Why the Gospel Terrifies Christians | Theocast

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Hi, this is John, and today on Theocast, Justin and I have a conversation about the gospel and how the gospel often is terrifying.

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And what we mean by that is the implications of it. How powerful is grace? And if we're not careful, we tend to add to the gospel so that it doesn't sound as crazy as it is, but it is crazy.

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The grace is that powerful and it can transform us, but yet we seem to keep adding to the gospel.

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We're going to talk about this throughout history and the different things like the law gospel, pietism, reformation, and dispensationalism.

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Hope you enjoy. A simple and easy way for you to help support Theocast each month is by shopping at Amazon through the

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Amazon Smile program. When you make a purchase through Amazon Smile, a portion of the proceeds will be donated to our ministry.

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To learn how to sign up, just go to theocast .org slash give. Welcome to Theocast, encouraging weary pilgrims to rest in Christ.

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Conversations about the Christian life from a Reformed and pastoral perspective. Your hosts today are

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Justin Perdue, pastor of Covenant Baptist Church in Asheville, North Carolina, and I'm John Moffitt, a pastor of Grace Reformed Church in Spring Hill, Tennessee.

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And Justin, today's a unique day for us. It's the last podcast of the year, but it'll be coming out in 2022.

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Lord willing, I pray it doesn't come out. I pray we're not here to listen to it, to post it. But if we are, we are hoping that it finds you well and encourages you.

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So yeah, that's pretty much all I have for the introductions. Oh, I will say this by now, hopefully, well, for sure, we have our new stickers out.

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Trust Christ and calm down. You get Theocast stickers as well, so you can go get those. We've got some help with shipping those out, so that's amazing.

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And our new books are ready or they're updated. They're not new, but they're updated. And hopefully by this time very soon,

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The Reformed Book will be coming out as well. That's all the announcements I have. I don't have anything other than that. Justin, we want to save almost all of our time to talk about our subject today because it is one that is clearly we should probably do 10 podcasts on, but we're just going to do one.

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Well, we've done quite a few. Yeah. So greetings from last year. This is one of those back future moments,

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I guess. Yeah. No kidding. What up, Theocast fam? Good to be chatting with you again. Oh, and for those of you on YouTube, Justin's in his new studio that's been redone.

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He doesn't have the new camera yet. We'll get that soon. I'm using the new camera that'll have a better, you'll be able to see a little bit more of the new studio. But yeah.

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Yeah. Excited to have some new digs here and a little bit better lighting and some sound panels and all that good stuff.

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We'll do a walkthrough of my office and his soon, but it's fun. All right, Justin, tell us why it's so important that we save all of our time today.

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First of all, I love the episode title. Let's go ahead and say that. Why the gospel terrifies

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Christians. And it's an important conversation that we're having today. You said, you know, we should probably do 10 episodes on it.

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We've done a number of episodes really getting at this issue over the course of the last two and a half years together. And as most people listening to this podcast know, the

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Protestant Reformation historically occurred 500 years ago, a little over 500 years ago is when it's formally recognized to have begun.

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And the battle of the Reformation at its heart was a fight for the purity of the gospel, was a battle for salvation by grace alone, through faith alone in Christ alone.

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The formal battle was in part over sola scriptura, the sufficiency of scripture and all these matters.

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But the battle in material at the heart was for the gospel. And it's one sense of recovery of the biblical doctrine of assurance and peace with God and Christ on account of what he's done, not on account of what we do or could ever do for God.

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And as we survey 2000 years of church history, it's pretty obvious that there is always a tendency to regress amongst

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God's people, to in some way return back to some form of works righteousness or to revert back to some notion of law keeping, to synthesize our work and Christ's work in various ways so that this turns into some cooperative effort between us and God that would result in our final salvation.

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And so today's episode is one of a number where we seek to take the gloves off a little bit.

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We're both, I mean, Truth in Advertising, it's the end of the year. It's been a very busy year in ministry for John, been a busy year in ministry full year for me as well.

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We're both dealing not only with our own frailties, but pastoring churches that are comprised of sinners.

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We're sinners. And so we're tired and at the same time, happy to be able to get on here and get behind the mics and talk about Christ.

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And we're going to try to not be overly punchy about Jesus in the gospel, not aiming to offend anyone.

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And at the same time, we're going to try to give a pretty unfiltered conversation about this issue and how we tend to throw all kinds of clutter on top of the gospel.

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And even people who profess to be Christians, I'll go and say this, even people who profess to be

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Reformed Christians freak out when the pure, as we would maybe like to describe it, the pure unfiltered gospel is heralded over and over and again, when we are unashamedly

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Jesus -centered in everything that we say in the church, people freak out.

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They get scared by that. And there are reasons for that fear. And we're going to try to identify some of those things.

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We're going to identify some of the tendencies that exist in the church and try to peel back the onion a little bit and get underneath this thing.

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Why is it this thing called the gospel? Why is grace? Why is faith alone? Why is Jesus being the focus of all the scripture?

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Why does that stuff scare us as Christians? So John, take us away with our first of several talking points.

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Yeah, we have a lot. That's why I wanted to get into this quickly. One of the greatest helps for me is when Paul says, I am present tense, the greatest sinner

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I know. And Paul probably was the greatest preacher outside of Christ of the gospel. Paul was not afraid of the power.

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He was not stingy with grace. And he on multiple occasions in multiple letters defended grace.

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And that helps me understand, you know, when Justin said we have churches full of sinners, in many ways, the self -righteous, they don't last very long in a church full of grace because grace at its heart constantly uses the law to show you your need of grace.

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And so I grew up in the law, right? Right. And we want that because as our confession says, when we see the depths of our sin, it causes us to have a greater dependence upon Christ.

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It does not justify our sins. It does not give us freedom to sin.

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So one of the things that I grew up in, and I know there's a lot of listeners who are gradually finding

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Theocast or who've been here for a while, that have grown up in a dispensational background and the history of dispensationalism has its roots in really a very heavy law preaching, a very fire and brimstone preaching, which there's nothing wrong with getting heated in a sermon and really getting passionate about the nature of sin and how damaging sin is.

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We can see this often in scripture that a lot of the prophets got very angry with Israel. But when you only preach the law and then the gospel is only the part of which you must now do, which is the cleanup part, it creates what we call a manipulative side of preaching or life of Christianity on a fear -based tactics, where even in times theology becomes so prevalent in the preaching and teaching, where you're always using it as a means to govern one's life.

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I remember growing up in a youth group where we would watch the original 1980s, 70s,

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I can't remember what it was, but the Left Behind movies, where the fear was you don't want to be caught not living for Christ when he comes back, because you could be one of those people who were left behind.

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You walk into the church and all the clothes are there. We always did that. We had a judgment household situation at Halloween and all that.

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And it still plays out today. There are people who are extremely afraid of the return of Christ and being caught as if they aren't ready and God's going to leave them here because they're not taking it seriously.

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I did a whole video on, Is the Vaccine the Mark of the Beast? And it's insane the conversation that goes on in the comment section, where people truly do live by fear, thinking that if Christ comes back and I've either taken the vaccine or I'm not living for whatever reason, they don't walk by faith.

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They walk by fear. And that's what governs them. I mean, and I'll throw it back over to you, Justin, but when you think about what this has to do with it, they don't just say, you know, live for Jesus, they then give you rules and regulations.

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And from this fundamentalist movement that started and really was a lot of dispensationalism that pushed this along, it became more about not drinking, not going to movie houses, not you listen to certain kind of music.

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It became that what you didn't do. And those who were living this particular lifestyle were the ones that could have confirmation that when

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Christ came back, when the trumpet sound, then you were ready to meet with him. And so preaching became more about warning people about morality than it did proclaiming the sufficiency of Christ.

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And there's nothing wrong with warning people about their moral life. We'll get into that later. But if that's all the diet is, then it's completely lopsided from what we've been handed to us in the

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New Testament. And I would even say in the Old Testament. The fear -based tactics are effective in ways, though I would argue that they are very short -sighted.

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They're manipulative, as you even alluded to. I think they work because if you get a room full of people who have tender consciences at all and are familiar at all with the scriptures and the law of God and what

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God requires and how holy and righteous he is, and the reality of final judgment and all these things, you can work people up into a pretty good frenzy without a lot of difficulty by just reminding people of these simple truths from the

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Bible, again, devoid of really any kind of gospel. In my mind, John, I didn't come from that context, but I'm not altogether unacquainted with it.

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To me, the gospel simply is—there's all this hell, fire, brimstone, judgment stuff, righteousness of God, holiness of God, he's a consuming fire, all these things, and it's just taken out of context at points and overemphasized.

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And the gospel really, all that's preached, is that Jesus did die for sinners, yes, but what's demanded of you is you better repent.

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And it's almost like we're saved by how well we repent, or the question is whether you've repented, and then you're going to prove your repentance through a life of abstinence, basically.

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That's right. Repentance really is from your past life. Correct. You're turning from your former sins, and you're not living like that anymore, and you're going to continue to prove that you're legit day after day after day by abstaining from the things that you used to do, that used to characterize your life before you saw the light and decided to follow

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Christ or whatever it is. And I think it's easy for me to see how that's effective, and at the same time, there's no gospel really in that.

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And last comment before we move on maybe to our next subject, I think it's important, we've talked about this in ways before, but it's important that people understand that the roots of dispensationalism, like Darby and others who were the fathers of this theology, they were actually very clear in their opposition to the active obedience of Jesus Christ.

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By active obedience, for those who are unfamiliar with that language, when we use that term, we are referring to Christ's perfect life and fulfillment of the whole law and fulfillment of all of the righteous requirements of God in the place of sinners.

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Where we talk about the double imputation piece, or like we sing of in Rock of Ages, how the water and the blood from the wounded side of Christ, they flow, they are of sin, the double cure.

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They save from wrath, which we get that part pretty good, like the atonement propitiation side, but they also make us pure, the blood and the water, the sacrifice of Jesus, his perfect life, his fulfillment of the law is what is counted to us as our perfection.

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Dispensationalism historically has been opposed to that kind of teaching. And so in the dispensational scheme, in this kind of hellfire and brimstone scheme, the active obedience of Christ, the fact that Christ is our righteousness is nowhere to be found.

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And so in that regard, Jesus is preached as maybe half a savior. He deals with your sins, at least in a past sense, but you need to provide righteousness in what you're doing.

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If you nail it to the wall, it's where it goes. And I would say dispensationalism by and large is not a charlatan movement where they were trying to manipulate people for the sake of money or it's not a cult or anything like that at all.

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And there are those movements where you see people and they're purely just doing it for the sake of prosperity, gospel, and money and wealth.

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Dispensationalism is not that at all. No, and dispensationalism also has a great history of taking the Bible literally, fighting for inerrancy.

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But the struggle became in their concerns for a world that was falling faster and faster, in their opinion, into lawlessness and sinfulness.

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There became a reaction that was wholeheartedly good, but not necessarily biblical in that they began to emphasize the nature of the law and they didn't necessarily, let's put it this way, and this will lead us into our next section,

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Justin, which I know you want to talk about. It's a great study case of a law gospel confusion.

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They assumed that repentance and obedience was the gospel. That's the good news. Do these things.

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But they would herald, no, no, no, we're saved by grace alone, we're saved by grace alone, but, and this is carried into today. So Justin, explain to us what this looks like.

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We're going to talk for a minute about the confusion of the law and the gospel or how the law and the gospel are often collapsed. What you were just describing in a dispensational framework is how the law is often preached as gospel.

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If you do these things at least well enough, you'll be saved. And then the gospel is preached as law.

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It's preached as a kind of covenant of works that we need to do some stuff in order to be in. We need to do this or this or this thing in order to be under the gospel or in Christ.

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And that's just all kinds of confused and backwards according to the scriptures. One of the things that we rejoice in here at Theocast as Reformed and Lutheran brothers and sisters have through history and even people before the

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Reformation is the distinction between the law and the gospel. What we mean by that is that in the

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Old and New Testament, there is law and gospel in each. There's law and gospel in the Old Testament.

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There's law and gospel in the New Testament. And that anytime we read in the scriptures of things that are required for us to do in order to be righteous, that is law.

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Whenever we read and hear of what Christ has done that God then gives to us in grace, that's gospel.

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To illustrate some of the ways that the gospel and this law and gospel confusion leads to fear amongst well -meaning, well -intentioned

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Christians, I'll just say this phrase. And just let it sit for a second and we'll talk about it. The gospel actually contains nothing in it whatsoever for us to do.

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And now that people have had a couple of seconds, people have a few seconds to think that over.

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And I assume in the hearts and minds of many people of a maybe self -proclaimed

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Reformed ilk or whatever, all kinds of things are welling up and you're, is it okay to say that?

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There's nothing in the gospel. The gospel contains nothing within it whatsoever for us to do or to frame it in other ways.

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The law demands everything and gives nothing. It's an exacting taskmaster.

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The gospel... In the law, there's everything to do. Correct. The gospel, on the flip side, demands nothing but gives everything.

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Again, people hear that and they're like, uh, don't know. What about the demands of the gospel?

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What about what Jesus demands of the world? I mean, I can hear people right now and again, we would come in and say, we're happy to talk about what

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God demands of the world and what Jesus demands of the world. We delight in God's law and we're happy to use it lawfully, but we need to call it that.

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We need to call it law and then be very clear on the fact that the gospel is completely and only about what

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Jesus Christ has done. It's not at all about anything that we have done, could do. Therefore, simply, to use the language of our confession, we trust, we accept, we receive, we rest in Jesus Christ for justification, sanctification, and eternal life, all by merit, by virtue of the covenant of grace.

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That's good news and that's what saving faith is. I'll turn it right back over to you.

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I'm sure you want to comment on this in a second, John, but this law and gospel confusion is illustrated in a number of ways and a number of streams of thought that are common in the evangelical church today.

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One that we've talked about at points is the Lordship Salvation stream, the Lordship Salvation camp, where we've done episodes on this.

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We could refer the listener to those, but one of the things that occurs in that form of thinking and that kind of theology is a collapsing of law and gospel, where we see the law and the gospel confused.

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We also see a redefinition of even saving faith, where obedience or a desire to obey, those kinds of things are woven into the definition of what saving faith even is.

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That's a concern. We see people told that they need to do certain things in order to prove their legitimacy so that they can then actually say that they're in the

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Lord Jesus Christ. We would just humbly rebut that and say, yeah, that's putting a bunch of qualifiers on the gospel.

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That's putting a bunch of law on top of the gospel and collapsing the law and the gospel in a way that makes it sound like we have something to contribute.

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The gospel does, in fact, require some works from us in order to be legitimately in Christ. Jon Moffitt That's good.

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This can be confusing, even in 2 Thessalonians 1, when Paul says for those who do not obey the gospel.

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You could say right there, Justin, you just said there's nothing to be done. It's only news, so you're wrong.

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That's probably the only verse that's often used. The thing

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I want to help people understand— Justin Perdue I was typing you a message. What verse were you citing? Jon Moffitt 2 Thessalonians 1 .8.

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When you go back and you look at what all the Scripture has to say, you learn very quickly that the good news, the gospel, is proclamation of a past event.

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It is not the potential, it's the proclamation of the past.

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You have to understand it's not potential, but past. This is why it's important when we say you have to define the difference between the law, because the law has all potential.

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The law is a set of rules. If obeyed, then you earn righteousness before God. So the law always presents potential, but the gospel always tells you of the past.

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It is the declaration that Christ sufficiently not only lived your life that you could not live as the second

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Adam, but then paid for your sin, which you could not pay for, and that's been declared. Part of that good news is all of this is yours if you believe.

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All of this comes to you if you believe. Belief is not an act, it's a gift granted.

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We know this from Ephesians. What does he say? Not by works lest any man should boast.

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He says by faith through grace, which is a gift of God. When Paul says they did not obey the gospel,

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I do believe what he means is in contrast because he's talking about the nature of those who've rejected the gospel.

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He means those who have heard of the good news and believed. That's what he means.

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Justin Perdue To clarify and use Scripture to interpret Scripture, you mentioned 2 Thessalonians 1 .8.

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The reason I asked you to clarify what verse you're talking about is that phrase of obeying the gospel, it recurs in the book of Romans as well.

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Romans 10 .16, Paul uses that same language of, but they have not all obeyed the gospel.

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But in Romans 1 .5 and Romans 16 .26, Paul will use the language of the obedience of faith.

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So I think it's very simple, and I know you agree, John, biblically, when we're talking about what does it mean to obey the gospel, again, this phrase that occurs like twice in the

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New Testament. Well, to obey the gospel is nothing other than the obedience of faith. It's to trust Christ.

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And so whenever we hear that, we ought not, because as soon as we hear the word obedience, we immediately think law. We immediately think, well, that means

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I need to do a bunch of stuff in order to prove my legitimacy or I need to do a bunch of stuff in order to be right with God.

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No. To obey the gospel simply means to trust in Jesus, to receive from Him, to receive, accept, rest in Jesus.

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Again, 14 .2 from our confession. Which is the conclusion of the gospel, because the good news, part of the good news is that you were condemned.

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You could not produce righteousness. Christ produced righteousness, took on your condemnation.

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And part of that good news is He did this so that you could be reconciled to God.

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Here's the key note, by faith. So that's the obedience part.

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And it's hard for us sometimes when we don't look at all of Scripture. But Justin, I think the confusion, this is the next section we want to go into.

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The confusion is, throughout the years, is a word called pietism. And pietism,

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I'll let you give us an introduction on that and then I'll comment on it. But pietism is what happens when the law and the gospel gets collapsed and we don't know how to read

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Scripture. The lenses are blurred. And so when we go to see certain passages, they get confusing.

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And then all of a sudden, we have to prove our faith instead of accepting the faith.

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So Justin, talk to us a little bit about what is pietism. By the way, for those of you that haven't read, we have a book called

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Rest, and Justin has a great introduction in there on what pietism is. I would encourage everyone to go read it.

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It's for free. Just go to our website, theocast .org slash primer. If you're new to Theocast, we have a free ebook available for you called

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Faith vs. Faithfulness, A Primer on Rest. And if you've struggled with legalism, a lack of assurance, or simply want to know what it means to live by faith alone, we wrote this little book to provide a simple answer from a

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Reformed confessional perspective. You can get your free copy at theocast .org

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slash primer. And plug for our forthcoming book called

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Reformed, I'm going to have a chapter in there on confessionalism, and I'm going to give an even more expanded treatment to pietism and confessionalism for those who are interested in that book that we hope is coming out maybe first quarter next year.

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So all that by way of plugs and advertisement, let me get to the heart of the matter here. Pietism...

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Let me back up. Pause button. Rewind. Piety. Let's talk about that really quickly. I think it's always good to do this.

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Piety is a good thing. So we are all for piety here at Theocast. Piety is effectively

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God -wrought righteousness. It is the work of God's Spirit in us as we trust in Christ.

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So we want to talk in those ways a lot and affirm and exhort people toward piety that is the work of the

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Lord in them as we partake of the means of grace and live life in the church trusting in Jesus. So piety is good.

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Pietism, historically, is an overemphasis on a few things.

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The inside, the interior, as we like to say, of the Christian life, right? So the affections, the desires, the obedience, the performance of the believer.

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There's an overemphasis on those things. There is also an overemphasis on transformation of life in a pietistic framework.

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This could be aimed at the individual almost exclusively. Individuals, transformation of life, and maybe the society through the individual.

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Or in a more liberal environment, it might be just aimed broadly at the society. So conservatives and liberals can be pietistic.

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And again, if you're interested in that, if that's kind of a mind blow for you, then I would recommend our forthcoming book and just continue to listen to some of our content here.

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We're going to be talking about these things, I'm sure, over the course of months and years. So pietism, overemphasis on the interior of the

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Christian life, also an overemphasis on transformation. And so what that results in,

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John, and I'm happy to kick it back over to you for a minute, and then I might riff a little bit more, is it results in this thing where we preach the gospel.

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We preach Jesus crucified for sinners. We might even preach, well, the righteousness of Christ for sinners.

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So that's wonderful, and we're all for that. But then somehow, someway, the thing circles back in on us.

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At the end of the day, the real wedge is driven down on the Christian, not on Christ.

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And so you leave a sermon or a service or whatever in a pietistic context with a bunch of marching orders, and the emphasis has been on the ways that you're failing to do as you should and the ways that you need to go then do better.

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And you, at times, rightly, can be confused as to where your security and your assurance come from because of this.

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We like to say this, John, and I want you to riff on this some. We like to describe pietism as a kind of prove -yourself theology.

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So what you're being exhorted to do all the time, it's like, yes, Jesus, yes, amen, Jesus. We love

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Jesus, Jesus, precious Jesus, absolutely. He died for us. He is our righteousness. But then you need to go and prove you're legit through your disciplines and your obedience or your desire to obey or your affections.

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You fill in the blank. Through the transformation of your life, go prove you're legitimate. And as we always say, you can't do it like that.

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You can't reverse engineer this thing. Streams only flow downhill. They don't flow uphill. Sanctification flows out of justification, not the other way around.

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That's right. John, go. Yeah, man, this is the one where we get the most objection.

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People call us antinomian and all kinds of things. So we're going to take our time and do our best here and probably answer most of the objections in this

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Emperor of Vermonda podcast for those who are interested. We will save the objections for SR because I want to talk about Jesus before we're done with this.

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This is probably where Theocast got its boost. People started paying attention to what we were saying because we were one of many.

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We will never take credit for anything because Justin and I have never said anything new unless it was sinful.

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Even that, there's nothing new under the sun. We are only pulling up the carpet off of the hardwood floors.

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We're dusting off the books and pulling them off the shelf from theology that has been handed down to us from our brothers and sisters before.

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We got distracted by the new and shiny. We got distracted by fear and doubt.

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All of a sudden, what the gospel was meant to be, which is our hope and driving factor for everything that we do, became cluttered by things that worked.

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So fear worked for a while. Then you have all these different mechanisms of things that work.

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Well, pietism can be seen in any denomination and almost in any religion that's out there.

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We look at Joel Osteen and someone would say, well, that's not a very pietistic, what are you talking about?

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It's very pietistic because your blessings from God are based upon your performance and really your attitude.

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Good attitude means good blessing. Bad attitude means no blessing. It's basically one plus one equals two.

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Your obedience plus God's promises equals assurance, and that's not how it works.

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That gives you a reason to boast. That means you can say, I know I'm a

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Christian because of my actions. Well, there's a massive problem with this in that there are a lot of Christians who did things that are horrendous and they're not justified.

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They're not okay. They shouldn't have done them, but they didn't disprove their loyalty or they didn't disprove their faith before Christ because their sin got the better of them, which is what the

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New Testament warns us can happen. I mean, James even literally says in chapter one that your own desires can lead you away and cause you to fall into temptation.

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And then he says, don't blame God for this, but he doesn't question their salvation. Justin, what's interesting about the

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New Testament is that Paul is very clear, and Peter and the Hebrews, that your faith in the gospel is the starting point.

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You can't put anything underneath faith as the foundation. Faith is the foundation that everything else is built upon.

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And then upon that, we can see as our faith is strengthened, we will see, as Peter says, 2

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Peter 1, 3, he says, add to your faith these things. What's the foundation?

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It's always faith in Christ. As a matter of fact, in verse nine, he says, if these qualities are not yours and increasing, you have forgotten that you have been cleansed from your former sins.

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He goes back to the foundation. Pietism does the exact opposite. Pietism adds faith to the foundation.

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The foundation is really your actions, your attitude, and your desires.

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And then they say, oh, yeah, yeah, and faith. Or maybe I agree with that, or maybe the way I might frame it is, the foundation is this kind of mixture, this concoction of faith and your obedience.

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That's the foundation of your Christian life, right? That's right. And it's interesting, like you gave that equation of the one plus one equals two.

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If I've got to have a sum total of two to be assured, my obedience one plus the one of God's promises equals two, my assurance.

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I think you said rightly, well, if that's true, that provides room for boasting, which the

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New Testament contradicts that notion. We've got nothing to boast in, Christ alone. The other thing I'd say to that is if one plus one equals two, what about those of us who are very aware that we don't have a full one to chalk up in that obedience column?

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Maybe on my best day, I'm at a half or at a third or a fourth.

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It's like, well, like a 1 .20, 0 .25 plus one equals 1 .25 on the assurance scale, and I don't have any.

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That's the issue. And this is why we get email after email after voicemail after voicemail from people who are wrestling mightily with assurance, and they're like,

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I don't have any. I just don't know that I'm that I'm in the Lord Jesus. And we talk to these individuals. And I mean, I have a church full of them.

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I'm one of them, John. I mean, for goodness sakes, right, like where we constantly are questioning our legitimacy because we know the corruption that remains within us.

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This would be a lot simpler if perfection was attainable in this life or if at the moment of regeneration, we just didn't have the corruption of the flesh anymore.

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This would be pretty easy. But because of the already not yet piece, because of the fact that there still is remaining corruption in our flesh, yet we are a new creation.

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Yeah, right. We literally are utterly unique in the scope of all the world because we're born again by the spirit of God.

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We are regenerated in our inner man, yet we still have the corruption of the flesh. And so we now have this war on our hands.

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Well, that in a pietistic kind of framework results in a lack of assurance all over the place, unless you have people who are so deluded into thinking that they're righteous that they're not worried about it.

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But we don't want that. We want people who are very aware and tender when it comes to the sinfulness of their hearts.

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But then if you're telling them that they've got to be at least obeying enough and performing well enough in order to really be assured, it's like, well, all right, which is it?

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Do I need to work for assurance or am I assured in Christ? And nobody can explain that to me. It's kind of mysterious, you know, right.

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And actually, it's not that mysterious. No. And I do find in, sorry, Justin, I do find in pietism that the list of what we should be doing that we come up with is often very contrary to the, if we're going to say that if there was a list, which there is, we'll get into it,

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I know. But the list has more to do with some kind of personal development, whether it's

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Bible reading, discipline, dietary actions, fasting, prayer, church attendance, whatever.

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The list, basically, you look at the stoic person and you say to yourself, well, that person's a very righteous.

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Well, obviously they're a Christian and you could give Judas that entire. I mean, Judas was so trustworthy that they gave him all the money.

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That's all. So you don't need Christ inside of you to do good moral acts.

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The problem is you need Christ when you fail to do those, because James says if you fail in one area of the law, you fail in all areas of the law.

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But what it is interesting is that there are in the New Testament multiple times where there is a list given as saying, all right, my disciples are the ones who do this.

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And what's interesting, Justin, it's the thing that no one wants to do, which is interesting. He says, you will know that you are my disciples by the love that you have for one another.

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Or as 1 John says it, if you say you love God and you don't love your brother, it's right.

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So what's interesting to me is that pietism doesn't seem to emphasize that because that's, yeah, that's the hardest thing of the

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Christian life, right? And it requires a work of the spirit to do that.

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It really does. But what that pietism doesn't emphasize are things that the Bible does not emphasize.

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And they create rules and regulations like the Pharisees did that we are not called to obey, not to any measure.

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And my question is, too, to that point, is that how much of these things must we do?

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And no one can answer that question. So when we emphasize the gospel, now we have the motivation to love our brothers and we love them imperfectly.

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That's fine. But pietism basically creates watermarks for the Christian life.

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And if you don't hit those watermarks, you should question yourself. I mean, I've literally had people say, John, why don't you ask your congregants if they're reading their

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Bibles? Like, it's a great way to know if they're a Christian or not. To which I'm like, how much

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Bible reading should I get them to know to justify that they're saved? There's just no way of ever answering that question.

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Yeah. And we are to live in light of the word of God in everything we do. You know, we're to grow in our knowledge and understanding.

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All those things are true. And we've done a number of podcasts about how that happens most effectively in the church corporately.

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Right. Yeah. We are so prone, John, to seek to quantify everything, to codify everything.

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We've got to measure our progress like we would a child's height against the wall. I mean, we've talked about those things over and over again. And pietism, that really is the project of that kind of thinking, is we're going to measure things and we're going to gauge how well a person is doing spiritually in the

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Christian life by how they're improving in this discipline or that discipline or their affections or whatever it may be.

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I know whenever I ask people, you know, how are you doing and how are you doing spiritually? Right. And immediately they respond with all the things that they're reading or how this is going in their life.

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It's like, yeah, but with all due respect, you haven't answered the question. You know, it's you've told me about all these things you're doing, but you've not told me how you are.

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You know, how about trusting Christ? Anyway, that that's just kind of a little diagnostic piece to maybe illustrate how we are all so prone to think in pietistic ways of I need to prove how

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I'm doing spiritually based upon how I'm doing in my disciplines or whatever it may be. Really quickly, before I move to our last talking point,

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John, I want to make this general comment because I know we're going to answer objections in SR, but I want to be kind of clear.

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I think the title of the episode, right? Why the gospel terrifies Christians. We've already talked about several of the ways that the gospel itself is a little bit threatening or confused and all these kinds of things in different streams and how there's all this other stuff that we focus on.

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When you come into a pietistic context or a place where the law and the gospel have been mixed or you come into a dispensational kind of fear based context and you preach the unfiltered, pure gospel of Jesus Christ, that he's done everything and that he's the point of the entire

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Bible and all these things, people get very nervous because their immediate questions are, well, guys, yeah, but what about righteousness?

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Well, guys, yeah, but what about obedience? Well, guys, yeah, but it matters how we live, right? Like those are the questions that people ask because they assume that in preaching the gospel the way that we are advocating for, that we are then throwing righteousness and obedience and a concern for how we live out the window to which we're like, that's absurd.

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And I'm going to continue thinking and talking in these ways as we get to our final talking point. And maybe we'll have a minute to talk generalities before we go to SR.

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Maybe not. Here we go. Last thing that I want to bring forward, and I know John agrees, this was prompted by some interaction on social media recently.

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I had the privilege this past Sunday of preaching Psalm 1 and 2 at Covenant Baptist Church here in Asheville, North Carolina. What a wonderful passage of the

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Bible. And I, along with a number of the Reformed through history, as well as our Lutheran brothers and sisters, they would agree with us on this.

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I preached Psalm 1 and 2 in the following way. Jesus is the blessed man of Psalm 1.

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Blessed is the man. And he is the Messiah who we're going to learn more about in Psalm 2.

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Psalm 1 -1, blessed is the man who does not walk in the way of sinners, etc., etc.

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Psalm 2 -12, blessed are all who take refuge in him. And now, in between that and in preaching

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Jesus is the blessed man, I'm just going to go ahead and say it. You can go listen to the sermon at this place. You're hearing me talk about this today.

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Go listen to the sermon if you want to. There's plenty in there about living in light of God's word and what this means for us in the church and all of these things.

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But I began and I ended with Jesus is the blessed man and blessed are all who take refuge in him.

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And that idea on social media created a firestorm when I just put some posts up about that in recent days.

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People are writing essays on my Facebook page about how concerned they are, you know, that like in literally asking the question.

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But, you know, because Psalm 1 often taught the way of the righteous, the way of the wicked, we need to be righteous. That's the general modern commentary take.

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I was super discouraged in reading commentaries. I was like, good grief. I've just, I mean, I've literally skimmed through and I've read through pages and pages and pages on Psalm 1 and there's no

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Jesus anywhere, apparently. Like he's not even here. And yeah, so you say this,

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Jesus is a blessed man. And immediately people respond with this question. Well, brother, but aren't we to pursue righteousness and flee from wickedness?

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My response is, duh, of course. But Jesus as the blessed man in whom we take refuge is where I begin and end as a preacher.

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And if you don't, are you preaching a Christian sermon? Like if you get up and you're like, oh, but what about the original context?

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And it's like, I hear you. I hear David's the author. I agree with you. And ultimately

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God is the author of this book. God is the author of the scripture. And we are told by Jesus himself and the apostles demonstrate this pattern, that we're to understand the

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Psalms, the law and the prophets to be a testimony about Jesus Christ. And we preach him unashamedly as the point of the entire thing.

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And it's amazing to me, John, how when you get up and preach or you advocate the preaching of legitimate

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Christ -centered sermons, many other like self -professed reformed brothers and sisters lose their minds and immediately start to freak out about, yeah, but bro, what about righteousness and what about obedience and what about sin?

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Do we not care about any of these things? And I'm like, yes, we do. And we preach Christ and then we preach all of these other things as we rightly preach law and gospel.

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And we help people understand the uses of the law and how we should see the pursuit of righteousness and the pursuit and fleeing from sin underneath the sufficiency of Jesus Christ and all that.

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And then last thing before I throw it back over to you, because this relates to our disciplines comments. Yeah. In Psalm 1, you know, verse 2, verse 2 is, you know, he meditates.

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The blessed man meditates on the law of God day and night. Another way that we tend to just misunderstand all this. We read that word meditate and we immediately assume quiet times.

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We assume special times that I need to set aside for devotions. It's not at all what it means. In the context, it's clear that that means that this man lives his entire life in light of the truth of God's law.

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God's law, he reflects on it in all of his daily ongoing normal activity.

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It's a way of life. It's not punctilious devotional moments, you know, and it's just it demonstrates how twisted we've gotten a lot of these things.

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And the fact I just was shocked that the fact that Jesus is the blessed man of Psalm 1 would be so offensive to Christians, you know, it's like, how in the world have we gotten to a place where we are scared to death and offended by the preaching of Jesus himself from all the

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Bible? Anyway, John, say something because. No, well, yeah, no, it's great.

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I was enjoying it. This is goes back to the act of righteousness of Christ where prophetically we are.

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We are told multiple times in the Old Testament that Jesus is going to be the one the Messiah is going to be the one that comes and perfectly obeys the law on our behalf.

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I mean, this is the covenant covenant. Come on. Right. So David, I'm here for it, John, receives the Davidic covenant, is also the one who writes

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Psalms one. And those are the things that when you don't understand the Bible from a redemptive historic understanding of Scripture, there is an original context.

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Yes, but there is a greater context here as a greater context. I got my cheering section over here.

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I'm pumped. But this is why this is important. Obedience is paramount.

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It is what Christians do. It's who we are. Now, if you if you if you miss that, then you miss even

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Christ. It's like those who love me will do my commandments. Amen to all of that. But the question is how and why the why is what

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Justin and I are trying to get at and how. So you cannot obey anything in the eyes of God that would be acceptable ever in your own works and in your own righteousness.

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God will not accept your works because James says and Paul that if they're not done perfectly, they're not acceptable.

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So if you fail in one area, you failed in all. If you're trying to be clothed in your own righteousness, you will not please

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God. This is why it says without what it's impossible to please him. It doesn't say works.

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What does it say? Last time I checked, Hebrews 11, 6 says without faith. Without faith. Faith in what? Not your works.

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It's faith in the work of Christ. Right. So we want Jesus to be the man in Psalm one because he perfectly did what we could not do.

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We just forget that we do not obey because God thinks our works are acceptable.

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They're only accepted because of Christ Jesus. In other words, when you get to heaven and when God looks at your works, they're only going to be acceptable because of what

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Christ has done in you for you on your behalf. Therefore, your good works are necessary because who are the we say this all the time?

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The benefactor of those are the lost. They need to hear the gospel. So we need to obey by preaching the gospel and our brothers.

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They need to be encouraged. But we get confused in thinking that somehow those good works are now also used as a means to gain favor with God.

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I'll just say this and I hand it back to you, Justin. You cannot lose favor with God.

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How do I know this? Because if you're in Christ by faith alone, through Jesus Christ alone, there is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.

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So we can't be condemned. So you cannot lose your favor. You also cannot earn your favor because Paul says that by the power of the

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Holy Spirit, your inheritance is kept, which means everything that belongs to Jesus belongs to you.

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And how is it kept? It's not kept by your obedience, brother. It's kept by the power of the

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Spirit. This is why pietism is so dangerous because it literally weakens both of those.

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You must maintain your acceptance before God and you must increase your inheritance with Christ by your obedience.

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And that is a lie. I'm just going to camp for a second. We're here.

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We're talking about Jesus. I'm going to say a couple of things from Psalm 1 that I think are helpful and then you can take us over into SR.

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I think even as you look at the first two verses of Psalm 1, the mood and the tense of the verbs there make it clear that what's being described is a righteous man who never does the following things and who always does the thing of meditating in God's law.

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Never and always are big statements, brother. Jesus never walked in the council of the wicked.

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And the question is, all right, well, how about you? Every day. Jesus never stood in the way of sinners.

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How about you? Right. And he never sits in the seat of mockers or scoffers.

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How about you? And he delights in the law of the Lord always. And on his law, he meditates day and night.

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How about you? Right. I mean, immediately, like if you're really thinking that Psalm 1 in this regard, because people will say this, this is the introduction to the

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Psalter. It's the gatekeeper of the entire Psalter. And they say, the modern renderings, interpretations, the pietistic kind of Calvinistic understanding is, it's the doorkeeper of the

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Psalms in telling us about the way of the righteous and the way of the wicked, and we need to be righteous, to which

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I would say, okay, if that's true, if Psalm 1 is the doorkeeper, the gatekeeper to the entire

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Psalter in that sense, how does an individual get past the threshold of even its first verse? You can't.

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You can't. And again, I just go back, I begin and end with this. Blessed is the man,

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Psalm 1 .1, the end of Psalm 2 .12. Blessed are all who take refuge in him, the Son, the promised

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Messiah. And Psalm 1 and 2, many will know, originally were written as one poetic unit. It's very clear that the

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Messiah, the Lord's anointed, the Son of the Father is the one who is the blessed man of Psalm 1.

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And we should go to all the scriptures with this kind of lens on. You talked about the redemptive historical framework.

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You talked about covenantal realities, the Davidic covenant, the promise of a son of David who would be a faithful son of God, who would keep the law and represent the people.

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If you understand those things and you read Psalm 1 and 2, it's like light bulbs start going off and we can now actually preach a

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Christian sermon. Because I grow weary, John, and this is another podcast for another day of guys.

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Guys will say that, like, we need to preach Christian sermons. And then they'll go to Psalm 1 and they'll give me 35 minutes of really good commentary on the text and original context and these kinds of things.

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And they'll give me some good law thoughts that are true, some of them convicting, some of them helpful, you know, in ways that I can think about my life.

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And we're 40 minutes in to a Christian sermon and there's no Jesus in it. And then we'll insert the plan of salvation.

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You know, God made us, we fell, Christ came, respond in faith and repentance and call it a

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Christian sermon. And I'm just like, bro, I'd shrivel up and die under that. And I'm not trying to be uncharitable.

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Like we need to preach Christ. And the fact that the preaching of Jesus, the way that we're talking about is frightening to Christians, I think is indicative and illustrative of a larger systemic problem.

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Anyway, now that I've encouraged us all, John, please rest in Jesus.

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Trust, take refuge in the blessed man who is Jesus Christ. And he, through his righteousness, then makes all of us to be counted among the righteous that in Psalm 1 6, we're told the

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Lord knows the way of the righteous. That's right. Right. He knows, loves, and assures us and promises us eternal life.

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Jesus has secured it for us. Take refuge in him. Well, we'll continue this conversation. There's a wonderful community of those who have been supporting

50:07

Theocast and are part of this reformation going forward of making sure that we uncover the gospel.

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Now we're not here to claim anything, but that of sinners in desperate need of Christ.

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So we have another podcast, Justin and I, to do. It's a little bit more pointed. It's fun. We enjoy it. It's called

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Semper Reformanda, Always Reforming. It's a part of a community that we have called Semper Reformanda. There's an app online community that we participate in.

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It's growing faster than I thought it would be exciting. So you can come join the conversation, talk to Justin and I over there.

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And I'll just end with one thought as we leave it, and this is where we'll pick it up over there. What's hard about that,

50:45

Justin, is that basically what we're telling people is that they have to trust that Christ is sufficient to obey on their behalf, and that's hard to do.

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We don't like to trust other people. So you can answer that and comment on that in the next podcast.