God-Centered Gospel Produces Christ-Centered Lives — E.A. Johnston

The Rise of the Man-Centered Gospel

Somewhere, in the last 60 years, the church lost her way in how she preaches the gospel. She caved in to the mounting peer pressure of competitive church growth, which focused on immediate results. In order to achieve that, she had to jump aboard the bandwagon of a man-centered gospel, a gospel message centered around the happiness of man.

Churches found they could get more new members by dishing out a man-centered gospel. Some labeled it felt-need teaching, some labeled it seeker-sensitive, and it sure crammed her sanctuaries with new members.

False Conversion and the Danger of Heresy

But the trouble was, they were nothing more than baptized heathen lured into a cattle shoot on their way to the slaughterhouse for souls. Because when you preach a gospel different from the one found in my Bible, then you preach heresy that only deceives and damns the souls of men.

The old gospel, which is the biblical gospel, is a God-centered gospel that proclaimed the unbending attributes of a thrice-holy God. A God-centered gospel will produce Christ-centered lives. And that's the title of my message today, friends.

A God-centered gospel will produce Christ-centered lives. In Romans, we hear the Apostle Paul proclaim in Romans 1 .16,. For I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ, for it is the power of God unto salvation to every one that believeth.

Christ's Bloody Cross and the Glory of God

Listen, friends, a God-centered gospel is centered around a bloody cross on which the Son of God, the Prince of Glory, was slain for sinful man. The Lord Jesus Christ did not step out of heaven to suffer and die by bloody crucifixion so you could be happy, but for the glory of the Father.

The gospel is not about you. The gospel is about the Lord Jesus Christ, in whom we have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of sins according to the riches of His grace. The gospel is about a thrice-holy God that gave His only begotten Son that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish but have everlasting life.

Repentance, Regeneration, and True Conversion

When the church lost her grip on the biblical gospel, we pandered to the will of man by giving him a gospel that would soothe his guilty conscience without repentance and regeneration. A man-centered gospel produces no deep reverence for God nor humility and repentance in man.

A man-centered gospel makes man centered in his thoughts rather than God, and the result is church membership without conversion, religion without life, church worship without the Spirit of God. Men are not God-fearing in their hearts by a man-centered gospel, rather it turns Almighty God into a mere butler for man and his needs.

We snap our fingers, and we expect our God, who's a butler, to jump to meet our needs. That's the watered-down, superficial, so-called Christianity of our here-in-America friends. For our churches preach a gospel that is merely helpful to man, but it has no power to change him, to deliver him from the bondage of sin and the kingdom of darkness.

I've never seen a day in my life where the churches are filled predominantly with the unconverted, but that's what the man-centered gospel will do. It will fill a church with the unconverted. The old gospel of my Bible is a proclamation of divine sovereignty where salvation is in the hands of God and not man.

Judgment, Hell, and the Necessity of Repentance

The old gospel proclaims a violated law and a future judgment for all mankind. It warns of the danger of dining your sins to be shut up in hell beneath the outpoured wrath of an avenging God. A God-centered gospel demands repentance or it's hell to pay.

The Gospel's Power to Save and Transform

A God-centered gospel will produce Christ-centered lives because it has power to save, power to cancel sin, and power to produce transformation through regeneration of the new birth. Listen, brother pastor, a God-centered gospel may get you fired from your church because the good deacons will fight against it, but a God-centered gospel will keep your hands clean from the blood of men as you warn men to flee from the wrath to come.

The Holy Spirit's Work Through the Proclaimed Gospel

A God-centered gospel gives the Spirit of God room to work conviction in the heart and conscience of man and it allows Almighty God room to vindicate His holy word as He always has when the real gospel of His dear Son is proclaimed to a sinful world.

Recovering the Old Gospel in the Pulpit

A God-centered gospel will produce God-centered lives and Christ-centered lives because it has at its center a blood-stained Christ who has power to save. The only way America will stand is when the pulpits of this land recover the old gospel and God-called preachers proclaim it beneath the anointing of the Spirit of God as they fear God more than man.

Let us pray that this will occur before God destroys this sin-loving nation which has rejected Him. Heaven help us all.