Have You Heard the True Gospel?

(Please read this article and answer ONE question at the end)

"If God has already forgiven all our sins by His grace through Jesus Christ, and we are made righteous apart from our works, wouldn’t that cause people to go out and sin with impunity? Doesn’t this give people a license to sin?" - This is a very common question and objection to the pure unadulterated gospel of grace. Perhaps, after reading my articles, this question must have crossed your mind too. Did you know that Paul, in his presentation of the gospel, had to stop and interject this question, ‘Shall we sin because we are not under law but under grace’ at least three times (Rom 6:1, 15 and 3:8) so as to make sure that people weren’t getting the wrong idea?

What Dr. Martin Lloyd-Jones of the Westminster Chapel, London, had to say about this question is very PROFOUND. He said, “The true preaching of the gospel of salvation by grace alone ALWAYS leads to the possibility of this charge being brought against it. There is no better test as to whether a man is really preaching the New Testament gospel of salvation than this, that some people might misunderstand it and misinterpret it to mean that, because you are saved by grace alone it does not matter at all what you do; you can go on sinning as much as you like because it will redound all the more to the glory of grace. If my preaching and presentation of the gospel of salvation does not expose it to that misunderstanding, then it is not the gospel. Let me show you what I mean.

If a man preaches justification by works, no one would ever raise this question. If a man’s preaching is, ‘If you want to be Christians, and if you want to go to heaven, you must stop committing sins, you must take up good works, and if you do so regularly and constantly, and do not fail to keep on at it, you will make yourselves Christians, you will reconcile yourselves to God and you will go to heaven’. Obviously a man who preaches in that strain would never be liable to this misunderstanding. Nobody would say to such a man, ‘Shall we continue in sin, that grace may abound?’, because the man’s whole emphasis is just this, that if you go on sinning you are certain to be damned, and only if you stop sinning can you save yourselves. So that misunderstanding could never arise.

I would say to all preachers: If your preaching of salvation has not been misunderstood in that way, then you had better examine your sermons again, and you had better make sure that you are really preaching the salvation that is offered in the New Testament to the ungodly, the sinner, to those who are dead in trespasses and sins, to those who are enemies of God. There is this kind of dangerous element about the true presentation of the doctrine of salvation.”

So, if you will be honest with yourselves, please answer this one question - In all your years of sitting in the pews and listening to sermons, has any sermon ever provoked you to think – ‘preacher, are you saying that we can sin now since we are under grace’? If no preaching has ever raised this question in your mind, then perhaps, you have never heard the true New Testament Gospel.