A Little Country Church — E.A. Johnston

The New Gospel and Its Omission of Sin's Peril

The New Gospel of Our Day tells folks that God loves them, and he loves them so much that he sent his son Jesus to earth to die on a cross so we can be saved and go to heaven. But this gospel leaves out what men are saved from and why they need to be saved in the first place.

The Old Gospel and the Threat of God's Law

The Old Gospel prepared men's hearts by giving them a real sense of their danger if they continued in a natural condition, that because of the holiness of God and the strictness of his law, that sinners lay under immense danger of dying in their natural state and falling under the sentencing of the law, which will by no means clear the guilty, that a man who dies in his sins will be liable to God's wrath for sin, and the only way of escape is to flee to the refuge from sin, the Lord Jesus Christ.

Fleeing Self-Righteousness and False Faith

Men must be driven out of themselves and out from any false refuge like self-righteousness or a false faith. They must see what danger they are exposed to before they want to come to Christ to save them from that danger, to save them from the terribleness of damnation and God's wrath upon them.

The Preacher's Illustration of Driving Out Snakes

I used to have to kill poisonous snakes on my property in the South. They were crawling all over that property. The hardest ones to reach were the copperheads that lived in the rock bed in a drainage ditch in front of my house.

I'd have to hold a can of gasoline in one hand and a shovel in the other as I straddled those rocks, and I'd pour the gasoline into the rocks and smoke those snakes out. Soon they'd come slithering out from the rocks, and then I'd hit them on the head with my shovel.

Warning Sinners to Flee the Coming Wrath

And as I had to get serious about driving those snakes out to destroy them, so too the preacher must inform men of their great danger of lying under God's wrath for sin, that they are exposed to the sentencing of the law if they remain in the rock bed of a natural condition.

They must be driven out of their coronal security by the threatenings of the law, and a sinner must be made to see his danger before he will be willing to come to Christ to be saved from damnation and hell beneath the outpoured wrath of God, which is like a smoking furnace.

The New Gospel is faulty in that it doesn't warn men to flee from the wrath to come. It merely invites men to come to Jesus when they see no need of him in the first place. That's why today in our churches we have decisions and very few conversions.

A Church Filled With Unconverted Members

Few have been awakened to their lost condition and brought under conviction by the Holy Spirit. This is why the church doesn't function as it should, because it's become more like a barnyard overrun with goats who like to bite and nip at each other and who trouble the rest of the members.

Sheep, Goats, and the Return to a God-Centered Gospel

A little country church is nice so long as the members are sheep who get along as they follow Jesus, but I fear until the Old Gospel, which is God-centered, is brought back again into our pulpits, the new man-centered Gospel will only continue to fill up the sanctuary with bearded goats who like their place of prominence and who will butt heads with anyone who gets in their way.