The Gospel of the Kingdom is the Gospel of Grace

Hey guys, it's a beautiful Good Friday afternoon where I am in upstate New York. The breeze is blowing, the sun is shining, I couldn't ask for a better day. I was thinking about the Gospel as I was walking, and how churches across this country are going to meet tonight, Good Friday.

I'm going to be at church as well to talk about the passion of the Christ, what Christ did on our behalf, how He substituted His own life for ours, took our sin upon Himself, gave us His righteousness, satisfied the wrath of God, brought us from the domain of darkness into His marvelous light.

And then, of course, on Resurrection Sunday, we're going to be going to church, and we're going to hear about the resurrection of our Lord, how He conquered death, how there's hope for us, and how His promises are true.

And that's a beautiful, wonderful thing. It's actually the central message of Christianity. This is the time when many Christians who don't normally go to church are going to be showing up. And one of the things that I wanted to impart to you is many Christians reach out to me, and they ask me about sermons their pastors have preached, or articles that are shared by leaders at their church, and whether or not they're good or in error.

And one of the main issues is whether or not there's a false gospel, or an incorrect gospel in some of the things pastors have preached or shared. And I can't look at every single article or every single sermon, but what I have seen is a tendency over the years, the last few years in particular, for those in what was once conservative evangelical churches and organizations to sound a lot like Jim Wallace from Sojourners, or Lisa Sharon Harper from Sojourners, or Desmond Tutu, or even going back so far as MLK or something like that.

They sound more and more like those figures, and less and less like the authors of the New Testament. And it's a gradual slide in my opinion. It's not something that happens necessarily once, it could, but oftentimes it subtly creeps into a church, and then eventually it changes the whole very nature of the church.

And the way it works is there's usually a false gospel introduced, a gospel of political activism, and that is set alongside the gospel of grace in Jesus Christ. And then over time that gospel of political activism becomes more and more important than the gospel of grace until the gospel of grace is so diminished it's not even the central message anymore, it's hardly talked about anymore, and more and more the emphasis is on keeping this Marxist drive law, doing good works, and less and less on the finished work of Jesus Christ.

And it gets to the point that the gospel is completely redefined. You just lose the salvation by grace through faith, and it becomes all about political activism. And so I wanted to read for you something I wrote this morning to hopefully make sense of some of this, because I know it's confusing for some people, especially if you're on that slide.

But let me give you some pointers here, if I may, that might help you. And as you go to church and you're listening to your pastor, this is the time of year that if they don't give gospel presentations normally, which they should, they're going to do it.

They should at least, during Good Friday service and Resurrection Sunday. And so listen. Listen to what you're hearing. If you're confused already, if you're not sure, listen to the message you're hearing.

And it's possible that you're on the pendulum still, even if you hear a good presentation, that you're still going in the wrong direction. That is possible. But it's encouraging to know you're not all the way there if you're hearing a really good presentation of the gospel.

So I want to mark out some things to look for and make some delineations here. So this is what I wrote this morning. I said this. Most confusion I've seen over the definition of the gospel involves conflating it with a manner in which it spreads or the fruit it bears.

Preaching the gospel isn't the gospel. Applying Christian ethics to situations isn't the gospel. Enjoying the benefits of living a Christian life isn't the gospel. Yes, these things are connected, but as means and results.

I hear social justice-influenced Christians especially make the gospel about things like racial reconciliation or fighting racial disparities. Some will even go so far as to claim Paul's gospel in Galatians was an individual gospel, while Jesus's was the gospel of the kingdom intended to establish his reign through our works.

Not only does this pit Paul against Jesus, but it reads into Jesus a Marxist political playbook that hijacks the convicting element of the law and uses it to guilt people into building a second tower of Babel confusingly labeled the kingdom of God.

Yet the gospel was never about our efforts. It was always about his. I'm going to stop there for a moment. If you go to church and what you're hearing is you need to be involved in some kind of political activism or you're guilted into that.

I mean, it's a natural thing to have guilt, but you're not intended to go to the cross with that guilt. To deal with it once for all where Jesus has said it is finished, but instead the motivating factor is to get involved in some kind of a political effort or social effort and that will ameliorate your guilt.

That is the response to guilt. Then run for your life. That's what I would say to Christians who go to churches like that. Just run. That is not the answer. More law, more works. That's not how to take care of your guilt.

It's to go to the cross. It's to repent. It's to go to the cross. Jesus Christ offers forgiveness. Of course, once you're forgiven of your sins, you love God and his law and you want to follow him. That's a response.

That's fruit, but it's not the root. It's an outcome. It's a result. It's not the basis for. That's the key difference here. The problem in the book of Galatians which you had Judaizers coming in and saying, it's on the basis of circumcision and Christ's atonement, but on the circumcision to your works, that you can claim to be a Christian, that you can be part of the body of Christ, that you can be part of the kingdom of God.

That's just not true. You are transported from the domain of darkness into the kingdom of God when you put your faith in Jesus Christ.

It's faith.

It's God's work. It's not your work. The gospel was never about our efforts. It was always about his. The gospel is the power of God to salvation for those who believe. The good news is that God has made a way to transport sinners from the domain of darkness into the kingdom of God.

More specifically, it is what Jesus accomplished on Calvary's cross, crying, it is finished, thus satisfying the wrath of God against the sins of believers and conquering the curse of death, thus proving his claims were true and his mission was accomplished.

It is those who are poor in spirit, knowing they had nothing to offer God from their works and relying on him to make a way that inherit the kingdom of God. Matthew 5 .3. The kingdom of God is within the hearts of those who believe the gospel.

Luke 17 .21. It was not with the Pharisees who thought they could keep the law, but didn't realize how high God's standards actually are. Matthew 5 through 7. And by the way, I'm going to stop here. That is game over for any Christian.

Eric Mason being the first one in my mind as I think about this. Any Christian or so-called Christian who says that we got to go look to South Africa's anti-apartheid initiative, which he does, or Germany's denazification program, or some external thing that's not even Christian in the world or in the culture or something that's not even a redemptive Christian thing made up of people who aren't even Christians and say, that's where we take our cues from.

That's part of the gospel. That's what Christians need to be involved in. They got to march with BLM because that's part of the gospel. That's our gospel duty. Any Christian who does that, run. Run. The Pharisees didn't have the kingdom of God because they thought that they could actually keep God's law and they couldn't.

Jesus raised the stakes. He said, if you look with lust, that's adultery. If you hate in your heart, that's murder. Pharisees were guilty. Who are the ones that Jesus says actually the kingdom of God belongs to?

It's the poor in spirit.

It's the meek.

Those who are persecuted for the sake of righteousness. Those are the ones that inherit the kingdom of God. Those are the people. Guess why? Because they know that they're not good. They know they can't keep the law.

They know there's nothing they can give to God. So they are humble and they're at his feet for mercy. They're begging God for mercy. That's the penitent position of a Christian. We beg God for mercy. And without any illusion that we are able to keep his law because we know we're not perfect.

And any requirement to keep his law as a basis for any kind of salvation only damns us even further. That's not good news. Good news is what Jesus has done, him and him alone. And so the kingdom of God is not going out and reforming the prison system in this life, in this temporal world right now, partnering with non-believers to do so.

It's not the kingdom of God. It's not, hey, look, the atonement is applying to the prison system even though no one's saved in the prison system. No, the kingdom of God is within the hearts of those who believe the gospel.

Go to Luke 17. Check it out. So this is what God has brought us. And yes, there's going to come a time when God will reign on this earth in a way that he's not right now, in a physical way. His moral law will be applied in every single situation.

And we're looking forward to that day when we will reign with him. That's something that he brings about. That's something we're looking forward to. We're in this already and not yet, regardless of your eschatological stripe.

That's where we're at right now. But to think that or to say that part of the kingdom of God, I mean, if I was on the right wing, I could say, you know, how ridiculous does that sound? Part of the kingdom of God is a free market.

Therefore, that's what the gospel is. That's what we need to be about is establishing the free market and getting rid of government regulation. And that's gospel work. That's evangelism. That's political evangelism, to take the title off of Richard Mao's 1971 book that motivated so much of what we're seeing today.

So that's a confusion. That's not the gospel. It's a different gospel when you are merging law with grace. It's Christ Jesus who fulfilled the law of God himself that we look to, not our own efforts to fulfill any kind of law, whether it's God's law or some external Marxist drive law.

What we're seeing today are modern Pharisees trying to convince us that the gospel is about political activism, i .e. our works. At best, this could be fruit of the gospel, but it is not the gospel. The efforts of man will always condemn, but the grace of God brings life.

On this Good Friday, turn to the one who does not condemn, whose burden is light, who made a way we can be transported into his kingdom apart from our efforts. So that's all I have to say. I hope that clarifies some things for you all because I think the confusion often comes in with, well, hey, this is a good thing, what we're doing over here.

This is the fruit of the gospel. It might be Christian ethics. It might be part of Christians being obedient to God's law after they're saved and using the law as a guide because the law is a curb, it's a guide, and it's a schoolmaster.

But it is not ever a basis for salvation. It is not good news that in so keeping the law and in cooperation with Christ's death, we can be transported into the kingdom of God. Nope, you repented, you trusted in Christ with faith, you're already there.

And so that's what I wanted to bring to you today. That's good news, and I hope that you celebrate it this weekend, and I hope that the churches you go to are also celebrating that very clearly and concisely.

God bless.