Seven Ways We Can Improve Our Proclamation Of The Gospel, Part VI: Make Sure BOTH Confessions Are Very, Very Specific

Posted on August 26, 2011 by Pastor Foley

Paul says in Romans 10:9-11, “If you confess with your mouth, ‘Jesus is Lord,’ and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. For it is with your heart that you believe and are justified, and it is with your mouth that you confess and are saved” (Rom. 10:9-11).

Notice how specific that confession is. It’s not a confession when someone says, “I believe in God and stuff.” As Polycarp noted shortly before he was martyred, “To confess Christ with the heart is to acknowledge him as he is, as Lord… Confessing requires…articulating in words and sentences to fellow human beings penitent words fitting to the occasion” (Oden, 581).

And note how public that confession is. It’s not a one-time prayer at an evangelism rally. It’s a daily confession before the world. As Paul says in 2 Timothy 2:12, “If we deny him, he also will deny us.” So really, when it comes to confession, the whole sentence could properly be interpreted, “If you confess with your mouth and do not deny that confession…”

But there’s another part of the concept of confession we need to not miss that’s equally important. Confession is used in two ways in the Scripture:  in relation to confessing Christ as Lord, and in relation to confessing sin. And it turns out the two are joined at the hip. As Clement of Rome pointed out, “One who has not confessed sin is hardly prepared to confess Christ” (Oden, 579).

And what the Scripture has in mind is not a general confession like, “Sure, I’m a sinner. After all, we all sin, right? Nobody’s perfect.” That is not a confession of sin. It’s just a vague but true statement. As Oden notes, “To be genuine, confession must be sincere, personal, definite, and unconditional, not ambivalent or blurred or halting…” The Protestant Reformers put it this way in the Westminster Confession: “Men ought not to content themselves with a general repentance” (Westminster Conf., 15) (Oden, 580).

As you evangelize, teach confession as a lifestyle, not an event. It’s not a rusty turnstile that you walk through one time and scratch yourself on the way to becoming a Christian. It’s a way of life—a constant, searching self-examination in the company of other brothers and sisters to make sure we are not deceived by Satan, who is so good at blinding us to our sin.

And did you catch that I said, “In the company of other brothers and sisters?” As we’ll note in our next and final post in this series, we desperately need to reform our proclamation in order to make clear that the outcome of our believing the gospel is not just a personal relationship with God but a whole new life in a whole new family in a whole new creation.

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Seven Ways We Can Improve Our Proclamation Of The Gospel, Part V: Prescribe Repentance When Someone Responds to the Gospel

Posted on August 24, 2011 by Pastor Foley

It’s interesting that in Luke 15:10, Jesus says that it is in the repentance of one sinner that heaven rejoices. He doesn’t say the belief of one sinner prompts rejoicing, not because repentance is more important or necessary than belief, but because as Paul notes in 2 Corinthians 7:10, “Godly sorrow brings repentance that leads to salvation.” Or, to put it differently, properly understood, repentance and belief both appear in seed form in the same seed.

And by repentance we mean something more than feeling sorry for how messed up things are. As Thomas Oden says, “Though the English word repentance carries the nuance of sorrow for what one has done, it does not as adequately imply reformation of character as does the Greek. Hence it is a less powerful term than metanoia [the Greek word for “repentance”], which implies a fundamental behavioral reversal (Matt. 3:8; Acts 26:20; Heb. 6:1,6). Metanoia denotes a sweeping change of mind and heart followed by a behavioral reformation of a sinful life, a sorrowing for sin so as to forsake sin altogether” (Oden, 567). It would be a mistake to ask if repentance is “necessary” for salvation like faith is. It would be better to ask: What in the world would authentic faith look like if it didn’t come accompanied by genuine repentance?

One way of thinking about it is that repentance is how God involves our whole self in the process of new birth. Our spirit is enlivened. Even our bodies get into the act in baptism. And when it comes to repentance, every part of our soul—mind, will, and emotion—will be involved if the repentance is really prompted by the Holy Spirit. Oden puts it this way:

The reversal does not occur without first a change of mind, a revised conception of oneself, utilizing one’s own best moral reasoning to recognize the intolerable cost of sin. But where the reversal touches only the mind but not the heart and will, the despair of sin deepens.

Repentance requires a change of heart, a deep sorrowing for sin, aware that sin, whether personal or social, is in fact sin against God who gives humans freedom (Ps. 51:4). Far more than a mode of analytical reasoning, repentance is a deeply felt remorse and emotively experienced regret over wrongs done voluntarily against others, offending one’s own integrity and dignity and finally offending God.

Repentance requires a change of will, a redirected disposition to seek a new life of forgiveness and grateful responsibility. This reversal is not fully accounted for as an act of knowing or feeling. It is a grace-enabled act of volition, a determination to turn the whole self around (Oden, 568).

That’s why the typical “admit that you’re a sinner” doesn’t get at the fullness of what the Scripture is talking about. Oden calls repentance “a radical act of self-examination reaching into every chamber of the house of willed experience” (Oden, 572). The Holy Spirit is working in your brain, your will, and your emotions—and that typically takes some time. That’s why in the early church they didn’t have a habit of rushing people into the Christian life after a quick prayer, no matter how deep and sincere they seemed. Sin can deceive you for a long time, even when you’ve resolved to follow Christ. That year of preparation and searching self-examination under the guidance of mature Christian brothers and sisters was a crucial part of making it so when, as part of their public baptism, they confessed Christ and renounced sin, they were striking at the root of evil in their lives, not “trimming leaves one at a time” (Oden, 575).

Oh—and speaking of confession, we need to note a very important truth about that in our next post: If we want to reform our proclamation of the gospel, we need to remember that Christians are only ever as strong as their two-pronged confession.

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Seven Ways We Can Improve Our Proclamation Of The Gospel, Part IV: Promote A Belief That Is “According To The Scriptures”

Posted on August 22, 2011 by Pastor Foley

The one phrase that appears twice in Paul’s presentation of the “first things” of the gospel in 1 Corinthians 15:3-8 is “according to the Scriptures.” We might be tempted to say, “Well, the ‘first thing’ is that Jesus died for my sins. We can fill in the blank on the rest of the Scriptures in the discipleship process. Let’s get people saved first.”

It’s interesting just how differently things were done in the Scriptures and by the early church fathers and by the Reformers. J.I. Packer and Gary Parrett have a book called Grounded in the Gospel that does a great job talking about how in the good parts of church history the goal has not been to get people into the church and then teach them, but rather to get people taught and then into the church. So when people would express a desire to follow Christ, they wouldn’t begin with the sinner’s prayer and then a celebration with a free gift available at the back table afterwards to help you grow in Christ. Instead, they would first of all interview each person to make sure they were wanting to follow Christ for the right reason. Then they would train these potential followers by teaching them to believe “all that the prophets had spoken,” to quote what is said of Jesus when he talks to the disciples on the Emmaus Road in Luke 24. Then they would join the church on Easter.

And that was not a weird stage of church history that ended quickly. The Heidelberg Catechism of the Protestant Reformers took the same approach. It says in there, “What, then, must a Christian believe? All that is promised us in the gospel, a summary of which is taught us in the articles of the Apostles’ Creed” (Oden, 222). Because they took the long view of salvation rather than seeing it as a singular event, they didn’t ask, “Well, what is the one thing a person has to believe to be saved?” They asked, “What does a Christian have to know in order to believe ‘according to the Scriptures’?”

And instead of asking people to close their eyes and raise their hands or come forward or pray the sinner’s prayer after me, they required new Christians—who were baptized on Easter—to share the Apostles’ Creed or the Nicene Creed from memory. They understood that the Apostles’ Creed or the Nicene Creed or the ceremony of baptism didn’t save anybody any more than the sinner’s prayer saves anybody. That’s not why they had people learn the Creed or be baptized. People did these things because they had been taught to believe “according to the Scriptures” “all that the prophets had spoken.” That way when people asked them what the heck they meant when they said, “I believe Jesus died for my sins” or why they were being baptized, they could explain it—or, rather, proclaim it. And that’s an important part of how God uses us to make Christians.

The Scriptures and the early church fathers and the Reformers knew something else that was crucial for making new Christians. As we’ll talk about in our next point, it’s the one thing that the Scripture says that sinners do that makes the angels in heaven rejoice.

And it’s not believe.

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