A New Kind of Heretic

Disclaimer: I gave my life over to jesus at a stadium event called Harvest Crusade. Those events and others like it have played a significant role in building the church. I would venture to guess that the church would appear very different today if it weren’t for these minstries. Again I am a product of one of these ministries and this post is in no way to take away from the work they have done.

I try not to fill this journal wor my quiet times in general with theology, and debate, but I feel that it is healthy once in a while. So this weekend at church we were talking about the cost of being a disciple, as seen in luke 14. This topic has been burning a hole in me since I got started thinking about it, and I have been waiting till I had a chunck of time to sit down and write/process this idea in this blog. The question arose: Can you be a saved and not be a disciple? Simple enough. Modern-day evangelicals will almost all give you a simple response…yes, you can. That was the conclusion that we came to in our services this Sunday. There was more to it than just that, but the answer was that if you really wanted to, you could probablly get away with that. You could accept Jesus and then live your whole life just as you were before. I, on the other hand, am not exactly sure if I agree with this conclusion (I say this for the sake of argument, and literary suspense because as you probablly have guessed I am on the other side of the coin). This is not to say that I am against the idea of salvation by grace, because I for one am for it. Here is how I see it. To answer this question we must first answer another – What must I do to be saved? Do we have it right? Does it really only take us asking Jesus to come into our heart and forgive our sins to be saved or is it more complicated than that? I think it is slightly more complicated than that. I base this on Romans 10:9 – If you confess with your mouth, “Jesus is Lord”…you shal be saved. There it is layed out nice and in a row. But it is my thought that we miss some of that in modern day evangelical circles. I call the part that we are missing the “Lordship intent.” Basically this means that if you confess this and ask Jesus into your heart without an intent to make him your lord, you just lied in your confession and it is therefore invalid. To truly comprehend Pauls idea of salvation here, we must understand the principle of Lordship in our lives. Simply put Lordship is giving your lord the priority in your life. Making him number 1. Giving him preference over yourself and others. That is what Lordship. Lets put it all together. I believe Pauls salvation message, as seen in Romans 10 to be something more like this – “If you confess with your mouth honestly ‘I want Jesus to be my number one priority from now on.’ …You shal be saved”. This is the cost of being a disciple, and the truth is that it took me six years of wasted life to actually figure that out. I spent six years just living with my get out of hell free card, even though I may not have really had one. So to answer the question posed this weekend, can you be saved and not be a disciple? – It is difficult but yes. A better question might be: Can you become saved with no intent to ever be a disciple? My thought is that you can’t.
Of course that is for the Lord to figure out, it is not my place to judge other peoples eternal destination. But what this thought does for me is it changes the way I approach my ministry. I think the church has been done a disservice by allowing this idea of a completely free gift of salvation to form our modern viewpoint. Again I am sure that salvation cannot be earned through works, but at the same time, salvation is not free. Not by a long shot. It’s a good deal, but boy is it expensive. The disservice that we have done to the church is that we have robbed it of the exponential evangelism system that God intended it to have. You see when we preach a gospel that doesn’t require the Lordship of Jesus, we lose out on every bit of kingdom building that the hearer had in their potential. Granted there are exceptions to the rule, but when I look at the american church, I see very few exceptions as compared to the rest. The vast majority of americans consider them selves to be christians, but we always see ourselves as being around 15 percent of the population. It seems logical that this is the gap can be attributed to those who were given a gospel that required nothing of them, and that is exactly what they gave. It was lipservice.
If we look at JC’s example with the rich young ruler, we see that even he was quick to share the enormous cost of being a disciple, and I am not a fool to thnk that as many people would come to the Lord when the Gospel is presented in this way. Many will walk away sad in the same way the rich youn ruler did. But we can trust in the numbers of workers growing for oour harvest. To me this is a much better position to be in. More people with God in control, rather than an even greater number of people with a supposed get out of hell free card.
Let me clue you in on my life mission statement. I live to improve and increase the worship of God. I want to do this in the most efficient way I know how. I hope you will join me, even though it is expensive.