Have you ever sat through a sermon and when it was over you felt like you just attended a self-improvement seminar? I have. I usually fall asleep during such a talk. You know what I mean, it's where the message is: "You Should Behave Differently than You Do!" It's the most common theme in current Evangelical pop culture. In the Evangelical world it seems to be a favorite pastime - telling people to shape up.
I've been around the block a time or two in my life and when I say I've heard it all before I am one of the few who who actually has heard it all before. Believe me, I would not recommend my spiritual path to anybody and I don't know much about what God is trying to say to us, but I have become something of a whiz at knowing what he is not saying to us. I'm the professor of what it ain't.
God's message to humanity is not, "You people should do better." He is not telling us to clean our act up and then he will get close to us. He is not saying we need to gradually improve ourselves until our behavior finally represents his character. He isn't trying to whip us into shape. He is not saying, "Get it together or you'll be sorry." That's what we think ought to be said. That's our idea of what a god-like god would tell us. Instead, he has a different message than we think he should have. I think he even has a different personality than we think he should. That's why we so often don't get what he is trying to tell us. Our problem is a different problem than we think it is and God has done something in Jesus other than what we would have recommended if God had polled us first instead of acting unilaterally as he has.
You know what the oldest profession in the world is? No, not that. It is religion: finger-wagging let-me-tell-you-how-to-live religion. It's older than that other profession.
Now think about this with me for a moment. If finger-wagging did any good, if telling people how they should look, act, sound, etc. actually worked the world would have changed dramatically for the better by now, and long ago too. We should be living in a moral paradise. I mean every religion and philosophy in the world does that - finger wagging - and has done that throughout the ages. And guess what? We're still broken and we still can't fix ourselves (see the last blog concerning David Nystrom's message). All that moral exhortation, week after week, for at least a thousand years and we're still exactly the same, morally as we were. Amazing.
Moral exhortation, finger-wagging, pastors kicking their sheep yelling, "Get fat! Get fat!" "Ought to" sermons, the raising of the moral bar, trying to fix our inner problem by using outer means just doesn't work. It's a bust. Always has been, always will be. Whatever the gospel is, it is something else.
Listen to what the great Tim Keller, famous Presbyterian preacher said about all this:
To "get the gospel" is to turn from self-justification and rely of Jesus' record for a relationship with God. The irreligious don't repent at all, and the religious only repent of sins. But Christians also repent of their righteousness. That is the distinction between the three groups - Christian, moralists (religious), and pragmatists (irreligious).
I know, most of you probably think I should go find something important to worry about. I don't know why all this stuff seems so important to me, I just think that motives matter more than we think they do. But what do I know? Maybe it turns out that motives don't matter much. Maybe the exterior is more important than the interior, just as preachers have preached through the ages. Maybe I should just take my meds and go back to sleep.
The Gospel Crank
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