4 March 2021

We have considered ‘Sanctification and Predestination’ and we noted that sanctification is the goal of election; it is the fruit of election and it is the only proof of election. Let there be no doubt that God chose us before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless. If there is no change in our nature and if there is no evidence of transformation in our life to be like that of the Son of God; if there is no holiness to be seen, then there is no basis on which we have any right to suppose that we are among God’s chosen people.

We also looked at Christian morality and we lament that it has taken quite a battering and it is ‘drifting off course’. We noted that essentially, Christian morality is a morality of divine command, based on the reality of a divine gift, and both the gift and the command are elements in the doctrine of God; it is a ‘blueprint’ for living under the authority of an almighty and personal God by whose grace we have been saved, and to whom we owe gratitude, loyalty, worship, and accountability on the day of judgement.

By grace, we have been saved through faith but salvation is meant to lead on to sanctification and glorification; it must however begin with the Spirit’ work of drawing us to God, convicting us of our sin and granting us faith and repentance when the message of the gospel is communicated to us. God deems it fit to have man to communicate this wonderful message of the gospel; it is important that the message of the gospel remains unchanged. The way the message is communicated and the content of the message are significant in ensuring the accuracy of the message God has entrusted to His people to herald. These would then ensure that salvation gives rise to discipleship and leads on to sanctification and transformation.

Faith is not just intellectual or mental assent to what God tells us in the gospel. The principal acts of saving faith are accepting, receiving, and resting upon Christ alone for justification, sanctification, and eternal life by virtue of the covenant of grace. Repentance and faith go inseparably together. We need to distinguish faith as an act from faith as a work; faith is a means of receiving undeserved mercy from God – it is not work and there is no ground for boasting. Repentance, on the other hand, is not merely a change of mind about who Jesus is; repentance means turning from sin and a change of life.
Regeneration represents a new birth, an inner transformation of one’s being or ‘heart’, which makes it impossible for one to go on living under sin’s sway as one lived before. The effect of regeneration is that now one wants, from the bottom of one’s heart, to know, love, serve, trust, obey and honour the Father and the Son, so that obedient devotion and discipleship spontaneously spring up whence there was only resentful hostility to God before. Notice that the right and accurate communication of the gospel, in dependence on God’s Spirit, would result in true saving faith and repentance and this would lead to regeneration and justification by God’s Spirit.

What must be clear is that basic missionary, evangelistic, and pastoral policy has to do in the first instance not with programs – though programs have their place – not with institution – though you cannot get far without institutions – but with the message.When Apostle Paul came to Corinth to preach the gospel, he decided to exclude eloquence and the parading of wisdom (1 Cor. 21-5). The people in Corinth were interested in eloquence, debate and discussion rather than the truth. They were more concerned about the skilful presentation of a point than they were about whether what was being talked of was real or not. If people are looking for cleverness of argument and you make your presentation of the gospel to them by means of clever arguments, what you actually are doing is affirming their intellectual excellence. The Scripture clearly teaches that the human mind is blind to divine things and the minister of the gospel has to humble people and to convince them that their minds have been blinded through sin and that they must humble themselves and accept what God tells them – they need to acknowledge that they cannot save themselves and they need to cry out to God for His saving grace. Perhaps, in today’s context, we are relying too much on our apologetics and arguments to prove the truth of Christianity.

The way we present the gospel may determine whether people attend to Christ or to us. Paul communicated the gospel to the Corinthians in such a way that the cross of Christ was always his centre of reference. We too must be equally clear that the creative, redemptive love of God on the cross, whereby sins were borne and new life was won, is the hinge on which everything turns. It is only through the knowledge of Christ – His Person and HIs work – that human need at its deepest level is ever met. Paul preaches the adequacy of God from the cross.
People today are suggesting that we should feel free to amend the message, modernise it, move its centre of reference, give to the cross of Christ a different significance from that which Paul saw in it. They want us to shift attention from the cross to other emphases about Jesus, or even to shift attention from Jesus to Christlike things in other faiths. Our response should be a firm ‘no’!

J.C. Ryle explained that the gospel is easily distorted:

“You may spoil the Gospel by substitution. You have only to withdraw from the eyes of the sinner the grand object which the Bible proposes to Faith, – Jesus Christ; and to substitute another object in HIs place, – the Church, the MInistry…and the mischief is done…
You may spoil the Gospel by addition. You only have to add to Christ the grand object of faith, some other objects as equally worthy of honour, and the mischief is done…
You may spoil the Gospel by disproportion. You only have to attach an exaggerated importance to the secondary things of Christianity, and a diminished importance to the first things, and the mischief is done. Once alter the proportion of the parts of the truth, and truth soon becomes downright error…
You may completely spoil the Gospel by confused and contradictory directions. Complicated and obscure statements about faith, baptism, and the benefits of the Lord’s Supper, all jumbled together, and thrown down without order before hearers,make the Gospel no Gospel at all” (Ryle 1964:12-13).

Stay with Paul of 1 Corinthians 2:1-5; only so can we meet the deeper needs of man, and only so can we hope to see God calling forth men and women and building His church in these days. Learn to be rich and tireless communicators of the good news of Jesus Christ, the living Lord, and Him crucified; we shall appeal to the deepest human needs, and people will come to recognise Him as the reality that they desire. God the Holy Spirit can be trusted to do that and to see to that as we speak in dependence on Him.