Evangelism Without Guilt: A Focus on Relationships Rather Than Legal Technicalities

ISBN-10
1482620359
ISBN-13
9781482620351
Category
Religion
Pages
86
Language
English
Published
2013-02-23
Author
Michael Morrison

Description

Guilt is so thoroughly ingrained in religious culture that many people cannot imagine the gospel without a focus on guilt. They present the gospel as a transaction: you will be forgiven IF you accept the gospel. But Jesus already paid for your sins and you are already forgiven. There is no IF. Sin is forgiven, but it still messes up relationships. So the gospel needs to focus on our relationships."God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting people's sins against them" (2 Cor. 5:19). "Love...keeps no record of wrongs" (1 Cor. 13:5). Jesus "canceled the charge of our legal indebtedness, which stood against us and condemned us; he has taken it away, nailing it to the cross" (Col. 2:14).Jesus paid for our sins, our debts, and he did it 2000 years ago. It was done, past tense, before we ever lived and long before we ever believed it. Forgiveness has been granted; God is not waiting on us to believe it before we are actually forgiven. There is no longer any debt to speak of.Why then do many evangelistic presentations dredge our sins back up, to pronounce people guilty? Why do they threaten people with non-existent debts? They present God as a cranky judge who is upset merely at the fact that people don't know that someone else has paid their debt. They present a Father who seems unaware of what his Son did, and one who has a different attitude toward us than the Son has.Some evangelistic presentations present the gospel as a trial in a court - that we first have to be proven guilty before we can be forgiven. But the Bible says that the sins are already paid for, and already forgiven. God is not counting our sins against us. He does not keep a record of our mistakes. The book of our sins is already blank.Other presentations say that our sins have created a huge chasm between us and God. But this chasm is a fiction; it has already been filled in by Christ. Our sins are not a barrier that keep us away from God, because God has already reconciled us to himself. It is a unilateral declaration of peace. He does not harbor any grudges against us.A guilt-based gospel is a misrepresentation of who God is, what Christ has done, and how people are to respond. It often works, though, because many people are already enculturated into thinking that God is cranky, that he is angry at people, and that we have to do something to get back on his good side. They think that God is like Zeus or Thor, ready to send lightning strikes on anyone who annoys him. But the gospel should free people from these errors, rather than act like they are correct.What would the gospel look like if we didn't harp about sins that are already paid for? If we didn't focus on guilt that God has already put aside? (We are of course guilty of all kinds of sins, but the Bible says that God is not counting our sins against us. He is not concerned about a legal category called "guilt.")However, many religious people think that God is still focused on our guilt, that our relationship with God is based entirely on whether he holds us guilty. They see humanity's problem through the lens of guilt, and if we remove guilt from the equation, then they think that the gospel will have nothing left to say. There is no reason for anyone to accept the gospel, they think, if everyone is already forgiven. Such people have a one-dimensional gospel.But consider this: If humanity's only problem is guilt, and that guilt is removed when we accept Jesus as our Savior, then that would mean that we have no more problems. If the only thing wrong with sin is that it makes us guilty, and that guilt is forgiven when we accept the gospel, then there will then be nothing wrong with sin! That is of course wrong, but it illustrates the fact that there's a lot more to sin and salvation than just the removal of guilt. There's a lot more to the gospel than a transaction by which our sins can be forgiven.

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