6:9 – 10 and Galatians 5:19 – 21 actually describe true believers, but they are Chris tians who will forfeit
The Gospel According to Jesus
revel in the sins of the flesh and spurn the way of holiness. By separating faith from faithfulness,2 it teaches that intellectual assent is as valid as wholehearted obedience to the truth.
Thus the good news of Christ has given way to the bad news of an insidious easy-believism that makes no moral demands on the lives of sinners. It is not the same message Jesus proclaimed.
This new gospel has spawned a generation of professing Chris tians whose behavior is indistinguishable from the rebellion of the unregenerate. Statistics reveal that 1.6 billion people worldwide are considered Chris tians. A well-publicized opinion poll indicated nearly a third of all Americans claim to be born again.3 Those figures surely represent millions who are tragically deceived. Theirs is a damning false assurance.
The church's witness to the world has been sacrificed on the altar of cheap grace. Shocking forms of open immorality have become commonplace among professing Chris tians. And why not? The promise of eternal life without surrender to divine authority feeds the wretchedness of the unregenerate heart. Enthusiastic converts to this new gospel believe their behavior has no relationship to their spiritual status — even if they continue wantonly in the grossest kinds of sin and expressions of human depravity.4
It now appears that the church of our generation will be remembered chiefly for a series of hideous scandals that have uncovered the rankest exhibitions of depravity in the lives of some highly visible media evangelists. Most troubling of all is the painful reality that most Chris tians continue to view these people as insiders, not as wolves and false shepherds who have crept in among the flock (cf. Matt. 7:15). Why should we assume that people who live in an unbroken pattern of adultery, fornication, homosexuality, deceit, and every conceivable kind of flagrant excess are truly born again?
Yet that is exactly the assumption Chris tians of this age have been taught to make. They have been told that the only criterion for salvation is knowing and believing some basic facts about Christ. They hear from the beginning that obedience is optional. It follows logically, then, that someone's one-time profession of faith is more valid than the evidence of that person's ongoing lifestyle
2. Chafer, Systematic Th eology, 3:385. 3. George Gallup Jr., and David Poling, Th e Search for America's Faith (Nashville: Abingdon, 1980), 92. 4. According to at least one writer, Paul's lists of gross sinners and their vices in 1 Co rin thi ans 6:9 – 10 and Galatians 5:19 – 21 actually describe true believers, but they are Chris tians who will forfeit the reward of "inheriting" the kingdom of God because of their sin. Zane C. Hodges, Th e Gospel Under Siege (Dallas: Redención Viva, 1981), 114 – 15.