One of the most deadliest forms of preaching that comes from the pulpit is what I would like to call the idolatry of grace. That is to say, grace is preached to the point that it becomes an abstraction. The word is thrown around to the point that it is stripped of all meaning and acts as an obscure, black box. Just as there are many who turn the verse, “God is love” into “Love is god,” so we also find that many turn “God is grace” into “Grace is god.” Grace is so emphasized that people envision God and grace as being one in the same. God is simply “swallowed up” in grace, and grace crowds out God’s other attributes viz. His holiness, justice, mercy, love, wisdom, etc. To only worship a God of grace, while neglecting His many other attributes, is to worship a false idol of God.
Further, grace is preached one-dimensionally. That is to say, only the benevolent side of grace is preached. Many will delight in the notion of grace when things are going good and God is blessing us (e.g. – materially). And yet, so many people read the story of Job, hear of how he was stripped of everything in one day, and you begin to hear grumbles of, “That’s not fair!” If we have a proper understanding of grace, we would delight in both the times of benevolent grace as well as the times of “malevolent” grace because we deserve absolutely nothing.
Further, you won’t hear much preaching on God’s fatherly displeasure because of our straying into sin or His disciplining rod to correct us out of a love for us. Instead of that, the only grace that is preached is the grace that tells us not to be alarmed because God can never be displeased with us. The idea that God is never displeased with us is dangerous at best. Such a statement fails to distinguish between judicial displeasure and filial displeasure. That is to say, on the one hand, nothing that I do or not do adds to or takes away from my standing before God. It is Christ’s righteousness that enables me to stand before God righteous (in a judicial, legal sense). However, now that I am a son in a reconciled relationship with God, I am able to both please and displease Him filially (1 Cor. 7:32, Eph. 4:30, Col. 1:10, 1 Thess. 4:1, 1 Thess. 5:19, 2 Tim. 2:4, Heb. 13:16).
Finally, grace is typically abused in the following three ways from the pulpit:
1) The first type of grace that is preached is a cheap grace. This is a grace that says praying the sinner’s praying automatically makes you a Christian. This is a false teaching called “decisional regeneration” that runs rampant in the majority of evangelical churches in America. The Gospel has been watered down and tightly compressed into a 15 second sequence of a raising of the hand, a walking down the aisle, and a signing of a card. Repentance and obedience is never mentioned. These people receive Christ as Savior and yet refuse to receive Him as Lord. They live like they are going to hell all the while duping themselves into thinking that they are going to heaven because they once prayed a prayer to ask Jesus to come into their heart.
2) The second type of grace is another form of cheap grace. This grace is preached in some of the more extreme wings of the redemptive-historical, biblical theological tradition. These camps say that only the indicatives should be preached, and we should never preach the application and imperatives. While attempting to make their message 100% grace, this is a more neatly re-packaged version of #1 above.
3) The third type of grace that is preached looks different than #’s 1 and 2, but in actuality, it is just the same as #2. These are the preachers that insist on preaching both on the indicatives and the imperatives found in Scripture, but a close examination of the “imperatives” show that the imperatives are nothing more than an exhortation to come full circle to the indicatives. This kind of “imperative” is just a way of blurring the line between indicative and imperative to the point that the indicate and the imperative become a tautology (e.g. – Indicative – God loves you; Imperative – This week remember the truth that God loves you). This idea of making the indicative the imperative and the imperative the indicative is absolutely foreign to Scripture (compare this wrong concept to the proper Biblical concept of the indicative/imperative paradigm found in Ephesians 1-3 and Ephesians 4-6, respectively).
In conclusion, I am sure I am going to be misunderstood from the things said above, but we need not be afraid of the commands Christ gives us out of a fear that we are being moralists or legalists. So much preaching is weak today because it preaches a wrong understanding of grace that is afraid to exhort and confront God’s people. As long as we remember that the indicatives precede and empower any imperative, and we follow it in that order, moralism and legalism will be avoided.
After all, Christ said, “If you love me, obey my commands.”
For Further Reading:
The Gospel According to Jesus - John MacArthur
Greenville Conference on Sonship and Sanctification
