Category: Gospel

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A Pastoral Prayer at Christmas

I compose a pastoral prayer each Sunday that I hope teaches my congregation. It hits different emphases each week. We start with a minute of quiet so each attender can confess sin and ask God to prepare his or her heart for worship. It’s been awhile since I’ve done this, but I’ve included a pastoral prayer I prayed at our church in December. Hopefully it encourages you.

Dear Father, We love the birth of Jesus. It reminds us of how humbly he came to earth. The God of the universe robed in human flesh—it’s so far beneath God the Son, but he did it for us. So we celebrate the humble birth of Christ. And not just humble by divine standards; it was also humble by human standards. Jesus was born to a poor family in a small town in a humble stable. That’s not how a king would be born we would think. Yet, Jesus exceeds our expectations in the humility of his birth. Father, thank you for Christ’s birth. He needed to be human so that he could die in our place. Millions of lambs were sacrificed in the years before Christ was born, but not one could ever permanently take our sin away. We needed a human substitute. And Jesus became that human substitute for us. So Father thank you for Christ’s birth.

God, help us to be unselfish this season. We develop such towering and enslaving expectations about what each event should be like, how our family should act and treat us, and how each person should react to our gift giving. There are many more expectations that we can have that we judge others by. They become idols that we serve. We want the perfect Christmas as defined by our expectations. Sometimes they are sinful; other times they are just too big. Most times they are reasonable expectations which makes them so dangerous. We live for them rather than living for your glory. We want others to serve us by meeting our expectations rather than us serving them as Jesus would. You never take a sanctification break on us—even during Christmas. So grant us grace to serve you and not our dreams, desires, and expectations this Christmas.

Father, our country needs Jesus. They need the gospel. So many are lost and blinded by their sin. They pursue what this life has to offer with no concern for its eternal results. There is a real, literal hell of unending pain for those that reject Christ. That is reality. You tell us in Matthew 25:46 that there is both eternal punishment and eternal life. If one is eternal, so is the other. Sins against an infinite God deserve unending punishment. It’s the awful reality of an eternal hell. Please don’t let us get numbed to that reality while we live for the temporal pleasures of this world. Save our relatives, our neighbors, our coworkers, and our friends. If we believe this, then we must obey the Great Commission and tell others about Christ. Give us ample opportunities combined with godly motivation to share the good news—that all can escape hell through Jesus. And may our gospel sharing be fruitful. May we share the gospel because we are so thrilled with Jesus that we cannot help it. In Jesus’ name, Amen.

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How to Detect a Sham Gospel

I am preaching through 1 Timothy for the first time and I came across verse 11 of chapter 1.

…and whatever else is contrary to sound doctrine, in accordance with the gospel of the glory of the blessed God with which I have been entrusted. (1 Tim 1:10b–11 ESV)

This might be heart of all false gospels–they elevate humanity and downplay Christ. False gospels say that you aren’t that bad. Yes, you fall short of your aspirations, but really, you’re not a terrible person. One person summarized it this way: 

“Deep down you’re okay; God accepts you just as you are. God smiles on you even if you don’t jump through any hoops. You have intrinsic worth. God accepts you, warts and all. You can relax, bask in His smile, and let the basically good, real you emerge.”[1]“God’s Love: Better Than Unconditional” in David Powlison, Seeing With New Eyes (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R, 2003), 169.

That is popular and wrong. It is not the gospel, and it exalts humanity. And by doing so, they take some of the glory that belongs to God and shift it to humanity. They shift it to you. That’s every false gospel.

The gospel brings God glory. Maybe that seems simple to you, but it’s a significant truth. He is glorified by the message and by every person that believes it. If you are there when a person goes from darkness to light, you are witnessing God being glorified.

God saving you didn’t happen because you were so wonderful, and he couldn’t imagine heaven without you. He saved you because he is wonderful. God took the initiative in salvation. You were not able to save yourself. Your good works would never be enough. In fact, they really weren’t good works at all.

For all of us have become like one who is unclean, And all our righteous deeds are like a filthy garment; And all of us wither like a leaf, And our wrongdoings, like the wind, take us away. (Isaiah 64:6 NASB 2020)

So you were a mess. I was a mess. We couldn’t save ourselves. The true gospel glorifies God, not us. It shows God’s love and holiness. It shows our sin. God is glorified.

False gospels, of which there are many, glorify man.

The social gospel has been around for over 130 years. Religious people that didn’t believe in miracles, the Resurrection, the divinity of Jesus, or that the Bible is God’s Word turned the focus to saving humanity now (e.g., labor laws, poverty, health, education, etc.). But by doing so they deemphasized sin, Jesus, hell, and God’s holiness.

They believed that humanity could save itself because man is basically good. The social gospel glorifies humanity. It is a false gospel. Certainly Jesus cared about the poor, but making a poor person wealthy without telling them how to be reconciled to God through Christ gives them a more comfortable road to hell.

The Presbyterian Church USA (PCUSA) was in the news this past week because they closed their office of Presbyterian World Mission and fired their remaining missionaries.[2] https://www.al.com/news/2025/04/presbyterian-church-usa-fires-missionaries-ends-mission-agency.html. The PCUSA is one of the mainline denominations that was completely compromised by religious liberalism about 100 years ago and has been on a slow decline ever since. The PCUSA has been teaching the social gospel for decades and decades. And at the end of March they gave up any pretense of foreign missions and closed their office. Why have foreign missions if you don’t believe people need Jesus Christ? People do need clean water, but they need Jesus more. They’ve been preaching a false, man-centered gospel for about a century.

The prosperity gospel has a more recent history but it is just as damning as any other false gospel. This is the belief that God intends us to be healthy and wealthy and the only obstacle to that is your lack of faith. If you just believe hard enough, you can be rich. It’s a false gospel. It glorifies you. How? Because your faith is what manipulates God into making you rich and healthy. You have faith in your faith, not faith in God. It’s faith in you, not God. And being rich is about your glory. Your wealth says that you’re something in the eyes of God. That glorifies you.

The gospel of works says that you can save yourself. You work hard enough. You can change yourself. You can get yourself to heaven. And who gets the glory and praise in that scenario? Why you do.

The Pope died over a week ago. What gospel did the Pope believe? Was it the true gospel? A few years ago he said this,

All religions are paths to God. I will use an analogy: they are like different languages that express the divine…There is only one God, and religions are like languages, paths to reach God. Some are Sikh, some Muslim, some Hindu, some Christian.[3] https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2024/sep/18/no-pope-francis-all-religions-arent-path-to-god/. Also in https://thecripplegate.com/what-will-jesus-say-to-pope-francis-on-judgment-day/

Is that the true gospel? Does that fit with John 14:6?

Jesus said to him, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father except through Me. (John 14:6 NASB 2020)

The Pope was an incredibly religious person. One of his titles is the Vicar of Christ. Do very religious people go to heaven? Is that what the Bible says?

“Not everyone who says to Me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but the one who does the will of My Father who is in heaven will enter. Many will say to Me on that day, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in Your name, and in Your name cast out demons, and in Your name perform many miracles?’ And then I will declare to them, ‘I never knew you; leave Me, you who practice lawlessness.’ (Matt 7:21–23 NASB 2020)

I’ve quoted this passage at my church many times because this is such a stark warning from the lips of Jesus. The religious don’t get into heaven. It’s only those that repent and trust Jesus alone. The Pope preached the gospel of works; that is a sham gospel. Unless in his last few moments he repented, he is not in heaven.

Maybe that offends you. I mean how could I sit in judgment of the Pope? Paul is writing to Timothy because what you believe about the gospel is of incredible importance. It determines heaven or hell; life or death.

All false gospels are man-centered. The true gospel glorifies God and God only.

Does your gospel make you feel better about yourself or does it lead you to praise God?

References

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Matchbox Cars, GI Joes, and Jesus

And the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us….

It’s an amazing truth. Jesus became human. The Word created the world, but He became part of our world. The incarnation is the enfleshment of the Word. Remaining what He always had been—God, He became what He never had been—human, ever so to remain—the God-man.

I played with Matchbox and Hot Wheels cars when I was a kid. We had a sandbox in our backyard and I remember carving out roads and tunnels and caves. It seemed so cool to me. And, as a boy would, I imagined what it would be like to actually live in my little sandbox world. It seemed cooler than the real world I actually lived in. After all, in my dreams I would be able to drive these Hot Wheels cars.

I also played with G.I. Joes—the full size one with a stubbly beard and a realistic facial scar. Oh, and for the record, they are not dolls; they are action figures. My brother and I would play in our basement with them. We strung string all over the basement imagining that our GI Joes could go hand over hand wherever they needed to go to fight. And again I imagined what it would be like to actually be a GI Joe. As a child it seemed pretty epic.

But I never entered either of those worlds. I was stuck with being human. I was always outside of those worlds I created.

Maturity helped me understand that entering those worlds would not have been good. For one, our sandbox world sometimes ended with plastic soldiers placed all over it and me and my friend throwing baseballs at them. The sandbox world got laid waste.

And for the GI Joes, they got lost, misplaced, or laid aside for years. Sometimes they lost arms—they always lost shirts and boots for some reason. On the coldest day in our basement, my GI Joe was shirtless.

In retrospect, it wouldn’t have been a good idea to enter those worlds. It was good to be above them, apart from them.

…and we saw His glory, glory as of the only begotten from the Father, full of grace and truth.

Did you ever watch ants as a kid? Maybe you even had an ant farm where you could see them construct their vast tunnel structure underground. Maybe, like a lot of kids, you wished you could be an ant even if just for a day so you could crawl around their tunnels.

But entering that world isn’t a good idea either. Lots of ants get squashed by humans. Some get fried by the magnifying glass in the hand of a young boy in Green Bay, WI in the summer of 1980… just an example. No one in specific. 😉

What’s the distance between you and a Matchbox world? … What’s the distance between you and a GI Joe world? … What’s the distance between you and an ant world? It’s a pretty big distance, right? It sounds fun to experience for a 10-year old, but if you could actually do it, you wouldn’t. It would be so far beneath you. You wouldn’t become “enfleshed” in plastic to save your Hot Wheels from certain death from a baseball. You wouldn’t become an ant to lecture them on the benefits of capitalism or how democracy could change their world.

Why would God become human? It’s way more ridiculous than a boy becoming a GI Joe. I use ridiculous respectfully. It’s an outlandish idea. It’s preposterous. It’s so far beneath the God of the universe. He created this world; he wouldn’t enter it.

And yet exactly that is what we celebrate at Christmas. God the Son became human. The distance between you and an ant is finite. It’s a big distance, but it’s measurable. The distance between God and man is infinite. And God became man. Jesus was born in a stable—a world he created he came to rescue.

And the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us, and we saw His glory, glory as of the only begotten from the Father, full of grace and truth. … No one has seen God at any time; the only begotten God who is in the bosom of the Father, He has explained Him. John 1:14, 18 (NASB95)
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Which Jesus at Christmas?

There are lots of wrong ways to think about Jesus at Christmas, aren’t there? There’s the sentimental Jesus. This is the view that the baby in the manger is just a nice story. We repeat it because it’s part of Christmas folklore. The Jesus story gives us warm feelings at Christmas time. Sentimental Jesus is very popular. He doesn’t ask anything of you, and he just gives good feelings. We feel warm and cozy thinking about sentimental Jesus.

There’s the view that Jesus was just a good man. He was better than most people and that’s why we celebrate His birth. We talk about Him on Christmas to motivate all of us to be better too. His story might help me think about others at Christmas. Good Jesus is popular too. Good Jesus is good by our definition of good. Good Jesus certainly wouldn’t call anyone a sinner. He wouldn’t demand your repentance. Good Jesus doesn’t judge anybody for his or her rebellion against God.

There’s the view that Jesus wasn’t a real, historical figure. His existence is a myth that grew up over the centuries. Oh there probably was a real person named Jesus, but we’ve mythologized Him—kind of like Paul Bunyan. Well, really, kind of like Santa Claus. Christians just tell some tall tales about Jesus—walking on water, healing the lepers. Those are the types of stories that are told about mythical characters. Mythical Jesus is just a story that we can take or leave. He wasn’t real, but it’s really harmless and even quaint that people still believe in Him.

Hopefully, Christians are not tempted to think of Jesus in those terms. But there’s another wrong way to think about Jesus that Christians are susceptible to. This is Sunday Jesus. Who’s Sunday Jesus you ask? It’s the belief that Jesus was real, but all He asks of us is our Sundays. We give Him a Sunday—and not even all of them. I think He’s fine with just a Sunday once in a while. It’s more of a courtesy, a tip so to speak. We give Him a Sunday and the rest of the week we’re on our own. Sunday Jesus doesn’t make a difference the rest of the week. We sing about Him on Sunday, but we’re on our own on Monday. Well, it’s not that we’re on our own, but that we can ignore Him on Monday.

Sunday Jesus is King in the same sense that most men are the “kings” of their houses. His wife and kids kind of wink and allow the man to pretend he’s in charge. We nod and wink and let Jesus pretend He’s in charge. “King of kings” is more of an honorary title than a real description of Jesus.

Sunday Jesus isn’t Lord either. He doesn’t really call the shots in our lives. Again, I’m giving Him some of my Sundays. If He’s Lord, it’s on those days. It’s not all the time. I determine His lordship, which means He’s not really in charge.

Sunday Jesus doesn’t demand that we become like Him. That’s more of a suggestion. When it works out, if you can without much effort or inconvenience follow His lead, then by all means do so. But only if the cost is low enough, only if it doesn’t disrupt your plans.

Really Sunday Jesus is a shriveled Jesus. He’s a shadow of the Jesus described in the Gospels. He’s a shadow of the Jesus described in the Christmas story.

Let all the house of Israel therefore know for certain that God has made him both Lord and Christ, this Jesus whom you crucified.” Acts 2:36 (ESV)
On his robe and on his thigh he has a name written, King of kings and Lord of lords. Rev 19:16 (ESV)

Are you worshipping Sunday Jesus or the real Jesus who is King and Lord and Savior?

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A Pastoral Prayer

Each Sunday morning I pray publicly for the congregation. My own devotional time, Scripture reading, and Christian reading provide some thoughts each week. I want to pray genuinely and also teach my congregation how to pray. For example, I want them to understand how to confess sin in prayer. Here’s one from a few weeks ago.

Dear Father, Our hearts have so many other loves, but only one is necessary—Jesus. Like Martha we are distressed and moved about by many things, but one thing is needful—time with Jesus. Remind us again this morning of Jesus’ love for us, and help us love Jesus most of all.

God, Ephesians describes you as rich in mercy. Some here this morning may think that’s good poetry but not true in their lives. Some bear more of the marks of a sin-cursed world than others. They’ve been mistreated, betrayed, attacked, diminished, and hurt. And it’s easy to wonder where is the evidence of your mercy in their life. But Father, the evidence of your mercy is your mistreated, betrayed, [and] attacked Son who died for us. And through his death we all know your mercy.

God, we have hearts that are stubborn and hard. Please make us pliable and teachable. We need your truth. You tell us that your Word is a light for our path and a lamp unto our feet. We need spiritual truth to make sense of life and yet we don’t seek your Word and we don’t listen when it’s presented to us. Soften our stubborn hearts this morning. May your truth sung and preached be used by the Holy Spirit to change us.

Father, don’t let our worship this morning to be perfunctory, habitual, dead. Instead may our worship be passionate, fervent, earnest, and intense. We are able to work up excitement and emotion on our own, but only you can give us genuine worship. So banish any thoughts except those that are focused on you. Eliminate any distractions that would keep us from thinking about you. May we be thrilled with you this morning.

Your Word says that people love darkness rather than light because their deeds are evil. We need to be people that live in the light. First John tells us to walk in the light and it ties that to confessing sin regularly. So Lord, convict us when we hide our sin. We hide it by not admitting we’re wrong to others and to you. We hide it by actually keeping it secret from others. Convict us and let us know the sweet forgiveness that comes when we admit our sin.

In Jesus’ name, Amen.