Finally, A Pastor Gets It

It is refreshing when a preacher, espe­cially one who has a big plat­form, calls out the Ins­ti­tu­tio­nal Church what it really is.  Matt Chand­le­rof The Village Church in Flo­wer Mound, Texas, told a group of Southern Bap­tist pas­tors Mon­day that church has become a place of “Chris­tian the­ra­peu­tic mora­lis­tic deism” which is “this is how a Chris­tian beha­ves, this is how you don’t behave”.

I com­monly use phra­ses like “Per­for­mance Chris­tia­nity”, the “Gos­pel of Beha­vior Modi­fi­ca­tion”, the “Gos­pel of SinMana­ge­ment.”  A mind­set that led me to more fai­lure in my jour­ney than any sin ever did.

Chand­ler goes on to say that peo­ple are being setup for fai­lure as they try to obey all the rules.

“If you’ve preached a lot of mora­lis­tic deism and haven’t trai­ned your peo­ple in what the Gos­pel is, then you will find them doing a slew of dif­fe­rent things to try to mor­tify their sin and grow in god­li­ness, most of which do not work and have no power,” Chand­ler stated.

“When you say … ‘this is how you modify your beha­vior,’ you’ve doo­med your peo­ple to a cycle of silli­ness that will last for the rest of their lives. [It will] end in them never really loving God fully and trying to mor­tify their flesh by wea­pons of their flesh and in the end only flesh wins.”

Iro­ni­cally, Scrip­ture tells us that no one call ful­fill all the laws.  And, here we are, 2,000 years later doing the very thing that Scrip­ture con­demns as use­less.  We are slow to learn that Grace requi­res NOTHING on our– part.

Ori­gi­nal post on ChristianPost.com is here.