Handling the Hard Side of the Gospel
Steve Brown
People fail in their obedience not because we make the gospel too good but because we don't make it good enough.
— Steve Brown Years ago I preached a strong sermon on the subject of divorce. I held no punches, and to drive home my passion about the sinfulness of divorce, I said, "I, for one, will never get a divorce!" Later that week, the wife of the chairman of the church board came to my office. Both she and her husband had been previously divorced, though in each case, I learned in retrospect, they had biblical justification. She was hurt and angry about the sermon, "You shouldn't be so judgmental," she said. I didn't understand what she was talking about, and I wasn't about to "wimp out" on what I thought were clear biblical principles. So I defended myself. What she said stuck with me, however. Years later, I looked back on that message and realized she was essentially right. Not that the teaching was wrong, but my attitude was. When I said, "I will never get a divorce!" I was acting elitist, looking down my nose at people, and they deserved better than that. "The gospel faithfully preached meddles with everything else on earth," said Henry Ward Beecher. Especially when we preach the hard truths of the gospel, we know what Beecher means. The gospel invades every nook and cranny of hearers' lives: their sexuality, thoughts, dreams, bank accounts, secret sins, goals, priorities, motivations, family, work. We want to "meddle" but without self-righteousness. We want to build up the congregation, not condemn it. We want to speak the truth but do so in love. So how do we do that? Grace First and Last
In an Episcopal church, an older woman came forward for Communion and knelt alongside others. She had been troubled about her own sinfulness, ...
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