Editorial – Tough, tender, Gospel

Let’s analyse the first-ever sermon – you know the one delivered on that first Day of Pentecost that added 3000 people to the church in a single day… (Acts 2: 1-41) 

Yes, that’s right, the one that so upset a huge crowd, that the police were NOT called to arrest the preacher for ‘hate speech’ and public offence. Surprising, since he had just accused everyone of complicity in murder and even insisted that their victim – a criminal in the eyes of the state and of their religious leaders – was in fact God’s chosen Messiah whom they had wilfully rejected. Peterboldly explained how the crowd was condemned and their victim vindicated because He had come back from the dead… and the crowd agreed – or at least 3000 of them did!

And then we wonder how to refill today’s empty churches…

We’ve become ‘nicer than Jesus’ – because He talked about Hell and the wrath of God, more than anyone else in the Bible (well, as a Saviour come to rescue, He would, wouldn’t He) and we wouldn’t dream of upsetting anyone… We tell the world (if indeed we tell it anything) about the wonderful grace of God and the grace we speak of is invisible because, like a diamond without its black cloth or stars without their inky sky, God’s unmerited kindness, separated from the twin realities of our sin and His righteous anger, can’t possibly be valued, appreciated or desired. Seven hundred years before Jesus’ birth, the prophet Isaiahhad grasped this principle. He said of God: “When your judgments come upon the earth, the people of the world learn righteousness. But when grace is shown to the wicked, they do not learn righteousness; even in a land of uprightness they go on doing evil and do not regard the majesty of the Lord.” (Isaiah 26:9-10)

The grace that’s generally preached today has transformed the Lion of Judahinto a teddy bear – just cuddle up and ‘feel the lurv…’. Satancurrently wields a merciless sword against the churches in Muslim lands, but in the West he has, for many generations, wielded an equally merciless pillow. While the too-comfortable western church has slept, all kinds of sin and moral filth have become acceptable and normal – and righteousness has become a crime. Godless western society thinks it can clean up its act by a mediadriven binge of accusation because the world – and the worldly ‘church’ – instinctively believes in ‘justification by blame’. In Babylon, you parade your righteousness by excusing in yourself what you condemn in others. It can be very self-convincing – except for that inconvenient truth-teller called ‘conscience’.

What if… Peter had preached ‘God loves you’? What if he had appealed to every sinner’s desire for divine indulgence rather than insisting on the humiliation of repentance? The crowd would have gone home reassured that their sin was ‘no big deal’. They would have felt no need to join the Church because the preacher had just reassured them that God had joined them! No need to be saved by grace when the preacher can save your face! No need for hard thinking when you imagine God is winking! 

God – intelligent, or what?

When the good news of Jesus Christ is presented only as an overture of love
from God, the staggering significance of Jesus’ obedience to the Father is lost on the preacher and the unexpected extravagance of God’s mercy is lost on his hearers. Divine love isolated from human accountability makes a Holy God out to be a doting, indulgently amused Grandfather instead of the Eternal God who is a “consuming fire”, whose mercy triumphs over judgment only through the Cross. The Church needs to rediscover the cost of forgiveness. If God forgave without the Cross, He would be unjust – because sin is such a ’big deal’ that it can’t be paid for with a few good deeds on a sinner’s better days. Do we not see that if God required the substitution of His own spotless Son for the guilty, this Calvary neon sign declares the enormity of human sin? Is it beyond our reasoning that God’s superior intellect would have contrived a softer solution had there been another option?

If we think Peter’s gritty sermon would win no converts today, we reveal our ignorance of the work and power of the Holy Spirit. Peter’s hearers were not ‘cut to the heart’ because he was a skilled and persuasive orator. Jesus had promised: “When the [Holy Spirit] comes, he will convict the world concerning sin and righteousness and judgment” (John 16:8). There are recorded incidents from historic revivals in the UK of people dropping to their knees under conviction of sin and weeping for mercy from God – without ever having heard a preacher! In our materialistic, self-reliant age, when Christians attempt great things for God and expect so little from God, it’s a gracious humiliation to be faced with the impotence of our programmes and preaching and evangelism apart from Holy Spirit power. A church that discounts the supernatural involvement of the Spirit of God in the preaching of the Word of God is functionally atheist. When we take His presence into account, 3000 new believers in one day is a predictable outcome!

Do we imagine that Peter’s crowd would have cried out ‘Brothers, what shall we do?’ if his message had filled them with despair? Their cry reveals both conviction and hope. Had they thought their status before God was beyond repair they would not have sought a remedy. The tough love of the Gospel is also tender with God’s mercy. God’s love is not the message of the Gospel – at least not all of it. But it is the primary motivation of His messengers: “…I am compelled to preach. Woe to me if I do not preach the gospel!(1 Corinthians 9:16) “…Christ’s love compels us…” 2 Corinthians 5:14).

Prophets and apostles often balked at the hard words they were required to speak – but they invariably went through with their hard task… and paid the price. Peter warned his hearers to “save themselves”. He declared that, by reversing their estimate of Jesus and agreeing with God about their sin they could receive forgiveness – from the very God whose Son they had sought to destroy! 

That said, for those who refuse so great a salvation, the clear default of facing God’s approaching wrath is unmistakably implied. Paul made it crystal clear: “the wrath of God is being revealed…”. This was how he summarised the social standards of his day. When he saw the truth being deliberately suppressed at government, societal and personal level and the ancient sins of Sodombecoming the accepted norm for human behaviour, he did not warn that these would bring God’s judgment, he declared that these dehumanising trends were God’s judgment on a rebellious society: “God gave them over to a depraved mind…”. 

The average moral age of a godless society is roughly teenage. When rebels hear God’s “Thou shalt nots” they respond with “you’ve ruined my life” or “whatever!” As any loving parent knows, prohibitions are generally intended as expressions of their protective love. When God says “Don’t”, this equates to ‘I’m the One in favour of life – if you keep using sex as a recreational sport and don’t respect the difference between bodily exits and entrances, your life expectancy will drop dramatically – you’re the one flirting with death’. Lies have terrible power to lock human minds and thereby control human behaviour – just consider the horrific ‘success’ of Nazi lies and how their relentless caricatures of the Jewish race produced millions of accomplices to the Holocaust. In the New Testament Church, homosexual behaviour became personal history for believers (1 Corinthians 6:9-11). Frantic modern lies spin ideas of DNA and heredity which lock people into ‘identity ideology’ so that change is considered impossible and any suggestion of change is condemned as cruel. [Twins are not cloned by their shared DNA, personal choice produces different behavioural outcomes.] 

It’s a matter of historical record, attested millions of times, that Jesus changes the lives of His followers – His power laughs at the locked rooms of our lives. When the Son sets you free, you are free indeed! (John 8:36)

It’s tragic to see today how Paul is branded as the archetypal woman-hater because feminists know that he said “wives submit to your husbands”, but they remain ignorant that he also said, in effect: ‘husbands, be prepared to die for your wives’ (Ephesians 5:25). When the truth is suppressed by quoting God’s isolated statements out of context, millions of ignorant followers are stirred up to support a cause that should be called out on its own ignorance (or deliberate suppression?) of the truth. 

That’s what Peter did on Pentecost morning – he called out the fraudulence of religious leaders and their complicit crowd who had wilfully suppressed the truth about Jesus of Nazareth: “…a man attested to you by God with mighty works and wonders and signs that God did through him in your midst, as you yourselves know – this Jesus, delivered up according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God, you crucified and killed by the hands of lawless men”. (Acts 2:22-23) 

Not so ‘nice’….

Those of us who know that we have been saved and secured for eternity by the selfless sacrifice of Jesus have all known what it is to be ‘called out’ by the Spirit of Truth speaking to our self-deceiving hearts. The shocking discovery that such ‘nice’ people as ourselves were previously God’s enemies until He reconciled us to Himself through the death of His Son (Romans 5:10) – that discovery is not a requirement for the specially hardened rebel. As a race, we are innately resistant to God’s Fatherly embrace – and hostile to His discipline and training. We imagine that independence is our holy grail and we resent every reminder that we are accountable to our Creator. Our hearts, by nature, are twisted away from Him. It’s why He insisted that nothing short of rebirth (a work of the Holy Spirit, impossible for humans to replicate) would fix our godless inclinations (John 3:3).

“Faithful are the wounds of a friend” (Proverbs 27:6). God’s tough Gospel is tender towards us. He wounds our pride to rescue our posterity – and make the glory of His grace visible to a blind world. Preach Him, Church!