Our Heart’s Deepest Need
I marvel when someone says, “I have no regrets.” That’s not me; I have lots of them! One of my biggest regrets, outside of not spending more time with Ellen and our kids when they were growing up (and not discovering Laphroaig sooner), is that for much of my 35 years of ordained ministry I have not preached “the gospel.” Not really. For too many of those years I preached law and not gospel. It’s how I raised our kids and conducted my life. It’s not that I wasn’t “Christian.” I just mistook “what we do for God” for “what he has done for us” – as good news. I was a nice man standing in front of nice people asking them to be nicer (in Steve Brown’s words). And if anyone’s life was changed as a result, it was a sheer miracle!
There are just two kinds of sermons: one is the gospel; the other is a get-better message. The first is based on God’s goodness; the second on self-improvement and self-betterment. The first is God-centered; the second is essentially self-righteousness.
Gospel preaching presupposes that, even though we deserve punishment for our sins, Jesus Christ suffered as our substitute on the cross. He lived the perfect life we cannot live, fulfilling the law on our behalf. He died the death we deserved to die so that we can have everlasting life.
A get-better sermon, on the other hand, is moralistic advice couched in Jesus language, in which a preacher essentially scolds the congregation for not doing more, or supporting such-n-such a program, or getting better. If we just try harder, pray and give more, read the Bible every day, attend church every week, and be nicer, we will somehow appease God. But this is Phariseeism and works-righteousness – what Michael Horton calls “an easy-listening version of salvation by self-help.” Those who came to hear me before I began to discover the gospel were vaguely entertained, or so they told me on their way out of church. But truth be told, they left mostly feeling beat up and like they didn’t measure up to the latest thing they needed to do for God. Instead of relieving guilt, get-better sermons reinforce the guilt and brokenness we all bring to church.
My conversion to gospel preaching was gradual and it’s still ongoing. I don’t remember what the initial catalyst was, except that people weren’t getting better with sermons filled with shoulds and oughts. Moralistic sermons dole out plenty of advice about what we can do for God, but hardly spend a moment on what God has done for us (the Good News!). Christ came, not to help religious people get better, but to help sinners who already know they are sinners realize that forgiveness and salvation are outside of us (an alien righteousness): in Jesus Christ.
St. Paul, in Romans, explains the gospel as God’s power and God’s righteousness (1:16-17). This is exactly opposite of repairing our nature by a determined will. It is what God has done for us when we couldn’t do it ourselves. When this message of one-way-love – God’s love without strings attached, love when we are not lovely – reaches our hearts, it causes our spirits to come alive to God and it fills us with meaning and purpose. The gospel speaks to our heart’s deepest need for real love.
When you get to church to find out that the preacher is in the third of a 10-sermon series on “10 steps to overcome depression,” get up and run out of there as fast as your depressed legs can take you. It’s self-help, not the gospel! Chalk it up to a well-meaning preacher who hasn’t yet realized that our real hope is in God, in the sufficiency of his work on the cross, and in the salvation that is not found in get-better sermons.