Listen or read the following transcript as D. A. Carson interviews on the topic of Faith and the Gospel in this address from The Gospel Coalition Sermon Library
Five centuries ago, in taverns and public houses across Europe, the masses would gather for discussion and debate over the latest ideas sweeping the land. From one such meeting place, a small Cambridge inn called the White Horse, the Reformation came to the English-speaking world. Carrying on the tradition of the early Reformers, welcome to the White Horse Inn.
Mike Horton: Hello, and welcome to another broadcast of the White Horse Inn. On this edition we’re discussing Faith and the Gospel. The White Horse Inn. Know what you believe and why you believe it. Joel Osteen, in his best-selling book Your Best Life Now: 7 Steps to Living at Your Full Potential, writes, “Don’t sit back passively. Hey, I’m just looking out for your own happiness when I say, ‘You do your part and God will do his.’ Sure, we have our faults, but the good news is God loves us anyway.”
Instead of accepting God’s just verdict on our own righteousness and fleeing to Christ for justification, Osteen counsels readers to just reject guilt and condemnation altogether. “If you will simply obey his commands, he will change things in your favor. God is keeping a record of every good deed you’ve ever done. In your time of need, because of your generosity, God will move heaven and earth to make sure you’re taken care of.”
It may be law lite, but make no mistake about it. Behind a smiling boomer evangelicalism that eschews any talk of God’s wrath or justice, there’s a determination to assimilate the gospel to law, an announcement of victory to a call to be victorious, indicatives to imperatives, good news to good advice. The bad news may not be as bad as it used to be, but the good news is just a softer version of the bad news.
The sting of the law may be taken out of the message, but that only means that the gospel has become a less demanding, more encouraging law whose exhortations are only meant to make us happy, not to measure us against God’s holiness. So while many supporters offer testimonials to his kinder, gentler version of Christianity than the legalistic scolding of their youth, the only real difference is that he smiles when he says it.
In his therapeutic milieu, the sins we need to avoid are failing to live up to our potential and failing to believe in ourselves, and the wages of such sins is missing out on our best life now, but it’s still a constant stream of exhortations, demands, burdens. “Follow my steps, and I guarantee your life will be blessed. If you’ll simply obey his commands, God will change things in your favor.” It’s still a message of God keeping a record, and if you follow my steps, you’re sure to be blessed.
This is what we might call the gospel of “God loves you anyway.” There’s no need for Christ as our Mediator, since God is never quite as holy and we’re never quite as bad as to require nothing short of Christ’s death in our place. The harsh version of works righteousness, legalism, is “Do all of these things and you’ll go to heaven; fail to do them and you’ll go to hell,” but the kinder, gentler version is, “Try harder and you’ll be happier; fail to do them and you’ll lose out on God’s best.”
If one’s greatest problem is loneliness; the good news is that Jesus is a reliable friend. If the big problem is anxiety; Jesus will calm us down. Jesus is the glue who holds our marriages and families together, gives us purpose for us to strive toward, wisdom for daily living. There are half-truths in all of these pleas, but they never really bring hearers face to face with their real problem, that they stand naked and ashamed before a holy God and can only be acceptably clothed in his presence by being dressed head to toe in Christ’s righteousness.
“How can I be right with God?” is no longer the question, when the real question is not my holiness in God’s presence but my happiness for myself. That puts in, I realize, kind of stark terms the issue that is before us … namely, faith and the gospel. Here to discuss this very important subject with us, as always, are Dr. Kim Riddlebarger, pastor of Christ Reformed Church in Anaheim, California; Dr. Rod Rosenbladt, Lutheran minister and professor at Concordia University in Irvine; the Reverend Ken Jones, pastor of Greater Union Baptist Church in Compton, California; and I’m Mike Horton. I teach at Westminster Seminary California.
Gentlemen, I think of J. Gresham Machen’s line. He was writing against liberalism, and today you could say the same thing about the state of evangelicalism, unfortunately. He said, “Do you have good news for me? I’ve heard your exhortations, and they don’t do anything for me. But do you have news? Then I’ll listen.”
Don’t you think there are a lot of people out there who, over time, said, “Once upon a time I believed the sales pitch. I don’t anymore. All it is is exhortations. It used to be exhortations that were legalistic and rigid and strict. Now it’s exhortations that are therapeutic and me-centered, but it’s all about what I do. Do you have anything to tell me about something God has done to save me?” That’s the question the gospel addresses, isn’t it?
Male: Well, in my neck of the vineyard, occasionally we’ll run across people who are burned out by that approach and that understanding of what the gospel is. More often than not, we’ve sort of dragged, or at least lured, people away from it before they realized the problem. In sharing the gospel with people, I have had people tell me, “Well, I don’t need that, because my life is fine. I don’t come from a broken home, so now what do you have?”
Male: That’s usually what I run into. I’ve been sort of surprised within the last weeks and months that there’s this theme coming out that there are people within the evangelical realm who know that something is deeply wrong; they just don’t know what it is. But for the most part, I’ve run into worshipers at these kinds of congregations who are pretty satisfied with the diet they’re getting.
Mike: Our producer recently asked Christians at an evangelical convention.… Speaking of therapeutic approach to Christianity, he needs therapy for all of these conventions he goes to. He asked, “What is the gospel?” Let’s listen to the answers.
[Audio clip]
Shane: What, in your opinion, is the gospel?
Male: The gospel is God’s breathed Word, the Bible, whatever is in there. The truth about what Jesus is.
Male: The gospel. It’s the Word of Christ given to the earth when Christ was here. It was written by man, but it was inspired by God.
Male: The gospel is Jesus Christ coming here to offer us salvation according to what they teach in the Bible.
Female: The gospel is the New Testament.
Male: What, in my opinion, is the gospel? Well, that would be the teaching of the Lord, I imagine.
Male: The gospel would be the gospel of Jesus Christ. That’s why God the Father sent his only begotten Son. A New Testament.
Female: The love of Jesus Christ.
Male: The gospel is the message of Jesus Christ, that he’s died on the cross and brings salvation to all.
[End of audio clip]
Mike: Wow, that was a mixed bag. There were a few good ones in there. Do we discern in some of those responses what happens after you have now a couple of generations of people who have said, “What really matters is that we’re missional, that we are evangelistic”?
Male: Incarnational.
Mike: Yeah, exactly. Not that we are doctrinal. Wouldn’t it be nice if we were evangelistic and could articulate the gospel of the New Testament?
Male: It’s the stress, as you said, Mike, on technologies. I think what we heard is symptomatic of the real problem here. People are so far away from the pages of Scripture that they speak in terms of clichÈs. We did this same experiment years ago, probably 10 years ago. We sent Shane off to the Christian Booksellers Association, and we asked 60 people, “What is the gospel?”
We got the same kinds of answers, but we had one man.… He identified himself as a Southern Baptist pastor, and his answer was, I think, the acceptable answer. “Oh, according to Paul in 1 Corinthians 15:1–7, the gospel is the death, the burial, and the resurrection of Jesus according to the Scriptures.” I think in this we see how far people have moved away from biblical definitions so that they speak in clichÈs.
Male: The thing that I notice is that it’s bloodless. “I’ll try and put the best construction on it. God gave the Son into death.”
Mike: Yeah, there were a few of those.
Male: There were. But by and large, there’s no wrath and there’s no blood.
Male: When I hear some of these responses, it’s going to be hard trying to convince some of these people that Jesus Christ was a real human being who actually died and who was actually physically raised. It’s almost as if none of those facts matter.
Mike: Let’s listen to some more of those recent interviews.
[Audio clip]
Shane: What’s the gospel? How would you summarize it?
Male: The gospel is about Jesus dying on the cross for our sins, so that if any man believes in him he won’t perish but he’ll have everlasting life.
Male: The gospel is Jesus Christ’s way for us to be forgiven. The blood of Jesus takes away our guilt from our sin. That’s the gospel.
Male: Jesus Christ is the King and Lord of all the earth, and that includes his embracing of us because of his sacrificial atonement on the cross.
Male: I think of the gospel more of not a historical fact used for man but used in modern-day terms to help us in everyday living.
Male: The gospel literally means good news. That’s what the gospel means. It means that if you feel like you can’t get help, you know what? You can get help. If you feel like there’s no hope for the future, there’s hope for the future.
Male: The gospel is the good news of Jesus Christ, that God loves the world and wants the world to love him, seeks a relationship with him.
Male: The gospel is a declaration that Jesus Christ died on the cross for all human beings who have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God to demonstrate that he alone is the way and the truth and the life unto salvation and that he offers forgiveness of sins through the shedding of his blood for all men.
Female: For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, his begotten Son Jesus, to die for all of us, that we might through him receive everlasting life and eternally be reunited with the Father who is the Creator of the whole universe.
[End of audio clip]
Mike: Now there were a few in there …
Male: There are some good ones there.
Mike: Yeah, a lot better than the last group.
Male: A really bad one too. I don’t think the gospel has anything to do with history, just how we live. But other than that, there were some very good answers. A couple mentioned the shed blood, Rod.
Male: I know when somebody says they’ve accepted Jesus as their personal Savior.… When you flesh that out, nine times out of ten you’re going to get somebody who’s going to at the end of the day say, “I am saved by what Jesus does, not by what I do.” But when you use language like “Accept Jesus as your personal Savior,” you’ve lost the precision that the biblical language of trusting Christ has.
Mike: The key difference is the gospel in the New Testament (well, the Old Testament too) is strictly limited to the announcement of what God has done in Jesus Christ to save sinners. There’s a lot of really good stuff that the Bible teaches. It teaches a lot of wisdom, a lot of morality, a lot of ethics. It teaches us how we’re to live as people who are in Christ, and so forth, but that isn’t the gospel.
The gospel is an announcement of a very specific nature, like the announcement of victory in Europe. I didn’t contribute to that victory, and yet that victory makes all of the difference for me. I’m going to respond in certain ways to that news. I’m going to follow that news appropriately. It’s going to make a difference in my life, but the difference it makes in my life is not the message, the announcement itself. Here are some more clips from the recent evangelical convention that Shane attended.
[Audio clip]
Shane: Would you agree or disagree with this summary of the gospel? “The gospel is the message of Jesus, who shows us how to live a godly life.”
Male: I would agree.
Male: Yes, it is. I’d agree with that, yeah.
Female: I agree.
Male: Incomplete.
Shane: Why is it incomplete?
Male: Because that’s just a moralistic message.
Shane: Would you agree or disagree that the gospel is the message of Jesus that teaches us how to live a godly life?
Male: I would agree with that.
Male: Yeah, I believe that is. The Bible pretty much just gives us basic instructions on how we need to live our lives and how we need to treat people and just how we need to show the truth that has been revealed to us.
Male: Well, I mean, it does do that, but I don’t know if that sums up the whole message of Jesus.
Shane: The gospel is the message of Jesus, which teaches us to live godly lives?
Female: Yes, I think that’s true in part, but I think that doesn’t encapsulate the whole gospel. I think that beyond showing us the life we should have lived, he lived the life we should have lived.
Shane: What if someone summarized the gospel like this? “The gospel message is about Jesus, who shows us all how to live godly lives.”
Male: I would agree with that in the perspective that that is part of what it is, but I would say maybe a broader scope would be the gospel is how to bring the kingdom of God on the earth, because our job is to be more than just good people; our job is to implement his kingdom on the earth.
Male: In part, sure. But that’s not the entirety of the gospel.
[End of audio clip]
Mike: So we either got, “Yes, I think that’s the gospel,” or “Well, that’s not all of it,” but the point we’re making here is that it isn’t the gospel at all.
Male: That wasn’t any of it.
Male: It is amazing how difficult it is to get evangelicals to know that when we are talking about the gospel or justification, we’re not discounting, nor are we talking about sanctification.
Mike: We’ll get to you in a minute. Can we talk about somebody other than you first? Now for something completely different … as the theologian Monty Python would say.
The apostle Paul, in 1 Corinthians 15, says, “Now I would remind you, brothers, of the gospel I preached to you, which you received, in which you stand, and by which you are being saved, if you hold fast to the Word I preached to you, unless you believed in vain. For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, that he was buried, and that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures.”
Or when Paul says, “He was crucified for our sins and raised for our justification.” Or famously, John 3:16, which you hardly hear quoted anymore.
Male: That’s what struck me. It used to be when you would ask people the salvation question, they could all and would immediately recite John 3:16. A couple did.
Mike: If Christianity has to compete in the marketplace of spiritual therapies, then we’re going to get things like this: “Look, become a Christian so you can have your best life now. Become a Christian so you can solve your marital problems. Become a Christian so that …” All of the therapeutic things.
Contrast that again with Paul’s objective message, where he says, “You didn’t hear me. I delivered to you this gospel that I received myself, and here’s what it is: Jesus Christ was crucified for our sins and was raised on the third day bodily for our justification.” “Well, yes, Paul. Perhaps that’s true, but even if it never happened historically, you’ve been born again. You have had this great experience.”
Male: A touch of glory.
Mike: “You have a personal relationship with Jesus. Your life has been your best life now.” Paul would look at you and say, “So you haven’t read my biography?” Then he would say, and did say there in that same chapter, “No, let me tell you what the stakes are here. I don’t care if it happened to help you with your family. I don’t care if it happened to help you raise your positive kids in a negative world. I don’t care.
None of this counts in favor of Christianity if historically it is not the case that Jesus rose bodily from the dead, because you were still in your sins. If you think the greatest problem is you’re not as happy this week as you were last week, you’re not going to get the problem that he came to solve. You’re going to turn Christianity into therapy.” And Paul says, “I’m here to tell you, the alternative to orthodox Christianity is not moralism but ‘Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die.’ ”
Male: And you among all people are most to be pitied.
Male: Yes, you’ve been taken in.
Mike: You’re dupes.
Male: You’ve been sold a bill of goods.
Mike: Yeah. Not, “Well, you’ve lived a happier life at least.”
Male: Well, and, Rod, as you mentioned, this is our natural inclination, to lean toward a gospel of that sort, because we just want to be fixed, and we just want to be more prosperous. It’s for this reason that the New Testament says you must die first. You have to die.
Male: Yeah, there’s a death involved, and it’s yours.
Male: Yeah, exactly.
Male: And particularly to your view of yourself as better than Charlie. The Latin was coram hominibus. You know, hoping you could stand in judgment because you were better than Charlie. “Look at my neighbor down the street. Now he’s really a mess. I, on the other hand …”
Mike: Yeah, like God grades on a curve. Folks, we’re not the only people here concerned about this matter. This past spring there was a major evangelical conference in Chicago dealing with this very crisis. It’s called the Gospel Coalition, and we recently had the opportunity to talk with D.A. Carson about some of the concerns he presented at this conference. Don, thanks for being with us on the White Horse Inn.
Don Carson: It’s an enormous pleasure to be with you.
Mike: Don, can you tell us a little bit about this new Gospel Coalition? What’s it all about and what are the various problems it’s seeking to address?
Don: Well, what we are trying to do is be very clear about what the gospel is and then work out from the gospel as the embracing term of Scripture, the embracing category, so that the gospel is not seen as something that sort of tips you into the kingdom and then you use all your therapeutic prowess or counseling techniques, or whatever, to get people to grow up after that.
The gospel is the big thing; it’s what the whole Bible is about. Within that framework, it wants to deal seriously with sin and the curse and what Christ’s death was about and resurrection and life to come and being saved from the wrath to come … a huge controlling vision of everything, and out of that to address all kinds of other issues.
Mike: Do you think that the gospel often today is assumed? That is, you know, we assume that people in our churches who are professing Christians understand the gospel, and now let’s move on. Now their diet should be all about how we grow in the Christian life, and the gospel can be sort of left behind.
Don: I couldn’t agree with you more. I think the nature of the fragmentation that is going on is complex, and different sections are going off in different directions, but one of the sections going off is exactly as you describe it. Once the gospel is assumed, then you’re already in danger of losing it. Any teacher (I’ve been teaching now for a lot of decades) knows that his or her students do not learn everything the teacher teaches. They tend to learn best what the teacher is most excited about.
So if the gospel is something that you assume while what you’re excited about is reading the culture or getting people to give generously or sorting out their family lives or whatever.… All of which things are important. I’m not taking cracks at any of them. Once the gospel is assumed, however, the generation after that will understand little of the gospel, and the generation after that won’t even know what it is or downplay it or begin to mock it.
If the gospel is at the center of all of what God has done in redemptive history to reconcile fallen men and women to himself and anticipate the coming of a glorious new heaven and new earth, the home of righteousness, and all bowing before his Son, then this must be the controlling vision out of which everything comes. But there is a rising recognition, I think, in several quite diverse quarters that, “This is what we must have. So help us God. We must have this.” To me it’s enormously encouraging that God seems to be stirring up hearts and minds in diverse quarters.
Mike: Don, of course, assuming the gospel is a problem. You’re trying to bring back a focus on the gospel’s centrality in the life of the church, but clearly, in evangelical circles even, it seems that in some cases even the doctrine of justification is being denied. Not just pushed to the periphery or not understood, but actually denied in evangelical, sometimes even Reformed and Lutheran circles. What do you make of that?
Don: Well, it would be easy to list half a dozen challenges, from the new perspective on Paul, which gets some things right but some things, I’m afraid, deeply mistaken, and from another quarter entirely, the openness of God that makes God very personal and interactive, but somehow along the line he loses his sovereignty and trustworthiness.
Then there’s a third, of course, and that’s just ignoring or assuming the gospel. It becomes sort of a sentimental clichÈ-driven thing but it’s not really well understood. Fourthly, there have been so many warnings against making the gospel so heavenly minded that it’s no earthly good that we have produced a generation that thinks of the gospel as that which makes us into nice citizens and nice people without seeing how much of it in the Bible is driven by escape from the wrath to come.
Unless the gospel is eschatologically driven, and driven also by an understanding that we stand under God’s wrath as we also stand under God’s genuinely loving, warm invitation and command to repent.… Unless we see that ultimately the threat that hangs over us is not that we’ll have failed marriages but that we will perish eternally in hell, we will not see what the gospel really does achieve and provide.
Unless the gospel prepares men and women how to die, it is still a terribly truncated thing. That, it seems to me, has its own attractions to a generation that has been thinking too many thoughts that are small about God. But this is not a time where we should throw up our hands in despair. It seems to me that God may bring horrible judgment on the West, on Europe, on North America. Yes, he may.
On the other hand, in his great mercy he may bring about reformation and revival in wonderful ways, and ultimately he will do that through the preaching of the gospel. So let us be faithful, and meanwhile there’s a new generation that is, on the one hand, attracted to everything that sounds hip and with it, but some are also a bit browned off by its pretensions and by the endless subjectivity and want to be grounded in something a little more stable than that. We, as Christians, need to take our controlling cues, the cues of a norming norm, so help us God, as best we can from Holy Scripture
We need to be recognizing, too, that we are rooted in church history, and trying to make the right kinds of connections with the best Christian thinkers from the past (it isn’t all discovered by us in the twenty-first century), yet at the same time taking everything back to the test of Scripture again and again and again, and not being so locked into culture, whether the twentieth century or the sixteenth century or the twenty-first century; recognizing our own cultural located-ness but recognizing that, so help us God, we bow to only one Lord. That has its own attractiveness of depth and compulsion, it seems to me, in this wandering generation.
Mike: You emphasized the gospel is historical. What happens when we take the gospel outside of this historical context?
Don: Well, one can tackle this one from many, many angles, but let’s consider the resurrection of Christ. Supposing it doesn’t matter whether or not historically Jesus did rise from the dead. After all, the Anglican Archbishop of Perth two Easters ago (he has retired since then) was asked, “Supposing suddenly we found the tomb of Jesus and it really was clear and unambiguous that it was the tomb of Jesus and he was still there, never had resurrected. What would that do to your faith?” The archbishop replied, “Well, it wouldn’t do anything. Christ has risen in my heart.”
Well, Paul doesn’t think in those terms at all. What Paul says is if Christ hasn’t risen, first, the apostles and, in principle, all 500 of the first witnesses are liars. They’re either deceived or deceivers. They’re saying something that isn’t true. When you’re dealing with a historical event, we have access to historical events like every other historical event: through the witnesses and artifacts of that event, and in this case, it turns out that the witnesses would all be lying if, in fact, Jesus has not risen from the dead.
Now in our contemporary world, faith largely means personal, subjective, religious choice. Either that or it’s a synonym for religion or many faiths. In the Bible, faith is validated in part.… It’s not the only validation, but it’s validated in part by the truthfulness of faith’s object, so that if you believe Jesus rose from the dead when, in fact, he didn’t rise from the dead, then, Paul says, your faith is vain, futile, empty, because you’re believing something that isn’t true.
In the Bible, God never, ever, ever encourages us to believe, to have faith in, that which is not true, and that’s also why in the Bible so often faith is fostered by, increased by, established by the application, defense, articulation of the truth itself. In other words, the way you improve faith.… It’s not the only way you improve faith. Faith can be improved by such things as suffering and so on, so that you’re forced to put down deep roots.
But in proclamation terms, the way you increase faith in Christ crucified is not by saying, “Believe, believe, believe, believe,” but by teaching and preaching and articulating the gospel of Christ crucified. Then finally, he says, not only is your faith empty, but if Christ hasn’t risen from the dead, then you’re of all people most to be pitied. In other words, your life becomes a bit of a joke.
You’re not to be admired because you find it personally helpful regardless of whether or not it’s true. You’re to be pitied as someone who is psychologically trying to sort of boost yourself up. But anybody who’s interested at all in truth wants the truth regardless of whether it’s comfortable or not. Rather we say, “You ought to believe this not because we like it but because it is the truth.” Paul says, “Christ died for sinners of whom I am chief. He rose again the third day according to the Scriptures. He was seen by witnesses. This is the truth.”
Mike: Don Carson, professor of New Testament at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School.
Male: God bless him. Was this a conference where there were evangelicals who were worried about their movement?
Mike: Oh many, many, many. Across denominations.
Male: Good for Don.
Mike: Yeah, absolutely.
Male: There are some good things going on.
Mike: By the way, we have a lengthier discussion with Don Carson on a bonus track, so if you want to get that, check out whitehorseinn.org and find out how you can get the full-length discussion.
Male: I haven’t heard in years of large numbers of evangelicals gathering together because they think something is wrong at the core. That’s the first I’ve heard that in a decade.
Male: The Cambridge Declaration was the last time, a significant number, until now.
Mike: So the gospel has to be front and center. Not that we don’t talk about the other things, but that we talk …
Male: It never can be an “of course.” It never can be assumed.
Mike: You can almost, if you’re going to do that, say, “Let the other stuff be assumed. Whatever you do, don’t assume the gospel.”
Male: It scares me how many pastors when I’m talking about themes like this say, “My people know that.”
Male: No, they don’t.
Male: The surveys deny that.
Mike: Now you’ve heard a lot of clips from people at a lot of evangelical conventions. Our producer attended the recent Gospel Coalition conference in Chicago and had a chance to talk to some of the attendees about their concerns. You see something a little bit different, I think … some responses that are a little bit different here.
[Audio clip]
Male: Well, I’ll just say that the fact that we have to have a conference like this speaks to the fact that maybe we don’t understand the gospel as well as we think we do. So I think that the gospel must be embedded in believers’ hearts and, thus, all of our ministry is centered around that. I think that is evidently not in a lot of churches, and it’s not preached in the pulpit.
Male: Yeah, I think that the state of the church is weak where its preaching has been weak, and there’s a famine for real feeding on the solid meat and the solid milk and the bread of the Word of God, so the church’s greatest need is for preachers who will have the courage to declare the Word in a straightforward fashion.
We have plenty of gimmicks and plenty of ways to draw a crowd, but what’s really going to nurture the church’s health for a long-term future is solid expositional preaching of the Word of God. I do think that’s lacking in most pulpits in our country, but I see a resurgence where it’s going to come back. It gives me hope.
Male: I’m from a background, a tradition, where I come here and am very much representative of the biblically illiterate-type person, so I was hoping you wouldn’t be asking me lots of questions after having heard you ask those people. Yeah, there certainly stands to be something said, and I think they’re right. The pulse is dangerously low in my case and in a lot of cases.
Male: Biblical illiteracy I think is huge. I think there are far too many assumptions that we know what the Bible says when we don’t have a clue. Part of the issue is not wanting to offend and needing to finesse things a certain way, such that at the end of the day I’m not so sure you even have the gospel left.
I’m finding too many parallels between what is happening on some of the fringes of evangelicalism and what happened 120 years ago with the liberal church: the concern to become relevant, so you had to update the gospel so it would find a hearing amongst the people. J. Gresham Machen speaks quite prophetically even yet today.
Male: I think justification by grace through faith alone is one of the biggest concerns. There’s one aspect to the church that it’s not even an issue. They’re not even thinking about those questions. Then there’s another aspect of the church.… They are thinking about those questions but going in the wrong direction. So that’s a major concern for me, just to see the eroding of confidence in biblical text and appropriate theological categories.
Male: God is most glorified when we declare what he has done in the life and death and resurrection and ascension of his Son, and the how-to only comes after what Jesus has already done.
Male: It’s not just, “What would Jesus do?” It’s, “What has Jesus done?” If we jump to the moral exhortation without what Christ has already done, that breeds legalism and moralism, and it robs the gospel of its glory and its beauty that it has done something for us that we can’t do but Christ has.
Male: We don’t get beyond the gospel. The gospel is not just this entry thing and then we move on to other concerns of discipleship and sanctification. It all comes back to the gospel. All of our theological categories.… Everything has to be shaped by the gospel or we don’t truly understand what the gospel is all about.
[End of audio clip]
Mike: May God increase the tribe.
Male: Oh, amen.
Male: Amen.
Mike: That’s exactly what we hope to hear from the average churchgoer 15 to 20 years from now.
Male: Now this conference, the Gospel Coalition.… You interviewed Don Carson. This is a conference that he and a group of other guys.… Tim Keller, Mark Dever, Ligon Duncan, and John Piper. It’s the Gospel Coalition, and they’re doing some good things.
Mike: Well, it’s very exciting to see that, and we’re seeing it wherever we go. There really is this growing awareness of the problem and a thirst, a hunger for understanding the gospel itself.
Male: And the solution is so simple.
Mike: It’s not about us, folks. It’s about Christ and him crucified and raised on the third day. That is the gospel.
Male: And what I don’t need, if I’ve finally come to hear God’s law and the standard against which my life will be judged at the judgment, is to be offered spiritual formation or walking a labyrinth or doing the canonical hours.
Mike: Doing, doing, doing.
Male: Away with you.
Mike: “You dress the wound of my people as though it were not serious. ‘Peace, peace,’ they say, when there is no peace.” Christ does not dress our wound lightly. He bears the curse for our sins. He bears our guilt. He took it, cancelled the list of condemnations against us, and raised victorious in triumph over the powers of death and hell.
Male: He is our peace.
Mike: He is our peace, and that is the good news that we have to give the world. Not our peaceful, easy feeling, but the peace that he accomplished by his life, death, and resurrection. We look forward to being with you again next week to talk more about this glorious gospel. See you next week.
