Fear Factor

There's been a lot of talk recently (even on this very blog) about the SBC resolution on alcohol use. While I certainly have my opinion, I try to remain open enough to listen to the arguments on the other side. I am willing to be convinced if I can be convinced biblically.

One of the chief complaints I have heard on blogs and in articles from the supporting side is that those on the dissenting side have a very loose idea of "freedom in Christ." It's a phrase that used in an almost disparaging, mocking, or sarcastic tone. Many who use this line of reasoning seem to insinuate that "freedom in Christ" is simply a made up term used to excuse sin. They seem to criticize the use of "freedom in Christ" but offer no convincing alternative as to what real "freedom in Christ" is.

I have heard teachers and preachers growing up proclaim that the freedom we have in Christ is the freedom to do what we should. Now I may be way off base, but that doesn't sound like freedom. It sounds like bondage. It sounds like a legalist could affirm that definition of freedom. And I guess I understand what they're getting at. It's true and biblical that until we are set free by Christ all of our actions are ultimately sinful because anything that does not come from faith is sin. Only when we are set free from sin are we set free to righteousness.

But when it's fleshed out in real life, it's so easy for that "freedom to righteousness" to be twisted into a new law. You are free from sin and free from the law, so now do what I tell you to do. It's as though we are frightened to tell people that the freedom that is theirs in Christ is really freedom. We are content to tell people that they are justified by grace through faith, but then we want to put them back under a list of demands and a yoke of bondage and define for them what holiness is and is not apart from the explicit teaching of Scripture. We are afraid to tell them that they are also sanctified by grace through faith, not by works of the law. We have become modern-day Judaizers who measure holiness by external adherance to an extra-biblical code.

But why this fear of freedom? Is it justified? Should we temper our proclamation of the gospel of grace? Should we tone it down? What can we do to address the fact that some may misunderstand the gospel of grace and freedom to be a license to sin? Should that frighten us? Listen to these words from D. Maryn Lloyd-Jones:

. . . If it is true that where sin abounded grace has much more abounded, well then, ‘shall we continue in sin, that grace may abound yet further?’

First of all, let me make a comment, to me a very important and vital comment. The true preaching of the gospel of salvation by grace alone always leads to the possibility of this charge being brought against it. There is no better test as to whether a man is really preaching the New Testament gospel of salvation than this, that some people might misunderstand it and misinterpret it to mean that it really amounts to this, that because you are saved by grace alone it does not matter at all what you do; you can go on sinning as much as you like because it will redound all the more to the glory of grace. If my preaching and presentation of the gospel of salvation does not expose it to that misunderstanding, then it is not the gospel. Let me show you what I mean.

If a man preaches justification by works, no one would ever raise this question. If a man’s preaching is, ‘If you want to be Christians, and if you want to go to heaven, you must stop committing sins, you must take up good works, and if you do so regularly and constantly, and do not fail to keep on at it, you will make yourselves Christians, you will reconcile yourselves to God and you will go to heaven’. Obviously a man who preaches in that strain would never be liable to this misunderstanding. Nobody would say to such a man, ‘Shall we continue in sin, that grace may abound?’, because the man’s whole emphasis is just this, that if you go on sinning you are certain to be damned, and only if you stop sinning can you save yourselves. So that misunderstanding could never arise . . . . . .

Nobody has ever brought this charge against the Church of Rome, but it was brought frequently against Martin Luther; indeed that was precisely what the Church of Rome said about the preaching of Martin Luther. They said, ‘This man who was a priest has changed the doctrine in order to justify his own marriage and his own lust’, and so on. ‘This man’, they said, ‘is an antinomian; and that is heresy.’ That is the very charge they brought against him. It was also brought George Whitfield two hundred years ago. It is the charge that formal dead Christianity – if there is such a thing – has always brought against this startling, staggering message, that God ‘justifies the ungodly’ . . .

Grace is indeed risky. It is scary. It gives freedom...real freedom. It does not simply change the prison cell you are in. I am willing to be misunderstood and taken advantage of if it means preaching the real, liberating gospel of grace. I am willing to be called "antinomian" and "heretic" and "liberal" for the sake of the gospel. I know I am none of those things, but go ahead and call names if you want. I know who I am. And I am not afraid.

Dave