My Article from 'THE FINAL WORD'

Every time the newsletter article comes “due”, I consider what to share with you. I look back over the past 6-8 weeks and see if there is anything worthy of your time and this printed page. So, as I look back the highlight of this past month was the Basics Pastor’s Conference at Parkside Church. This year was my 8th consecutive year attending and as always it was a great blessing. This year’s special guests were Voddie Baucham and Jerry Bridges along with Pastor Alistair Begg. The theme was “Preaching the Gospel to Ourselves”.

All of the messages were great and aimed at encouraging Pastor’s to stay near the Cross everyday.

While each of these men were excellent to listen to, Jerry Bridges is the “master” when it comes to this subject.

I love how he reminded us that the gospel is not just for unbelievers as we so often think, but instead that the gospel is for sinners!! Therefore, we need to preach the gospel to ourselves everyday because we are all practicing sinners! Obviously, just because we are “in Christ” does not change the fact that we are sinners. And those who are “in Christ” ought to be people who “mourn” over their sin. Like Paul in all of his new testament letters (we see this in Romans as we study it in our Adult Bible Fellowships each week), we ought to be deeply aware of remaining sin and see sin as an offense to a holy and righteous God. It is true that even on our very best days, we still fall woefully short of the holiness that God requires.

If you are like me, it is at this point that we find ourselves saying “but this doesn’t feel very good”. But what we are really saying (and feeling) is that this doesn’t make us feel good about ourselves. But, the gospel and Christianity was never intended to make us feel good about ourselves. If we felt good about ourselves we would have never come to Christ in the first place. The gospel and the Cross and Christianity is intended to make us feel good about Christ!!

This is why we must start with our sinfulness. The greatest benefit of acknowledging our sinfulness is that it makes Christ and His work precious to us. Why? Because only sinners need a Savior! I am reminded of the wise words of Thomas Watson who said, “till sin be bitter, Christ will not be sweet”. We see this of all the saints of old…they were men and women who came to see themselves in the light of God’s holiness. We see this over and over again in the Apostle Paul’s writings. As we read his letters it is apparent that with each passing day, two things became clearer and clearer to him: his sinfulness in light of the holiness of God and God’s mercy in the face of his sin. John Newton, author of the hymn “Amazing Grace”, as he came to the end of his life couldn’t remember much but what he did remember was that “he was a great sinner and Christ was a great Savior”. They must go hand in hand. Christ will never be seen as a great Savior until we see ourselves for who we really are – great sinners!

Once again, let us hear from Charles Spurgeon on this subject:
“too many think lightly of sin, and therefore think lightly of the Savior. He who has stood before his God, convicted and condemned, with the rope about his neck, is the man to weep for joy when he is pardoned, to hate the evil which has been forgiven him, and to live to the honor of the Redeemer by whose blood he has been cleansed”.

Bridges encouraged me and I in turn encourage each of you “to preach the gospel to ourselves everyday”.

This means we must start with “guilt”. But, we don’t stay there! Next we move to “grace”. God’s grace. Grace that is greater than all our sin. It is gracious of God to provide a solution to the sin problem. His solution being that He gave His only begotten Son who lived the perfect life we could not live and then died the painful death that we should have endured. He became our sin-bearer. He was our substitute. He paid a debt He did not owe because I owed a debt I could not pay!

And then “gratitude”! As Spurgeon said in the above quote, the man who truly sees his own sin and feels that guilt and then sees the Savior extend His grace…this is the man who will then live in “gratitude” to the honor of His Savior!

I hope that this will challenge you, as it did me, to spend each morning meditating and dwelling on the glorious gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ and God’s gracious disposition towards sinners like you and me.

May I leave you with a final quotation…I had heard it before but was reminded of it when Jerry Bridges gave it to us as the closing of his message…and I now keep it close by all the time.

“There is nothing in us or done by us, at any stage of our earthly development, because of which we are acceptable to God. We must always be accepted for Christ’s sake, or we cannot ever be accepted at all. This is not true of us only when we believe. It is just as true after we have believed. It will continue to be true as long as we live. Our need of Christ does not cease with our believing; nor does the nature of our relation to Him or to God through Him ever alter, no matter what our attainments in Christian graces or our achievements in behavior may be. It is always on His “blood and righteousness” alone that we can rest.” - B.B Warfield