A great sermon by Dr. John MacArthur summarized: I hope I haven’t missed his main points:
There was recently a survey of ‘evangelicals.’ People were defined as evangelicals if they believed the Bible, if they believed Jesus and the resurrection, the gospel, and if they felt they were responsible to communicate the gospel to other people. Those who believed this were considered evangelicals.
Check this, though: the survey revealed that the majority of ‘evangelicals’ really have no idea what they believe. One survey question, “everyone is born innocent,” agree or disagree? 65% of evangelicals agreed. Another: “the Bible is not literally true,” agree or disagree? 55% of evangelicals agreed. Finally, “God accepts worship from all religions.” 56% agreed. “Jesus was a good teacher, but not God.” 43% of evangelicals agreed. It seems that half of evangelicals are not Bible seekers, or are apostate—without knowing it.
This is so shocking, so dystopian, that anybody who presumably has a sound sense of Biblical doctrine could ever answer “agreed” to these untruths. How did we get ‘evangelicals’ who don’t believe what is necessary to be saved, let alone be a true evangelical? Dr. MacArthur believes “this is the legacy of their pastor/leaders.” People don’t rise above their teachers. Truth is, the evangelical pastors and churches, over the last 30 years, have been too busy trying to find ways not to offend non-Christians, and trying to take the offenses out of the message. They design approaches to non-believers that don’t create hostility, or rejection. But that man-truth voids the gospel of the truth.
Why do they do this? Because, honestly, the gospel is offensive. The ‘good news’ is hated by non-believers. Let’s focus on the main reason why that is so. Let’s select John 15:18:
“If the world hates you, you know that it hated Me before it hated you.
One thing that the original disciples knew, the world hated Jesus. Especially the Jews. (The “Christians” had a large part in making this possible). People professed to following God. Of course, Jesus is God Incarnate. But they were blind to that. Once they heard the message of Jesus and He preached it, they rejected it—and Him. But why the hate—toward Him who was the most merciful, compassionate, loving Person in all the world? Here’s the answer, in blunt language in John 7:7:
The world…hates Me because I testify of it that its works are evil.
That’s called the “Doctrine of Depravity,” a Biblical doctrine (don’t worry, I’m not going to try to make you Calvinist). It declares that the whole human race is sinful. But that ‘negative view of me’ brings out hate in everyone unsaved. People generally consider themselves ‘good enough,’ but many have a dominant sin of Pride. It’s easy to create an image of ourselves that escapes ultimate condemnation—by spinning a web of delusions. Man says that he is good—anything without acknowledging that his ‘deeds are evil.’
You can see, in the Gospel of John, how the hate plays out. In 5:16, the offense was He was doing these things on the Sabbath. He could have avoided much of the hate by only doing God’s work six days a week, but God doesn’t work under man’s restrictions. Limiting God? Who would do that? In 5:18, Jesus said the Jews were plotting already to kill Him. It’s only the fifth chapter of John and they want Him dead already.
Of equal offense to them was that Jesus called God His father, making Him equal with God in the Jewish religion. They judged that ‘blasphemy.’ Of course, their thinking that was irrational because His deeds were things that only God could do. Later in John, they tried to arrest Him, they wanted to stone Him, but His time was not yet.
Isaiah 53 prophesied that He would be an offense. Definitely proven true; the Jewish leaders treated Him as nobody, nothing. But He was compassionate to widows, to the disabled, to the children. He brought a message of eternal life and forgiveness. John 8 tells of the nature of their hatred; it wasn’t superficial. Jesus says “you cannot hear my words—you are of your father, the devil.” Speaking of being an offense! But please don’t judge the Jews: ALL OF US began life separated from God; OUR father was the devil. And he still is, unless we are truly saved. We do not start out ‘innocent,’ you see? We got this terrible trait from Adam. Jesus, in v. 45, says,
But because I tell the truth, you do not believe Me
The world’s minds have a natural tendency to be irrational on this subject. We are pre-programmed to believe lies—because, as Jesus says, the devil—our father if we are not saved—is the father of lies. This is a profound diagnosis of the human condition. Please don’t fall into the trap of excessive pride; face up to the truth. It could cost you eternal life.
So the Jews concluded about Jesus, ‘you have a demon. Not us.’ But that is the worst blasphemy of all. Their world was inverted.
Dr. MacArthur gets back to his original point: I don’t know what kind of evangelistic strategy you can devise to tell the truth and yet overcome natural human resistance; the truth is, you can’t. Think of this: Jesus had no strategy to bypass reality. We are, before Christ, sinful, dead, blind, ignorant, darkened to the Scriptural facts, and under satanic control. The truth is alien to our nature.
When we talk the gospel, we have a fear of being ‘brutal’ and so we avoid certain subjects, like the depth of human sin. To speak of that harsh truth takes courage, a willingness to obey Jesus who said we must endure persecution when we tell all the truth. When they begin judging our peculiarity, we should train ourselves to think, that’s what we expect, a further evidence of the sinful characteristics of man. Jesus said we should rejoice when this occurs—even though we kick ourselves because we could have said it better. We hope for them to think rationally and grasp the truth. We thought that ‘that person seemed a wise thinker.’
A side thought: I must reveal the Calvinistic sway of Dr. MacArthur here, his true belief in Total Depravity. The extremists of Calvin (I’m not saying Dr. MacArthur is one) say that we have no capacity to receive the truth, until the Holy Spirit puts the spark of regeneration in us first. This work is done by God randomly, without regard for our previous moral behavior or not. God chooses who is saved and who is not saved—and the latter is doomed to be hell-bound. I do not believe in this, what I consider a non-Scriptural characteristic of God. I agree more with Jacob Arminius, who argued against Calvin in the 1600s by stating that God gave us ‘prevenient grace,’ that He gave us free will to choose Him, even in our tragic condition, if we desired to seek after Him. Despite the bad news we read about Mr. Arminius, he was a godly man.
But let’s not get sidetracked. Our subject is how we have strayed from the whole gospel because people hate to hear it. Because people are so hostile--and the feeling is, “how can we convert them in this state of hostility? Because of their hostility, they’re not thinking straight, so let’s avoid that subject.” Truth is, people aren’t thinking straight to begin with. You can’t do anything to prevent it.
You must let the Holy Spirit do a will in your prospects’ heart.
You should burn the bridge totally, by telling them that they are under eternal judgment of hell. Paul does that at the Areopagus on Mars Hill.
But what evangelistic preaching do you hear now? ‘Jesus wants you happy, He wants you successful. They imply that He is willing to satisfy your carnal desires of truth and loyalty without pain, without inconvenience. Truth is, He paid the price on the Cross for our sin—so He owns us, we are His servants, we should avoid our carnal desires, but simply seek His will for all we do in all our lives. We realize how we deserve hell, but we gained heaven, so we love Him for saving us from hell. We aspire to the goal of seeking endlessly in Scripture for His commands, to find true godliness, and in developing love for our Savior.
Today’s sermons tend to leave off the sinful condition that we’re born into. It avoids that Jesus is the Judge, the Son of God whose second coming will be for judgment. When you die your destination is fixed, hell or heaven, depending totally on your relationship with Christ. Today’s gospel twists the simple fact that Every word in Scripture—even the negative ones—are all true. By not preaching on some subjects, we ‘follow’ by not believing in those subjects. They cover God as an idol of their own making, a grandfatherly, forgiving type, ignoring the Old Testament. Their god accepts pretended humility from all religions. Hence the terrible answers that you see above, as proof that what I’m saying is an accurate conveyance of these false and incomplete messages rampant in society. No other religion has this doctrine, even false forms of ‘Christianity,’ even the Jews in Jesus’ time (they twisted the truths in Old Testament Scripture). They are all dooming more people to hell, teaching that basically, we are good, and we can reform ourselves into a better life (or lives), and eventually, through purgatory or renewal or whatever, gain heaven. Or universal peace. God will approve of our righteousness. Most people go to church to relieve some guilt. Most pastors don’t shake them from this fable. People in the pews, who say they are Christian, hate the bad news that they are sinful, that they deserve Hell, according to God—and thus reveal that they are NOT Christian. Most pastors are deluded enough to believe that the people that are there regularly are Christian. But the pew-sitters believe lies, nuanced distortion of the truth, believe what’s convenient, like the survey above shows. Many of their pastors would get fired if they preached the truth for more than three weeks straight. So it has come to be in the consumer America.. The best Scriptural summary for our history might be in Ephesians 2:1-3--you decide if you are before or after:
And you He made alive, who were dead in trespasses and sins, 2 in which you once walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air (Satan), the spirit who now works in the sons of disobedience, 3 among whom also we all once conducted ourselves in the lusts of our flesh, fulfilling the desires of the flesh and of the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, just as the others.
The concluding statement says that we are all hell-bound, unless we grasp Christ as our Savior, and hang onto Him with all we have. Now see Ephesians 4:18:
…having their understanding darkened, being alienated from the life of God, because of the ignorance that is in them, because of the blindness of their heart;
Ephesians 4:19 adds the word “callous,” in the ESV, which means our minds, unsaved, are scarred over so that we cannot sense the truth. (In Genesis 6, God destroyed humanity except 8 people, saying all He saw was evil continually. Jeremiah says our hearts are desperately wicked). Scripture spells out the sad facts and destination for us, if we don’t dispose of pride and grasp God in humility to avoid hell. We don’t have to look far for it. Jesus raised the issues of hell and final judgment in EVERY chapter of Matthew, from chapter 3 to 25.
Dr. MacArthur simply finally says that we must be reborn, as Jesus told Nicodemus. Truly we cannot fix ourselves, our ‘reforming ourselves’ to heaven is not an option. Truly, we don’t know where the source that sparks our salvation comes from. Maybe we can’t ‘see the light,’ and get the real gospel. We are here maintaining simply the main point of the sermon; that we need to get the truth of Man back into the gospel to appreciate the deep love and sacrifice of God. We need that aspect of the gospel to have the motivation to realize that we need to cling to Him, that we want to forward His kingdom by anything He wants us to do. Only by knowing all the gospel will we be eager to read Scripture to know more about our lover, if I may use the term, namely God and Jesus our Savior. Only with the true gospel will we be eager to follow our Lord’s commands, to please Him and to know what godliness really is. Today’s “gospel” leads to ‘mental assent’ salvation, not deep-rooted enough to fight off the worldliness. If you still have worldiness, you have idols—of materialism, of envy, of greed, of jealousy. God does not save idolaters, because there is no love for Him there. Today’s gospel leads to a ‘Laodicean’ salvation, which is not a salvation at all; as Revelation says, He will vomit us out of His mouth. We will not be part of His body when judgment day comes. Let us spread the word. The reason why churches have lost their power is because they most teach a false gospel. I urge you to read Scripture, and find out what Scripture really says. Try the Gospels first. Your eternal life or hell depends on it.
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