Today I would like to commend to your attention a resource from Dr. Rod Rosenbladt entitled “The Gospel for Those Broken by the Church”. This is a 45-minute talk which is available from New Reformation Press. You can download it in MP3 format for only $3.45. Or, if you are a college student like myself and seeking to live resourcefully with limited means, you can save a dollar and download the text in PDF format.
I am sure that many of you who are Christians have wrestled with the question of “What does the Gospel mean for me now?” As unbelievers, we got that we were sinners who were completely, utterly, hopelessly incapable of living up to the requirements of an infinitely holy God. We were condemned to death followed by an eternity of separation from God and all the misery entailed in that–and justly so. And then we heard and believed the Gospel message that Christ had died for our sin and made a way for us to enter into relationship with God, that He had satisfied the requirements of a holy God and that this righteousness would be credited to us if we just believed.
But something else happened at that time. When we believed, we were received into the family of God and became privy to every gift, every blessing, and every good thing that God bestows upon His children. This includes the power to overcome sin, resist temptation, and live a victorious life. Some quarters of Christianity, namely the Pentecostal/Charismatic, teach that we receive the Holy Spirit through a separate spiritual experience subsequent to conversion, and that it is the presence of the Holy Spirit in our lives which enables us to live victoriously.
At any rate, a transformation has taken place inside of us. Verses such as “Be perfect, therefore, as your Heavenly Father is perfect” (Matthew 5:48) and “I can do all things through Christ who gives me strength” (Philippians 4:13) are now no longer outside the realm of possibility, because we now have the right spiritual equipment to enable us to live up to them.
Or do we? As we go on about our lives as Christians, we find ourselves fighting the same urges and temptations that we have dealt with all along, and probably succumbing more often than not. But now, we no longer have any excuse. As unbelievers, we at least had the excuse of being spiritually dead and separated from God and so what do you expect? Now, that excuse has been taken away from us. With the very power of God inside of us at our disposal, we ought to be doing better than this. And if this pattern of sin and struggle continues in our lives for any length of time, we begin to wonder if we really are Christian. If we were, then it would have worked out better than this!
The conventional wisdom in most of evangelical Protestant-dom is that if you reach this point, then in all probability you are not saved in the first place and you need to go through the whole conversion thing all over again. Go to the revival, youth camp, or whatever evangelistic meeting and respond to the altar call. Walk the aisle, sign the card, commit your life to Jesus all over again, because obviously it didn’t take the first time but maybe this time it will.
Go through this cycle often enough, and it will likely erode the confidence of the most stalwart believer. But Rosenbladt tells us that the Gospel is for Christians too. Even though we are saved, we still sin, therefore we still fall into the category of “sinner”. Therefore the Gospel message still applies to us.
I strongly recommend that you go and download this file, either the MP3 or the PDF. This message is one which we as evangelicals desperately need to hear.
