As Steve Thompson related in one of our leadership team meetings, there have been scientific studies made which indicate that the way that we are born can affect our whole lives. One example that was given is a procedure developed called "drug them and tug them," which was to drug the mother and tug the baby out. That generation became the one that turned to drug use in mass. Drugs are used as an escape from the pains of life.
It seems that there has also been a parallel to this in the church. When the gospel of an "easy salvation," or an easy new birth, began to be preached, Christians in mass seemed to become easily addicted to spiritual drugs, or doctrines that make you feel good while escaping reality. This message of an easy salvation was basically "come to Jesus and He will save you from all of your problems," rather than the biblical gospel that we come to Him to be saved from our sin, and to enter a life of radical discipleship and self-sacrifice.
I was given a prophetic word over twenty years ago that "the saved needed to get saved." This word continues to ring in my ears as I have watched a veritable meltdown of morality and integrity in the Western church. The weakness of Christians to stand against temptation and deception continues to grow rapidly. There is something fundamentally wrong with what is generally happening in Christianity today. When something starts going fundamentally wrong, it is the result of a problem with the foundation. We need to reexamine the very foundations of our gospel message, and the method, or lack of one, that is being used to disciple those who are coming into the church.
Because of excesses in the past with shepherding and discipleship, many believers now have a knee jerk reaction just to these words. As I have studied those movements, trying to understand what went wrong, I do believe that the methods that were devised by them promoted weakness and immaturity in believers rather than maturity. I am certainly not proposing a return to them, but there is a true discipleship, and there is a desperate need for true shepherds who will lay down their lives for the sheep, and not just try to use them for their own selfish gain.
The Apostle Paul described the gospel that he preached in I Corinthians 2:1-5:
For I determined to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ, and Him crucified.
And I was with you in weakness and in fear and in much trembling.
And my message and my preaching were not in persuasive words of wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power,
that your faith should not rest on the wisdom of men, but on the power of God.
A question that we must ask is: Are people today really being converted by the cross at all? Are we merely converting them to our denominations, to our doctrines, and to us? Are we even converting them to shallow promises of an easier life and deliverance from their problems? Following Jesus will not deliver us from all our problems— it will even give us some of the biggest ones, possibly even calling for our lives! He did not come to deliver us from our problems, but from ourselves. He did not come to change our circumstances—He came to change us! Jesus is not coming cap in hand begging men to "accept Him." He still calls men to come to Him the same way He called them when He walked this earth.
When Jesus called His disciples, it was for total commitment. They had to be willing to leave everything to follow Him, and so do we. If He is not the Lord of all, then He is not our Lord at all. As Paul also wrote:
and He died for all, that they who live should no longer live for themselves, but for Him who died and rose again on their behalf (II Corinthians 5:14-15).
Nothing less than this is true discipleship, as the Lord Jesus Himself made clear:
"Many will say to Me on that day, 'Lord, Lord did we not prophesy in Your name, and in Your name cast out demons, and in Your name perform many miracles?'
"And then I will declare to them, 'I never knew you; depart from Me, you who practice lawlessness'" (Matthew 7:21-23).
When we modify the message of the cross in order to make it acceptable, we destroy the power of that message to truly save. There are many "gospels" that are being preached today that have made multitudes feel safe in a spiritual condition in which their eternal lives were in jeopardy. Those who preach such a diluted gospel, and who promote such an easy Christian life, may be the biggest stumbling blocks living today. As Paul said, "For Christ did not send me to baptize, but to preach the gospel, not in cleverness of speech, that the cross of Christ should not be made void" (I Corinthians 1:17-18).
Before we can preach the true message of the cross, we must be delivered from the fear of man, the compulsion to be accepted by men, or the motive of wanting to receive anything from them. As Paul declared in Galatians 1:10: "If I were still trying to please men, I would not be a bond-servant of Christ."
If we are to walk with Christ we cannot be controlled by the fear of man, or the compulsion to be accepted by men. If we are controlled by these fears and desires, we will not be bond-servants of Christ. We do not preach in order to please men, but to please God. Our goal must not be to get people to respond to our message, but to the undiluted gospel of Jesus Christ. Only when we walk in this way are we truly walking under His Lordship, and only then will our message be true.