingspread | July, 2021 Wingspread | June, 2021 Wingspread | May, 2021 Wingspread | April, 2021 Wingspread | March, 2021 Wingspread | February, 2021 Wingspread | January, 2021 Wingspread | | Year 2019 Wingspreads | August, 2016 Wingspread | 2016 Wingspreads | 2014 Wingspreads | 2013 Wingspreads | 2012 Wingspreads | 2011 Wingspreads | 2010 Wingspreads | 2009 Wingspreads | 2008 Wingspreads | 2007 Wingspreads | 2006 Wingspreads | 2005 Wingspreads | 2004 Wingspreads | 2003 Wingspreads | 2002 Wingspreads | 2001 Wingspreads | August, 2001 Wingspread | November, 2001 Wingspread | December, 2001 Wingspread | 2000 Wingspreads | 1999 Wingspreads | 2015 Wingspreads | Year 2017 Wingspreads | 2018 Wingspreads | Year 2020 Wingspreads | Year 2021 Wingspreads | Year 2022 Wingspreads | Year 2023 Wingspreads | | Return Home | Current Wingspread | Wingspread Archives | Contact Us | |
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