Scripture reading: Revelation 3:1–6

The Four Spiritual Flaws?

From prophet to priest, everyone deals falsely. They have healed the wound of my people lightly, saying, “Peace, peace,” where there is no peace. (Jeremiah 6:13–14)

 

Much evangelism in the past fifty years has been modeled after Campus Crusade’s Four Spiritual Laws. For many in the church today, this is seen as a formula that both explains how salvation comes and what it means to be a Christian.

 

1. God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your
2. Man is sinful and separated from Therefore, he cannot know and experience God’s plan for his life.
3. Jesus Christ is the only provision for man’s Through him you can know and experience God’s plan for your life.
4. We must individually receive Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord; then we can know and experience God’s love and plan for our

 

Zip, zam, shabam. Just follow the steps, say the prayer and poof . . . you’re in!

How differently the Gospel was presented in previous generations! George White- field, the Billy Graham of the eighteenth century, embodied a form of evangelism that was much more robust and biblically informed than our contemporary methods. In his sermon The Method of Grace, Whitefield offered his own version of the plan of salvation. Based on the text Jeremiah 6:14, his goal was to protect his hearers from false preachers. He did not want them to put their faith in a gospel that was no gospel at all. He knew well that not all those who professed salvation were genuinely converted. In his sermon, “How can I have peace with God?”, Whitefield outlined what we could call his “Five Spiritual Laws” that a person needed to follow to become a child of God.

 

1. You must be made to see, to feel and to weep over your actual transgressions against the law of Gad.
2. Further, you must uncover the root from which those transgressions spring. You must feel the weight of that inward corruption with which you were born that makes you liable to God’s wrath and damnation.
3. You must be made sick of your own righteousness and come to realize that your best efforts at reform and religion are nothing more than splendid sins. Even your repentance needs to be repented of!
4. Finally, you must feel the guilt of your most damnable sin of all: unbelief. Many, even in our churches, are merely baptized heathens having no more faith than the devil himself! (James 2:19)
5. Now, by faith, lay hold of the perfect, all-sufficient righteousness of Jesus Christ. This is the only way to have real peace with God.

 

What about you? Do you have peace with God? Do you have assurance that your sins are forgiven? Has the power of sin been broken, and are you living the abundant life? The only way to be saved is to come humbly to Christ . . . and on his terms. When you do, you too can have peace with God.

 

 

 

 

Beware of presuming that you are saved. If with your heart you trust in Jesus,

then are you saved. But if you merely say, “I trust in Jesus,”

it does not save you. —Charles Spurgeon

 

 

 

 

point to ponder • What did Whitefield mean when he said, “Even your repentance needs to be repented of”?

 

prayer focus • That your church’s leaders will not give in to preaching a false Gospel and therefore offering only false assurance.