What's Good Here?

"The preacher is required to know the difference between the law and the gospel. If a sermon ends in 'ethics', if its 'application' (a word that needs to be avoided) amounts to something I should do, it is a sermon of law and not grace...
Whenever you hear a preacher invoking concepts like 'accountability' or 'discipleship', you can be sure you're hearing the law. Whenever you are genuinely comforted or elated or absolved, then you know you are hearing the Gospel".

Paul Zahl - Grace in the church.

There are occasions when I find it hard to be in church.
It's not when I find myself facing a contemporary song I really cannot sing because the words ("change the atmosphere") make me wonder why am I doing this. Neither is it when words in liturgy and hymns are 'updated' (no doubt by those well intentioned) because that's contemporary (when the original phrases were just fine, often better). I am sure that many would conclude it's just my age if they heard me sigh in such circumstances, because in truth, it's best to be tolerant about such minor infractions. What seriously irks me though is when whoever is charged with delivering the word - the meat and drink my soul is craving for the week to come - forgets to bring before us God's truly overwhelming, abounding care and mercy in their time in the the pulpit.

Now, don't get me wrong here - 

Certainly, there is a place for reminding us we're died in the wool sinners (good services will have a time of absolution and confession, close to the start) dead to God as a race, and certainly, touching on our true state, especially in respect to our need for Christ, is a valid diagnosis before providing the essential remedy,
but where do we get the idea that telling those who have gathered to find God's grace in time of need that what they actually require is a lecture on the virtues of some expression of Christian "stoicism" - a continual shouldering of your burden and committing to 'doing better', because that's what, apparently, you've been called to.

This is dangerous stuff, which generates a very different form of "christianity". I spent years in the prison camp of 'checking your fruit' every day or week to certify you really were a believer.
Have I prayed enough, witnessed enough, read enough scripture and, first and foremost, lived a holy life today?
Have I, in effect, been the person God would expect me to be were I able to keep His commands perfectly?

Inevitably, the truthful response was no, not even close.

It left me, and numerous others I know totally uncertain about who they were because they firstly lost any assurance in Christ (where the Gospel tells them they were supposed to be looking) and then proceeded to quickly loose confidence in themselves because there is, as Paul states concerning the believer in Romans 7, nothing good in us. They needed the good news. What they were fed was a constant diet of asking 'are you really walking well?' until it crushed them, or, even worse, left them believing they were pulling it off in themselves, having a righteousness other than what's provided in Christ.

So, how serious a problem is this?

Well, let me put it this way.
The Apostolic church of the first century never held any kind of church council or major assembly on any of the cardinal truths you'd state in the Apostles creed (The Trinity, the two natures of Christ, the Virgin Birth, and so on), or the nature of church government, or for clarifying eschatology, and so on, but they most certainly did on the issue of what we need to understand in respects to the nature of a believer's relationship to not mistaking faith as a series of rules to be imposed and then fervently kept and adhered to.

"Certain men had arisen and were teaching the brethren that unless you obey the customs of Moses, you cannot be saved" (Acts 15:1). 
Notice how Luke puts that - there was a teaching circulating that was adamantly stating that the saving work of Jesus in itself is not enough to save us. It was proclaiming that you had to do more for there to be any assurance of God accepting you, but therein lies the real trouble. Our diagnosis of the problem  (who we are, and what's to be done about it) has to be total and exact if we're to apply the right treatment. Keeping the Law, however we dress it (deeper commitment, holiness, sinless living, discipleship), whatever appeal we think it has, negates the Gospel. Did you hear that? That is why Paul is so emphatic in his letter to the Galatians (he repeats his crucial, damning warning twice in his opening of the letter) - you cannot mess with this without detaching yourself from Christ!

It's so easy for us to foster some manner of confidence in our flesh, but it won't engender anything but the nightmare of bad religion.

False religion incubates in the warmth of self righteousness.

So, what is the solution?
There's a story which really comforts me.

One night, whilst Martin Luther was a wanted man, incarcerated because he was daring to challenge the established church with the riches of the unmerited work of Christ, the devil came and presented him with a list of charges - his many sins.
Now, Luther had known a long and very troubling paralysis because, unlike most people, he knew the real seriousness of his wrongdoing, and the fact that he was constantly in jeopardy because of his foul nature would seem to have fashioned a tool the devil could use against him to turn him into a worthless, quivering wreck.

Naturally, it would be game over for any man made to face something of the sheer awfulness of his true condition...
How would the Reformer respond?

Luther laughed.

Your list is far, far too short he countered, and what of them?

Something astonishing had happened to this man. It wasn't that his sins weren't real, or that he'd become some extraordinary creature who in himself could rise above his iniquity. Looking back later, he tells us why he could be so calm and bold before the accuser...

When the devil, he noted, throws your sins in your face and declares that you deserve death and hell, tell him this - 'I admit I do indeed deserve them, but I know one who has made full satisfaction on my behalf. His name is Jesus Christ, Son of God, and where He is, I am also!'

Luther was resting in the full and glorious truth that He was one made free from sin only by the life, death and resurrection of another - that is where we find God's kindly face towards us.

Our one sole place of full confidence and assurance is the benevolence we find ours at the throne of grace (Hebrews 4:16). The purpose of our fellowship together here and now is to gather us there, that Christ and His death and life may become ours, for only then are we more than those swallowed by sin and death.

If we think our discipleship, our ethics or works are going to cut it in any way, we've fallen into detaching ourselves from Christ alone. He does the saving. the keeping, the resurrecting.

Jacques Ellul, in his comprehensive work The Subversion of Christianity notes that the root of all our troubles as Christians is when we omit to call believers to their true birth right as God's redeemed children - to be free (Galatians 5:1). It is freedom we find so shocking, and so we, like the Israelites of old, often seek to scurry back to some manner of slavery, either to the law or to sin, rather than live boldly beneath the love of God.

To do so leaves the church seeking to find confidence in all the wrong places and opens us to all manner of draining and destructive error.

Freedom in Christ alone, that God's grace may constantly be our meat and drink. That's the true requirement and result of God's love at work amongst us.

Let's remember that, especially in church on Sundays.