Tullian Tchividjian's Blog, page 18

Resentment, Rebellion and Exhaustion

In 2012, The Guardian published an excoriating email sent by retired Royal Navy officer Nick Crews to his son and two daughters. It quickly became a viral sensation. The letter lists, in remarkably colorful language, all the misery that the three grown children had put him and their mother through, from failed marriages and careers and poor finances and fears about their grandchildren’s well-being. The final paragraph is particularly vicious:

I can now tell you that I for one, and I sense Mum feels the same, have had enough of being forced to live through the never-ending bad dream of our children’s underachievement and domestic ineptitude’s. I want to hear no more from any of you until, if you feel inclined, you have a success or an achievement or a REALISTIC plan for the support and happiness of your children to tell me about. I don’t want to see your mother burdened any more with your miserable woes — it’s not as if any of the advice she strives to give you has ever been listened to with good grace — far less acted upon. So I ask you to spare her further unhappiness. If you think I have been unfair in what I have said, by all means try to persuade me to change my mind. But you won’t do it by simply whining and saying you don’t like it. You’ll have to come up with meaty reasons to demolish my points and build a case for yourself. If that isn’t possible, or you simply can’t be bothered, then I rest my case.

I am bitterly, bitterly disappointed.

Dad

Wow! Any parent can relate to Mr. Crews’ frustration. And many of us can probably relate to his children, and the disapproval they must have felt. It does not sound like Mr. Crews is making things up. He and his wife apparently have every reason to be so bitterly disappointed and angry. Like the Law itself, the content of his missive may be well-founded, and their standards for their children may be perfectly reasonable (and righteous). But expectations, as they say, are planned resentments; law and bitterness are frequent bedfellows. We expect people not to be self-centered sinners and when they turn out to be just that, we get angry and blame them!

Do you think that the letter had the effect Mr. Crews intended? Absolutely not! I don’t care who you are, no one responds to a letter like that by saying, “By golly, Dad, thanks for pointing these things out. Now that I know how much pain we’ve caused and how irresponsible we’ve been, starting tomorrow, that’s all over.” Of course, the law may work… for a little while. Guilt and fear can be powerful motivators in the short run. What they cannot do is change a heart from self-seeking to self-sacrificing. The letter may have succeeded in scaring the kids straight for a spell, but fear of further berating would be the driving factor, not the genuine desire to fly right. What’s much more likely is that the children were so hurt and offended that they struck back at their father by releasing his letter to an international media outlet, so that he might be castigated and humiliated by the public. Which is precisely what happened. His email backfired. Instead of bringing his children closer, it pushed them further away. This is an echo of what the Apostle Paul meant when he wrote that “the law was added so that the trespass might increase” (Romans 5:20)

It makes me sad that some pastors invoke Mr. Crews’ tactics from the pulpit. Frustrated with their congregation’s failure to come to church enough, get involved enough, give enough money, pray enough, read their Bible enough, invite their friends enough, so many pastors use their position to send verbal letters, “How can you afford your fancy SUV but not give more to the church?! How can you take your kid to their soccer game every Sunday but never bring them to youth group?!” Pastors who resent their congregations are just like husbands who resent their wives—the resulting guilt may produce some modified behavior for a while, but estrangement and rebellion is inevitable. The only difference is that a congregation has every right to expect that their pastor will preach a little Good News every Sunday. Make no mistake: over time, preachers who major on law and behavior rather than grace and faith will empty their pews and create refugees. Human DNA simply cannot bear the weight of the law indefinitely.

Musician Rich Mullins once wrote, “I have attended church regularly since I was less than a week old. I’ve listened to sermons about virtue, sermons against vice. I have heard about money, time management, tithing, abstinence, and generosity. I’ve listened to thousands of sermons. But I could count on one hand the number of sermons that were a simple proclamation of the gospel of Christ.” It’s not just Rich. I received the following letter a few weeks ago from someone I’ve never met. He wrote:

Over the last couple of years, we have really been struggling with the preaching in our church as it has been very law laden and moralistic. After listening, I feel condemned with no power to overcome my lack of ability to obey. Over the last several months, I have found myself very spiritually depressed, to the point where I had no desire to even attend church. Pastors are so concerned about somehow preaching “too much grace” (as if that is possible) because they wrongly believe that type of preaching leads to antinomianism or licentiousness. But, I can testify that the opposite is actually true. I believe preaching only the law, and giving little to no gospel, actually leads to lawless living. When mainly law is preached, it leads to the realization that I can’t follow it, so I might as well quit trying. At least, that’s what has happened to me.

So sad. And frustrating. The ironic thing about legalism is that it not only doesn’t make people work harder, it makes them give up. Moralism doesn’t produce morality; rather, it produces immorality. The Onion brilliantly parodied this dynamic with its article, “Where Are All These ‘Loose Women’ My Pastor Keeps Warning Me About?” in which a fictional 17 year-old kid laments that he never seems to run into any of the promiscuous ladies that he hears about at church so often. The humor is based in reality. It is no coincidence, for example, that the straight-laced Leave It to Beaver generation preceded the ‘free love’ movement of the 1960s. We live in a country where the state most known for its wholesomeness and frugality, Utah, also leads the country in rates of pornography consumption and antidepressant prescriptions.

We make a big mistake when we conclude that the law is the answer to bad behavior. In fact, the law alone stirs up more of such behavior. People get worse, not better, when you lay down the law. To be sure, the Spirit does use both God’s law and God’s gospel in our sanctification. But the law and the gospel do very different things. The law reveals sin but is powerless to remove it. It points to righteousness but can’t produce it. It shows us what godliness is, but it cannot make us godly. As Martin Luther said, “Sin is not canceled by lawful living, for no person is able to live up to the Law. Nothing can take away sin except the grace of God.” The law apart from the gospel can only crush; it cannot cure.

(Excerpted from my forthcoming book One-Way Love: Inexhaustible Grace for an Exhausted World)

God’s Two Words For A Worn Out World

I can’t believe that Liberate 2013 has come and gone. This was our second annual Liberate conference (you can read about last years inaugural conference here).

This years theme was Grace in Practice. Over 1500 people from 33 states and 3 countries gathered at Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church in Ft. Lauderdale to hear from Bryan Chapell, Steve Brown, David Zahl, Mark Galli, Paul Tripp, Tony Merida, Elyse Fitzpatrick, Paul Zahl, Sally Lloyd-Jones, Ray Ortlund, the White Horse Inn, and Shane and Shane, to explore grace in the Christian life, personal failure, families, the church, theology, suffering, pop-culture, and more. It was an amazing three days. If you couldn’t make it this year, make plans to join us next year (Feb. 20-23, 2014) when we’ll hear from Matt Chandler, J.D. Greear, Andy Crouch, Paul Tripp, Justin Holcomb, David Zahl, Scotty Smith, Steve Brown, Elyse Fitzpatrick, Sally Lloyd-Jones, the White Horse Inn, and many more on the theme of “One-Way Love.”

Below is my Friday Night message at Liberate 2013–”God’s Two Words: Law and Gospel.” I hope you’ll find it helpful.

Liberate 2013 – Tullian Tchividjian from Coral Ridge | LIBERATE on Vimeo.

Another Way To Go

One of the most enduring works of art over the past two hundred years is Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables. Rarely does a decade go by without a fresh film adaptation or staging of the classic musical it inspired. Les Mis has stood the test of time for good reason; it is an incredibly moving story of redemption, one that deals with the deepest themes of human life: mercy and guilt, justice and inequality, God and man, men and women, parents and children, forgiveness and punishment, and yes, the relationship of grace and law. It is also a notorious tearjerker. Like a true artist, Hugo burrows inside the ribcage and plays a symphony on our heartstrings. Perhaps it should come as no surprise that the entire story hinges on a stunning act of one-way love.

Out on parole after nineteen years in a French prison, protagonist Jean Valjean is denied shelter at several respectable establishments because his passport identifies him as a former convict. He is finally taken in by a kindly bishop, Bishop Bienvenu. Valjean repays his host by running off in the middle of the night with the church silver. When the police catch up to him, Valjean lies and claims that the Bishop had given him the silver as a gift. They drag him back to the bishops house, where Bienvenu not only validates Valjean’s deception but chastises him for not accepting the candlesticks as well. Jean Valjean is utterly confounded. His identity up until that point has been that of thief, prisoner, number, sinner. Now he has been “seen” as human and shown mercy. But it is more than mercy, isn’t it? Mercy would involve simply dropping the charges, but the bishop goes further—he actually rewards Valjean for his transgression! Bienvenu acts, in other words, in the polar opposite way than what would be expected of him. He is not wise or responsible. He treats Valjean recklessly, overruling what the law—literally standing in front of him—demands. He takes a major risk and blesses this criminal who has shown no ability to act in a non-shameful way. His love has everything to do with the sacrifice of the one doing the loving rather than the merit of the beloved. Needless to say, when I first saw the scene portrayed on the screen I fell to pieces.

This one surprising act throws Valjean into complete breakdown mode, causing him to question absolutely everything in his life and the world. In the musical, his bewilderment at the goodness which has been shown him is made plain when he sings:

One word from him and I’d be back

Beneath the lash, upon the rack

Instead he offers me my freedom

I feel my shame inside me like a knife

He told me that I have a soul,

How does he know?

What spirit comes to move my life?

Is there another way to go?

There is another way to go, thanks be to God, the way of Grace as opposed to Law. It is this way that Valjean takes from this moment forward—or I should say, the way that takes him. He doesn’t become a superhuman or even any less of a broken vessel, but from here on out, his life is fueled more by gratitude than greed, giving than receiving, love than fear. This one moment of grace changes him in a way that a lifetime of punishment never could. In fact, Valjean’s heroic, self-sacrificing actions in the rest of the novel flow directly from the word he hears from the bishop, which is the word of the Gospel.

Just as it is difficult to experience forgiveness without some knowledge of what you have done wrong, so it is difficult to understand the Gospel apart from the Law. If the Law is God’s first word, the Gospel is His last.

Listen closely: the law exposes Valjean (and us), while grace exonerates him. The law diagnoses, but grace delivers. The law accuses, the gospel acquits. The law condemns the best of us, while grace saves the worst of us. The law says cursed, the gospel says blessed. The law says slave, the gospel says son. The law says guilty, the gospel says forgiven. The law can break a hard heart, but only grace can heal one. Which is precisely what happens to Valjean. He may be a fictional character, but our response to his predicament is not fictional. The tears come because each one of us is dying to be treated this way. The scene gets us in touch with that one time that someone did show us a little sympathy when we deserved reproach.

It points us, in other words, to the truth at the very heart of the universe, the one-way love of God for sinners.

Does Grace Make You Lazy?

The gospel doxologically declares that because of Christ’s finished work for you, you already have all of the justification, approval, security, love, worth, meaning, and rescue you long for and look for in a thousand different people and places smaller than Jesus.

The gospel announces that God doesn’t relate to us based on our feats for Jesus but Jesus’ feats for us.

Because Jesus came to secure for us what we could never secure for ourselves, life doesn’t have to be a tireless effort to establish ourselves, justify ourselves, validate ourselves.

He came to rescue us from the slavish need to be right, rewarded, regarded, and respected. He came to relieve us of the burden we inherently feel “to get it done.”

The gospel announces that it’s not on me to ensure that the ultimate verdict on my life is pass and not fail.

This means you don’t have to transform the world to matter, you don’t have to get good grades to secure your own worth, you don’t have to be a success to justify your existence.

Because Jesus was strong for you, you’re free to be weak; Because Jesus was Someone, you’re free to be no one; Because Jesus was extraordinary, you’re free to be ordinary; Because Jesus succeeded for you, you’re free to fail. Because Jesus won for you, you’re free to lose.

But hold on…wait a minute…

Doesn’t this unconditional declaration generate apathy–an “I don’t care” posture toward life?

If it’s true that Jesus paid it all, that it is finished, that my value, worth, security, freedom, justification, and so on is forever fixed, than why do anything? Doesn’t grace undercut ambition? Doesn’t the gospel weaken effort?

Understandable question.

But the truth is, gospel grace actually empowers risk-taking effort and neighbor-embracing love.

You see, the thing that prevents us from taking great risks is the fear that if we don’t succeed, we’ll lose out on something we need in order to be happy and so we live life playing our cards close to the chest…relationally, vocationally, spiritually.

We measure our investments carefully because we need a return–we’re afraid to give because it might not work out and we need it to work out.

But, because everything we need in Christ we already possess, we can take great risks, push harder, go farther, and leave it all on the field without fear. We can invest with reckless abandon because we don’t need to ensure a return of success, love, meaning, validation, and approval. We can invest freely and forcefully because we’ve been freely and forcefully invested in.

The fear of not knowing whether I’ll get a return is replaced by the freedom of knowing we already have everything: because everything I need, in Christ I already possess, I’m now free to do everything for you without needing you to do anything for me.

I can now actively spend my life giving instead of taking, going to the back instead of getting to the front, sacrificing myself for others instead of sacrificing others for myself.

The gospel alone liberates you to live a life of scandalous generosity, unrestrained sacrifice, uncommon valor, and unbounded courage.

When you don’t have anything to lose, you discover something wonderful: you’re free to take great risks without fear or reservation.

This is the difference between approaching all of life from salvation and approaching all of life for salvation; it’s the difference between approaching life from our acceptance, and not for our acceptance; from love not for love.

So, what are you going to do now that you don’t have to do anything…

Belovedness Engenders Love

In his book 2000 Years of Amazing Grace: The Story and Meaning of the Christian Faith, Paul Zahl autobiographically recounts what happened to him many years ago when he discovered the indispensability of grace to produce the good works toward our neighbor outlined in the Bible:

My doing of the good deeds [Jesus] taught actually hinged on Him saving me-I, who had found myself paralyzed and blocked from doing those good deeds.When I felt myself loved in my chains, in my paralyses, that feeling of being loved seemed to trigger the very motivation and strength that had failed me before. Being treated forgivingly in my faults and fears freed me up. The faults themselves lost some of their binding strength. The confining fears ceased to restrict so tightly. There was an empowering connection between Jesus’ saving me (who he was for me) and the fuel to do what he said I should do (what he taught).

I take this connection between saving and the response to being saved that results in morally good actions (loving service to our neighbor), to be the heart of Christianity. It is the relation of being loved to loving. Being loved creates an environment inside a person by which the works of love begin to take place naturally. Loving is born from being loved…”Love to the loveless shown, that they might lovelier be” is a seventeenth-century way of saying it.

As I’ve said on numerous occasions here, the motivation and fuel to do good (which the Bible always describes horizontally in terms of loving service to others) comes from being moved by the completed work of Jesus for us. The impulsion to “do” comes only out of this undomesticated declaration that everything has already been done. Those who obey more are those who increasingly “get” that their standing with God is not based on their imperfect obedience to Jesus, but Jesus’ perfect obedience for them. The secret of grace is that we actually perform better as we grow to understand that God’s love for us is based on Christ’s performance, not our performance.

Another way to put this is to affirm that grace, not law, produces love-the love for God and neighbor that Jesus teaches (Luke 10:27). His love for us begets love from us.

Distinguishing Law And Gospel

In my last post, I shared a testimony I read recently from a man who experienced the devastating on-the-ground, real life consequences of the failure to distinguish between God’s Law and God’s Gospel (both are good but both have unique job descriptions). Well, a couple months back I sat down with my good friend Jono Linebaugh (Professor of New Testament at Knox Theological Seminary and Content Manager of Liberate) to discuss the all important distinction between the Law and the Gospel. In my opinion, no one speaks more clearly and intelligently about this than Dr. Linebaugh. His explanation in the short video below is really helpful. Enjoy…

A Treadmill Of Merit

I recently read this testimony from a guy who grew up in the pop-Evangelical culture of the late 20th century and who, for 7 years, was a full-time staffer at a large, well-known Evangelical para-church ministry. Sadly, I’ve heard this same kind of testimony from numerous people who grew up inside the church. As you can see from how he describes his experience, distinguishing law and gospel is not simply a theological exercise. Perhaps you can relate:

I experienced what happens when the Law and the Gospel are not understood and therefore distinguished. My Christian life, truly begun in grace, was now being “perfected” on the treadmill of the Law. My pastors did not end their sermons by demanding that I recite the rosary or visit Lourdes that week in order to unleash God’s power; instead, I was told to yield more, pray more, care more about unbelievers, read the Bible more, get involved in church more, and love my wife and kids more. Not until I came to the [theology of the Reformation] some 20 years later, did I understand that my Christian life had come to center around me and my performance: my life, my obedience, my yielding, my Bible verse memorization, my prayers, my zeal, my witnessing, and my sermon application. I had advanced beyond the need to hear the cross preached to me anymore…What had my Evangelical training done to me? The Gospel was critical for me at the beginning, critical for me to share with others, and still critical to get me to heaven, but it was of little other value. The “evangel” in Evangelicalism was missing. My training had me on a treadmill of merit.

Mockingbird

As readers of this blog know, I’m a huge fan of Mockingbird. The work and ministry of my good friend David Zahl and his crew is simply the best in the biz. What they’re doing is unlike anything else. These guys are super smart and savvy.

They have a passionate desire to reach both those “outside the church” and those who have been “broken by the church” with the good news that, in Jesus, God loves and forgives sinners. Their mission is to creatively connect the Christian faith with the everyday realities of life–”demonstrating and cataloging the myriad ways in which the Christian understanding of reality (what people are like, what God is like and how the two intersect) is born out all around us.” In this sense, it is intentionally evangelistic. It’s gripping, provocative, effective, and humorous apologetics.

I’m both honored and excited to be speaking at Mockingbird’s 6th annual conference in New York City in April.

I was encouraged yesterday to see the Episcopal Church highlight Mockingbird.

Inexhaustible Grace For An Exhausted World

I’ve never been more excited about a writing project than I am about my forthcoming book One-Way Love: The Power of Inexhaustible Grace for an Exhausted World (David C. Cook, October 2013). It’s a little more than halfway finished. The manuscript should be complete by the end of March. Here’s the intro just to give you a sense of what the book is about:

A few years ago, I read something astonishing. Dr. Richard Leahy, a prominent psychologist and anxiety specialist was quoted as saying, “The average high school kid today has the same level of anxiety as the average psychiatric patient in the early 1950s.” It turns out the problem wasn’t limited to an age group; in 2007 the New York times reported that three in ten American women confess to taking sleeping pills before bed most nights. The numbers are so high and unprecedented that some are calling it an epidemic. This came across my screen about the same time that the news broke about the meteoric rise of Americans claiming no religious affiliation, shooting up from 7% in 1990 to 16% in 2010. When those under the age of 30 were polled, that percentage more than doubled again, to nearly 35%. While the numbers themselves were a bit of a shock, I wish I had been more surprised by the findings. From my vantage point as a pastor, I can tell you, it is truly heartbreaking out there. The good news of God’s inexhaustible grace for an exhausted world has never been more urgent.

What I see more than anything else is an unquestioning embrace of performanicism in all sectors of life. Performancism is the mindset that equates our identity and value directly with our performance and accomplishments. Performancism casts achievements not as something we do or don’t do but as something we are (or aren’t). The colleges those teenagers eventually attend will be more than the place where they are educated – they will be the labels which define their value as a human being, both in the eyes of their peers, their parents and themselves. The money we earn, the car we drive, isn’t merely reflective of our occupation, it is reflective of us, period. How we look, how intelligent we are, and what people think of us is more than descriptive, it is synonymous with our worth. In the performancist world, success equals life, and failure is tantamount to death. This is the reason why people would rather end their lives than confess that they’ve lost their job, or made a bad investment.

This is not to say that accomplishments are somehow bad, or even that they aren’t incredibly important. It is simply to say that there is a difference between taking pride in what we do and worshipping it. When we worship at the altar of performance—and make no mistake, performancism is a form of worship—we spend our lives frantically propping up our image or reputation, trying to do it all, and do it all well, often at a cost to ourselves and those we love. Life becomes a hamster wheel of endless earning and proving and maintenance and management and controlling where all we can see is our own feet. Performancism causes us to live in a constant state of anxiety, fear and resentment, until we end up heavily medicated, in the hospital, or just really, really unhappy.

The Christian church has sadly not proven to be immune to performancism. Far from it, in fact. It often seems that the good news of God’s grace for those who don’t measure up has been tragically hijacked by an oppressive religious moralism that is all about rules, rules, and more rules; doing more, trying harder, getting better, and fixing, fixing, fixing–ourselves, our kids, our spouse, our coworkers, our boss, our friends, our enemies. Christianity is perceived as being a vehicle for good behavior and clean living—and the judgments that result from them—rather than the only recourse for those who have failed over and over and over again. Believe it or not, Christianity is not about good people getting better. If anything, it is good news for bad people coping with their failure to be good. Ask any of the “religious nones” who answered differently in past years, and I guarantee you will hear a story about either spiritual burn-out or heavy-handed condemnation from fellow believers, or both. Author Jerry Bridges puts it perfectly when he writes:

My observation of Christendom is that most of us tend to base our relationship with God on our performance instead of on His grace. If we’ve performed well—whatever ‘well’ is in our opinion—then we expect God to bless us. If we haven’t done so well, our expectations are reduced accordingly. In this sense, we live by works, rather than by grace. We are saved by grace, but we are living by the ‘sweat’ of our own performance. Moreover, we are always challenging ourselves and one another to ‘try harder’. We seem to believe success in the Christian life is basically up to us; our commitment, our discipline, and our zeal, with some help from God along the way. The realization that my daily relationship with God is based on the infinite merit of Christ instead of on my own performance is very freeing and joyous experience. But it is not meant to be a one-time experience; the truth needs to be reaffirmed daily.

What Bridges describes is nothing less than the human compulsion for taking the reigns of our lives and our salvation back from God, the only One remotely qualified for the job. “Works righteousness” is the word that the Protestant Reformation used, and it has plagued the church–and the world—since the Garden of Eden. It might not be too much of an overstatement to say that if Jesus came to proclaim good news to the poor, release to the captives, freedom for the oppressed, sight to the blind, then Christianity has come to stand for, and in practice perpetuate, the exact opposite of what its founder intended (Luke 4:18-19).

I’ve been in the church long enough to listen for certain things when Christians talk about grace. I listen for “buts and brakes.” Christians often speak about grace with a thousand qualifications. Our greatest concern, it seems, is that people will take advantage of grace and use it as a justification to live licentiously. Sadly, while attacks on morality typically come from outside the church, attacks on grace typically come from inside the church. The reason is because somewhere along the way we’ve come to believe that this whole enterprise is about behavioral modification and grace just doesn’t possess the teeth to scare us into changing, so we end up hearing more about what grace isn’t than we do about what grace is. The fact is that “Yes grace, but…” originated with the Devil in the Garden of Eden. Therefore, the biggest lie Satan wants the church to believe is that grace is dangerous and therefore needs to be kept in check. And sadly, the church has believed this lie all too well.

It is a terrible irony that the very pack of people that God has unconditionally saved and continues to sustain by his free grace are the very ones who push back most violently against it. Far too many professing Christians sound like ungrateful children who can’t stop biting the very hand that feeds them. It amazes me that you will hear great concern from inside the church about “too much grace” but rarely will you ever hear great concern from inside the church about “too many rules.” Why? Because we are by nature glory-hoarding, self-centered control freaks. That’s why.

But it is more than ironic, it is tragic. It is tragic because, just as it always has done, this kind of moralism can be relied upon to create anxiety, resentment, rebellion and exhaustion. It can be counted upon to ensure that the church hemorrhages the precise people that Jesus was most concerned with: sinners. Are you exhausted? Angry? Anxious? Fearful? Guilty? Lonely? In need of some comfort and genuinely good news? In other words, are you at all like me? Then this book is for you. You won’t hear any “buts”, you won’t feel the tapping of the brakes, and you won’t see a list of qualifications. What you’ll encounter is “grace unmeasured, vast and free.” It’ll frighten you and free you at the same time. After all, that’s what grace does.

It is high time for the church to honor its Founder by embracing sola gratia anew, to reignite the beacon of hope for the hopeless and point all of us bedraggled performancists back to the freedom and rest of the Cross. To leave our “if’s” “and’s” or “but’s” behind and get back to proclaiming the only message that matters—and the only message we have—the Word about God’s one-way love for sinners. It is time for us to abandon once and for all our play-it-safe religion, and, as Robert Farrar Capon so memorably put it, to get drunk on grace. Two hundred-proof, unflinching grace. It’s shocking and scary, unnatural and undomesticated…but it is also the only thing that can set us free and light the church, and the world, on fire.

Preachers Should Be Like Naughty Kids

For every head-scratching page that Robert Capon writes, he pens a a mind-blowingly insightful one. Some of the best paragraphs I’ve ever read on grace come from Capon. As far as I can tell, he holds some wild ideas about the atonement. So, as with anyone, you have to discern the meat from the bones. But it’s worth it. The following paragraph on preaching made me sing:

I think good preachers should be like bad kids. They ought to be naughty enough to tiptoe up on dozing congregations, steal their bottles of religion pills…and flush them all down the drain. The church, by and large, has drugged itself into thinking that proper human behavior is the key to its relationship with God. What preachers need to do is force it to go cold turkey with nothing but the word of the cross–and then be brave enough to stick around while [the congregation] goes through the inevitable withdrawal symptoms. But preachers can’t be that naughty or brave unless they’re free from their own need for the dope of acceptance. And they wont be free of their need until they can trust the God who has already accepted them, in advance and dead as door-nails, in Jesus. Ergo, the absolute indispensability of trust in Jesus’ passion. Unless the faith of preachers is in that alone–and not in any other person, ecclesiastical institution, theological system, moral prescription, or master recipe for human loveliness–they will be of very little use in the pulpit.

May God raise up a generation of preachers who storm the the gates of worldliness with “It is finished.”