The Gospel Is for the Broken

In this article I want to address a particular problem: What we might do as Christians with those who see themselves as “alumni” of the Christian faith. By that I mean those who once professed that Christ shed His blood, freely justified them before God, forgave their sin, gave them eternal life — but now they don’t believe it.

Given my limited space, I can only deal with today’s “sad ones,” the “having-given-up-on-it-all” ones. (In the full address of which this article is a condensed version, I also talk a little about the gospel of Christ for today’s “mad ones,” the angry ones.)

For some reasons that I think are fairly specifiable, more people than we would like to think leave “Bible-believing” Christianity. Some are sad about it. Some are mad about it. In our day, there are so many of these people that it is hard not to come into contact with them. Many of these people were broken by the church. I know that sounds harsh. As Christians, it’s upsetting to hear words like that. But for many people, this is how they really see what has taken place in their lives.

By the “sad alumni” of the Christian faith, I mean the hundreds whose acquaintance with the Christian church was often one in which they were helped to move from unbelief (or from rank moralism) into professing faith in Jesus Christ. They heard the preaching of God’s law and then heard the announcement of Christ’s work on their behalf on the cross — Jesus as the God-man who met the Law’s demands for them and died for their sin, died to save them, died to give them eternal life. And they came to believe that the cross of Christ was their salvation.

But something happened after that, something that broke them. And, in many cases, I think what happened is nameable. It has to do with what our first president at Christ College Irvine called “law-gospel-law.” It’s that third point that, if executed badly, results in a lot of the “sad alumni” of Christianity. If Reformation folk execute this badly, the sensitive Christian believer can be driven to a slavery as bad as any slavery done by any totalitarian dictator. If the Ten Commandments were not impossible enough, the preaching of Christian behavior, of Christian ethics, of Christian living, can drive a professing Christian into despairing unbelief. Not happy unbelief — tragic, despairing, sad unbelief.

In the beginning, it seemed that now that we had been justified by the death of Christ, we were equipped to obey verses like “Be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect” (Matt. 5:48). Or in 1 John 3:9: “No one born of God makes a practice of sinning.” Or Paul in Philippians 4:13: “I can do all things through him who strengthens me.” And then, the unexpected. Sin continued to be a part of our lives; it stubbornly would not allow us to eliminate it the way we expected. Continuing sin on our part seems to be evidence that we aren’t really believers at all. We start to imagine that we need to be “born again again.”

When the major stress in pulpit and curriculum shifts from “Christ outside of me, dying for me” to “Christ inside of me, improving me,” the upshot is always the same: many broken, sad ex-Christians who despair of being able to live the Christian life as the Bible describes it. So they do what is really a sane thing to do — they leave. The way it looks to them is that “the message of Christianity has broken them on the rack.” To put it bluntly, it feels better to have some earthly happiness as a pagan and then be damned than it feels to be trying every day as a Christian to do something that is one continuous failure — and then be damned anyway.

The key question here is a very basic one: Can the cross and blood of Christ save a Christian (failing as he is in living the Christian life) or not? Most of us would say, I hope, that the shed blood of Christ is sufficient to save a sinner all by itself. So far, so good.

But is the blood of Christ enough — all by itself — to save a still-sinful-Christian? Or isn’t it? Is what Luther said about the Christian being simul justus et peccator biblical or not? Can Christ’s righteousness imputed save a still-sinful Christian? And can it save him all by itself? Or not? I think the way we answer this question determines whether we have anything at all to say to the “sad alumni” of Christianity.

Has the Law done its killing work on these “sad ones?” Boy, has it ever. They need more of the Law like they need a hole in the head. For them, the gospel often got lost in a whole bunch of “Christian-life preaching.” And it “did them in.” So they left. And down deep there is a sadness in such people that defies description.

C.F.W. Walther said that as soon as the Law has done its crushing work, the gospel is to be instantly preached or said to such a man or woman. What the “sad alumni” need to hear (perhaps for the first time) is that Christian failures are going to walk into heaven, be welcomed into heaven, leap into heaven like a calf leaping out of its stall, laughing and laughing as if it’s all too good to be true. It isn’t just that we failures will get in. It’s that we will get in like that. “You mean it was just Jesus’ death for me, that’s why I’m here?” But, of course. That’s the point isn’t it? As a believer in Jesus you won’t be condemned! No believer in Jesus will be. Not a single one!

" Well to be forgiven you must have repentance. "

Repentance is repenting from man's way to God, to God's way to God, repentance is a change of thinking, thinking that your " Good Deeds " will make you right with God.
That was the whole point of the Old Testament, God gave us his law and told us to obey it, and no matter how hard we try , we can never live up to God's standards, Jesus fulfilled the law to it's utter end... every i and T of the letter of the law was satisfied.
The Bible tells us that there is NO ONE that does good, all have gone astray.
God's standard was so high, that no man could or ever will fulfill it on this side of heaven , THE ONE, the only one that could and did was Jesus Christ.
The law was not only to be obeyed ( in which, many or most of us could not hold up ), but, it also showed us how sinful we really are.
The law is still doing it's work today, causing death to self, and that's what God wants to die in our hearts and minds, SELF.....
The law shows us how in need of a Savior we need.

Those who say that we need to repent are mostly those who believe in a works based salvation, but, yet, those same ones , do they also sin ? or have sins in their lives ? .. I bet that they sin even more so than those who base their lives on a salvation by grace salvation.
NO matter how hard you try, you can never live up to God's standards, nor can you earn salvation or be " Good enough " in God's eyes, the only way, is in Jesus Christ.

If you have studied and read the whole book of Hebrews, the writer was writing to the " HEBREW " Christians.
I wonder why ?
Because, there were a group that were called the judaizers who caused Christians who have already come to the Christian faith to renounce their faith and go back to Judaism.
It's like a Christian who became a christian, but, someone deceived them and renounced their faith and became a Musilm.
That is what the writer was warning about.
To renounce your Christian faith is rejecting Jesus Christ.
And to come back is to put Jesus back on the cross again.

I only know a handful of people that “went back to their vomit” as Scripture so delicately puts it. I believe that only God sees the heart and knows if faith is genuine. If it is, then by the power of the Holy Spirit within us we can experience a life that grows in holiness. A little child is disciplined and corrected, chastened, in order to become a better human being. Our Heavenly Father promises us that he will also discipline his children - and he knows those that are his kids - and that this discipline yields the “peaceable fruits of righteousness”.

The grace that saves us also keeps us saved. Those who have been “born again” become children of God and sealed with the Holy Spirit until the day of redemption. Jesus says he will never leave us or forsake us and that he will not lose a one of us, he will never cast us out - this means we cannot lose our salvation because it’s not based on what we do but what he has already done for us.

I think people who say they have honestly accepted Christ as savior but then “backslide” and give up, so to speak, really don’t fully understand the good news of the Gospel of grace nor the power they DO have through Christ to live a life pleasing to God. They may not understand that the Christian life is a work in progress and we all sin but that we can come to God at any time to confess that sin and be cleansed of all unrighteousness - not to get saved again, but because we never lost it to begin with. Grace means unmerited/undeserved after all.

And finally, it’s not over ‘til it’s over. A backslider can still be saved but just not realize it. Satan does not want a Christian to live with freedom and assurance because it is a victorious life and victorious Christians attract others to the Lord. Satan has no real power over us and happy is the person who comes to that realization.

Thank you for the post.

By God’s mercy and grace, I’ve been a Christian for over 56 years. I did not work for it,(that is earn it).

It was a gift as I reponded to “whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved. I’m past 75 now, and have attended a lot of my co-workers, neighbors, and relatives funerals.

At many of these funerals, I was greatly grieved to hear: “how good of a church member they were, and how much they loved the Lord,” when just the opposite seemed true. (How they hated the church, and all the hypocrites, was their life message in word and in living).

Since I have retired, and have purchased my wife (of over 51 years)and my grave site and monument with the words, “the dead in Christ shall rise first” I want my funeral to be different.

The theme should be, for me, “He was a pretty sorry Christian, he never deserved to be a Christian, he never deserved to be called a saint, nor a child of God, nor a heir of God in Christ, much less a joint heir with Christ; but he was, by God’s grace, mercy and love, “translated into the kingdom of God’s dear Son.”

“Being confident of this very thing, that He which begun a good work in you, will perform it until the day of Jesus Christ.” (Phil. 1:6)

If I have learned anything in these later years is: “the older we get, the more we focus on what we have done for Christ(and talk about it, rather than to share what our Saviour has done for us, and what He is doing, in us and through us.

I confess, in my younger years, I purposed to focus on: “For me to life is Christ” but as I grown older my focus is more on “to die is gain.”(Phil. 1:21)

It also seems to me, we have been to busy trying to make celebrities,not servants,out of our pastors, teachers and evangelists. And now we are encouraging and teaching our
young people to be celebrities, not disciples, in the church.

It could be, why many have become discouraged and deluded, they just have not getting the right message!

The few I referred to, whom I know that seem to have forsaken their faith, aren’t dead yet! I pray continuously for them that the Lord opens their eyes and softens their hearts and that they return to him. I cannot see their hearts to know if the conversion was ever real, but I can see by their lives that God is far from them.

Just like the father in the parable of the prodigal son, our Father in heaven is always watching and waiting for us to come back to him. His love will never end and his calling us back will never stop. He is ready to forgive, anxious to forgive and rejoice over us.

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