It's been a while since I've sent out a 'thought' for your consideration and encouragement. I was preparing for, and then doing, two weeks of ministry in India. Now that that has passed, it is back to work as normal!
This thought comes to you
from the Spring 2011 edition of Leadership Magazine. 
It is written by Lee Eclov,
pastor of Village Church in Lincolnshire, Illinois. Though it is aimed at
preachers, I found it a good word for all Christians to
consider, since if we are sharing our faith (as we all should be) we
will eventually face the difficulties that come when we need to share
hard truth without violating the grace of the Gospel. Enjoy.
Preaching Hard Truth in the
Age of Grace
"A young man
approached me after I'd preached on Mark 8:34 ("If anyone would come after
me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me"). I'd
quoted Bonhoeffer: "When Jesus calls a man, he bids him come and
die." The young man hemmed and hawed, then said plaintively, "I feel
I never do enough for God, so a sermon like that is hard for me."
There it was -- the
theological tension between doing and grace. The tension was clearly expressed
in that young disciple's face. I felt the weight too. Had I somehow turned,
"deny yourself and take up your cross" into a way to earn salvation? Had
I shortchanged grace?
In-your-face, prophetic
preaching poses a challenge for gospel preachers. How do you get up and preach,
"Repent and sin no more," when the congregation has just sung,
"Jesus Paid it All"? Prophetic preaching often goes to the dark heart
of bad behavior just when our people have gotten used to hearing about
"grace that is greater than all our sin."
The potency of New
Testament preaching is not in scaring the hell out of people. There is the
urgency of MUST in prophetic sermons, sure, but grace adds the beautiful counter-melodies of FORGIVEN and ABLE. Our preaching is one way
God fulfills his new covenant promise to write his law on our
hearts.
Hebrews 12:18-26 explains:
"You have not come to a mountain that can be touched and that is burning
with fire; to darkness, gloom and storm...but you have come to Mount Zion... to
Jesus, the mediator of a new covenant." Living on Mount Zion has
this in common with the responsibility laid upon God's people at Mount Sinai --
"see to it that you do not refuse him who speaks." But for gospel
preachers, these demands are tuned to grace.
Gospel preachers bring more
potency to the oughts and musts of holy living than Old Testament prophets ever
could. The gospel sends us out to do right, to deny ourselves, to wash
feet -- but to do so because God is our loving Father, because in Jesus we are
forgiven already, because the Spirit places God's love in our hearts.
Yet there is something about
passages heavy with commands that stirs the moralist in us. Why is it so easy
to sound angry, to become religious taskmasters? Jesus warned of teachers who,
"tie up heavy loads and put them on men's shoulders, but they themselves
are not willing to lift a finger to move them." It is hard to do
justice to both law and grace in our preaching.
We are most likely to find
the tender balance when we have processed our texts through our own hearts in
prayer before we stand to preach. We confront ourselves there in God's presence
with his righteous commands and take the measure not only of our righteousness,
but also of our faith. We see what we can do and what we can't. Then we bring
to our sermons sympathy born of our own struggle. We invite people into our own
Gethsemane and urge them to "watch and pray lest you fall into
temptation."
We misunderstand grace if
we think its only about forgiveness. Grace has backbone. It was grace that
confronted the rich young ruler with his poverty. It is God's grace that warns
about hell and shows us the glory of God until we say, "Woe is
me!" Grace is what we are sent out to offer to others, without
price. It's not just something that we are forever taking from God. In
preaching, we insist that God's people carry grace, and we outfit them with
grace. Preaching that is alive with grace wrenches the remote control from
people's hands, snaps off the TV, and pushes them out the door to live like
Jesus.
My heart went out to the
young man who stood before me in the foyer. I told him how I struggled with the
same battle of fearing my failures. Then a gospel idea dawned on me. I'd said
in my sermon that Peter received power only after his crowing denials woke him
to his deep need. I reminded the young man of that. "When you see your own
inadequacy so clearly, you are near that place where Peter died to himself.
That is where you find Jesus' grace to strengthen you." The grace
change moved over that man's face like dawn. Muscles relaxed. Eyes
widened. He smiled in a kind of relief -- the kind only the gospel can
give."
As a pastor I can
assure you it is difficult on many occasions not to stumble into preaching
a mere morality that suggests that we can become more acceptable to God
the more we do for him. Yet thankfully the Spirit brings to mind the
Gospel truth that jolts me from such vain fantasies and
reminds me we could never earn even the smallest bit more of God's
acceptance, or love, than Jesus purchased for us through the merits of His
life, sufferings, death and resurrection.
It is He (and He alone) who
made us, and makes us, acceptable to
God! As believers we work FROM God's grace, not FOR God's grace. We work from a
position of acceptance and security, not to earn a position of acceptance or
security.
The merits of Jesus,
credited to me by faith, not only make me acceptable, they make me
responsible -- that is, "response-able" (able to respond
to the gospel's imperatives). Commands not grounded in grace
merely leave us feeling hopeless, but commands issuing forth from grace
give us both the desire and ability to do as He commands. And there is a big difference between the
two approaches! One crushes, the other liberates. One
drives us into the ground, the other helps us to "soar on wings like
eagles" and fly (Isaiah 40:29-31).
With you in the struggle to
remain true to the Gospel even when sharing hard truth, Pastor Jeff
