Don’t Confuse Entitlement with Salvation
A Christian is someone who knows they need to be saved not only from their bad deeds, but also their good deeds.
We have all become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous deeds are like a polluted garment. We all fade like a leaf, and our iniquities, like the wind, take us away. -Isaiah 64:6
Many people who sit in church think they are Christians because of their righteous deeds.
This is where nominal Christianity comes from. For many who grew up in the church/Christian culture, salvation is no longer salvation–it’s entitlement. Some believe they’re entitled to salvation because of their righteous deeds.
That’s not salvation. Salvation is knowing that you’re a sinner–that even your best deeds are disgusting to God, for they are unable to save you. Salvation is humiliation, seeing that you are desperately lost in your sin, under the wrath of God for your sin, and that your only hope is outside help.
Jesus is that outside help. Jesus saves sinners. It’s all of grace. Entitlement has zero place in Christianity.
Jesus doesn’t save the righteous and the entitled. Jesus saves the sinful and the desperate.
I have not come to call the righteous but sinners to repentance. -Jesus
There Are Only Two Religions
Yesterday I shared the following story in my sermon.
Decades ago, when Dr. Harry Ironside finished preaching the gospel to a university audience in California, he was approached by a student who asked:
Dr. Ironside, there are literally thousands of religions, how do we know which is true?
Ironside replied:
Well, before we can get into the question of which one is true, we need to clarify something. There are not thousands of religions. There are not even hundreds of religions. There are only two: one which tells you that salvation comes as a reward for what you have done, and one which tells you that salvation comes by what somebody else does for you. That’s Christianity. All the rest fit under the other. And if you think you can get your salvation by your own efforts, then Christianity has nothing to say to you. But if you know you need to be saved, then you are a candidate.
-Quoted by Ben Patterson in Muscular Faith.
The Strongest Evangelist in Our Church
Right now the strongest evangelist in our church is Sameer, a former Hindu who was converted through the ministry of Garden City Church just three Sundays ago. Immediately after Jesus saved Sameer, Sameer began sharing the gospel with other people and inviting them to church on Sundays and to our mid-week Neighborhood Groups. People in our church who have been Christians for decades are learning evangelism from watching Sameer, a fifteen-day-old Christian.
Friends, Jesus saves. Believe it. Preach it. Pray it. Share it.
I’m preaching my guts out at Garden City, banking on the truth that Jesus makes dead people come alive and that Jesus builds his church.
Garden City Church is ten weeks old, and Jesus is on the move. And Sameer is a fifteen days saved, and he’s begun writing about it on his own blog. Click here to read Sameer’s story in his own words. Below is the lead in:
I attended Garden City three weeks ago as a guest with my childhood friend John. It was an ordinary day and I wasn’t expecting much. During the sermon, I heard the gospel for the first time. My legs were trembling, and my heart was sweating. I felt Jesus for the first time.
Photo: Michael Ziegler
The True Story of The World
I launched our new church plant with a seven-week sermon series called The True Story of The World. We’ve watched Jesus use these sermons to do something fresh in people’s lives. Click here to listen to the sermons.
The Gospel Makes us Christians, Not Ascetics
The gospel makes us Christians, not ascetics. Jesus Christ did not die and rise for you so that you would stress out about whether you’re being spiritual enough. So take a nap. Go for a walk in the woods. Play with your kids. Eat some chocolate. Watch a good movie. Christian, you are free.
Parents of young children know what a chore chart is. It is how we assign chores to each child and how we remind them of these chores. Sometimes we organize the chart according to a child’s age, aptitude, and interest. Different chores go in different columns.
The tyranny of hyperspirituality pictures the Christian life like a chore chart. But the gospel frees you to rest.
-Jared Wilson, Gospel Wakefulness p. 111
Garden City Church: Our First Baptisms!
Yesterday Garden City Church turned 35 days old and we celebrated our first baptisms. It was a Sunday we will never forget.
We rent space on Sunday afternoons from a very kind and generous church. For a variety of reasons we weren’t able to hold our baptisms on the church property. So, we put a hot tub on the back of a trailer, parked it on the street in front of the church, and held our baptisms on The Alameda immediately after our Sunday worship service. You had to be there.
Watch the short video and check out a few pictures. Thank you for praying for our new church plant. Please don’t stop.
Christianity is the Unreligion
I am loving Dane Ortlund’s new book, Defiant Grace: The Surprising Message and Mission of Jesus. To give you a taste, here is a quote from the book that I’ll be using in my sermon this Sunday:
Christianity is the unreligion. It turns all our religious instincts on their head…
The ancient Greeks told us to be moderate by knowing our inclinations. The Romans told us to be strong by ordering our lives. Buddhism tells us to be disillusioned by annihilating our consciousness. Hinduism tells us to be absorbed by merging our souls. Islam tells us to be submissive by subjecting our wills. Agnosticism tell us to be at peace by ignoring our doubts. Moralism tells us to be good by discharging our obligations. Only the gospel tells us to be free by acknowledging our failure. Christianity is the unreligion because it is the one faith whose founder tells us to bring not our doing, but our need.
Get Drunk on Grace
The Reformation was a time when men went blind, staggering drunk because they had discovered, in the dusty basement of late medievalism, a whole cellarful of fifteen-hundred-year-old, two-hundred-proof grace—of bottle after bottle of pure distillate of Scripture, one sip of which would convince anyone that God saves us single-handedly. The word of the gospel—after all those centuries of trying to lift yourself into heaven by worrying about the perfection your bootstraps—suddenly turned out to be a flat announcement that the saved were home before they started…Grace has to be drunk straight: no water, no ice, and certainly no ginger ale; neither goodness, nor badness, nor flowers that bloom in the spring of super spirituality could be allowed to enter into the case.
-Robert Farrar Capon, Between Noon and Three: Romance, Law, and the Outrage of Grace
A New Status Before God
In the first place, you have been justified. This is to say that God looks upon you and deals with you as though you were perfectly righteous, as though you had never sinned and will never sin. However difficult this idea may be for you to grasp, it represents an event that has already taken place and that will never change.
It is not that God wears blinkers and pretends you are better than you are. He knows about your sin. Yet his feelings toward you and his dealings with you are based on a righteousness Christ has given you. God treats you as though you were as righteous as Jesus.
-John White, The Fight, (IVP, 1976)
If you haven’t read The Fight before, you’re missing out.
Don’t Pretend That Life Isn’t Painful
Don’t pretend that life isn’t painful.
People that you meet, Christians that you meet, who tell you that life isn’t painful are pretending. They’re selling you something.
Life is painful.
And only Jesus can fix the pain.
God is the only answer to the pain. Only Christianity reveals a God who suffers, a God has fully experienced the worst pain this world has to offer. Only Christianity reveals a God who can heal and redeem all the pain in your life and make something beautiful out of it.
