Left Behind: Have We Moved On from the Gospel? | Theocast

The Gospel as the Starting Point and the Problem of Moving Past It

Hi, this is John, and today on Theocast, we have a conversation about moving past the gospel. How the gospel really is the beginning point for many, but it's not the point of the Christian.

Life.

The Christian life really is involved with more. We enter into the Christian life through the gospel, but we don't necessarily see it as the point or that which drives our everyday life. And then in the members podcast, Justin and I try and explain that experience that you have when you're in a church and the gospel becomes the center point of every aspect of the church service and even the church life compared to a church that assumes the gospel.

They tack it on at the end as maybe an invitation. We hope you enjoy. A simple way for you to help support Theocast and join the Reformation is by shopping at Amazon. That's right. Everything that you purchase there, they will take a percentage of it and donate it to our ministry.

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Welcome to Theocast, encouraging weary pilgrims to rest in Christ. Conversations about the Christian life from a Reformed perspective. Your hosts today are Justin Perdue, pastor of Covenant Baptist Church in Asheville, North Carolina, and I'm John Moffitt, pastor of Grace Reformed Church in Spring Hill, Tennessee.

Justin, it's good to be with you. My friend, you have the most anticipated moment of the week for all. Wednesday morning, they want to know, what is it that Justin is against? What's his pro con?

It's what's made our podcast wildly popular.

We're at least in the top 10 ,000 of podcasts.

Seriously. We sit here today, and this is the first day of October in the year of our Lord 2020. It is getting nice and brisk outside in Asheville, North Carolina. We've had some of that really nice, crisp, early fall weather in recent days, which I absolutely love.

I am pro fall. It is my favorite season of the year. There are so many things that I love about it. I could probably talk about it for half an hour, but nobody's interested in that. They want this to be briefer than 30 minutes.

I love the weather, especially in the area of the country where I live. The weather in the fall here is great. I love the crispness in the air, the smells that you even associate with fall. I love bourbon and a fire, football.

There are just a lot of things that happen in the fall that are great, that I think are kindnesses from the Lord. My con is related to fall. I've already expressed my undying affection for this season of the year, and yet I grow quite weary of quite literally everything having to be pumpkin-spiced.

I'm over the pumpkin-spiced thing. Everywhere I look, it's pumpkin-spiced this, and it's pumpkin-spiced that. There are other flavors, guys, that are associated with fall in this time of the year. I'm just asking for a little bit more diversity.

Spice is sort of part and parcel of fall, but can we do something other than pumpkin?

You want a turkey-flavored, a stuffing-flavored coffee?

Now you're just getting silly, man. I'm not against pumpkin flavor. I just feel like it dominates in a way that could be better. I think we can do better, guys. Let the listener do what he or she will.

I've been obviously thinking about these things quite deeply for some time. I hope that was evident in that meditation.

Well, I'm never going to offer you pumpkin pie, that's for sure.

I'm okay with pumpkin pie. That's the point. All things in moderation, John. We are going to talk about something more substantial than fall or certainly than pumpkin spice today on Theocast. Why don't you give the listener an idea of where this conversation is headed and tee up this conversation for us?

One of the things that Justin and I love to do is we spend some time whenever we can just talking about life and what's going on in our ministries and our marriages and home and entertainment, whatever.

Then we start talking about, what are we going to talk about today? Sometimes we have a schedule, a lot of times we don't, but we often want to talk about what I think gets us going, what we find to be the passion behind our ministries, the passion behind Theocast.

One of those is the theme of Theocast is resting in Christ. We're always trying to look at what are ways in which the Christian life has this rest robbed from them, where they carry around a burden, where Christ has relieved them of that burden and the burden is being placed back on them.

What causes that? One of those, which is a massive theme within our podcast, which is pietism, but specifically we want to get into a more nuanced issue within the broader Christian world. This isn't just evangelicalism.

This isn't just in the Baptist legalistic world. This can come in even into some of the Reformed world. It sneaks in very easily because our hearts desire this. What we're going to be talking about is how we can separate the gospel from the Christian life, where the gospel isn't that driving force.

It's not where it's seen in every area of our life. Even when there was a movement a while back, was it 10, 15 years ago? It was the gospel, everything, the gospel in marriage, the gospel in parenting, the gospel in your job, the gospel in food, the gospel in everything.

But even in that movement, what I began to realize in those podcasts is that one, they would actually never explain the gospel. They would assume it in their book, and they only emphasized the implications of the gospel.

They never actually got to the importance of the gospel. It just became the title to get people's attention, but the gospel wasn't the driving force of the book or the sermons. It was the implications of the gospel, which is the how-to's and what-to-do's after you know the gospel.

The emphasis still was on what we should be doing, not on what Christ has done. That's what we want to try and explain to you, the difference between the implications of the gospel, the gospel, and then what is the gospel and the Christian life and how the two come together.

So for many people listening to this, perhaps you have been in what we might call broad evangelicalism, or maybe you're still there. You're just in a broadly evangelical context. You've not really heard a lot of confessional reform theology, or you're certainly not in a confessional reform church.

So we want to try to put some handles on this for that listener as we go through this conversation. Something that John and I were talking about before we hit record is clear to us that as we look at the evangelical church in recent decades, a large project of the evangelical church this is a good thing has been focused on evangelism.

Again, we want to commend that. We want sinners to trust in Christ. But what that has meant in many contexts is that the church has become so focused with getting people in that that has all kinds of bad implications for those who have come in and are now part of the church.

What I mean here is that the gospel is often viewed as the entry point to the Christian.

Life.

It's the starting point. It's the doorway in. Then once you're in, we're going to move on to other stuff. We're going to move on to, in particular, the Christian life and what that should look like and the things that you should be doing, the things that you should abstain from doing, the things that you should be feeling, the things that you should be thinking.

John and I are not saying that there isn't room for that kind of talk. Absolutely. The Scripture contains things about that. But whenever you view the gospel as the entry point of the Christian life, there are problems that flow out of that.

There are implications of that kind of an understanding. In many evangelical churches, even to this day, the Sunday morning gathering is essentially seen as a stationary Billy Graham crusade. The goal of Sunday morning is to reach the seekers and reach the lost and to bring them.

In.

The gospel, in that sense, even from a preaching perspective, is really seen as primarily needing to be preached to the person who is not a Christian. I need to preach the gospel and make the gospel clear to the person who has shown up today who does not know Christ.

We would just want to kindly push back against that and say, of course, we should preach the gospel to those people. But the Sunday morning gathering is actually for the saints. It's for the edification of the body of Christ, and the primary way that the saints are built up, sustained, confirmed, and strengthened in the faith is through the proclamation of the gospel to them.

Of course, the person who isn't a believer who shows up at church is going to hear the gospel, but we, like Martin Luther would say, we're going to preach the gospel to the gospel every week to our people because we all tend to forget it every week.

We tend to move on in our own minds and hearts from the gospel, and so if there is not a very self-conscious emphasis in the church on the centrality of the gospel in all things and of the redeemed saints' need of the gospel all the time, then inevitably other things are going to become the focus.

That's sort of what we're trying to highlight here, is that the implications of the gospel become the focus rather than the gospel itself. I just wanted to start there because I think that's the experience of many people, is that the gospel is for the non-believer and then the Christian life and an emphasis and a focus on that, whether it's discipleship or marriage or family or parenting or finances or leadership or whatever it is, those things become what we really need to consider and concern ourselves with in the church.

Self-improvement. It's all about how do I become a better me or how do I—we can make it sound more biblical,.

Right?

How do I become more like Christ? And so that sounds good. It's like disagreeing that Jesus is the point of the Bible. No one would disagree with that, but at the same time, if they agree with it, they don't read and preach the Bible that way.

They don't read it as if Jesus is the point. They read it as if they're the point. Every time we interact with the Bible, we're interacting with it as instructions for how I can become a better me. I would say, Justin, as you were talking, one of the things that we're trying to do at Theocast is not say the same thing over and over again, but really try and pull apart our thoughts in history so that you can see it from maybe different angles every time that we look at it from what we write and what we say.

One of the things I know is true of my own life is that the gospel that was handed to me was a true gospel. When I mean by a true gospel, it was true good news. It was, you're a sinner. God's going to judge you for your sin.

The only thing that can redeem you is Jesus, and that payment has to be a perfect Jesus. So I believed in the virgin birth. I believe that he lived a perfect life, and I believe he died on the cross for my sins.

All of that took place within the gospels. None of that took place outside of the gospels. All of that took place in the gospels, and that's how I became a family member. Now let's talk about what it looks like to be a family member.

I would say, and this may sound like it's a false gospel. It's not. I had a watered-down gospel. I had a very elementary level gospel. And I think the Bible is designed to be adding to your understanding of the gospel for the rest of your Christian life.

I think Paul, when he says, I should be giving you the meat of the word, but I'm giving you the milk. Paul was talking about a watered-down versus a robust gospel. He's saying you should have a robust gospel, and you don't.

You have a very watered-down, surface-level gospel, and he was disappointed in them for it, which is interesting to me, because he wasn't upset with their actions. He was upset with, in other words, their actions were the result of their theology, and he wasn't upset with their actions.

He was upset with their theology, saying you should know better, and you don't, because you haven't been trained well. You haven't been growing in your faith. So, all of this to say, one of the reasons Justin and Jimmy and I try and help everyone have a covenantal slash redemptive historic understanding of scripture is that it broadens the gospel for you.

The gospel is not just contained in the four gospels. The gospel is seen and developed and creates this wide perspective all the way back to Genesis chapter three, and I would even say in Genesis 1 .1, because Jesus is described as the creator and sustainer of the world, who is the Savior of the world.

So, your understanding of covenant theology, and I think even your understanding of redemptive historic understanding of scripture is going to allow you to have that robust understanding of the gospel.

Now, I need to be very clear here before I hand this off to Justin. I am not saying you don't have the gospel, or you've misunderstood the gospel, or your gospel is wrong, or you can't have a full gospel unless you have a covenantal redemptive historic understanding of the Bible.

I am not saying that. So, please don't hear me say that your gospel is wrong. All I'm saying is that often what happens in evangelicalism and the reason that we emphasize what we should be doing, pietism, to earn God's favor, the implications of the gospel, is because we haven't been trained in how the Bible is pushing us towards a robust understanding of the gospel as our motivation for the Christian life.

So, we go to the actions and we miss out what's already been done, right? Done versus due. We should be looking at what's been done before we ever look at or emphasize what we need to be doing.

The Gospel, the Christian Life, and the Problem of Assumed Faith

Justin Perdue. Sure.

And essentially, what we're driving at here is how the gospel and the Christian life are somewhat separated from one another in the minds of many people. And that's very clear as you look at many churches and the kind of culture that exists within them.

The gospel is there. The gospel is even preached. It's not that Christ crucified is not heralded, but when it comes to the rubber-meets-the-road issues of the Christian life, it turns into a focus on the believer and the believer's performance, the believer's effort, the believer's discipline, and all those kinds of things.

And we just need to educate people in terms of how to live and give them some tips and some wisdom and some tricks in terms of how to do this stuff better, and that's really what the project of the church becomes.

And so for us, I want to be really clear too. There are plenty of implications of the gospel that we could unpack for a long time on a podcast like this, and by implications of the gospel, we mean things that naturally flow out of it according to God's word.

These are the things in particular that have everything to do with how we relate to each other, like how we should treat one another, love for the brothers, being eager and willing and ready to forgive, to seek reconciliation, to pursue unity, to flee from things that are evil, to hold fast to things that are good.

I mean, we could talk a long time.

Justin Perdue. Can I just give one example here to help people understand what an implication of the gospel is? So, Ephesians 4, the first three chapters of Ephesians is gospel. It is glorious gospel.

It is Paul giving some of the most robust theological explanations of the gospel you can find in all of Scripture. It is dripping with Old Testament imagery. And then he says this, I therefore a prisoner, this is chapter four, verse one, I therefore a prisoner for the Lord urge you to walk in a manner worthy of the calling to which you have been called.

He is talking about the calling of the gospel, right? He says this, with humility and agileness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, eager to maintain the unity of the spirit and the bond of peace.

That is an implication of the gospel. If this is true of you, this is how you respond.

Or think of Jesus. When your brother sins against you and he confesses that to you and says, forgive me, you forgive him. That is an implication of the gospel. We could talk about a bunch of those, and those are very good, and those are things that I know John and I, and also Jimmy, we teach those things and preach those things and emphasize those things in our local churches.

So, we value those things very much. But what we are trying to drive at here today on this particular episode is the way in which implications of the gospel, as good as those things might be, are often functionally divorced from the gospel itself in terms of how we live in the church.

The apostolic pattern, you mentioned the letter to the Ephesians. It is a great example of this, maybe as clear of one as there is in Scripture. But I would argue that all of the epistles are written in this way, where the apostles always begin with not only the gospel, but they begin by reassuring their listeners, their readers, their audience, that they are in Christ and that they have been justified.

That they have been called, that they are loved, that they are being kept by God, all of those kinds of things. Then, having made that crystal clear, that your identity is now one of being in Christ and that your status is now one of being justified, the apostles go on to talk about implications of how the redeemed live.

That is what we are advocating for. Do not ever assume the gospel. Do not ever assume that we all, as the saints who gather together or who are trying to live our lives, just are always thinking about our identity in Christ and are always aware of our justified status.

We often aren't because this life is hard and we struggle and we sin and we doubt. We wrestle. I had a conversation yesterday with a brother. He and his family are visiting our church. He looked at me and he just said, Justin, this has been so refreshing for us because every Sunday when we come, we are given Christ.

He looks at me and he's like, bro, that's what we need.

That's what we need.

We had a great conversation about that that I don't need to unpack right now, but he's exactly right, and this is what we're talking about. When we show up to church on Sunday, we've lived Monday to Saturday battling our sin, battling our flesh, doubting all kinds of things, doing things that we swore we would never do, feeling things we don't want to feel.

The world bombards us. Finances are tight. Our job sucks. Politics are insane. Then you show up on Sunday and what do we need? What do we need? We don't need, here are things that you need to be doing, and here are things that will improve your life.

No, I need Jesus, brother. Can you give me Christ?

Justin Perdue. Can I ask you a question? Let me ask you a question to what you're saying. Answer this. When the pastor shows up and says, here are five ways to deal with this, would you say he's really saying is, here are five ways to handle the sinful nature you still have?

Justin Perdue. Is that what he's saying?

Jon Moffitt. I mean, he isn't understanding it to be that way, but I guess what I'm saying is the way in which you deal with, I mean, this is the end of Colossians where Paul says, these have an appearance of wisdom, but are of no value of stopping the indulgence of the flesh.

So, you just got done describing the battle against the flesh. The people who assume the gospel or only preach about the implications of the gospel, are you getting where I'm going?

Justin Perdue. They are not coming at it from the perspective that you and I would come at it from. They're not articulating it the way that I just did, that here's your battle, here's your experience.

Now, look to Christ, consider Christ, and now, having considered him and having been reassured, hey, flee from stupidity and love one another. Practice these things. That's how we want to do it. But I fear that often, and I'm trying to kind of play the game here with you, Jon, and I fear that often what happens in many church contexts is when the gospel is assumed, meaning, okay, well, everybody here, we got the gospel.

Jon Moffitt. Right, we believe.

You wouldn't be here if you didn't believe.

Justin Perdue. Right, we got the gospel. Now, let's talk about how we need to be living. There often, along with that, I would agree, is a misunderstanding of the internal war, the saint-sinner reality that we are at the same time justified and sinner, and that we are battling against our corrupted flesh, and our inner man delights in God's law and wants to obey, but then our flesh does not want to obey, and our flesh wants things that are wicked.

I think there is an ignorance of that often in this kind of teaching and preaching and in these kinds of church contexts. So, yeah, it's often presented as—and this is the assumption, right? We assume the gospel.

We're trusting Christ. That's why we're here. You have the Holy Spirit. This all sounds very good. We have the Holy Spirit, so now go about doing this thing or that thing, or we have the Holy Spirit, so let's talk about what our marriages should look like.

We have the Holy Spirit, so let's talk about what real good leadership is, or whatever it may be. It's not that talking about marriage or leadership is out of bounds in the church. Not what we're saying at all.

It has everything to do with what the emphasis is, and it has everything to do with what.

The tone is.

If we are understanding marriage and we're understanding leadership or parenting or work and employment and all these kinds of things, if we are understanding that and viewing that through the lens of Christ and the gospel, where Christ is in the foreground and the Christian life is in the background, praise God.

Go for it. That's good. That's what we should do. But what we're trying to address today is how that whole thing has been reoriented, and in the foreground is all this stuff about us and how we need to live and what our marriages need to look like and what kind of employees we need to be.

In the background is this kind of assumption of Christ in the gospel, whereas what we're pleading for is, no, please, let's bring Christ back up into the foreground so that when we gather, it's very obvious, redundantly clear that what we have gathered for is Christ, and these other things that are contained in God's word, we will give appropriate consideration to in light of Christ.

That emphasis makes all the difference, John.

Faith vs. Faithfulness and the Weekly Need for Christ

We're excited to announce that we have a new free e-book available at our website called Faith vs. Faithfulness, a Primer on Rest. We, the hosts, put this together to explain the difference between emphasizing one's faith in Christ versus emphasizing one's faithfulness to Christ, and how one leads to rest and how the other often to a lack of assurance.

You can get this at theocast .org slash Primer. If you've been encouraged by what you've been hearing at Theocast, we'd ask you to help partner with us. You can do that by joining our Total Access membership.

That's our monthly membership that gives you access to all of our material that we've produced over the last four years, or simply by donating to our ministry. You can do that by going to our website, theocast .org.

We hope that you enjoy the rest of the conversation. Well, that's the word, emphasis. Where are you putting the emphasis? Probably the passage that's helped me the most here is 2 Peter chapter 1. Peter makes no bones about it.

If you begin in the very beginning of the chapter, he says, His divine power has granted to us all things that pertain to life and godliness, through the knowledge of Him who called us to His own glory and excellence.

Peter immediately starts with the sovereignty of God, and that it's through the knowledge of Christ and His glory and His excellence is the way in which we govern our lives. Verse 4, by which He has granted to us a precious and very great promise, so that through them, these promises, you become partakers of the divine nature.

Having escaped from the corruption of this world because of its sinful desire. Where is Peter putting the emphasis? The divine power and God's nature and the knowledge of that, that's what governs us.

Then he says, listen, now he does the same thing Paul does. If this is true, then you should govern yourself in such a way. He gives things like godliness and brotherly affection and brotherly affection with love.

For he says, if these qualities are yours and increasing, they keep you from being ineffective or unfruitful in the knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. He's saying, hey, look, these are purposeful.

These are good things. They make the work of God effective. Now, listen to where he points the emphasis back again. He says, for if these qualities are yours and increasing, they keep you from being ineffective.

Verse 9, for whoever lacks these qualities is so nearsighted that he is blind, having forgotten that he was cleansed from his former sins. Then he says, look, be diligent. Be diligent to be examining this cleansing.

This is the next two verses where he talks about where our emphasis is on what is waiting for us. This is the good news of the gospel, that we have been cleansed, that we have been given union with Christ, that we have been given a final home and destiny, and that this is not our home.

So he's saying, if you are not showing grace and kindness and brotherly love, and you're not adding to these things into your life, it's not that you haven't been trained well. It's not that you need to be afraid.

It's not that you need more how-tos. He's saying, you have forgotten the gospel.

You've forgotten the good news.

Right. You've watered down that which should be robust. You have stopped emphasizing what needs to be emphasized. Emphasizing the gospel is what gives you motivation and explanation for the implications of the gospel.

When you de-emphasize the gospel, you now don't understand why you are doing what you're doing, or your reasons for obedience are wrong. That's pietism.

So let me pick up on that, and I've already got this written down on my whiteboard. So you and I are on the same wavelength. We will trust the Holy Spirit of God that that is what's going on here. So the question is not, like John and I do not want to be misunderstood.

The question is not, should we be doing good works in the Christian life? The answer to that question is an obvious and resounding, yes, of course, we should be doing good works in the Christian life.

We should pursue them. The question is, why? Why do we do good works?

That's right.

What's the motivation for good works? And the answer to that, the motivation is, at the most fundamental level, Jesus and what He's done for me. So this is very much the language of Paul in Philippians 3, that I press on to take hold of the prize and run the race and all these kinds of things.

Why?

Because Jesus has taken hold of me. That's right. This is Ephesians 2 .8, 9, and 10. We've been saved by grace through faith. It's a gift of God that no man may boast, and we are created in Christ Jesus.

We are His workmanship, and we are going to walk in the good works that have been prepared beforehand for us to walk in. So we're going to be motivated by Christ and His work for us in order to even go about pursuing good works, and we're not going to be so concerned.

This is a big issue here. We're not concerned with our own personal improvement for our own sake. We are concerned for the good of our brothers and sisters and the good of our neighbor. We realize that these good works that have been prepared for us to walk in, we do them because of Christ, out of love and gratitude toward God, and out of love for our neighbor.

It makes a world of difference in terms of the emphasis and the understanding. I know, John, you do too. I have this conversation constantly in my own church because people are like, Justin, it does matter how we live, right?

I'll say, absolutely, it matters how we live. We should be doing these kinds of things, right? I say, of course, we should be doing them, but the thing is that when you begin to understand the centrality of Christ in the gospel in all of the Christian life, you will find that you're going to be pursuing the same things but for different reasons.

You will be pursuing the same things with a very different heart posture, not chasing after something that you have yet to obtain, but you are living in Christ, realizing that every spiritual blessing has already been given to you.

Now I am going to, because I'm safe, I can concern myself with doing these good things so that my neighbor will benefit and so that God will be honored.

I just wanted to add one thought that, Justin, is that when people say we should be doing things, I always say, yes, but not the things that you've been told to do.

Sure.

Because what you've been told to do, everything you've been handed in the Christian life, I would say, is a misinterpretation of the gospel. If we are saved through the message of the gospel, this good news, and we become people of the gospel, right?

We live underneath the banner of children of God, unified in Him, justified, sanctified, glorified, cannot wait for this reunion with God while I'll be in His presence. That is my new identity. I live in two worlds.

This world is not mine. I mean, those are all things that are true. And then what you are handed is nothing that is related to that. What you are handed then are, here's what you should be doing as a Christian, as if the salvation is not quite finished.

It's almost finished. It's 99 done, but there's still 1 left for you. We would never word it that way, but that's exactly what it is. So when you're handed things, these are the things you must do as a Christian, in other words, to prove that you're a Christian.

The emphasis becomes on proving your salvation. I am so fed up with this, and I'm going to lose my temper here for a little bit. I'm just so fed up with this whole idea that the Christian life is about you proving you're a Christian.

The emphasis becomes on you demonstrating that somehow you have faith. And the gospel says, if you have faith, these things are true. It's not prove that they are true. If someone's not doing good works, it's not because they just, I don't know, this whole thing about lazy Christianity or lukewarm Christianity.

The problem is not that they don't want to do it. The problem is they don't understand why they should do it. This is what I always think is funny. If someone says, well, I just think they're a lukewarm Christian, and then I ask them.

Why.

Well, they don't have any desire to listen to sermons on YouTube, or they don't post any quotes about the Bible on their Instagram, and they don't read their Bibles faithfully. And I was like, none of those have anything to do with Christianity.

None of them do. So the things they should be doing, which is showing kindness and mercy, and I'm going to jump into this one section, Justin, I'll let you, I know you probably have something to add. Justin Perdue.

What's interesting to me is that the means by which that we receive the gospel is through the Ephesians chapter four. God, through the Spirit, has gifted preachers and teachers, and it is through the administration of God's word with his people is where we receive the gospel.

Because many people go home and they think, well, I just need to read my Bible more, and that way I will think on the gospel more. And the more I think on the gospel, the more I'll be like Jesus. It doesn't say that in Ephesians.

It says when the body functions properly, it builds itself up in love. It doesn't say when you go home and meditate on the gospel. I know I just opened up a can of worms, but I'm in my second cup of coffee right now.

Justin Perdue. That's cool. You're good, brother. I mean, I may want to circle back and comment on the centrality of the word and sacrament in the service, the Sunday morning gathering, and even what the ministry of the word and the administration, in particular, of the Lord's table is about.

So we may want to circle back to that. I want to maybe riff on something else for just a minute. You mentioned how there are things that people would never say a certain way, but then functionally they kind of live that way.

One thing that nobody would ever say, at least in these terms, is, okay, now that we've got the gospel, let's move on to the real important stuff, which is the Christian life. Nobody would ever say it like that, but people almost do sometimes when they come up to you and they say, almost like, we need more meat in the sermon, and by meat in the sermon, they mean you need to tell us a bunch of stuff to do.

That's kind of a dead giveaway that people are thinking that, man, what I really need is instruction on what I need to be doing. I need application. I don't so much need the objective declarative realities of what God has done.