Lost Doctrines Cross in Life of a Believer — E.A. Johnston

The Cost of Discipleship Beyond Easy Optimism

Today's modern evangelism paints a rosy picture of becoming a Christian, that if you become a Christian, then your life will be all sunshine and honey blossoms, and we hide the reality that to be a Christian is to live a life of discipleship that has hills and valleys, victories and defeats.

The False Promise of the Prosperity Gospel

Some evangelists take the positives to an extreme and preach only a prosperity gospel that if you take Jesus, you will automatically have health, wealth, and happiness, but it isn't so. Those kind of preachers are more interested in fleecing the flock than helping them because they just want to help themselves to your money.

Denying Self and Taking Up the Cross

You have to realize, friends, that there is a cross smack dab in the middle of the Christian life Jesus told his disciples. If any man will come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me, for whosoever will save his life shall lose it, and whosoever will lose his life for my sake shall find it.

Crucified Christ and the Cost of Following Him

The bottom line, friend, is a crucified Christ must have crucified followers. One must count the cost to being a Christian. Anything worth having in life has a sacrifice attending it. What cost counts and what counts costs.

There will be a constant battle with the world, the flesh, and the devil. I like what my friend William MacDonald had to say about discipleship. Bill MacDonald wrote the widely popular Believer's Bible commentary and he wrote the following words on faulty evangelism in our day.

The Missing Repentance in Easy Believism

It's important that we listen carefully to his words as he describes easy believism. At first blush, the method and message might seem above criticism, but on closer study we are forced to have second thoughts and to conclude that the gospel had been oversimplified.

The first flaw is the missing emphasis on repentance. There can be no true conversion without conviction of sin. A second serious omission is a missing emphasis on the Lordship of Christ, Jesus' first Lord, then Savior.

Hiding the Terms of Discipleship

A third defect in the message is the tendency to keep the terms of discipleship hidden until a decision has been made for Jesus. Our Lord never did this. The message he preached included the cross as well as the crown.

The result of all this is that we have people believing without knowing what they believe in many cases. They have no doctrinal basis for their decision. What I like his comments, friends, because they are so true.

Recovering the True Gospel and the Lost Doctrine of the Cross

We have watered down the gospel so much in our day to make it more palatable to sinful man that in the process what we preach today bears little resemblance to the real gospel of the Son of God. Jesus told his followers about the cost of following him.

Christ’s Costly Example in Matthew 8

We see this clearly from Matthew 8, 19 and 20. And a certain scribe came and said to him, Master, I will follow thee whithersoever thou goest. And Jesus saith unto him, The foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man hath not where to lay his head.

In our pulpits in the land we need to be honest with folks and we need to recover the lost doctrine of the cross in the life of a believer. Remember this, friends. The Christian life is lived via the cross.