Düsseldorf IMC²International Missionary City ChurchSelected Articles

One of the best ways to understand the point of the spear of the gospel is to say the gospel is news, not advice. Advice is counsel that you get to help you get something accomplished. News is a report that something has been accomplished for you. It's already happened in history, and you must respond to it.

Essentially all religions besides Christianity are all advice. Christianity is news, gospel, good news. Every major religion was founded by a prophet, or a sage, or a figure who came and said, here's the way to find God. Only Christianity, of all the world religions, was founded by a man who came and said, I'm God, come to find you.

Not, here's the way to God. I'm God, come to find you. I'm God, come to do what you couldn't do. Every other religion says, here's advice on how to do what you need to do to connect to God. Christianity is the other way around. It comes down and says, I'm God, come to find you.

Another way to put it is that the gospel doesn't come through Jesus Christ. The gospel is Jesus Christ. So that Paul can say, I made it my object to know nothing except Christ and him crucified. For Paul to say that is an exaggeration, of course. But what he's actually saying is: what Jesus has accomplished for us, and our reliance on him — that's the gospel.

A couple of historic accounts have meant a lot to me and helped me understand this. William Holland was one of the friends of John and Charles Wesley, one of those early Methodists. He was converted at about the time the Wesleys were getting converted too. And one of the things they were doing was reading aloud from Martin Luther's commentary on Galatians. And one night William Holland got it. You can read this in Arnold Dallimore's first volume of his life of George Whitefield.

William Holland says Charles Wesley read the preface aloud. And at Luther's words — what, have we then nothing to do? No, nothing; but only accept of him who of God has been made unto us wisdom, and righteousness, and sanctification, and redemption — at that moment there came such a power over him as he could not well describe. His great burden fell off in an instant. His heart was so filled with peace and love that he burst into tears. When he afterwards went into the street, he could scarcely feel the ground he trod upon.

There's an account of a man named Nathan Cole. He was a man who lived in Connecticut in the 1740s, a barely literate farmer, and he heard George Whitefield preach, and he was converted. His account is all in caps, no punctuation, a little bit hard to read. But here's the key spot where he became a Christian.

He doesn't say, I accepted Christ as my Savior — though that's okay to say, it doesn't, I don't think, get the point of the spear. Here's what he said, listening to George Whitefield: my hearing him preach gave me a heart wound. By God's blessing, my old foundation was broken up. And I saw that my righteousness could not save me.

The reason I'm stressing this is because it is extremely easy today for Bible-believing, evangelical Christians to fall into one of two forms of what I would call advice-giving rather than gospel-shaped ministries and lives.

On the one hand, you have what most of us know as legalism. There are churches that have a high view of the Bible, but they are legalistic. And what they do is, either explicitly but usually implicitly, they make everybody in the ministry believe that unless you're incredibly good, unless you follow every one of these rules, including a lot of these extra-biblical rules, unless you live like this, and do this, and believe all these things, you're not really a Christian. They're putting burdens on. They're saying, if you bear these burdens, then God will be pleased with you — which, of course, is losing the gospel.

But there's also, I would say, a kind of liberal evangelical legalism. And it goes like this. It says, we don't want to talk too much about wrath, and blood, and atonement. We would rather talk about the church as a new people of God, a community of love, joy, peace and justice. And to become a Christian, you join the community, you become part of this community, you become part of God's program to renew the world.

And as great as that sounds, it's a new kind of legalism. Why? Because it's putting a burden on you again. You've got to not be bigoted. You've got to be inclusive. You've got to be reaching out. You've got to be loving people.

Charles Wesley did eventually figure out the gospel. He actually didn't understand it when William Holland was getting it; he still wasn't quite sure what was going on, but he eventually got it. And there's that line in that great hymn where he says: my chains fell off, my heart was free.

Now, is that the language of your heart? If you get into either of these kinds of legalism, is that it? In other words, if you say what it means to be a Christian is you have to love people, and you have to care for them, you have to do justice in the world, and you have to renew the world — does a person say, okay, my chains fell off? No. They're saying, okay, that's great, I'm excited, but it's a burden.

The gospel takes burdens off. The burdens of your past, the burdens of your guilt, the burden of your fear of the future, the burdens of parental expectations — all burdens are taken off.

If you feel like you can improve on the propitiation of the wrath of God through the blood of Christ, leading to complete freedom from all guilt — if you can improve on that, whatever that improvement is, I don't think you're going to be singing, my chains fell off, my heart is free. You're not. You're putting burdens on people.

There are plenty of folks who say, the gospel doesn't shape the life; the law shapes the life. That is to say, you have gospel and you have law, and we mustn't confuse them — and that's right. The gospel saves you. You believe in the gospel, and you rest in him, and you're saved. But then, what actually directs the way in which you live should be the law. Now that I'm saved, I turn and say, Lord, how can I please you? And here's the law, and the law tells you how to live.

As far as it goes, that's actually true. The law is still our guide. As a good Reformed Presbyterian, I believe that though I am saved by grace, it doesn't mean that I don't want to please God. And how do I please God? I look at the law. That's how to please God. That's his will.

However, it's actually too neat to say the gospel doesn't shape your life, only the law does. Not only does it not really line up — there are too many biblical texts that talk about the obedience that flows from the gospel — but I want to show you that it actually is pretty impractical, too.

Some years ago, I saw a young woman who clearly wasn't a believer, didn't seem to know anybody else, would come in and run out at the very end of the service. One time I caught her after the service. And she says, I come in, and I'm not sure if I believe what you guys do, but I'm intrigued. So I said, how did you find out about Redeemer?

She worked for a TV network in New York City. She hadn't been with the network very long when she made a really bad mistake, a career-ending kind of mistake. And she thought she'd get the ax, and that would be it. But her boss, who had a lot of credibility with his superiors and everyone else, went in and took the blame for her, and said, I didn't train her, I didn't prep her. If you're going to be mad at somebody, be mad at me. Don't fire her.

Now when he did that, he lost credibility. He lost social capital, no doubt about that. But she kept her job. So she went in to try to thank him, and he says, no, no, don't thank me. And she wasn't satisfied with that. She said, I've had bosses in the past take credit for things that I've done; that happened all the time. I've never had a boss take the blame for something I had done. That's not human nature. Human nature is to take credit for what the people underneath me have done, and if somebody underneath me does something wrong, then you blame them. You took the blame. I've never seen that before.

And of course he still was trying to be modest. But finally she pressed him enough. And he says, okay, I'm going to say this once, and you've made me say it. I just want you to know I'm a Christian. And my whole life is based on a man who took the blame for me. And that actually tends to shape the way in which I do everything in my life. And she said, where do you go to church?

Would you say that that man was just doing what the law of God requires? Could you say that the law of God requires him to take the blame, maybe even get himself closer to losing his own job? It wasn't his fault, it was her fault. Does the law of God require that? I actually think that if you really think about it, yeah, if you go down deep enough into the golden rule — treat others the way you'd want to be treated. But there's a sense in which the law of God would not really require that. It wouldn't be a sin for him not to go in and take the blame.

Galatians 2:14 and that area is a great example of a place where Peter, being raised as a Jewish man, would have considered the Gentiles just unclean to eat with. He becomes a Christian. There are other Gentiles that are Christians. He's a Jew and he's a Christian, and yet he can't overcome the feeling of, yeah, you guys might be Christian, but you're still Gentiles. And he stopped eating with them.

But when Paul confronts him, he doesn't actually say, Peter, you're breaking the no-racism law. He confronts him and says, you're not in line with the truth of the gospel. How can we Jews, who know that we're justified by faith alone and not by anything we do — how can we look at the Gentiles like this? How can we see ourselves as superior to them?

First of all, can you look in the law of God, just the law, and see that the law of God requires that you not be a racist? I think, yes, actually. There are plenty of places where the Bible talks about not treating people on the basis of race, not being prejudiced, not being a respecter of persons. But what the gospel does, with justification — see, racism isn't simply a breaking of the rule. Racism is motivated by something. What's it motivated by? It's motivated by a desire to bolster your own sense of superiority. You're insecure yourself. You need to feel like, I'm right and they're wrong.

And the gospel — especially the gospel that you're saved by grace alone, that you are no better than anybody else, that you're a sinner — there's no more amazingly leveling thing than that. James chapter 1 talks about the rich and the poor: now that you're a Christian, if you're poor, you have to think about your high position; if you're rich, you have to think about your low position. There's something about the gospel that changes class attitudes and changes racial attitudes.

I find it fascinating that in 2 Corinthians 8 and 9, where Paul is trying to get the Corinthians to give lots of money to this offering, he says, I don't want to order you. I don't want this offering to simply be the response to a demand. I'm not telling you you have to give.

Now, he's got a lot of reasons why he could. I don't know where they were on tithing, but I do think you can go to the Bible, to the Old Testament and the New, and say to Christians that you should tithe, you should give ten per cent of your income away, that that's in the law of God. But Paul here isn't going to the law. He actually says it. He says, not only am I not going to the law, I'm not even going to my apostolic authority. I could order you, but I'm not going to order you.

Then what does he do? He says, you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ.

What's he doing? He's bringing the gospel to bear on those people. So when anybody says, the gospel doesn't shape your life, the gospel is just something you believe in, it's the law that shapes your life — what is Paul doing? Paul knows the gospel shapes.

And here's the thing. If you stick with the law, you get to ten per cent of your income, and you say, I'm doing everything God wants me to do. But in light of the gospel, and of what Jesus gave — and he gave everything. He didn't tithe his blood. And for Paul to say Jesus' generosity is the basis for your generosity blows right past that ten per cent. It's got very, very specific ethical, practical consequences, the gospel.

In Ephesians 5, Paul is talking especially to the husbands. He talks to wives, but he talks more to husbands as far as I can tell. In the last couple of years I've been studying the passage pretty closely, and to some degree I feel this: he was talking to people from a pagan background. I don't think Paul was just trying to say to these men, be faithful to your wives. I think they probably knew that. But he was going further, and he was saying, you need to be cherishing them, you need to be loving them, you need to be looking at them and saying, what can I do to help my wife grow and become beautiful, spiritually and every other way?

That is not the pagan understanding of marriage. That's not in the background. Marriage was very often pretty much a business relationship. You married well for your family. And of course, in rank paganism, you had your wife, and then you had your mistress over here. The wife couldn't do that; she's not allowed to. That would be wrong. Men could.

Probably you can get that from the law. But from the gospel, from what Jesus Christ did for us, to say: look at Jesus Christ's spousal love for you. Think of yourself as the bride, him as the husband. Look at how he loved you. Now go and do likewise. Could you get all of that ethical freight, all that ethical power, the practical implications of how I should live with my spouse, just from the law? No.

I believe that the law of God still guides us. I believe I'm still bound to the moral law of God. And yet, it's the motivation. I'll give you one more example — Titus 2.

That's interesting. The grace of God teaches us to say no. The grace. Now, wait a minute, we say. When you tell me that I'm loved and forgiven no matter how I live, that doesn't make me want to say no to ungodliness. That tempts me to say, hey, I'm saved, I'm okay, I can't be condemned. Ungodliness? Maybe a little, here or there, because I'll be forgiven later.

That's not how Paul said it. Paul says, if you understand grace — and he's talking about constant grace. You don't just think of grace in the abstract. You think of grace coming from a crucified Savior.

There are a lot of ways to say no to ungodliness. You can say, no, because I'll look bad. No, because I'll be excluded from the social circles I want to belong to. No, because then God will not give me health, wealth and happiness. No, because I'll hate myself in the morning, and disappoint myself, and I'll have low self-esteem. But do you realize what all those motives are? They're selfish. Every one of them is selfish. No, because it won't pay off for me in some way.

And if you use a selfish motive to try to keep yourself from being ungodly, when ungodliness is selfishness, basically it's a house of cards, and it's going to fall down. If you're trying to keep yourself from this or that temptation just by saying, don't do that, you know you'll be punished, something bad will happen, people will find out about it — instead of saying, Jesus Christ died so I wouldn't do that. For me to do that is like taking Jesus Christ's blood and throwing it back in his face. How can I treat my Savior like that?

Third question: what does the gospel-shaped life look like? Let me give you a kind of macro look. I have been rereading Calvin's Institutes this year. And when you get to the section on the Christian life, I love Calvin's brevity. In spite of how massive the Institutes are, he can be awfully terse, in a great way. And he says, you want to know the Christian life? It's 1 Corinthians 6:19.

You're bought with a price — that's grace. Therefore you're not your own. Which means, toward God and toward everyone around you — that's how Calvin expounds it — you now live a life of deep unselfishness. You don't do things for yourself. You're living for God. You're living for others.

Andrew Delbanco is an academic at Columbia University. He's written some fascinating books of cultural criticism. He's not a believer; he's a secular Jewish man. Some years ago he wrote a book called The Real American Dream: A Meditation on Hope. And he traces the history of American culture through three eras, three chapters: chapter one, God; chapter two, Nation; chapter three, Self.

He says that in the beginning, the people who came to America were largely animated by a Christian understanding of things. So why do we get up in the morning? Why do we work? Why are we building a country? The glory of God. That morphs, and by the early nineteenth century America becomes somewhat secularized, and he puts it this way: the United States gets put into the place of God in the American culture. Democracy is what's going to make the world a better place. We have a manifest destiny to get to the Pacific Ocean. We're the greatest country in the world. And he says that lasts almost up into the middle of the Second World War. Though people believed in God, patriotism and national pride took the place. And then, finally, he says, now people are living for self.

His point, though, is a very powerful one. He says hope has narrowed to the vanishing point of the self alone, so that America's history of hope is now one of diminution. The self-fulfilment narrative has created a cultural crisis. To say that the meaning of life is mere self-fulfilment cannot give a society the resources necessary to create a cohesive, healthy culture. A cultural narrative must give people a basis for values, a reason for sacrifice, for living and dying. The self-fulfilment narrative cannot do that.

So you say, whoa — religion. Religion is the way to do it. Why don't people see we need to get back to religion? Well, here's the other thing that Delbanco hints at. It is true that religion tends to make people less selfish, more charitable, more communal. Jonathan Haidt, a psychologist at the University of Virginia, has written a very important book called The Righteous Mind. And one of the things he points out is research about how secularism — the basic view that there's nothing really to live for other than my own happiness — makes people selfish. He studies the kibbutzim in Israel; there are secular ones and religious ones. And there's a lot of research that shows the secular ones don't last, or they don't do well.

Religion creates unselfishness, because religion comes and says, let's give to the poor, you must help your fellow man or woman, you have to do all this. Religion can make you less selfish than secularism, but it makes you more tribal. That's one of our problems. Religion can create haughtiness. Religion can create the sense of, you're the infidel. Religion can make us feel that the people who don't believe what we believe are sort of subhuman in some way.

But Christianity fulfils you and yet humbles you at the same time. It fulfils you: you have something bigger than yourself to live for. It makes you unselfish. But at the same time, the humility of the gospel, the knowledge that you're saved by grace, levels you, pulls that pride away. And then it turns you outward, looking to others, talking to them about the truth, but doing it in love, and serving.

Smart people know the culture is falling apart. And they also know it's hard to get the genie back in the bottle, because we have no basis for moral values any more. But they don't want to go back to religion, because they know religion creates tribalism. And they don't see the difference between religion and the gospel. And we have to show them the difference.

Now, what does it really mean to live a gospel-shaped life? If you take legalism, and you take relativism, and you take gospel, you'll see that there are at least three different ways to live in every area of life.

Discouragement or depression. When somebody is really cast down — let's assume it's not physiologically based; there are plenty of depressions that have a physiological basis. But assuming they're not, someone gets really discouraged, really despondent, really down. There are three ways to go.

The moralist tends to say, you must be doing something wrong. Repent. Let's find what you're doing wrong and repent. The relativist says, you just don't like yourself, you need to find people, you need to be good to yourself. The moralist focuses just on the behaviour. The relativist focuses directly on the feelings.

Parents. If you come from more traditional cultures, you're never going to be able to overcome your need to live up to what your parents say. I remember some years ago talking to a young woman whose parents wanted her to be a world-class concert violinist. And she tried and tried and never did a very good job. And she was depressed, and she was in an institution. And I remember talking to her doctor, who was a Christian, who said, she would be out of there tomorrow if she could get her parents out of the centre of her life and put Jesus there.

But I must say — as some of you may guess — that was a non-white person, because we white people, we don't care. You can't tell me how to live my life; get out of my face. The fact of the matter is we are afraid of our parents' expectations, and we've said, get away from me.

But honestly, the gospel frees us from making our parents' opinion of us into a kind of pseudo-salvation. It frees us from that, but it also frees us from the anger that individualistic Western people feel because their parents didn't give them what they deserved. They didn't love me like they should. They didn't give me the things they should. They clipped my wings.

Race. Until you get the gospel deep, it's going to be very hard not to feel racially superior. I can't tell you how many times I've done a wedding between, say, a white Westerner and a non-white person. The white people, especially if they're from Europe, especially northern Europe, are right there in the pews. It's a two o'clock wedding; they're there at two, and everybody on their side of the church is there too. And nobody from the Asian, or Hispanic, or African, or Korean side is there. The bride or the groom is not there. And about twenty minutes later, they start filtering in.

And everybody gets what happens. Everybody starts to moralise adiaphora. They moralise cultural differences. So the white people are sitting there saying, these people aren't punctual. No wonder they've got the problems they do in their part of the world. In other words, they're taking a particular approach to time and turning it into a moral thing. And meanwhile the other folks are looking at them and saying, they're so uptight. No wonder they're the oppressors.

And so everybody is taking their cultural difference and turning it into a moral thing, when it's not. Unless the gospel goes in really, really deep, you turn cultural differences into righteousness. On the other hand, you can be a relativist and say, oh, it doesn't really matter, all cultures are wonderful, all cultures are the same. You mean the ones that do child sacrifice? And the gospel pulls you out of your paternalism and gives you a truth by which you can judge cultural differences — some things about a culture are right, some things about it are wrong.

Humour. One of the ways you can tell a person doesn't get the gospel — they're very religious, they really know their Bible, they're big into doctrine, and they don't have a good sense of humour. Some years ago somebody said, the way I can tell a Pharisee is this: they go around looking at people, saying, that's not funny.

There's another kind of humour I would call relativist humour, which is actually very cynical, very skeptical, very bitter, but also sometimes very cutting to people they don't like — which shows that in the end everybody is actually self-righteous, even the so-called open-minded people. They say, oh, I'm open-minded. I hate bigots. I hate self-righteous people, I can't stand them, I feel much superior to them. I wouldn't want my daughter to marry one.

And so the gospel takes that all away, because the gospel makes you able to laugh at yourself. And it's the only kind of humour that's funny. It's the only kind of humour that's healing. And you can laugh at yourself without cutting. There are people who make fun of themselves and you can tell that they're bitter, they're upset, they're kind of into self-loathing. That's not the gospel. The gospel makes you not think too much of yourself or too little of yourself. It just makes you think of yourself less often, because you're full. You're not worried. You're not having to steal self-acceptance from what everybody else says.

Here's the fourth question: how does the gospel change and shape us? Thomas Chalmers has a sermon called "The Expulsive Power of a New Affection." Chalmers, of course, was channelling Jonathan Edwards when he said this.

You want to transform yourself? You want to be shaped differently? You want to become a new kind of person? It's not enough just to work on the will. It's not enough just to beat on yourself and say, I've got to change because I'm going to disappoint people, I'm going to have a problem. The only way you can really change is through worship — not just loving Jesus in the abstract, but giving love and experiencing the love of Christ, seeing him as an ultimate beauty.

Some years ago I learned a tremendous amount from one woman who was living about four blocks away from my church when I was in my late twenties. It was a trailer park, and there were a lot of people in there that the folks in my church didn't want to have anything to do with. But I got to know a woman, probably in her forties. She had been very beautiful as a younger woman. And because of that she had become what they used to call in the old gangster films a gun moll — a girl who drove around North Carolina with criminals as they robbed banks, almost a Bonnie and Clyde kind of person.

One of the problems was that she'd always been pretty when she was younger, and as a result she became essentially addicted to men. She had to have some man loving her, some man taking care of her. At a certain point she became a drug addict. She went to jail. Her life was kind of ruined. And when she ended up in a trailer court in Hopewell, Virginia, on food stamps, she started going to a counsellor, and she also started going to a church. It wasn't my church, but it was a church where she did hear the gospel and started to believe the gospel.

The counsellor she was going to wasn't a Christian, but she rightly identified her idol, her idolatry of men. The counsellor said, you mustn't base your identity in men. You mustn't base your self-worth and your significance in men. And she said, what should I do? And here's what the counsellor said: you need to finish your education and get a job and become a financially independent career woman who's proud of the fact that you're independent. Then let your identity rest in that.

She thought this out. And at one point she told me she said to the counsellor: so you want me to get rid of a female idolatry and adopt a male idolatry. You want me to stop being so fragile by basing my salvation, as it were, on men, so that if a man drops me, my life falls apart. Instead you want me to base my salvation on my career and making money, so that if anything goes wrong with my business, I'll fall apart. Is that it? In other words, you just want me to fall apart over different things. You want me to transfer my fragility to a more politically correct place.

Eventually she figured out a way of taking the gospel and applying it to her life. And she based it on Colossians 3.

And she said she started meditating on this when she would see a guy looking at her. She would feel that old thing rise up, and she says, I stopped myself. I would talk to my heart, and I would say this. I would look at him, and quietly inside I would say: maybe I would love to be married. I'd love to be married to a great guy. Maybe you're a great guy, who knows. But I can tell you one thing. You are not my life. Christ is my life. Men are not my life any more. Christ is my life.