My Pastors Don’t Preach Against Sin

00:00:00.000 | A pretty common question is reflected in today's email from a young woman from Sweden, a listener

00:00:09.860 | to the podcast. And Pastor John joins us over Skype today to answer.

00:00:14.560 | "Dear Pastor John, hello to you and the team at DG. I'm a relatively new Christian in Sweden,

00:00:19.380 | and I have a problem with my church. I got baptized four years ago and became a member.

00:00:24.540 | As time passed, I noticed our sermons don't touch on sin and never call for repentance.

00:00:30.420 | I've asked one of the pastors who said they are not preaching contradictory to the Bible,

00:00:34.180 | they just decided to not talk directly about sin. They want to focus on the love of Jesus

00:00:39.420 | and his acceptance of sinners. It sounds well to me as an effort to attract lots of people

00:00:44.500 | into the church. At the same time, they don't celebrate repentance and obedience. What do

00:00:49.940 | you think of a church that doesn't preach against particular sins?"

00:00:55.860 | I think that church is profoundly defective. It is unfaithful to the Word of God. Over

00:01:08.100 | and over, issue after issue, controversy after controversy, sin after sin is traced back

00:01:19.060 | up the stream to the watershed issue of, do leaders and people treasure the Word of God

00:01:28.780 | above gold? Do they savor the Word of God as sweeter than honey? And do they submit

00:01:36.340 | to the Word of God gladly in its truth and in its proportions? That's the watershed issue

00:01:44.100 | over and over again, Tony, that I'm seeing in these days as it is right here. So why

00:01:50.500 | would pastors presume to be wiser than the Scriptures in the way they speak to God's

00:01:59.900 | people? That baffles me. And yet over and over, I find that to be the case on this issue

00:02:08.100 | and other issues. Church leaders think they know better than the pattern of the Scriptures

00:02:16.820 | themselves. So let me give four reasons from the Bible why it is defective, why it is unfaithful

00:02:27.060 | not to explicitly name, denounce, and call for repentance from specific sins that are

00:02:36.820 | in the world and in the church. First, whether you look at the prophets in the Old Testament

00:02:43.460 | or Jesus preaching before the crucifixion or the apostles preaching after the crucifixion

00:02:50.460 | and after the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, wherever you look in biblical preaching, God's

00:02:56.420 | spokesman included not only the glorious good news of forgiveness for sins, but also a blood

00:03:06.780 | earnest denunciation of sinning and specific sins and a call for repentance and obedience

00:03:13.620 | in the power of God's grace. For example, Malachi 3.5, to look to the prophets, "I

00:03:22.700 | will be swift witness. I will be a swift witness against the sorcerers, against the adulterers,

00:03:29.460 | against those who swear falsely, against those who oppress the hard worker in his wages,

00:03:35.100 | the widow and the fatherless, against those who thrust aside the sojourner. And do not

00:03:40.260 | fear me," says the Lord. In other words, they named the sins. That's the way they preached.

00:03:46.500 | Or take Jesus on the sin of lust. "If your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out,

00:03:52.380 | throw it away," Matthew 5.29. Or greed, "Woe to you that are rich, for you have received

00:03:58.600 | your consolation," Luke 6.24. Or hypocrisy, "Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, you hypocrites,"

00:04:05.660 | Matthew 23.29. Or take Paul, "Flee from sexual immorality," 1 Corinthians 6.18. "Do not be

00:04:13.900 | deceived, neither sexually immoral or idolaters or adulterers or men who practice homosexuality

00:04:20.340 | or thieves or greedy or drunkards or revilers or swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God."

00:04:28.580 | So prophets, Jesus, the apostles, this is the way they preached. They named sins and

00:04:38.020 | they denounced them and they called for repentance and obedience in the power of the glorious

00:04:44.700 | good news of forgiveness that they preached. So if a pastor wants to find an authority

00:04:51.960 | for preaching that does not name and denounce and call for repentance from sins, he's not

00:04:58.060 | going to find it in the Bible. But there's something even more important than the fact

00:05:05.140 | that in all biblical preaching, sins are named. The New Testament reveals that the actual

00:05:11.620 | way that sanctification works—and I presume these pastors want their people to be holy

00:05:17.980 | and loving and good and beautiful representatives of Jesus—the way that actually comes about

00:05:26.060 | is by a combination of God's conquering sin by divine action together with God's command

00:05:37.780 | to kill sin in reliance on that divine action. That's the pattern. It's unbiblical to separate

00:05:46.740 | God's conquering of sin and his command for us to kill it.

00:05:51.940 | Now let me give you three illustrations of that pattern of sanctification. This is the

00:05:57.940 | more fundamental problem. These pastors just don't get how God works. That's their problem.

00:06:04.060 | They're making it up as they go along instead of submitting to the pattern of how sanctification

00:06:10.500 | actually works. And so they're cutting the legs out from under their own gold to make

00:06:14.780 | a beautiful people. Number one, let's take the cross, then let's take new birth, and

00:06:20.380 | then let's take the fruit of the Holy Spirit. So how does the cross work to get sin out

00:06:25.380 | of our lives and make us holy? How does new birth work? And how does the fruit of the

00:06:29.540 | Holy Spirit work?

00:06:30.860 | Peter—let's cross first. Let's go to the cross. Peter says in 1 Peter 2.24, "He himself

00:06:38.420 | bore our sins in his body on the tree, that we might die to sin and live to righteousness."

00:06:49.320 | So Christ died not only to forgive sin, but that it might die in the lives of his people.

00:06:59.220 | But that glorious triumph of Jesus over sin's power on the cross is given as the basis in

00:07:08.820 | 1 Peter, the basis of verses 22 and 23. "Don't revile when you are reviled. Don't threaten

00:07:17.180 | when you suffer." In other words, Peter did not assume that the way the cross kills sin,

00:07:26.260 | the sin of reviling and threatening, was automatic. Instead, he named the sin, he called for obedience

00:07:35.740 | on the basis of the cross and the power of the cross. Christ conquered vengeance on the

00:07:44.020 | cross for his people. Then he commanded us on the basis of his conquering not to revile

00:07:52.860 | those who revile us, not to threaten those who cause us to suffer, not to return evil

00:07:58.540 | for evil. That's how we are made new. The divine sin-destroying work of Christ and the

00:08:06.940 | divine sin-naming, sin-denouncing word of Christ. That's the pattern. The conquering

00:08:14.580 | of Christ, the command to kill it, the work of God and the word of God to name it and

00:08:22.660 | put it to death. Here's the second illustration, the new birth.

00:08:26.860 | Peter says in 1 Peter 1.23 to Christians, "You have been born again, not of perishable

00:08:34.360 | seed but of imperishable, through the living and abiding word of God." So there, that's

00:08:41.860 | the decisive divine work in us to make us new, turn us into the kind of people who hate

00:08:48.260 | sin and love righteousness. That's the work of the new birth. Hate the dark, love the

00:08:55.220 | light, turn from Satan, embrace Christ. That was worked for us by the Spirit in the new

00:09:01.660 | birth. But three verses later he says, "So," in other words, on the basis of this new birth,

00:09:10.100 | "So because this miracle has happened in your life, put away malice, deceit, hypocrisy,

00:09:19.900 | envy, all slander." Now we might ask, maybe these pastors ask, "Why? Why, if we're

00:09:28.580 | born again and we have the divine DNA in us to make us holy, inclining us away from sin,

00:09:37.980 | inclining us to love God, why, Peter? Why, Mr. Apostle, inspired by God Almighty, why

00:09:44.740 | would you bother to name sins and tell us to put them away?" And the answer is, because

00:09:51.700 | that's the way God has designed for sanctification to work. Christ conquers sins by the new birth,

00:10:01.820 | and then he commands us to kill what he has conquered. He does not say, "Christ conquered

00:10:09.500 | it, so I never need to name it anymore. I never need to summon my people into battle

00:10:15.220 | against their sins." No, that's not the way God designed it. These pastors are making

00:10:21.640 | it up as they go along. They're not submitting to God's way in the Bible.

00:10:26.780 | One more illustration, namely the fruit of the Spirit. I remember back in Germany, goodness,

00:10:33.340 | a hundred years ago when I was studying there, sitting in my pantry wrestling with this very

00:10:40.940 | issue of how the Word of God and the fruit of the Spirit related to each other. Galatians

00:10:46.780 | 5:22, Paul says, "The fruit of the Spirit, love, joy, peace, patience, and all the rest,

00:10:52.420 | all nine of them, those who belong to Christ," he says, "have crucified the flesh with its

00:10:57.620 | passions and desires." The Spirit is going to bear fruit in your life, so you are dead

00:11:02.460 | with Christ and the Spirit is alive and bearing fruit in your life. Ah, what a beautiful,

00:11:07.340 | positive, positive, positive way to look at the Christian life. Let's preach that and

00:11:13.180 | only that. Well, you can be unbiblical if you want to. Make it up as you go along. Draw

00:11:18.660 | inferences that the Bible doesn't draw. That's not a good way to minister. So we might think,

00:11:23.980 | "Well, that's all we need. We've got the Holy Spirit. We've got the cross. We've got the

00:11:27.500 | new birth. Just love, joy, peace." Paul, in the preceding verses, names, he names 15 works

00:11:41.040 | of the flesh. I'll read them. The works of the flesh are evident. Sexual immorality,

00:11:47.500 | impurity, sensuality, idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife, jealousy, fits of anger, rivalries,

00:11:56.020 | tensions, divisions, envy, drunkenness, orgies, and things like that, in case I missed any.

00:12:04.380 | And then he adds, "For the sake of Christians to hear." Now, this is what these pastors

00:12:08.980 | are not doing. Paul thinks this is essential. He says, "I warn you. I warn you, Christians

00:12:15.180 | in Galatia, as I warned you before, I've done this before, that those who do such things

00:12:21.160 | will not inherit the kingdom of God. So I ask again, why name the works of the flesh

00:12:28.700 | and tell us not to do them if the fruits of the Spirit are mightily at work in our lives?

00:12:34.980 | Why? That's what I wrestled with those hundred years ago. The answer is, that's the way God

00:12:41.580 | designed it to work. Don't try to be smarter than God. God conquers our sins by the Spirit.

00:12:50.900 | And commands that we kill those sins by means of the Spirit. That's the biblical pattern.

00:13:01.280 | So I conclude that a church that fails to name sins, denounce them, call for repentance,

00:13:11.980 | puts human wisdom above divine wisdom by ignoring the way the prophets, Jesus, and the apostles

00:13:19.780 | preached and by failing to grasp how sanctification in the Bible really works. How the cross,

00:13:29.860 | the new birth, the fruit of the Holy Spirit actually conquers sin through God's command

00:13:38.300 | for us to kill it.

00:13:40.860 | Hard words, but necessary ones. Necessary for our joy. Thank you, Pastor John, and thank

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My Pastors Don’t Preach Against Sin — Is That Okay?

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