What Happened to the Power of the Gospel? | Jon Moffitt

The Credibility and Power of the Gospel

What happened to the credibility of the gospel? When you remove the third dimension of your understanding of Scripture, you're removing the power from the gospel. See, when God says, I will save you, and you don't read how He did it before, you can wonder if it's really going to happen.

What's the ground that I'm standing on? When you don't believe in the sufficiency and the power, you don't believe in the magic of God, it's easy to slip in another gospel, another explanation. And it doesn't come from our king.

He doesn't provide another gospel. His is sufficient. This is why Paul on multiple occasions says, be weary of other gospels. Be afraid when there might be a logical gospel. A gospel that makes you uncomfortable, that is the gospel.

A gospel that makes sense is most likely not the gospel. For us who have the Spirit within us, He will never be able to remove our faith, this evil realm. But He can weaken it, as Paul says. He can distract us, how 2 Peter says it, He can cause us to be ineffective and unfruitful.

The Serpent's Cunning and the Weakening of Faith

Going back to, you don't have to turn there, turn with me to 1 Peter, but referencing 1 Peter chapter 1, referencing, again, 2 Corinthians 11 and 3, but I am afraid that as the serpent deceived Eve by his cunning, your thoughts will be led astray from sincere and pure devotion.

If your hope is wavered from Christ, it's because the third dimension did it to you. That's Paul's conclusion. I'm afraid that he's done it. So how do we put the credibility and the power and the weight of the hope of the gospel back in so that it actually does its intended effect?

Well, brother, I stole your thunder and you stole mine. 1 Peter chapter 1, blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ according to His great mercy. Man, you read that Old Testament, it requires a lot of mercy upon Him.

He has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. For the sake of time, I'm not going to read verse 4, but I will read verse 5. Who by God's power.

God's Power to Keep Salvation and Inheritance

You're not keeping yourself. You're not keeping your inheritance. You're not keeping your sanctification. You're not keeping your position. So you go back and you realize God is proving to you there is no human and there is no God.

There is no demon. There is no angel. There is nothing. There is no nation, no president, no Nero who can beat me because I've won. Every story God wins. Then you read that and you go, yeah. You see, if Peter really means that God holds my salvation, there's no bully bigger than Him.

There's no being who can outsmart Him. See, the hope of the gospel rests in the power of a supernatural God that has nothing to do with your physical capacities. That's the hard thing about the hope of the gospel.

The Modern Gospel and Human Capacity

That's what's changed about the modern gospel. All of our hope is placed upon the reality of our own capacities, our own power. We misquote passages such as, without holiness, no one will see the Lord.

And you know where we're pointing? What holiness we're pointing to? Your power to obey. You want to stand up to God's power with that? Go ahead. I'm going to go ahead and just crawl up in His hands and say, do your best because I've already seen it.

I'm good. I got nothing to worry. You see, Paul doesn't rest on just making a statement. Hey, you know, you don't need to be afraid. You ever talk to a salesman who's trying to sell you something you really don't want, and he's doing his best to give you all the evidence as how the benefits of other people?

And then you talk to someone who's actually owned it and experienced the benefit of it. You don't need no salesman. Why? Their experience sold you on the reality that it's good for you. Paul does not stand up and say, here are all the reasons and listens.

He pulls the God of the old and says, do you remember him? He's the God that saves. And it's not like anything you've ever seen. And by, let me tell you, you're going to be under the attack of the mind.

This is why, how many times does Paul and Peter say, be sober minded, be sober minded, be watchful, protect your mind. We as elders and shepherds have to be on the lookout for those. I mean, 1 John literally says, test the spirits to make sure they're of the Lord.

That's another third dimension. When everybody ever like hiccup on that, we'd be like, well, man, it sounds Pentecostal to me. What? We speaking in tongues now? What's going on here? That's because Paul really believed that the angels of darkness would appear and start twisting the truth that we rely on.

This is why Paul says, if myself or anyone else, I don't know if Paul thought maybe someone could like shape-shift and look like him. If someone shows up and looks like me and preaching another gospel, that isn't me.

Or that angel shows up that was freed. Didn't even have that thought till now. Super fascinating to think about though. If an angel shows up and starts telling you a gospel that makes sense, reject it because it's not God's gospel.

Donald Gray Barnhouse in this book on the invisible war made this observation that I found helpful for me. If you're like me, whenever I have to put something together, I was recently building a bike rack for my kids' bikes and I read the instructions and I was like, I've got no clue.

What did I do? Flipped it over and looked at the photos, the illustrations. I need to see the end product, what it's supposed to look like. We need the illustrations to prove to us this is going to work.

Barnhouse makes this argument that he has let the realm of the rebellion have their best shot. Do your best so that my people will know I win. I win. Who can separate you from that? They've never been able to do it.