I have long realized that a "downstairs church" offers a "what's in it for me?" salvation, focusing on what God will do for ME rather than my dying to self and living in obedience to His plan for my life, directed in all things by Christ. I recently ran across this comment by T. Austin Sparks and wanted to say "Amen!" to what he wrote:
What is the Gospel? The Gospel is Christ crucified, as revealed in the heart. The Gospel is not only attesting objective facts, even the fact of Christ crucified, but what constitutes the Gospel is that, that which was true in the Lord Jesus, has been revealed by God in the heart. We are not constituted Gospel preachers because we have read somewhere that Christ was crucified, raised fromthe dead and ascended, and all those historic facts, but because God has revealed in us, not facts but a Person in relation to the facts, and the facts in relation to the Person. There has come to our hearts by revelation of the Spirit of God Jesus Christ and Him crucified, and that has constituted us preachers; that has constituted the Gospel.
There is no Gospel apart from that.
Now you see how that brings us back to our initial position. It means this, that a struggling to reach, to attain, unto something conceived as Christianity, is a failure to see Christ. Christ has not been seen, He has not been revealed. Immediately the Holy Spirit reveals the Lord Jesus in us, we have come into the place where the work is done, and what we are doing now is to live out from a perfected position, instead of striving to reach a perfected position.
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One must come to the stark conclusion that he needs saving from himself, and that salvation comes through the work of Christ on the cross.
ReplyDeleteSo the "what's in it for me?" question isn't off. It's where everything begins... Christ, God, God's Son, the Cross, Salvation.
The issue you are blogging about seems to be a complete lack of discipleship in the area of lordship within the church today.
BTW, your last paragraph is powerful, but far too brief. You should add a long comment to this blog entry exploring the depths of what you wrote. I know it's probably in your upcoming book, but you should go deeper with thoughts like this instead of brief snippets... they're too deep for just one brief paragraph.