Restoring Kingdom Builders

You win a contest at your church and become Pastor For A Day.  This means you get to preach a sermon on an upcoming Sunday.  Which topic would you choose?  (Just humor me.)

Let’s say you decided to talk about stealing because there has been widespread looting in your community.  Would you slant your message toward warning people not to steal or making things right after they’ve already stolen something?

If you talked about lying, would you present reasons why it’s best to tell the truth in all situations or how to be forgiven after someone has already lied?

This is a continual dilemma for those who preach and teach God’s Word.

Because I grew up in more fundamentalist churches, most of the sermons I heard were preventative.  From our youth leaders to the pastor, we heard talks on “how to avoid having premarital sex” and “reasons not to take drugs” and “why you shouldn’t listen to rock music.”  Those who spoke assumed that if they scared us enough, we would avoid such sins.

Of course, public school teachers in my day warned us not to do those things in Jr. High and High School as well – and it worked in some cases.  (I still remember seeing a film featuring Sonny and Cher encouraging us not to take drugs.)

But as time went on, an increasing number of young people did have sex before marriage and did take drugs – and everyone listened to rock music.  So if a high school kid visited a friend’s church and the pastor’s message was on the prevention of sin, that kid couldn’t relate to the message at all.  Heck, he’d already done all those things and a whole lot more.

Revivalist Billy Sunday exemplified the “preaching against sin” attitude when he once said: “I’m against sin.  I’ll kick it as long as I’ve got a foot, and I’ll fight it as long as I’ve got a fist.  I’ll butt it as long as I’ve got a head.  I’ll bite it as long as I’ve got a tooth.  When I’m old and fistless and footless and toothless, I’m gum it till I go home to glory and it goes home to perdition!”

Whenever I taught, I believed that I needed to make a case for the wisdom of what God said in Scripture.  When He said don’t get drunk, the Lord gave good reasons why this isn’t wise (Proverbs 23:29-35).  When He prohibited gossip, He knew how badly the practice wounds people (Proverbs 6:16-19).  The fundamentalists I heard preach kept telling us, “Don’t do this, avoid that, stay away from this, walk around that.”

But what do you do if you’re speaking to people who have already broken every commandment?  The prevention prescription feels like condemnation to them, not liberation.

What did they need instead?  They need to know that even though they have sinned, God still loves them.  They need to know the wideness of His mercy and the depth of His grace.  And they need to know that when they confess their sins, God will forgive them – every time.

I don’t remember hearing the message of forgiveness very much growing up.

Many years ago, I had lunch with one of my ministry heroes.  He was an educator, a missionary, and an author.  But this man wrestled with perfectionism and an obsessive-compulsive mentality.  As we compared notes, we both concluded that we struggled with certain issues not because of our parental upbringings, but because of the perfectionistic, nitpicky churches we grew up in.

To counter this thinking, some pastors have stopped warning people about sin and just tell people how they can be forgiven instead.  They continually preach that “God loves you” and “I just want to encourage you” and “Isn’t life with God great?”  They intentionally self-censor any talk about sin, focusing instead on how great God is – and how great we all are as well.

This reminds me of the famous quote by H. Richard Niebuhr who said that modern Christianity was about “a God without wrath who brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross.”

That quotation perfectly sums up a lot of preaching in churches today.

When I was a pastor, I tried to maintain a balance between prevention and forgiveness whenever I spoke about sin.

The next time you hear a pastor speak, listen carefully.  If he talks about sin, see if he mentions both prevention and forgiveness.

John 1:17 expresses my philosophy of preaching: “For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.”

The best preachers utilize both grace and truth.  Liberals emphasize grace (or God’s love); fundamentalists emphasize truth (or God’s holiness).

Biblical preachers emphasize both … and God’s love makes virtually no sense unless He is also holy.