The “Gospel” of Unconditional Acceptance

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Transcript:

Well, in Romans 1. 16, the Apostle Paul said that the gospel is the power of God unto salvation to everyone who believes. But unfortunately, some studies have shown over the recent years that more and more people are confused about what the gospel actually is.

Fewer and fewer people, as a percentage, understand what the gospel actually is. So over the next five Sunday mornings through the month of September, we’re going to spend some time focused on what the gospel is and what the gospel is not. We’re going to look at God’s word for an in-depth view so that we can hopefully understand this if we don’t already.

Now, some of us might think that a series of messages like this is unnecessary because we live in the Bible belt, but I hate to break it to you. the Bible Belt as we know it, if it ever existed, is on life support or dead. I mean, it’s, the 50s are not coming back.

Sorry to break the news to you, which is not to say that we can’t engage people with the gospel. That’s not to say that God can’t send revival. That’s just hopefully to wake us up to the point that we don’t live in the same world that we used to. We can’t take for granted.

What I mean by the Bible Belt is on life support, if not dead, is that we can’t take for granted that people outside these four walls understand what the gospel is. We can’t take for granted that they’ve heard, that they know, that they have any kind of Christian background. Used to, even if you didn’t go to church, because of the community, because of the families that we were raised in, everybody knew they at least had a passing familiarity with the gospel.

That’s not the case anymore. We’re looking in some cases at the third, maybe the fourth generation of people with no connection to a church with no connection to the gospel. We can’t take for granted anymore that everybody around us in our community knows what the gospel is or has even heard the gospel.

And if you don’t believe that, I found some rather disturbing statistics. Within the last couple of years, Lifeway, which is an arm of our convention, has conducted studies that found 74% of people believe we have to contribute something to our own salvation. 74% of the people in this survey said you have to contribute something to your own salvation.

56% believe that human beings are basically good. I don’t know what news they’re watching. 54% believe that God accepts all religious viewpoints or that there are multiple roads to God.

52% did not agree that all sin deserves the condemnation or the judgment of God. There are some that God should be okay with. 39% said that they would get into heaven because of their good deeds.

And 37% said God would bless them materially as a reward for their faith. Now, folks, these numbers would be horrifying enough, but I left out one little detail about the survey. This survey was not they went down to the gas station or went down to Walmart or went down to the ball field and picked out a few hundred people at random and asked them these questions.

They were looking for people who they could identify as evangelical believers in evangelical churches. In churches like ours across America, these were the results. that three-quarters of the people said they had to contribute something to their salvation.

And part of me wondered if maybe the questions were just worded in a confusing way. I think that might account for a little bit of the numbers there. But the bigger picture here is that there’s a lot of confusion in America about what the gospel actually is.

There’s a lot of confusion about where our trust belongs in order for us to be saved. And so I was looking at this, realizing that if we can’t take for granted that everybody in the church pews knows what the gospel is, we certainly can’t take for granted that everybody out in the community knows what the gospel is. And I thought about this, and I don’t know that these numbers hold up for our church.

I wouldn’t think so. I’m sure a lot of pastors didn’t think so. And I just thought about it and thought, you know what, there’s no wrong time to preach the gospel.

There’s not. There’s no wrong time to preach the gospel. There’s no wrong time to go back to basics and talk about what Jesus Christ did for us and what that means for our salvation and for our eternity.

Those who have never trusted Christ need to hear the gospel. Those who have trusted Christ need to be reminded. We need to be reminded regularly of what Jesus did for us so that we don’t grow complacent in our faith.

So over the next five weeks, we’re going to study what the gospel is, as I said, and what the gospel isn’t. We’re going to look at five types of beliefs that are prevalent in America today, and beliefs that sound similar to Christianity because they have a few things in common, but they’re not quite Christianity. They’re not quite.

They missed the mark. And then we’re going to look at each of these and see what the Bible has to say about them. That’s what we’re going to do over the next five Sunday mornings through the month of September.

And there are three things that I hope will happen out of this study. Three things that I’m praying for. First, that if you’ve come to worship with us and you’re looking for answers about Jesus, you’re looking for answers about how you can be forgiven, you’re not sure about these things, I’m praying that you’ll understand clearly what the gospel is, what Jesus came to do for us, and that you’ll put your trust in him and be saved.

That’s one prayer. I’m also praying that if you believe one of these other gospels that we’re going to talk about, maybe you’ve been sitting in the church pews for decades, but you’ve been believing one of these other Gospels and thinking you’re saved the whole time, one of these things that are not quite Christianity, my prayer is that you’ll realize it and believe the truth of God’s Word and throw yourself entirely on the mercy of Jesus Christ for salvation. And I’m praying, third of all, that if you’re somebody who has understood the Gospel, if you’re somebody who’s understood it all this time and you’ve trusted in Christ as your Savior already, that’s taken care of you.

Your faith and your trust is completely in him for your salvation. I’m praying that those of us in that third category, that we will realize that the world around us needs the message of salvation by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone, more now than it ever has. And I’m praying that it’ll light a fire under me, and I’m praying that it’ll light a fire under the rest of us to go out there and confront the confusion, confront the misinformation, and take the gospel to people who need it.

If you would, turn with me to 2 Peter chapter 3 this morning. 2 Peter chapter 3. There toward the end of your Bible, just before 1 John, just after 1 Peter.

And here we’re going to look and we’re going to see that the Bible rejects what I’ve chosen to call the gospel of unconditional acceptance that is believed by so many people in our world. Now, that term, and it’s written on your notes that are in your bulletin if you’re following along there, that term is something I came up with. If you Google the gospel of unconditional acceptance, I have no idea what you’ll find.

Because as far as I know, it’s a term that I came up with this week. But it’s not a set of teachings that I’ve made up. These are a set of teachings that people actually believe.

And there are all sorts of variations on it. And people call it different things. So I just said, here’s the label.

I’m going to slap on it because it’s what makes sense to me. So again, keep in mind the term is made up, but the teachings are a very real problem. The gospel of unconditional acceptance is a collection of beliefs that emphasize the positive attributes of God, what we would consider to be the positive attributes of God, and downplay or eliminate the negative attributes of God.

So they would take things like love and grace and mercy, forgiveness, etc. They’d take those things and they’d crank them up to 10 in their theology. But the things that the Bible teaches about God that aren’t quite so warm and fuzzy, the things like his holiness, his justice, his righteousness, his judgment, they would take those things and say, we’re going to turn those all the way down. We’re just not going to talk about those.

We’re going to completely write them out or we’re just going to not emphasize them quite so much. And what happens when you do this, when you take, it’s like that old song, you’ve got to accentuate the positive, eliminate the negative. That’s a great life philosophy, but in our theology, what happens if we do that with our understanding of God?

We end up with a really one-dimensional understanding of God. If we take one set of attributes and put them up here and take another set and put them down here, we end up with a really lopsided one-dimensional view of God. He becomes a God who accepts our wickedness and shrugs it off and acts like it’s no big deal. It becomes a God who’s totally different from the God of the Bible.

The God who, in the Bible, loves his children unconditionally becomes a God who accepts the rebellious world unconditionally. Just whatever the world wants to do, God’s okay with. It’s not the God of the Bible, but it’s the God that’s believed by many people who call themselves Christians.

Unfortunately, it’s a God who’s preached by many who are in pulpits and positions of authority who, quite frankly, should know better and should be ashamed of themselves. Thinking about it this week, I realized I don’t know how many of you have ever seen this show. My children would instantly get this.

But their version of God sounds to me more like SpongeBob SquarePants than the God of the Bible. You ever seen this show? Okay.

If I’m honest, I’ll admit that I used to watch it in college. After you’ve been sitting there thinking about Plato and Aristotle all day, you want to come home and watch something mindless. One of the things that I’ve learned about SpongeBob SquarePants is that he looks at life through such rose-colored glasses that no matter how mean or selfish anybody around him is, he just thinks they’re wonderful and he just thinks they’re his best friend.

And, you know, Squidward, Mr. Krabs, I never thought I’d be talking about SpongeBob SquarePants in a message on the gospel. But watch, if you haven’t, watch one 11-minute episode sometime.

You’ll see what I’m talking about. No matter how mean these people are, no matter what they do to him, he just loves them. He just, oh, I’m just accepting you.

It’s just, you’re just wonderful. Okay. It’s a funny show sometimes, but it’s not the God I want to worship.

And it’s not the God that the Bible teaches. Okay. That’s not God.

To look at our sin, to look at all this wickedness, to look at no matter how mean and selfish we are toward him or toward one another, to look at that and say, oh, it’s, it’s wonderful. That’s all right. But because of this distorted view of God, a lot of people have come to the conclusion that God has no expectations for us, that he makes no demands on us, and that he just accepts us as we are.

Now, there is a sense in which God accepts us where we are. I want to be clear on that. There is grace.

But I’m not talking about somebody who comes to God and says, Lord, I’m wicked, I’m a sinner, I can’t change myself, would you please forgive me? God accepts that. I’m talking about the wicked world that says, God, I know you said I’m supposed to do this or not do this, but I’m going to do what I want instead, and I just expect you to be okay with it.

God doesn’t accept that. That’s not how this works. Back to TV, but that Geico commercial, that’s not how this works.

That’s not how any of this works. I need to get that woman’s face made into a poster. God, this false gospel, says that God doesn’t care that you’re a sinner.

He just loves you. Now let’s be clear on this. God loves you, but God absolutely cares that you’re a sinner.

Your sin is a problem. My sin is a problem for God. It says you don’t have to worry about sin.

You don’t have to feel bad. He just accepts you how you are. Again, there’s a point where God accepts you when you come to him seeking forgiveness.

But when you come to God with the attitude of, God, you’re just going to have to take whatever I’m willing to give you. God doesn’t accept that. That’s not how it works.

This gospel says you don’t have to think about getting right with God. God wouldn’t punish anyone. And I agree.

The SpongeBob SquarePants God would not punish anybody because he thinks we’re all just wonderful. But the God of the Bible says there are consequences and there’s a penalty, there’s a punishment for our sin, for our wickedness. And because he’s a just God, we wouldn’t expect anything different.

We shouldn’t expect anything different. But all of this comes together. It’s a feel-good view of God.

And it’s a feel-good view of God that leaves us feeling really good up until the point that we’re separated from him for eternity in hell. Leaves us feeling really good right up until that point. And the reason so many people believe this is that it does have some similarities to Christianity.

There are some similarities. Okay, here they are. The Bible does teach God is love.

It says that. If you turn just a couple pages, 1 John 4. 8 and 1 John 4.

16, say God is love. It’s right in there. I don’t deny that.

God is love. His nature is to love us. And the passage that we’re going to look at this morning in 2 Peter 3 says, God is not willing that any should perish.

It’s not God’s desire. It’s not God’s perfect will. It’s not God’s ideal that any of us should reject him and go to hell.

God does love and accept us. That’s true. God does show grace.

That’s true. He does desire people to be saved. All of those things are true.

The problem with the unconditional acceptance gospel is not necessarily that it teaches a lot that is untrue. It’s that it takes half the truth and elevates it to the sum total. God is loving. God is gracious.

God does desire us to be saved. But that’s not the total. That’s not the sum of who he is. So we’re going to look at this passage this morning.

Just a few verses here. I’m sorry, 2 Peter chapter 3, starting in verse 1. He says, This second epistle, beloved, I now write unto you, in both which I stir up your pure minds by way of remembrance, that you may be mindful of the words which were spoken before by the holy prophets, and of the commandment of us, the apostles, of the Lord and Savior.

Knowing this verse, that there shall come in the last days scoffers, walking after their own lusts, and saying, Where is the promise of his coming? For since the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they were from the beginning of the creation. So in verses 1 and 2 there, Peter reminded his fellow believers that they needed to take seriously what the prophets and apostles had already written to them, especially, he talks about the commandments, so especially in context of the passage as a whole that we’re going to look at today, he’s talking about the holiness and the justice of God.

He’s telling them, he’s writing to them and saying, don’t forget these attributes of God. God is holy. God is just. God is not going to let sin go forever.

And then in verse 3, he writes about how they would come face to face with people who were going to mock these ideas. We think the world’s so uniquely terrible today, the way people mock God. This has been going on for millennia.

This is nothing new. People just can do it on television and social media now, so it gets a much wider audience. They were going to come face to face with people who were going to mock these ideas who were going to say that sin was no big deal and teach people to do just whatever felt right to them.

He said there were going to come mockers and scoffers walking after their own lusts. And that fits right into what I’ve already talked to you about this morning with this gospel of unconditional acceptance, which tells us that sin’s no big deal. The problem is that’s not biblical. That’s the opposite of what the Bible says. That’s what Peter was warning against. Those who would come and tell you, oh, sin’s no big deal. It’s fine.

And verse 4, he talks about how these people, these same people, would evidently deny the judgment of God against sin. Okay, they were going to say, where is the promise of his coming? They were going to ask that.

Oh, yeah, when’s God going to judge the world already? If there’s going to be judgment, when’s it going to happen? That’s what they were going to be asking.

What they were doing was denying the judgment of God against sin. And their reasoning was that many of them who expected to find the judgment, to see the judgment day occur, many believers who thought that they would live to see the end times had already died and Jesus had not yet returned. Things had gone on as they always had.

And so many came along and said, well, clearly this judgment thing has been way overblown. And Peter’s warning them not to fall into that trap of believing that God’s justice was not real just because he hadn’t done it yet, just because he hadn’t judged sin yet. And the gospel of unconditional acceptance downplays the idea that God will one day judge sin.

People today, there are teachers that you can go home and God forbid watch on TV in who will lead you to believe that it’s not going to be that big a deal. And even if they don’t say that by their neglect of the topic, they’ll lead you to believe that the judgment’s not a big deal. It downplays the idea that God will one day judge sin. Or he may judge the big ones, but not the little ones. That goes back to those in the survey who thought Not every sin is deserving of God’s judgment.

And there are people who think if you’re not Hitler, Mao, Stalin, Pol Pot, you’re not a serial killer, you’re probably okay. That’s not what the Bible teaches. Let’s look at verses 5, 6, and 7.

It says, For this they willingly are ignorant of, that by the word of God the heavens were of old, and the earth standing out of the water and in the water, whereby the world that then was being overflowed with water perished. But the heavens and earth, which are now by the same word, are kept in store, reserved unto fire against the day of judgment and perdition of ungodly men. So in verse 5, he’s talking about these people and their ignorance.

And he’s saying that when they assume God doesn’t take sin seriously just because he doesn’t zap us every time we step out of line, and that’s not how it works. God’s not standing up there waiting to squish you with his giant boot every time you step out of line, that they were willfully ignoring the evidence from history. Just because God doesn’t judge every little sin immediately, they concluded there’s no such thing as judgment.

And Peter said they were willfully ignoring history. And the gospel of unconditional acceptance says that God isn’t worried about our sin. On the contrary, the Bible teaches that God has judged sin all throughout history.

I mean, we don’t have to look any further than verses 5 and 6 where he’s talking about the flood in Noah’s day. God was so upset about sin that he wiped out the entire population of the earth except for eight people and two of every kind of animal. And I know some people say, well, what kind of cruel God would wipe? You read about humanity at that time and how every thought was only evil all the time.

All they could think about was hurting one another. The world was in chaos and violence, how could a loving God let that continue to go? We can’t have it both ways.

We can’t get mad when God doesn’t, we can’t doubt the character of God when he doesn’t judge sin immediately and get mad at him when he judges sin. I mean, we can’t have it both ways, but that’s the way human nature wants it. No, you look at Noah’s Ark.

We’ve turned it into a nursery story with all the cute animals on the boat, and I know we’ve had some of those things in the kids’ room. It’s a story about God’s judgment, that God said, y’all have got to stop treating each other this way. You’ve to stop doing all this stuff, and they wouldn’t, and God brought it to an end.

God judged it, and this passage talks about how in Noah’s day, God cleansed the world with water, and in the same way in the future, God is going to cleanse the world with fire. There will be a time of judgment and fire. Sorry, I know this is not the most encouraging message I’ve ever preached to you, but it’s what God’s Word tells us this morning.

Let’s look at verse 8. Let’s look at verse 8, verses 8, 9, and 10. But beloved, be not ignorant of this one thing, that one day with the Lord one day is with the Lord as a thousand years and a thousand years as one day.

The Lord is not slack concerning his promise as some men count slackness but is long suffering to usward not willing that any should perish but that all should come to repentance. But the day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night in the which the heavens shall pass away with a great noise and the elements shall melt with fervent heat the earth also and the works that are therein shall be burned up. So in verse 8, he wants us not to be confused.

Don’t be confused. Just because the judgment day hasn’t happened yet doesn’t mean that there’s not going to be one. Right?

There are some things you can take to the bank. Just because tax day hasn’t happened yet doesn’t mean there’s not going to be one. Right?

Some things are a certainty. And if God’s word is promised a judgment day, just because it hasn’t happened yet doesn’t mean it’s not going to. This verse teaches, when it talks about the day being like a thousand years and a thousand years being like a day.

Some people want to take that literally and apply it to history. I don’t know how that works with the timetable and all that. There’s an argument to be made there one way or the other.

In context of what he’s talking about, though, I don’t look at that as a formula for the end times or a formula for history. What he’s telling us there in context is God doesn’t work on your timetable. That’s what I understand it to me, because I want things right now, and I want to understand things right now, and I want God to wrap all this up right now.

not necessarily in the world, but when somebody does something to me, I want God to deal with it right now. And this verse is pointing out to me, God does not work for me. He does not operate on my timetable.

God looks at a day as the same as a thousand years, and God looks at a thousand years same as a day, meaning my concept of time has nothing to do with God’s plans. That’s exactly what that means. And then we move on to verse 9, and this really is the heart of the passage.

This The Lord is not slack concerning his promise, as some men count slackness, but is longsuffering to usward, not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance. There’s a lot of things to unpack in that verse. God’s judgment is not delayed because he has a careless attitude about sin.

So if we look at God and say, you know, why hasn’t he zapped that person? Okay? Why has he not zapped Ralph for what he said to me last week?

Ralph didn’t say anything to me. That’s just an example. But why hasn’t God taken care of this?

Why hasn’t God done this right now? All right, God isn’t letting that person’s sin go, and God isn’t letting my sin go unpunished for a time because God’s sloppy and God doesn’t care about sin. The time delay does not have anything to do with God having a careless attitude towards sin.

This verse tells us that if God holds back his judgment for a time, It’s only because it’s a deliberate act of his grace. So the fact that God doesn’t zap us every time, every single time we step out of line, right then, it’s because it’s a deliberate act of God’s grace to hold back, to give us space to repent. And this verse tells us that God is patient.

It says, long-suffering to us, where God is patient toward us in a way that we don’t deserve. When I step out of line, I deserve to get smacked down. And you may think, well, it’s just a little sin here and there.

No, I know what lurks in my heart, and I deserve to get smacked down. And yet he doesn’t, because God is patient toward us. Not that he’s accepting the sin, not that he’s saying, I’ll just let it go.

Every once in a while, if we’ve had a hard day with the kids and disappointing them, they’ll do something, and I’ll just tell Charlotte, we’re just not even going to deal with this. I’m too tired. I’ll just let it go.

That’s not God’s attitude. God doesn’t say, I’m just going to let this one slide. and it’s because of his grace and it’s because of his patience and though his justice demands that our sin has to be punished, God’s mercy doesn’t desire for us to perish in that punishment and go without him into the flames of hell forever.

See, we deserve death for sin, but that’s not God’s first stop because God doesn’t want us to be eternally separated from him because God loves us for reasons that I still don’t understand. I still don’t understand why God loves me, but I know that he does because he said it and he proved it on the cross. And because God has this justice that says the sin has to be punished, the penalty has to be paid, and God also has this mercy that says I don’t want them lost forever, God out of his patience and out of his grace holds back on judgment for a time to give us the opportunity to repent.

Not to say oh it’s okay, not to let it go, but to give us the opportunity to repent. and we’re going to come back to that word repentance in just a moment but verse 10 teaches about God’s judgment on the unrepentant and how his judgment on this unrepentant sinful world is coming and it’s not necessarily going to come when we expect it again just like in verse 8 God doesn’t work on our timetable he says it’ll come like a thief in the night you know what that means you won’t expect it the thief doesn’t call you ahead of time and say I’m going to break in at 3 a. m.

He comes when he thinks you least expect it. Comes like a thief in the night, but when when the judgment does come, it’s going to be unmistakable. Now I want to talk a little bit about repentance, which features so prominently in verse 9.

The major difference, hear me on this, the major difference between the gospel of unconditional acceptance and the true gospel of Jesus Christ is repentance. It’s repentance. This false gospel says that God is okay with our sin because he loves us and accepts our sin, making repentance unnecessary.

The real gospel says that God is not okay with our sin, but because he loves us, he calls us to repent because he’s willing to forgive us no matter what those sins look like if we’ll repent. That’s where God accepts you. When you come to him in faith and repentance through Jesus Christ, it doesn’t matter what the sins were.

God’s willing to forgive. Verse 9 says that God wants us to come to repentance instead of because those are our two options. That is not what the false gospel of unconditional acceptance teaches.

So we need to understand what repentance is because it is such a big deal. It’s part of the gospel, and it’s one that unfortunately we don’t talk about very much. The simplest explanation for the word repentance is that it’s a change of mind. The Greek word that we see here, we see the word repentance, we see repent, it comes from the word metanoeo in Greek, which means to change your mind.

It’s a simple word, but it’s one of the most misunderstood concepts in the whole Bible. Because there’s all sorts of ideas about what repentance are that have been preached through the years. It’s not.

Folks, it is not turning away from your sin. Some preachers will tell you today, and I think they’re well-intentioned, but they will tell you that repentance means turning away from your sin. That’s not true, because if we need to repent and trust Christ as our Savior, then that definition requires us to start living better in order to trust Christ as our Savior.

If we could live better, if we could live in a sinless way, if we could turn our backs on our sin before we come to Christ and have the Holy Spirit within us, if we could do that, we wouldn’t need Jesus Christ. I think there’s a hole in the logic there of saying, well, repentance means to turn away from your sin. We can’t. We can’t.

We’re sinners, and it’s in our job description. Turning from your sin comes after repentance. They’re connected, but they’re not the same thing.

Turning from your sin comes after repentance. It’s also not just feeling guilty over your sin. Some people talk about it like it’s a godly sorrow.

It’s a guilty feeling. Okay, feelings come and go. Anybody in here ever been a teenager?

Do you remember that far? You know that feelings come and go. They change, like hourly.

Most of us in here are adults and still experience the same thing. Okay, feelings come and go. If nothing changes, mere feelings are meaningless.

Feeling guilty about your sin is the result of repentance. It’s connected, but it’s not the same thing. And it’s also not just an intellectual change.

I know I said it means changing your mind. It’s not, hey, I think I’ll take this idea. It’s not just an intellectual changing of mind.

You know, I’ll adopt this idea, and then nothing else ever changes. It’s a change in our whole perspective toward God. In our natural state, we sin and we love it.

I mean, we just love it. We’re like hogs in mud. The hog doesn’t care he’s in the mud.

He loves it. That’s what he likes to do. We love it.

And when the natural man is confronted by the reality of his sinfulness and his rebellion against God, he couldn’t care less. Right? The natural man, the sinner, we do what we want and we like it and we don’t care what God says.

The repentant man is not sinless. We see people in the New Testament who have repented and they are not sinless. But when confronted by sin, the repentant man says, God is right and I’m wrong.

My sin’s wrong. See, there’s a change of our perspective there. The way we use the term repentance a lot of time, because we don’t talk about it with salvation, because we like to focus on faith alone, and I believe that, but I believe they’re inseparable.

When we talk about acknowl