Chicken and Egg; Which Can We Do Without?

To a Christian, this should be an easy question: Righteousness or Good Works – which one causes the other? Of course, to any Bible-dedicated student, the righteousness of Christ imputed from his sacrificial death is the catalyst of a Christian’s good works (a.k.a., fruit of the spirit, Christian charity, etc.). However, the superficial, experiential, easy-believism preached from today’s pulpits only focuses on the results of grace – works – and therefore neglects the cause – God. I’ve been fascinated by the cause-result relationships throughout doctrine, philosophy, education, life, and whatever else, because as a human race, we tend to cut corners, and this often incurs the disaster of either no result or one other than the result we were seeking in the first place. The irony lies in the fact that seeking only results leads to bad ones, thus, a vicious cycle.

Christianity has assimilated to this country’s obsession with pragmatism, where the proverbial end justifies the means. This sounds all fine and dandy, except that one forgets that an end cannot be achieved without means specified to that end. Rocket science, I know. Today, I’m focused on how this tragedy is destroying two important areas in my life: Gospel presentation and Church focus. I’m not advocating the dismissal of end-goals – since goals are important in any endeavor – but the achievement of quantity has extremely sacrificed the regard for quality.

Superficial Half-Christ

What is the primary goal of a church: “To preach Christ and Him crucified” (1Cor 2:2) or to bring in people – saved or preferably unsaved? Most people would argue that you cannot do the former without first accomplishing the latter, and therefore the church is so consumed with bringing in new crops of fresh faces that they “leave their first love” (Rev 2:4). Pragmatism has invaded the Church in many ways, but they all boil down to pleasing people over pleasing God. Churches by the masses have remodeled everything – from the look of the building, to the pews, to the music, to the gospel itself – to accommodate and “bring in” people who normally would not go to church. Therefore, churches become non-churches in order to look like a gym, a lecture hall, a business corridor, in order to become more “camouflaged” or “user-friendly”. I guess the idea is to disguise the fact that this is a church, and therefore people are so stupid that they can be fooled to believe that they are not actually in the house of the holy and demanding God of the universe. However, people must either actually be this stupid, or else they are so smart that they can truly trick themselves to believe that this new informal atmosphere reflects a newly uncaring, easily-satisfied, and thus unholy God. But enough about what the engineered structure says, let’s go to the next segment of the “worship service” one notices.

Is it just me, or does the term “Praise and Worship” denote singing praises TO God and not about ourselves singing to Him? If you ever want to get a good laugh (or become enraged, like me) actually listen to the words of today’s modern “worship” music. For one, you will hear the words “I” or “me” more than you will hear any name of the Lord. Not only that, but “worship” has become a mind-numbing, purely emotional experience instead of an edifying practice. For instance, John MacArthur calls most modern “worship” songs “7-Eleven” songs because you repeat seven words eleven times. You will then notice that it is precisely during this blank, meaningless incantation that most people feel the impulse to raise their hands, cry, or take other emotional actions, most likely because since the brain is not functioning, they have more mental energy to focus on other bodily actions. This is in stark contrast to most hymns of yore (and even recent ones) that contain deep, enriching, and beautiful doctrinal praises to the Lord. These words could even be read as sermons and studied as commentaries, they are so pregnant with meaning! But if we included an electric guitar solo, a hymn would be way too long, and we’d much rather have the cool music than intellectual worship, thank you very much. Modern churches have done away with hymns, I’ll argue, because people don’t want to think. But more on that later.

There are many other aspects about the modern church (or it may be more accurate to say current, since today’s church is really more postmodern in the sense of philosophy [more on that later too]) that are more geared toward pleasing unbelievers than real believers (let alone, GOD!), but for the sake of windiness, I’m going to skip to the “hinge upon which all turns” (to quote Luther speaking of predestination), which is the presentation and adherence to the Gospel of Jesus Christ. If churches focused on this, the matter of results would take care of itself, since Jesus Himself said that “The gate is small and the way is narrow that leads to life, and there are few who find it” (Matt. 7:14). Jesus himself said that our churches would be small, that is, if our churches are filled with believers (as is the intent of a New Testament church), so then why are we trying to make them so big? Tithing, you might say? [sarcasm:] But I thought “the love of money was the root of all sorts of evil” (1 Tim 6:10). HMMMM… maybe Paul’s words could be directly implied here, since the love of money is causing millions of churches to turn away from the gospel to a self-indulgent, self-loving, Opra-like motivational speaking center.

What perplexes me most about today’s most popular health-wealth-happiness preachers is the total lack of God in their focus. They focus on YOU, the consumer (Yes, I did say Consumer). They try to explain what the Bible means to YOU, what it does for YOU, and how it’s going to make YOUr life better. It’s as if we created God to make us feel better about ourselves, an idea which seems to take its lead from Nietzche and other raving atheists of modernity. For example, on 60 Minutes a while ago, one of the most well-known “Christian” preachers and authors had to dodge an accusation that his “Christian” book explains how to be a better Christian, but scarcely mentions, God, Jesus, or the Bible. How ludicrous is that?!? This type of behavior robs Christianity of any validity among people with half of a brain. However, this take (or lack thereof) on God is logical when one considers that all natural people do not want to come face to face with what is holy (ahem, God), because when you see what is absolutely (yes, there are absolutes) holy, a person’s logical response is to see that he himself is not nor can be.

In the same way, Jesus has become like a over-marketed drug – something that can enhance your life, mask your symptoms, help you hit homeruns, and make you a better you (pun intended), but when it gets down to it, the widely-marked Jesus does not deal with your real problem, because, well, we don’t want to admit that there’s a deeper, not-so-easily-fixed source of one’s pain, discomfort, or lack of satisfaction with life. Jesus humbled Himself from His throne on high, took on human flesh, lived among us, died on the cross, and raised Himself from the dead for one purpose only: the redemption and atonement of his Bride, the Church (all believers). Sadly this truth is usually either thrown out as meaningless terms or else disregarded because it begs the question: What are we redeemed and atoned from? Ah…the forgotten twin of the gospel message.

The most disastrous result of church pragmatism is that people do not like to hear about their sin, and so therefore preachers stay away from the dirty, disgraceful side of the gospel. The first of the two sides of the gospel is: Who God is (Holy, Righteous, and Justly unable to accept anything less), versus who we are (even the best of us Unholy, Unrighteous, and completely Unable to earn God’s favor and salvation). That’s the side that most preachers today conveniently leave out because who wants to hear that we have no chance to get to heaven? In comes the infomercial transition: “But wait! There’s more!” to the second side of the gospel: “But God demonstrates His own love toward us: in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us” (Rom. 5:8). The beautiful doctrine of imputation clarifies that “He made Him who knew no sin to be sin on our behalf, so that we might become the righteousness of God in Him” (1 Cor. 5:21). Thus, on the cross, He became our sin (which is why God forsook Him), and therefore as believers in Him as our Savior from the eternal punishment we deserve, we are given his earned righteousness and entrance into heaven. However, the second half of the gospel – God’s grace – does not make sense without the first half – our sinful predicament. In other words, without knowing what you’re saved from (sin), you can in no way know what you are being saved to (righteousness), and I’d argue that you’re just not saved, period.

The Overwhelming Questions

The problem with most current churches is that they are borrowing from pagan philosophies the ideas that there is no truth, that anyone’s interpretation is as good as anyone else’s, that we don’t need a Savior, and so on. The trend is to bring God down to our level, so that we don’t have to feel bad about not being able to get up to His. The real gospel is saturated and drowned out by sensationalism, and useless, foundationless emotion. People don’t want to think, because our sin is so extremely blatant, that thinking (once you are presented with the truth) for any prolonged period of time will usher in a sea of grievances.

My questions are: when this half-Christ is preached, can a person be saved from his sin if he does not even consider himself a sinner destined for hell? When this half-Christ is preached, can a person truly enjoy and praise God for grace as a gift he did not earn? When this half-Christ is preached, can a preacher understand that speaking the gospel through scripture is in itself the application? When this half-Christ is preached, can we start treating individual sins as symptoms of our Original Sin nature and not its cause? I would argue no to each of these questions, because when we fast forward to the “happy ending” of the gospel tale, it means nothing because in fast forwarding we don’t consider the fiery dragon that is slain within us for the victory, and therefore we cannot truly love our Savior.