Do the Word

The gospel is the announcement of the rule and reign of Christ in three equally important and essential acts:

Christ has died.
Christ is risen.
Christ will come again.

Modern gospel formulations typically stress the first act and either go soft or quiet or queasy on the latter two. They either fail to mention those two acts altogether (i.e., “Christ died for your sins, and if you believe that, your afterlife will go down much more smoothly”) or  they subvert them to the first act (i.e., “Christ died for your sins; his resurrection proves it; and he’s gonna come back and be jolly decent to you if you believe it”).

But the latter two proclamations are far more than just struts and supports for the first. They are essential elements of the good news in their own right. When we fail to give them equal emphasis to the first in our evangelism, we end up with misshapen Christians living out a misshapen Christianity.

• “Christ is risen” reminds us that all power in heaven and on earth has been given to him. We can be set free from the sins that entangle us, not just forgiven for our entanglement. And we can move and act boldly without fear of those who can harm the body. It is this present earth, not only a future heaven, that Christ holds in his hands.
• “Christ will come again” reminds us that the remainder of our lives is to be devoted to preparing for his return. His return influences whether we marry, what job we do, how we do it, the kind of holy lives we live, and the content of the conversations we have. The wellspring of action for the Christian is not “I’m forgiven” but rather “Behold! He is coming soon!”
• Leave out or subvert the proclamation of Christ’s present reign and you get forgiven but woefully anemic Christians who continue to submit their bodies to sin even as they assure themselves that this is simply proof of God’s amazing grace that we need do nothing to earn our salvation.
• Leave out or subvert the proclamation of Christ’s return and you get Christians whose earthly hopes, dreams, goals and visions are virtually indistinguishable from their non-Christian counterparts. Worse, you get Christians who are ill-prepared for the acceleration of persecution that the Scriptures warn will attend the coming of the end of the present age.

That is why Paul insists in 1 Corinthians 15:3-4 that the gospel is always to be proclaimed “according to the Scriptures.” Absent a robust, tripartite proclamation that puts equal emphasis on each 1/3rd of the gospel–“Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again”–we leave even those who receive our truncated message trapped until death as forgiven sinners in an endless evil age.

In a guest column for the Christian Post cleverly titled Cheap Law,  Tullian Tchividjian warns:

In Matthew 5, Jesus shows unambiguously that the greatest obstacle to getting the gospel is not “cheap grace” but “cheap law” – the idea that God accepts anything less than the perfect righteousness of Jesus…

But, there are some who seek to escape their need for grace and deceive us by lowering the cost of God’s righteousness. They preach a cheap law that sells indulgences to those who pay with the appearance of sanctification.

Problem is, Tchividjian’s stern rebuke ultimately convicts a null set. His concern is for those who, having received salvation solely as the gift of God, are tempted to “trust in some personal display of good fruit to save [their] seat.” He refers to such individuals as “self-sanctifying little sovereigns” who “let the flesh pervert sanctification into the process of needing grace less and less.”

Here, though, a study of the Scriptures indicates that Tchividjian’s concern is misplaced. When Paul, for example, castigates the Galatians for “turning back to those weak and miserable forces” (Galatians 4:9), he portrays this not as a sanctification problem but rather as a justification problem, i.e., they didn’t embrace the gospel of grace in the first place, or they betrayed and abandoned the gospel because they failed to understand it. Witness his passionate exclamation in Galatians 4:19, “My dear children, for whom I am again in the pains of childbirth until Christ is formed in you…”

Translation: When you see someone misunderstanding and manhandling their sanctification, you actually have a justification problem–a “first principles” issue. The problem isn’t that cheap law has crept in to bespoil sanctification. It’s that (Calvinist version) grace never really supplanted sin in the first place or (Arminian version) somebody’s been backsliding. So it’s back to childbirth we go.

And that’s why Tchividjian ultimately succeeds in binding the straw man, not the strong man. Ask yourself: Have you ever met anyone who really embraced and understood and vibrantly lived the justifying gospel according to the Scriptures who viewed sanctification as a process of divesting himself of the need for grace? Talk to such a person and it will quickly become apparent to you both that he failed to fully grasp or put into practice or preserve what you taught him about salvation, and you’d best be bent over double in childbirth on his behalf until Christ is actually and genuinely formed in him.

But all of this is phrased negatively (which, in my view, is one of the problems with Tchividjian’s post and other posts of this type). Let’s flip it around positively and call it “The Justification/Sanctification Postulate”:

When justification by grace occurs in response to a proclamation of the gospel according to the Scriptures, a healthy and biblical practice of sanctification by grace will flow as a matter of course from a healthy and biblical practice of  justification by grace.

When I was saved in my late teens, I turned to the person who had just led me through the sinner’s prayer and asked, “So what do I do now?” My guide responded (as Tchividjian does here), “Well, that’s the great thing: You don’t need to do anything.”

That response is true, but trivially so. If I had been asking, “What do I need to do now to maintain my salvation?”, the guide’s response would have been brilliant. But that is not what I was asking. I fully understood that I did not now need to earn what ninety seconds earlier I had clearly received as a gift. What I was asking was, “Now that I have given my life to Christ, how then do I live?”

In response to that question, the guide was seriously unhelpful. I wasn’t seeking to “be a replacement for his Beloved Son,” in Tchividjian’s terminology. Instead, I was simply taking seriously the gift of new life I had just received and wanting to live by it.

Want to avoid an errant practice of sanctification? Then avoid imparting an errant or incomplete understanding of justification. That’s the strong man that really does need to be bound: many churches today don’t know how to proclaim the gospel according to the Scriptures. They conflate the gospel with a testimony, a plan of salvation, or a fire insurance policy, or they prize justification over sanctification, viewing one as necessary and the other as optional. They do not know or embrace or place equal emphasis on each elements of the tripartite formula:

Christ has died.
Christ is risen.
Christ will come again.

This month we’ll be talking about proclaiming the gospel according to the Scriptures. In so doing we’ll be removing the bifurcation too often placed between justification and sanctification. That they are distinct theological processes is undeniable. That you can get one right and yet wildly mess up the other is one of the grave errors of our modern church age.

It’s not hard to figure out when you’re searching for something against the Google grain.

When you type “How To Heal Others When You Are Sick,” for example, you get hits like:

• How to Heal the Sick
• How To Send Healing Over A Distance
• Divine Healing – It IS God’s will to heal you! Find out how to receive it!

Google “prayers by the sick” and you’ll end up with dozens of sites focused on prayers for the sick.

Sum it up and say: There is an understandable tendency for us to fold up on ourselves like broken lawn chairs when we are sick. When we are sick, we want to get well. We want others (including God) to help us get well. We have little time to focus on anything else but our illness.

But in this concluding post for this month of focusing on the Work of Mercy of healing and comforting it is important to affirm that Christianity does go against the Google grain: Ours is the religion that claims with Isaiah,

But he was pierced for our transgressions;
he was crushed for our iniquities;
upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace,
and with his wounds we are healed.

So the Savior did his saving through his wounds. And we do not believe that he suffered so that we don’t have to. We believe that when we understand his suffering we will willingly choose to suffer also, in his name, for his sake, taking up our crosses daily. We say with the Apostle Paul that we are

always carrying in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be manifested in our bodies.

This doesn’t mean that we neglect or ignore our own health and illness. Of course not. We’re stewarding his body, after all–it doesn’t belong to us in the first place. But just as care for our own family does not preclude care for others, care for our own body does not preclude healing and praying for others who are sick when we are sick. In fact, the two are far more interconnected than we typically recognize.

So how can we heal others when we are sick? We begin by focusing on praying for the healing of others when we are healthy, employing all of the disciplines of prayer and giving and service in relation to others that we’ve been talking about this month.

Then we continue to keep up those spiritual disciplines and Christ-mirroring focus even when we face small ailments–headaches, colds, sore backs, upset stomachs. These are the minor irritants that tempt us to curl inward at the edges. When we do that in the face of small ailments, of course we’ll fold like lawn chairs in the face of bigger ones.

But faithfulness with a little–in this case, interceding for the healing of others and visiting the sick even when we are sick (though hopefully not contagious!)–is what yields the ability to be faithful in a lot, as we saw in the story of Shery Lim in a blog post earlier this week.

Here again I want to commend you getting a good personal prayer book with prayers that you can grow into as you pray. You will be remarkably uncreative and Sudafed-groggy when you don’t feel well, so having a prayer book to keep your prayers for others bigger than the size of your Alka Seltzer tablets will be a real help. I use several from different traditions, and they tend to be easy to find on amazon.

And one last great resource for you this month: check out this article on Praying Beyond the Sick List. If your prayers for the sick essentially consist of saying “Be with _______,” this article will help you understand what God normally likes to talk about when it comes to illness.