Moralism – Already Not Yet

January 14, 2018

Moralism is Not the Gospel (But Many Christians Think It Is)

Al Mohler: One of the most amazing statements by the Apostle Paul is his indictment of the Galatian Christians for abandoning the Gospel. “I am amazed that you are so quickly deserting Him who called you by the grace of Christ, for a different gospel,” Paul declared. As he stated so emphatically, the Galatians had failed in the crucial test of discerning the authentic Gospel from its counterfeits. His words could not be more clear: “But even if we, or an angel from heaven, should preach to you a gospel contrary to what we have preached to you, he is to be accursed! As we have said before, so I say again now, if any man is preaching to you a gospel contrary to what you have received, he is to be accursed!” [Gal. 1:6-7] This warning from the Apostle Paul, expressed in the language of the Apostle’s shock and grief, is addressed not only to the church in Galatia,

April 8, 2014

Moralism is Not the Gospel (But Many Christians Think it Is)

Albert Mohler: One of the most amazing statements by the Apostle Paul is his indictment of the Galatian Christians for abandoning the Gospel. “I am amazed that you are so quickly deserting Him who called you by the grace of Christ, for a different gospel,” Paul declared. As he stated so emphatically, the Galatians had failed in the crucial test of discerning the authentic Gospel from its counterfeits. His words could not be more clear: “But even if we, or an angel from heaven, should preach to you a gospel contrary to what we have preached to you, he is to be accursed! As we have said before, so I say again now, if any man is preaching to you a gospel contrary to what you have received, he is to be accursed!” [Gal. 1:6-7] This warning from the Apostle Paul, expressed in the language of the Apostle’s shock and grief, is addressed not only to the church in Galatia,

April 6, 2013

Christianity or morality?

“Christianity is confused with morality. It has been very common in this country in all ranks of society. It is what is sometimes called ‘public school religion,’ which was started by Dr Thomas Arnold of Rugby. His idea of Christianity was that ‘it is morality touched with emotion,’ nothing more! The Christian is the perfect little gentleman, the man who does not do certain things! But that is not Christianity; that is not the kingdom of God. You can do that yourself. Yet that is what Dr Arnold taught; it is nothing but ethics and morality, a negative, cold, miserable religion, something that was always prohibiting everything and never giving anything at all. Now it is a part of the preaching of the gospel to say things like that. I do not defend the Victorians; I think they did great harm to the kingdom of God. They really did bring it down, most of them, to the level of morality

The Sin of Sodom

From Tyler Kenney at Desiring God: As Bible-believing Christians, we are known for our convictions against sexual immorality. But are we known equally as well for our contempt for religious arrogance? Scripture clearly states that sexual immorality is sin (Matthew 15:19; Romans 13:13; 1 Corinthians 6:18; Galatians 5:19, 1 Thessalonians 4:3, etc.). We must also remember, however, that this is only one bad fruit of our rebellion against God, one among a list of many others, including idolatry, theft, greed, drunkenness, reviling and swindling (1 Corinthians 6:9-10). And all of these, God says, are just spin-offs of a more deep-seated trouble. Speaking to a disobedient Israel, the prophet Ezekiel declares, Behold, this was the guilt of your sister Sodom: she and her daughters had pride, excess of food, and prosperous ease, but did not aid the poor and needy. They were haughty and did an abomination before me. So I removed them, when I saw it. (Ezekiel 16:49-50) In the context surrounding this passage,

Repenting of Our Good Works

Tim Keller from his book The Prodigal God on the need to repent, not simply of our unrighteousness, but our righteousness also: What must we do, then, to be saved? To find God we must repent of the things we have done wrong, but if that is all you do, you may remain just an elder brother. To truly become a Christian we must also repent of the reasons we ever did anything right. Pharisees only repent of their sins, but Christians repent for the very roots of their righteousness, too. We must learn how to repent of the sin under all our other sins and under all our righteousness – the sin of seeking to be our own Savior and Lord. We must admit that we’ve put our ultimate hope in both our wrongdoing and right doing we have been seeking to get around God or get control of God in order to get hold of those things. It is

Reach them with the Amazing God not helpful tips

From Kevin DeYoung: I beg of you, don’t go after the next generation with mere moralism, either on the right (don’t have sex, go to church, share your faith, stay off drugs) or on the left (recycle, dig a well, feed the homeless, buy a wristband). The gospel is not a message about what we need to do for God, but about what God has done for us. So get them with the good news about who God is and what he has done for us. Some of us, it seems, are almost scared to tell people about God. Perhaps because we don’t truly know him. Maybe because we prefer living in triviality. Or maybe because we don’t consider knowing God to be very helpful in real life. I have to fight against this unbelief in my own life. If only I would trust God that God is enough to win the hearts and minds of the next generation. It’s his

October 6, 2009October 6, 2009

“We preach Christ crucified” – Do we?

Martyn-Lloyd Jones: “I am increasingly convinced that so much in the state of the Christian church today is to be explained chiefly by the fact that for nearly a hundred years the church has been preaching morality and ethics, and not the Christian faith. It is this preaching of the ‘good life’, or being ‘a good little gentleman’, and of viewing religion as ‘morality touched by emotion’, as Matthew Arnold put it, that has been the curse. Such men have shed the doctrines; they dislike any idea of atonement, they dismiss the whole notion of the miraculous and the supernatural, and ridicule talk about re-birth. Christianity to them is that which teaches a man to live a good life.” (Life in the Spirit, 19) (HT: Matthew Morizio)

September 14, 2009September 14, 2009

Moralism is NOT the Gospel

The following paragraphs are the conluding remarks of Al Mohler’s artcle: Why Moralism Is Not the Gospel — And Why So Many Christians Think It Is […] Just as parents rightly teach their children to obey moral instruction, the church also bears responsibility to teach its own the moral commands of God and to bear witness to the larger society of what God has declared to be right and good for His human creatures. But these impulses, right and necessary as they are, are not the Gospel. Indeed, one of the most insidious false gospels is a moralism that promises the favor of God and the satisfaction of God’s righteousness to sinners if they will only behave and commit themselves to moral improvement. The moralist impulse in the church reduces the Bible to a codebook for human behavior and substitutes moral instruction for the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Far too many evangelical pulpits are given over to moralistic messages rather

Exhortation without the gospel degenerates into mere pharisaism

“A message that merely advocates morality and compassion remains sub-Christian even if the preacher can prove that the Bible demands such behaviors. By ignoring the sinfulness of man that makes even our best works tainted before God and by neglecting the grace of God that make obedience possible and acceptable, such messages necessarily subvert the Christian message. Christian preachers often do not recognize this impact of their words because they are simply recounting a behavior clearly specified in the text in front of them. But a message that even inadvertently teaches others that their works win God’s acceptance inevitably leads people away from the gospel. Moral maxims and advocacy of ethical conduct fall short of the requirements of biblical preaching… A textually accurate discussion of biblical commands does not guarantee Christian orthodoxy. Exhortations for moral behavior apart from the work of the Savior degenerate into mere pharisaism even if preachers advocate the actions with biblical evidence and good intent.” Bryan

June 9, 2009June 9, 2009

10 Reminders re: Gospel Faithfulness

From Tony Reinke. Ten notes about gospel faithfulness, a collection derived from Galatians 1:6-10: 1. Gospel faithfulness is required of the entire church, not merely its pastoral leaders. 2. No matter how religious we claim to be, no matter how close to the truth we reside, no matter how recent our conversion, sinners are all prone to an unintentional replacement of the gospel with a counterfeit. 3. According to Paul, we can relax our grip on the biblical gospel suddenly and dreadfully easily (ταχέως). 4. To add anything to the gospel is to desert the gospel. 5. To add anything to the gospel is to have a “no-gospel.” 6. To modify the gospel is an act of defection from God. 7. The content of the gospel is unchanging and “embodies a core of fixed tradition which is normative so that no preaching deviating can be called ‘gospel’” (Fung). 8. No authority—not even an angel from heaven—has the right to modify

June 8, 2009

The gospel is what God has done in Christ – Carson

“By contrast, the first two greatest commands—to love God with heart and soul and mind and strength, and our neighbor as ourselves—do not constitute the gospel, or any part of it. We may well argue that when the gospel is faithfully declared and rightly received, it will result in human beings more closely aligned to these two commands. But they are not the gospel. Similarly, the gospel is not receiving Christ or believing in him, or being converted, or joining a church; it is not the practice of discipleship. Once again, the gospel faithfully declared and rightly received will result in people receiving Christ, believing in Christ, being converted, and joining a local church; but such steps are not the gospel. The Bible can exhort those who trust the living God to be concerned with issues of social justice (Isa 2; Amos); it can tell new covenant believers to do good to all human beings, especially to those of the

June 5, 2009June 6, 2009

Beware of Moralistic Therapeutic Deism

From my experience this is true of Christian youth culture in Europe, but not in Africa and Asia. My thanks to Jason Robertson for this: Dr. Albert Mohler reports that when Christian Smith and his fellow researchers with the National Study of Youth and Religion at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill took a close look at the religious beliefs held by American teenagers, they found that the faith held and described by most adolescents came down to something the researchers identified as “Moralistic Therapeutic Deism.” Therapeutic Deism consists of beliefs like these: “A god exists who created and ordered the world and watches over human life on earth.” “God wants people to be good, nice, and fair to each other, as taught in the Bible and by most world religions.” “The central goal of life is to be happy and to feel good about oneself.” “God does not need to be particularly involved in one’s life except when God is