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.
Introduction
in determining whether to embrace him or her as a true believer. The character of the visible church reveals the detestable consequence of this theology.
As a pastor I regularly rebaptize people who once "made a decision," were baptized, yet experienced no change. They come later to true conversion and seek baptism again as an expression of genuine salvation. We hear such testimonies nearly every week from the baptistery of Grace Community Church.
What is needed is a complete reexamination of the gospel. We must go back to the basis for all New Testament teaching about salvation — the gospel proclaimed by Jesus. I think you will be surprised to find how radically different the message of Christ is from what you might have learned in a personal evangelism seminar.
My purpose in writing this book is to deal with the biblical accounts of Jesus' major evangelistic encounters and His teaching on the way of salvation. We will explore a series of questions: Who is Jesus? How is He to be identified in the gospel proclamation and received by sinners? What is saving faith? What occurs in the saving act? Those are basic questions, affecting all we affirm and proclaim as believers in Christ; they are not theological trivia. After all, the message we proclaim has eternal consequences. We dare not preach a message that sows confusion or false hope.
Galatians 1:6 – 9 is a curse on anyone who distorts the gospel of Christ:
I am amazed that you are so quickly deserting Him who called you by the grace of Christ, for a diff erent gospel; which is really not another; only there are some who are disturbing you, and want to distort the gospel of Christ. But even though we, or an angel from heaven, should preach to you a gospel contrary to that which we have preached to you, let him be accursed. As we have said before, so I say again now, if any man is preaching to you a gospel contrary to that which you received, let him be accursed.
That is a sober warning of eternal damnation to those who would tamper with the message of salvation and corrupt it to make "a different gospel." Paul applied it to the Judaizers, who had exchanged a system of works for the gospel of grace. His warning underscores the importance of getting the gospel right. The difference between the gospel of Christ and "another gospel" is the difference between the blessed and the cursed, the sheep and the goats, the saved and the lost, the true church and cults, the truth and a lie.
Am I suggesting that the popular gospel of our day is so seriously adulterated that it has become "another gospel," a message so corrupt that its purveyors doom themselves to perdition? No. I have not written this book to label anyone a heretic. But I do believe that the danger of "another gospel" is a very real threat. As the message is further weakened and cheapened, the church