WesleyGospel Ministries

God may have called you into pastoral ministry, but that doesn’t mean he called you to friendship evangelism. That teaching, that practice is so completely false according to both the Old and New Testaments, that it needs no refutation for those who read the whole Bible.

Justice is turned back, and righteousness stands afar off; for truth is fallen in the street, and equity cannot enter.So truth fails, and he who departs from evil makes himself a prey. Then the Lord saw it, and it displeased Him that there was no justice. –Isaiah 59:14-15 (KJV)

The Matthew Henry Commentary says the following about that Scripture:

They owned that that was not done which might have been done to reform the land and to amend what was amiss, Isaiah 59:14. “Judgment, that should go forward, and bear down the opposition that is made to it, that should run in its course like a river, like a mighty stream, is turned away backward, a contrary course. The administration of justice has become but a cover to the greatest injustice. Judgment, that should check the proceedings of fraud and violence, is driven back, and so they go on triumphantly. Justice stands afar off, even from our courts of judicature, which are so crowded with the patrons of oppression that equity cannot enter, cannot have admission into the court, cannot be heard, or at least will not be heeded. Equity enters not into the unrighteous decrees which they decree, Isaiah 10:1. Truth is fallen in the street, and there she may lie to be trampled upon by every foot of pride, and she has never a friend that will lend a hand to help her up; yea, truth fails in common conversation, and in dealings between man and man, so that one knows not whom to believe nor whom to trust.”

What we’re seeing here is a state of declension and backsliding across society. That’s the opposite of revival: and the preachers in times of declension, tend to preach theologies of antinomianism. That means that they come up with a form of theology that ignores the Ten Commandments being put into practice in people’s lives. We call it cheap grace, sloppy agape, we can call it whatever we want to call it, but the Ten Commandments get thrown to the side. They are no longer remembered, honored, revered, and obeyed: they’re thrown to the side and the preachers will come in with some cheap grace ideology. What does “cheap grace” mean? The expression comes from Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s The Cost of Discipleship (pgs. 3-4). Its the false anti-Reformation teaching that you can receive grace and forgiveness from God, with absolutely NO SACRIFICE on your part: you never do anything at all: God just forgives you, and so it’s a cheap grace. The Bible doesn’t teach anything like cheap grace. Not even remotely close! It teaches that unrepentant people have to become repentant in order to receive forgiveness from God, and after receiving that grace, they will remain repentant within the blood of Jesus and with a clean, forgiven conscience (see Westminster Confession ch. 15). Luke 24:47: “Repentance and remission of sins should be preached in his name among all nations.” Mark 1:15: “Repent ye, and believe the Gospel.” Acts 20:21: “Repentance toward God, and faith toward our Lord Jesus Christ.”

Real Christians don’t earn God’s grace by repentance, but we do put ourselves in a position to receive it by our repentance. This anti-repentance American false gospel message you’re hearing, is what theologians call antinomianism, solifidianism, sloppy agape, non-lordship salvation, easy believism, cheap grace, greasy grace, and hyper-grace. Its a hellish teaching of backslidden preachers who can’t stop masturbating to porn, like the old prophets of Baal used to; and they’ll console all of their porn addicted buddies with words like, “I understand how it is.” They call these guys “accountability partners,” as if this REALLY helped them in the fight against porn. It never does. Its just a way for Christian guys to excuse themselves: “He looks at porn, so I can look at porn too.” 1 Corinthians 15:33 (NASB): “Do not be deceived: ‘Bad company corrupts good morals.’” Pastors who are into extreme carnality should be disciplined. Wesley called such an attitude “the worst of heresies.” Young Bible college grads can be idealistic about the way they think pastoral ministry is going to be, and say things like, “I’m gonna change the church from within.” But then after a 5-year to 10-year period, no, not at all. The cheap grace church culture changes them instead as they realize its the only way to hold down their job as a pastor; and so it ends up being primarily a financial concern, not a spiritual one. The role of pastor becomes a heretical if not a completely pagan idol without any Biblical holiness mixed into it. Everything is social clubby and educational. It has the spirit of Balaam all over it. A divine calling to preach repentance and warn sinners of a burning Hell turns into looking at porn, masturbating every day, living a lie, roving eyes, inappropriate touching, and clergy sexual abuse. In a word: OPPRESSION. And you couldn’t ask for a more spiritually toxic way to raise a family. “Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites!” Jesus Christ said. “You travel over land and sea to win a single convert, and when you have succeeded, you make them twice as much a child of Hell as you are” (Matthew 23:15).

THEY’RE ALL GOIN’ TO HELL! If we offend God, if we break the Ten Commandments, then it provokes God to be angry at us. It is then that we find ourselves to be sinners in the hands of an omnipotent, holy, just, fully alive, and for the time being, an EXTREMELY ANGRY God that’s willing to send us Category 4 and Category 5 hurricanes, F4 and F5 tornados, and floods, volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, and wars, just to get us to wake up from our backslidden conditions. He gave us the Ten Commandments at Mount Sinai, and he expects us to frame our lives and hearts according to them, but what do we do? We break them instead, and we set our hearts against them with evil conversations, shady business deals, porn, R-rated movies and video games, gratuitous profanity, endless lies, and manipulations, and provocations not repented of, and so many worldly distractions, and so we provoke God to anger, and his wrath abides on us like a pillar of fire. We think God doesn’t care about these things. We test God in this, by running all the way up to the edge of the line, of what we call Christian liberty. But God expects us to take the way of escape from temptation (1 Cor. 10:13). That loving voice, vision, dream, and presence of God all wears off and flies away from us, and there are no signs of his intervention to us anymore; and its all our fault, because of our stupid, man-made, anti-Biblical cheap grace theology that we deceived ourselves with. We manufactured our unbiblical rebellious lifestyles; and then turned around and accused God for not speaking to us anymore! Hell fire and damnation clearly await such men; and yet they say they don’t know why! They’re unbelievers, ashamed of God’s lordship, rude, insensitive, adulterers at heart, murderers at heart, thieves at heart, hypocritical stage magicians putting on an act before everyone, and they still wonder why the voice of God doesn’t speak to them anymore. Spiritual idiocy. Self-deceived fools! God finds that he doesn’t remotely like us at all in this condition, not even close. He HATES us! He sets himself against us! He’s not our friend at all, he’s our ENEMY in such cases. As an angry avenging Judge he feels as if he’s mad with rage, to aim the fire tornado of his holy wrath at us, and drill it right into us until we end up in Hell under the force of it–that is, until we repent or deeply turn from our wicked ways, and we place our faith in the substitutionary, sacrificial, blood of His Son Jesus on the cross, and he hears from Heaven, and gladly forgives our sins against him, and he becomes an adopting Father to us (2 Chron. 7:14). But make no mistake: God is not mocked; only a sincere heart before God will procure his forgiveness. That’s what we need to have a friendly, saving relationship with God, and to be on good terms with him, through the Cross and the Ten Commandments. The Good News is simply this: that salvation from Hell is received in a justification by faith alone, which leads to a heart renewed in Biblical sanctification, and leads to eternal blessedness in Heaven.