"to impose a need to surrender the life to God as an added condition of salvation is most unreasonable.
Introduction
hat is the gospel? That question fuels the passion that has driven me all the years of my ministry. It is not merely an academic quest. I want to know what God's Word teaches so that I can proclaim it with accuracy and clarity. Above all, I want the doctrine I teach to be purely biblical — growing out of Scripture itself rather than just conforming to some popular system of theology. A particular theologian's view of this or that doctrine is only of incidental interest to me. All that really matters is what God's Word says.
And nothing matters more than what Scripture says about the good news of salvation.
Several years ago I began to study and preach through the gospel of Matthew. As I worked through the life and ministry of our Lord, a clear understanding of the message He proclaimed and the evangelistic method He used crystallized in my thinking. I came to see Jesus' gospel as the foundation upon which all New Testament doctrine stands. Many difficult passages in the Epistles became clearer when I understood them in that light.
This book grew out of seven years of study in the Gospels. As I immersed myself in the gospel Jesus taught, I became acutely aware that most of modern evangelism — both witnessing and preaching — falls far short of presenting the biblical evangel in a balanced and biblical way. The more I examined Jesus' public ministry and His dealings with inquirers, the more apprehensive I became about the methods and content of contemporary evangelism. On a disturbing number of fronts, the message being proclaimed today is not the gospel according to Jesus.
The gospel in vogue today holds forth a false hope to sinners. It promises them that they can have eternal life yet continue to live in rebellion against God. Indeed, it encourages people to claim Jesus as Savior yet defer until later the commitment to obey Him as Lord.1 It promises salvation from hell but not necessarily freedom from iniquity. It offers false security to people who
1. Lewis Sperry Chafer, whose teachings helped generate the popularized gospel of today, held that "to impose a need to surrender the life to God as an added condition of salvation is most unreasonable. God's call to the unsaved is never said to be unto the Lordship of Christ." Systematic Th eology (Dallas: Dallas Seminary, 1948), 3:385. Cf. also Rich Wager, "Th is So-Called 'Lordship Salvation,' " Confi dent Living (July – August 1987), 54 – 55. Wager comes to the astonishing conclusion that it is a perversion of the gospel to invite an unsaved person to receive Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord. To present Christ as Lord to a non-Chris tian is "to add to scriptural teachings concerning salvation," he declares.