A Treatise for the Church

We live in a culture that has elevated pride to the status of a virtue. Self-esteem, positive feelings, and personal dignity are what our society encourages people to seek. At the same time, moral responsibility is being replaced by victimism, which teaches people to blame someone else for their personal failures and iniquities. Frankly, the biblical teachings about human depravity, sin, guilt, repentance, and humility are not compatible with any of those ideas.

The church has been far too willing to embrace the fads of worldly opinion—particularly in the area of psychology and self-esteem. Christians often merely echo worldly thinking on the psychology of guilt and the importance of feeling good about oneself. The adverse effect on the life of the church can hardly be underestimated.

Nowhere has the damage registered more than in the way professing Christians deal with their own sin. In speaking to Christians around the country, I have seen a disheartening trend developing for at least two decades.

The church as a whole is growing less concerned with who Jesus Christ is, and more obsessed with self-exoneration and self-esteem. Christians are rapidly losing sight of sin as the root of all human woes. And many Christians are explicitly denying that their own sin can be the cause of their personal anguish. More and more are attempting to explain the human dilemma in wholly unbiblical terms: temperament, addiction, dysfunctional families, the child within, codependency, and a host of other irresponsible escape mechanisms promoted by secular psychology.

The potential impact of such a drift is frightening. Remove the reality of sin, and you take away the possibility of repentance. Abolish the doctrine of human depravity and you void the divine plan of salvation. Erase the notion of personal guilt and you eliminate the need for a Savior. Obliterate the human conscience, and you will raise an amoral and unredeemable generation. The church cannot join hands with the world in such a grossly satanic enterprise. To do so is to overthrow the very gospel we are called to proclaim.

This treatise is not merely a lament about society’s deplorable moral state or the damage we see caused by sin all around us. Nor is it an attempt to stir Christians up to tackle the impossible task of reconstructing society. Awakening the church to the awful reality of sin is not my only point of concern. That alone would have a positive effect on the world. But it is the one who took all our sin and became sin for us so that we can be free from the burden of sin. Are we following Jesus?

God’s purpose in this world—and the church’s only legitimate commission—is the proclamation of the message of sin and salvation to individuals, whom God sovereignly redeems and calls out of the world. God’s purpose is to save those who will repent of their sins and believe the gospel—not to work for external corrections in a morally bankrupt culture.

My prayer is that this will help to prompt Christians to turn again with new appreciation to the biblical doctrines of human depravity, sin, and the role of the conscience, leading to holiness that comes from following Jesus Christ. My prayer also is that it will help stem the tide of spiritual apathy, carelessness, shamelessness, and self-centeredness that worldly thinking has begun to breed among Bible-believing Christians. My most earnest prayer is that individual Christians who read this will be encouraged to reject such worldly values, and instead nurture “love from a pure heart and a good conscience and a sincere faith” (1 Tim. 1:5).

But we can only do this by lifting Jesus Christ above everything else. He is not a doctrine, but the one whom all of history and the future is waiting for to return. He is the reason why the whole universe and everything in it exists. It has been, it is now and ever will be about Jesus. Jesus loved us first, let us not lose sight of our first love.

John 12:32
32 But I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all men to myself."
(NIV)