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About Jesus Steve Sweetman My Journey Through The Ecclesiastical Maze Part 7 The
Gospel To Get What I recall most about
the gospel message I heard while
growing up in Evangelical circles was, “come to Jesus to get your sins
forgiven so you can go to Heaven”.
I now call this the “gospel to get”, as in, get saved, get
forgiven, get heaven, get healed, and get whatever we can.
One reason why our church
preached this “gospel to get” was because they taught something
called “Entire Sanctification” as an experience with Jesus
subsequent to being “born again”. Theologically
speaking, this is called a “second work of grace”.
The word “sanctify” means “to set apart for a specific
purpose”, so in Christian terms it means to have your life “set
apart strictly for Jesus”. When
adding the word “entire” before the word “sanctification”, it
suggests that before you have this second experience you’re not fully
set aside for Jesus. The doctrine of “Entire Sanctification” states that you
accept Jesus as your Saviour when you first come to Him, and then at
some future date you make Him your Lord.
When you make Him your Lord, you’re completely set aside for
Him. Yet it seemed to me
that what I heard taught concerning “Entire Sanctification” was
pretty much unattainable. Only
a few people actually got to this “state of perfection” as some
called it. The rest of us
were stuck being just plain old partially sanctified Christians.
I apologize to any non-church person reading this.
I know these strange words and concepts are confusing, but
that’s life in the ecclesiastical maze.
When my friends and I
went to the altar to get saved, we only had getting our sins forgiven
and Heaven in mind. That’s
it. We had to figure out
later how to get sanctified and make Jesus our Lord.
Not making Jesus our Lord at the altar in the first place is
probably another reason why we made so many trips to the altar.
I won’t get bogged down
in all the detailed Scriptural support for my thinking, but “Entire
Sanctification” seems to be more of a product of certain
theologians’ over-active thinking processes than anything else. A few of my favourite
words found in the Bible are spoken by Peter in the very first Christian
sermon ever spoken. He
taught in Acts 2:36 that Jesus is both Lord and Christ. Evangelicals
recognize that fact. The
title “Christ” means that Jesus is the one who saves us, or rescues
us from the If you read Peter’s
message carefully in Acts 2 you’ll note that he does not teach a two
stage conversion process. He
merely states the gospel as it is, and that is, Jesus is both Lord and
Christ, therefore you repent. “Repent” means that you change the
direction of your thinking in relation to God and the path you’ve
chosen for your life. You decide to live for Jesus and not for yourself.
Once you’ve decided to make this change, you give your life to
the “Lord” Jesus. At
that point you are saved. Jesus
becomes your Saviour or your Rescuer upon making Him Lord of your life
when you first come to Him. There’s no “second work of grace”
here. The New Testament
gospel is simple, “allow Jesus to be the Lord of your life and you
will be saved”. If I could have
understood this as a youth I probably wouldn’t have rushed to the
altar so many times to get saved, but I didn’t.
I wanted my sins forgiven, and when I doubted that they were
forgiven, I felt unsaved. I
should have just handed my life over to Jesus in the first place instead
of trying to wait for some elusive future date.
The Greek word
“pistis” confirms what I’m saying.
This word is translated as “faith”, “trust” and
“believe” in the New Testament. “Pistis”
means to “trust, submit to, or hand over to”.
So when the Bible says to have faith in Jesus, or believe in
Jesus, it’s not just telling us to mentally agree with what it says
about Jesus. It’s
telling us to hand our lives over to Jesus because He is the final
authority over all there is. Because
of this we don’t just trust Jesus to get us to Heaven.
I like to say it this way. Salvation
is all about trusting Jesus with every aspect of our lives, which
includes getting our sins forgiven and going to Heaven.
If all of what we
understand about becoming a Christian is getting our sins forgiven and
going to Heaven, we’ve started out on the wrong foot. We’re
trapped in the “gospel to get” which influences how we relate to God
and the church. Our
mentality becomes, “what can I get from God and what can I get from
the church”? This is one reason why
church leaders plead with people for help with church activities with
little success. We’ve been
trained to get from the church, not to give to the church.
The popular “Seeker Sensitive” entertainment style of doing
church in the last 25 years has promoted this thinking to our detriment.
The teachers in this movement simply say, “come to our meetings, watch
our production, and enjoy yourself”. Those
who taught this style of church are now reaping what they’ve sowed,
that is, non-productive church attendees who do nothing but sit and
watch the show. Now that I
think of it, this isn’t all that different from the average
Evangelical church. It’s
only more refined. It’s
interesting to note that some of the I’ve seen the “gospel
to get” mentality also in
the “Hyper-faith and Prosperity Movement”.
These people believe they can expect to get from God all that
they ask for, as long as they have lots of faith.
But faith has more to do with giving than getting, as in giving
or trusting your life to Jesus. New
Testament thinking is not getting everything we claim we should have.
It’s about getting what Jesus wants to give us.
He only promises to give us the necessities of life and that
which we need to promote His Kingdom.
I’m not saying He won’t give us more. He might well do that,
but anything beyond the necessities is a bonus.
I’d like to elaborate on this,
but that’s another book. I’ll just quote one
sentence Jesus spoke, knowing that one sentence isn’t sufficient proof
for anything, but it is an example of His thinking.
In Matthew 6:33 He told us to “seek first His Kingdom and His
righteousness and ‘all these things’ would be added unto you”.
The words “all these things” refer to the things He just
mentioned in the preceding couple of verses, and they weren’t
Cadillacs and good stock picks. They
were the necessities of life. Beyond
these necessities He is quite willing to give us lots of things that
will help demonstrate the Our consumer driven
society has infiltrated the gospel message we preach and our thinking
about church to the extent that we now shop around for the best church
deal. We study church web
sites to see what they offer and we pick the one of our liking.
This isn’t really New Testament thinking, but it is life in the
“ecclesiastical maze”.
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