Teaching on the practicalities of Christian living is not legalism. It’s every pastor’s responsibility.
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Christians need to know the difference between legalism/moralism and making every effort to be holy (Hebrews 12:14).
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There is a ditch on both sides of the gospel – legalism is the ditch on one side, antinomianism is the ditch on the other.
Sometimes, when you are warning against the ditch on one side, people will think you have fallen into the ditch on the other side. We need to preach the extremes, but we need to preach the extremes in balance – the radical freeness of God’s gracious salvation, and the radical demands of repentance and obedience should be preached in equal measure. You know, just like the inspired authors of Scripture.
We must never tame or dilute the extremes that Scripture gives us. “You are justified freely by his grace” and “repent or perish” are found side by side in Scripture without the least suggestion that there is a contradiction. “Justification by faith” and “faith without works is dead” are both true and both must be proclaimed.
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One of the biggest problems in the church today is preachers who adopt antinomian formulations of the gospel.
Martyn Lloyd-Jones said that if a preacher is never accused of antinomianism, he probably isn’t preaching the gospel. That’s true. But it’s also true that if a preacher is never accused of legalism, he probably isn’t preaching the gospel either. There is a ditch on both sides.
The gospel promises the free forgiveness of sins. The gospel also demands and promises to produce obedience. Forgiveness of sins AND life transformation are gifts of grace.
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Sin = man putting himself in the place of God
Salvation = God putting himself in the place of man
Sin = man claiming prerogatives that belong to God
Salvation = God taking on himself what sinners deserve
Sin is self-deification, man arrogating himself to God’s station. Salvation is God consigning himself to the place of sinners, taking the curse man deserves.
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The gospel is Trinitarian. The gospel includes not only what Jesus did for me outside of me, but also what the Spirit does to me inside of me. The gospel is not just Good Friday and Easter; Pentecost is gospel too. The Father approves of the Son’s work for me and the Spirit’s work in me, and my entire salvation redounds to the glory of the Triune God.
Sin produced a double problem, legal condemnation and moral corruption. The gospel answers both of these, as it brings both justification and transformation. Both justification and transformation come by faith.
We died in Adam, we are made alive in Christ. We are under the power of sin in Adam, we are set free in Christ. We are guilty and depraved in Adam, we are righteous and obedient in Christ. Christ restores all that Adam lost, and much, much more. Where sin abounded, grace super-abounds.
The gospel God promised to Abraham included both the forgiveness is sins (Romans 4:1-12) and the gift of the Holy Spirit (Galatians 3:1-9). As Abraham’s children we have both of these gifts.
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A significant part of pastoral ministry is convincing unbelievers they are totally depraved and Christians they are not.
A faithful pastor will be deeply pessimistic about what man can do on his own, and incredibly optimistic about what the Spirit can do in us. Our anthropological pessimism is matched and exceeded by our pneumatological optimism. Where the flesh is weak, the Spirit is exceedingly strong.
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God has made a multitude of promises to his people. And he has never broken a single one. He is a God of his Word, and he keeps his Word.
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“[T]here is an eschatological (‘already/not yet’) structure to each aspect of soteriology . . . And while it requires carefully guarded statement, it is also true that justification is an already accomplished and perfect reality, but awaits consummation…Similarly, while believers have already been justified with irreversible finality, they will appear before the judgment seat of Christ to receive what is due them (2 Cor. 5:10).”
— Sinclair Ferguson, The Holy Spirit, p. 103.
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The biggest problem in the world today is worldliness in the church.
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Preachers need to preach the extremes. (HT: Rob Rayburn).
When preaching free grace, make it as radically free as you can make it. Make grace amazing, astonishing, marvelous.
When preaching human responsibility and obedience, ratchet it up as much as possible. Hold nothing back.
That’s what the biblical authors do. It’s what the great preachers have done.
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We need less therapeutic preaching and more fire and brimstone.
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The church’s failure to do political discipleship is one of the reasons we are in the mess we are in.
When pastors stopped preaching election day sermons, politics fell into the hands of secularists and progressives.
Historically, the church discipled both civil magistrates and citizens in their political duties, according to the word of God.
Many people want to keep the church out of politics, but to do so is to muzzle the pulpit. For pastors to go along with this is to refuse to preach the whole counsel of God. There is no way to restore America to political sanity without political preaching. Without such preaching from the “black robed regiment,” America would not even exist
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There are orthodox and heretical ways of seeking to express this truth, but there is no getting around the reality that good works are necessary to salvation.
There is no salvation without repentance and obedience.
All true gospel preaching will make this clear.
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Political preaching is a significant part of the Reformed political tradition .
Calvin’s sermons, eg, on Deuteronomy and Samuel, continually touched on political issues.
The Puritans were known to address kings and other magistrates in their sermons.
There would have been no American War for Independence without “the black robed regiment” – preachers who applied the Word of God to the political issues facing the colonies
Election Day sermons had a long running history in British and American Reformed/Protestant churches.
The attempt to keep preachers from making political application from the pulpit has more in common with the novel “radical two kingdom view” than historic Protestant political theology.
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The point of preaching is for the people of God to interface with God through the Word of God.
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We live in an age of therapeutic parenting and therapeutic preaching, an age in which both parents and elders have rejected their own responsibility and authority to discipline those under their care.
Obviously the parental failures are related to the preaching failures. Neither preaching nor parenting is for the faint of heart.
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Political preaching is an ancient and venerable Christian tradition. The magisterial Reformers and Puritans all stood in this Augustinian line, believing the church had a duty to apply God’s Word to the civil realm. The modern tendency to privatize biblical truth so that it only applies to individuals and not to magistrates or society as a whole is one of the evangelical church’s biggest weaknesses.
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I like to say, “Romans 6 is gospel too.”
Lloyd-Jones used to say, “You haven’t preached the gospel unless the antinomian objection of Romans 6:1 is raised.”
My counterpoint is that the antinomian objection means you have not yet finished preaching the gospel.
Paul’s answer to the antinomian objection — namely, that our union with Christ means we have died to sin and now live a new life of righteousness — is not tacked onto the gospel as an addendum; rather, its inherent in the gospel.
A gospel that leaves unchanged, stuck in our sin, is not good news (or not good enough news).
Does the gospel leave us in our sins? Paul would say, “Absolutely not! How can we who have died to our sins live in them any longer?”
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When preaching a comforting passage, pile on the comfort as thick as possible. Wrap people up in gospel blanket.
When preaching repentance, turn the screws and drive the nail. Call on people repent of their particular sins particularly. Attack the sins of the people in the pews in front of you, relentlessly. Sinners can be shown mercy. Sins must not be.
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The gospel shows mercy to sinners, but not to sins.
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The gospel simultaneously forgives our sins and declares war on our sins.
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Calvin on absolution:
“[The forgiveness of sins] is dispensed to us through the ministers and pastors of the church, either by the preaching of the Gospel [including the declaration of absolution] or by the administration of the sacraments; and herein chiefly stands the power of the keys, which the Lord has gifted to the society of believers. Accordingly, let each one of us count it his own duty to seek forgiveness of sins only where the Lord has placed it.”
Again, Calvin:
“When Christ enjoins the Apostles to ‘forgive sins,’ he does not convey to them what is peculiar to himself. It belongs to him to forgive sins. This honor, so far as it belongs peculiarly to himself, he does not surrender to the Apostles, but enjoins them, in his Name, to declare the forgiveness of sins, that through their instrumentality he may reconcile men to God. In short, properly speaking, it is he alone who forgives sins through his apostles and ministers”
One more from Calvin, for good measure:
“•We now see the reason why Christ employs such magnificent terms, to commend and adorn that ministry which he bestows and enjoins on the Apostles [and their successors, pastors]. It is, that believers may be fully convinced, that what they hear concerning the forgiveness of sins is ratified, and may not less highly value the reconciliation which is offered by the voice of men, than if God himself stretched out his hand from heaven. And the church daily receives the most abundant benefit from this doctrine, when it perceives that her pastors are divinely ordained to be sureties for eternal salvation, and that it must not go to a distance to seek the forgiveness of sins, which is committed to their trust.”
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The problem with Tim Keller on LGBTQ is not that he held the wrong beliefs – other than having a massive blind spot regarding Revoice, I don’t doubt he held basically orthodox views on LGBTQ.
The problem is not his beliefs
It’s that he would not preach those beliefs.
Homosexuality has been one of the main battle fronts in the culture for a generation, and Keller simply would not engage the enemy from his pulpit. He did not fight with his greatest weapon in that part of the battlefield where the war rages the fiercest.
In fact, given his status and influence, he basically taught a whole generation of evangelical and Reformed preachers that there is no good way to address homosexuality in public preaching — and so its no wonder many otherwise orthodox preachers will not touch this topic. They are leaving their people vulnerable.
That’s the real problem with Keller’s legacy when it comes to LGBTQ issues.
What we need is preaching that proclaims the truth on these issues in a loving way.
Every sinner saved by grace knows that he should show compassion to other sinners, whatever their sin might be.
There is no room for smug self-righteousness.
But refusing to speak the truth about sin in the most hotly contested areas in the culture is simply not loving. It is cowardice.
We cannot go silent in those very areas where truth is most needed.
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The objection of Romans 6:1 (“Shall we continue in sin that grace may abound?”) is not raised after the gospel has been preached; it is raised in the middle of preaching the gospel. In other words, the antinomian objection is not a sign that you have preached the gospel; rather, it is a sign that you have not yet finished preaching the gospel. Paul’s presentation of the gospel does not end in Romans 5:21; Romans 6 is pure gospel as well. Thus, the gospel is not preached in full if union with Christ in his death to sin and rising to new life are ignored (Rom. 6:2ff). The gospel is not preached in full unless a call for obedience to all of Christ’s commands is issued (Matt. 28:20). The gospel is not preached unless the promised gift of the Spirit, given to enable us to put to death the misdeeds of the body (Rom. 8:13), is included in the offer. The gospel is not preached unless there has been a summons to repent (Acts 17:30).
The pure grace of the gospel is not threatened by a call to obedience. Indeed, the gospel, properly preached, understood, and embraced, demands and promises obedience. In the Scriptures, heralds of the gospel essentially interchange faith and repentance as appropriate responses to the message (cf. Acts 2:38 and 16:34). In other places, Scripture speaks of “the obedience of faith” and calls hearers to “obey the gospel” (Rom. 1:5; 2 Thess. 1:8). In still other texts, faith and obedience (cf. Rom. 10:16) as well unbelief and disobedience (Heb. 3:18-19) are interchangeable. The basic gospel confession is, “Jesus is Lord” (Rom. 9; 1 Cor. 12:3) – which is to say, “He has given himself for me, and I now owe him my allegiance.” In the gospel, we find that God’s righteous requirements are not legalistic impositions, but gracious gifts he promises to work in us (cf. Rom. 8:1-4).
The only kind of faith that justifies is a faith that lives – that is to say, a faith that loves, obeys, repents, calls, and seeks. Thus, faith can be seen (cf. Mark 2:5) and demonstrated (Jas. 2:18); it is embodied and embedded in outward action. True, at the moment of initial justification, faith has not yet done good works. But the kind of faith that lays hold of Christ for justification is a faith that will issue forth in obedience, not because something will be added to that faith a nanosecond after its conception (as if faith had to be “formed” by additional virtues, ala Roman Catholic teaching), but because that faith already carries within itself the seeds of every virtue. The faith God works in us, in order that we might be justified by faith, simultaneously begins the process of transformation by faith. Faith never exists on its own, even at its inception. The kind of faith God gives his elect is a living, working, penitent, persevering faith. It is a faith that is inseparable from repentance and obedience. When faith grasps Christ, it grasps the whole Christ, so that he simultaneously becomes Savior and Lord. Indeed, given that faith is a gift of God, its presence in us is proof that the Spirit has already begun his work of transforming us.
Works, then, are the public manifestation of faith. When Paul describes the life of faith, in union with Christ, he immediately turns to how we re-pattern the use of our bodies (Rom. 6:12-13). Faith redirects and reorients the way we use the body. We put to death the body’s misdeeds and begin to embody future resurrection life even in this present mortal existence (Rom. 8:1-17). While faith is certainly a matter of the heart, and renews the mind (Rom. 12:1-2), it has an inescapable communal, even political/cultural, dimension as well. The person acting in faith offers his body as an instrument of righteousness (Rom. 6:13); he becomes a holistic slave of God, even as he was previously a slave to sin (Rom. 6:19). Faith gives us a new posture, a new way of “leaning” into all of life.
The faith/obedience nexus is a critical aspect of biblical theology. The key thing to note here is that the gospel is bigger than merely the offer/promise of forgiveness; it is also the offer/promise of a changed life. God accepts us as we are, but he doesn’t let us stay that way. The necessity of obedience is not bad news tacked onto an otherwise antinomian gospel message. People need (and should want) transformation and freedom from sin’s enslavement, every bit as much as they want pardon and release from the burden of sin’s guilt. A gospel that did not ultimately aim at and guarantee the complete destruction of sin in our lives and the complete renovation of our humanity would actually be mediocre news at best, not the good news of Jesus Christ. Every demand God makes is also a promised gift in the economy of grace. It is good news to hear that God not only desires to clear us from sin’s penalty, but also re-humanize us so that we can begin to enjoy the kind of life we were designed to live.
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Consider the third membership vow used by many traditional Presbyterian churches. It’s used in the PCA. We use it at my CREC congregation. Note how it’s worded:
“3. Do you now promise, in humble reliance upon the grace of the Holy Spirit, that you will strive to live a life of repentance and obedience, in a manner worthy of the followers of Christ?”
This is very, very basic teaching that any Christian of age should be able to affirm.
It teaches that the whole Christian life is dependent on the Holy Spirit.
Our faith, repentance, and obedience all arise from the Spirit’s work in us.
But note that the Spirit’s work in us does not make us passive.
We must strive.
Yes, we strive in humble reliance.
But we still strive.
We work precisely because the Spirit is at work in us.
The Christian life is a life of striving, fighting, persevering, working.
This is not legalism, it’s grace.
This is not legalism, it’s love.
This is not legalism, it’s the fruit of faith.
Where there is grace, there will be good works.
Where the Spirit is at work in a person’s life, that person is striving to obey and repent – not perfectly, of course, but consistently, as a pattern of life.
This third vow teaches that good works are necessary to salvation.
It also teaches those good works are the fruit of grace in our lives.
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When you are united to Christ by faith, his righteous status is your righteous status, his vindication is your vindication, his life is your life, his story is your story, his future is your future, his security is your security. You are guilt-free and shame-free in Christ. You have a clean past because of his promise of forgiveness and a glorious future because of his promise to come again.
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Effort and grace are not at odds. Grace does not cancel out human responsibility but empowers us to fulfill our covenantal obligations. Jesus doesn’t believe the gospel for you or repent for you; rather he gives you the gifts of faith and repentance through the work of his Spirit. He makes you willing and able to beleive, but you really do the believing.
“By grace you are saved” and “Make every effort to be holy, for without holiness no man will see the Lord” are found in the same Bible and are part of the same soteriological program. If you don’t hold to both, you are wrong, deadly wrong.
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