A Bait and Switch Gospel?

The following text is taken from "The Current Move of God", by Frank Viola (Published in New Wineskins Magazine, Nov/Dec 2008. This article is freely available online, at(http://www.ptmin.org/currentmove.pdf) .

I don't agree with everything that Viola says in this article, particularly the idea that he stresses the corporate reality of being in Christ - not that I disagree with that, by any means, but it almost seems like he completely discounts the personal, individual need for a decision to follow Jesus. (Knowing everything else Viola has written, I'm almost certain he didn't mean to say that we can "be saved" as a group and that there is no need for an individual choice to be made, and perhaps I just missed a big caveat stating that fact --since I do tend to be a skim-reader sometimes! -- but I just wanted to note that while I did post the link above, for reference, I DO NOT agree with everything carte blanc in that article.)

What DID resonate with me, though, is the following passage.
...every sermon [visitors to local institutional churches] heard had the same essential message. It was this: "What you are doing isn’t enough to please God. You need to do more than you’re doing. You need to read your Bible more, pray more, help people more, come to church more, etc. You need to do better than the best you can do."

This is the script upon which most contemporary sermons are built. It is a gospel of duty—pure and simple. Interestingly, it was observed that these same churches give a very different message to the non-Christian. It sounds like this: "God loves you the way you are. It doesn’t matter what you’ve done, His love is unconditional. Jesus died for you because He loves you without condition. You can’t please God. Your good works are as filthy rags. But God will receive you as perfect if you come to Christ. So receive Him today."

Ah . . . but once those same people receive Christ and ―get saved, the "bait and switch" gospel kicks in with a passion. Here’s what it sounds like: "Now that you’re a Christian, here’s what you must do to please God. You must try harder, you must do more, you must work harder, God won’t be pleased with you if you don’t do such and such, etc."

A question that every Christian should ask when listening to a sermon or a message is this: ―Am I hearing about the glories of Jesus Christ or am I being told what to do to be a better Christian? The latter is a duty-based gospel – it’s legalism in one form or another. It’s eating from the wrong tree. The tree of the knowledge of good and evil is the luring counterfeit for the tree of life.

Note that the forbidden tree contains the knowledge of good. According to the New Testament, good works are like fruit that falls off of a tree spontaneously as the result of life. In the same way, Christians naturally walk in good works with others as they learn to live by God’s life.

I've been thinking a lot over the past couple days about the gospel of legalism. It is so very prevalent in our American culture. We teach it to our kids in Sunday school. So much Bible curricula for children is based on "do good or God won't be pleased" Bible stories. We tell them to "obey God or you will end up displeasing God, like Jonah". This is not the good news of Jesus! The gospel is that we CANNOT please God by trying to follow the rules -- so God Himself provided a way to pay the penalty for us. The Ten Commandments are to point us to our need for a Savior -- not to try our dardest to follow as hard as we can and hope that the good will (in the end, whenever that might come) outweigh the bad that we've done! Have you ever lied? Have you stolen anything? (Even a quarter out of your mom's wallet when you were ten? ...No mom, I'm not admitting to anything there...) Well then, sorry, you've blown it! Yes, everyone else does it -- myself included...big time -- but if everyone else is a thief, and you get caught, will the judge throw out your sentence just because "everyone else has done it"? No! You'll pay the fine, or go to jail. But the GOOD NEWS is that God loved us so much that he sent Jesus to take our fine for us, so that when the Judge looks at us and all the times we've messed up, Jesus is right there, stamping out our death sentence in his blood.

It's REALLY good news. So why do we insist on making the Christian life so difficult?

I was listening to a podcast from Wayne Jacobson this afternoon during naptime. One thing he said really struck me: we've looked at the ten commandments all wrong. In light of the New Testament, we should think of the commandments as "you will love me so much that you WON'T WANT to have any other Gods before me"; "you will love God so much that you WON'T WANT to lie". Good fruit should just grow from a tree that is deeply connected to the vine, based on the goodness and strength of the vine itself, not ourselves. Good fruit just won't appear because we try really hard to grow it. It never will.

(Yeah, I just had to throw in another fruit reference.)