The Healing Health of the Gospel of Christ Jesus
By Jay Wegter
Believers are saved by God’s love for God’s love.
Chapter four of John’s first epistle is a remarkably rich section on how the gospel of Jesus Christ speaks comprehensively to the human condition. In the following verse we see in bold relief the tension between love and fear. “There is no fear in love; but perfect love casts out fear, because fear involves punishment, and the one who fears is not perfected in love” (1 Jn 4:18). How fascinating that John the apostle so effectively and efficiently captures the anthropology of the universal human dilemma—namely that fear is a symptom of expected punishment. And that when controlled by this fear, a person is not open to the reception of God’s love. Fear is symptomatic of the fear of judgment, this is true of even milder forms of fear such as stress and anxiety. For the troubled conscience sets up court, hears the evidence for prosecution, accepts the verdict, and then expects to hear the sentence. Conscience is not a social construct; it is the very telling proof that we are made in the image of a righteous God.
This accusation within the bosom is the ongoing experience of every person on the planet who is not enjoying the cleansing benefits of Christ’s blood. But that does not mean that every unconverted individual is mourning over his sin or feels weighed down by it. No, sinners are quite enthusiastic about the false gods and idols they serve—and about their useless solutions to a troubled conscience including manmade religion. Nonetheless, sin separates the unbeliever from God, and sin sours the sinner’s expectation that a holy God could love him. A bad conscience heightens a sense of ineligibility for the reception of God’s love. But it is not that the impenitent are seeking God, for the reverse is true according to Romans 3:11—they are hiding from God rather than seeking Him. The reason sinners love darkness and hate the light is to protect themselves from exposure (Jn 3:19-21).
Because of being cut off from the experience of God’s love, the sinner brings his yearnings to created things. His heart is an idol factory, ceaselessly shoveling the finite things of this world into the God-shaped vacuum—treating those created things as if they were the true source of meaning, purpose, identity, security, and significance. Thus, as a result of mankind’s fall in Eden, the human condition is characterized by the service of sin and its resultant slavery (Jn 8:34-35; Rom 6:16-23). People commit sin in an attempt to get their deepest needs met. But all sin is lawlessness (1 Jn 3:4), and all sin is against God (Ps 51:4), and all sin ultimately brings disintegration and alienation from God rather than the wholeness and fulfillment we crave.
Salvation deals with the separation caused by our sin.
We were created for a love relationship with our Creator who has revealed Himself as a covenant-keeping God of love, mercy, care, and compassion. But our love of sin, our evil conscience, and consequent fear pull us toward self and the world and away from God’s command to look to Him that we might have life and salvation (Is 45:22). Wonder of wonders, the gospel proclaims to us that God really desires our fellowship! And that He has provided all that is needed for a relationship with us—namely a reconciliation bringing peace and friendship that is grounded upon what He has decisively done with our sin through the work of Christ (2 Cor 5:19-21).
The marvel of the promises of the new covenant is that everything is in place now for cleansing, pardon, and favor so that the believing sinner may experience unbroken fellowship with the Lord (see 1 Jn 1:1-9-2:2; Heb 8:6-13). Therefore, it is the blessed duty of the believing sinner to daily preach the gospel to himself –namely that sonship, pardon, favor, and fellowship, are all his irrevocable possession by virtue of his union with Christ.
As believers walk in fellowship with the Lord, receiving His love, they are progressively perfected in love. They grow ever more fully into unobstructed conduits of the Lord’s love to God and the brethren. “By this, love is perfected with us, so that we may have confidence in the day of judgment; because as He is, so also are we in this world” (1 Jn 4:17). The genuine believer is sensitive to any interruptions to fellowship with his Lord by acts of personal sin. He is frequently smitten by his unworthiness for God’s love and favor. But as the Spirit points him to the blood of Christ again and again, he enjoys cleansing, and he takes fresh courage that Christ is his eligibility and qualification for God’s eternal love and favor. The believer ‘walks in the light’—gladly being examined by the Word and the Spirit. “If we say that we have fellowship with Him and yet walk in the darkness, we lie and do not practice the truth; but if we walk in the Light as He Himself is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus His Son cleanses us from all sin” (1 Jn 1:6-7).
Humanity has a telos, an irradicable design and goal for our humanness —it is a telos of glory. We exist to be in covenant relationship with God so that walking with Him as our God comprises the purpose of our existence. Thus communing with Him in that blessed arrangement is how we glorify Him and fulfill our telos. That formula of mutuality, of the Lord being our God and we being His people, was first given in the book of Leviticus. “. . .I will be your God and you will be My people” (Lev 26:12). And it reaches its fulfillment and apex in the eternal state described in Revelation chapter 21:1-7.
You will worship what you hold worthy of your time, talent, and affection and regard as the source of life, supply, and meaning.
For God to be our God means first and foremost that He is infinitely worthy of our adoration and devotion, and He is our ‘Source Person’. In other words, we find our created purpose, deepest needs, and heart longings met in Him. He is the source of our supply and daily needs. In being our God, He harnesses His own attributes so to speak, and puts them into service in caring for us, blessing us, and sanctifying us—and He is glorified in doing so. This is an inestimable privilege to have the Lord as one’s God.
This is closely tied to worship. For we will give our time, talent, affection, devotion, and energy to that which we perceive meets our needs. Thus, true worship cherishes God as the source of life and of all we need. It could be expressed in this manner; our physical needs are promised to us as we seek first His kingdom and His righteousness (Mt 6:33-34). But we know what mankind’s problem is, people love the world instead of God, and treat the world as if it were true source. Why? We prefer a source we can control, earn, manipulate, and employ in accordance with our desires and plans (1 Jn 2:15-17).
Because of human depravity, heart needs planted in the soul by our Creator are taken to created things. “Do not love the world nor the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh and the lust of the eyes and the boastful pride of life, is not from the Father, but is from the world. The world is passing away, and also its lusts; but the one who does the will of God lives forever” (1 Jn 2:15-17). For the unbeliever, the world is regarded as what is necessary to satisfy his greatest longings.
Because we are created for fellowship with an infinite God, all finite (created) points of fulfillment will prove to be false integration points. For God has put eternity in our hearts (Eccles 3:11), and we cannot find ultimate rest until we are in relationship with our infinite Creator. “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you,” (Augustine). The world is not a fitting source of integration for a creature made in God’s image and likeness. Beauty, bucks, fame, and brains, and power, possessions, and pleasure are the counterfeit gods and false integration points of our age.
The not so subtle ‘pride of life’ has the world’s inhabitants jockeying for even a fragment of status. Social media platforms are dispensing pseudo status like a drug dealer does his cocaine. But the apostle Paul describes this hunger for a higher rung on the ladder as foolish, even stupid. “For we are not bold to class or compare ourselves with some of those who commend themselves; but when they measure themselves by themselves and compare themselves with themselves, they are without understanding” (2 Cor 10:12). For nothing under the sun can replace the relationship for which we were created.
Since we were created for a love relationship with our Maker, our deepest yearnings are going to perfectly match the fruitful fulfillment of that love relationship. Through Christ, the believer receives love and adoption. The glorious benefit of that to the soul is an abiding true sense of genuine security and significance. The true Christian has security because of God’s unchanging love. And the believer has significance through his sonship. Though a sinner, he matters, he is not a zero, why? Because he has belonging through adoption, he has immutable membership in God’s forever family. This is how Christ makes people whole, by His pardoning justifying grace which grants a relationship of love and belonging. Conversely, by way of radical contrast, idols mangle the human unity of soul—they disintegrate rather than integrate the dimensions of the soul. For only in Christ are mind, affections, will, and conscience brought together in one unifying, healing, God-glorifying life direction.
Love of the world is the default orientation of the unregenerate.
Due to man’s fallenness and alienation from God, the natural man will look for security and significance somewhere other than in communion with his Creator. How devious and cruel that the perfect security and significance that comes from love and belonging in Christ is perverted into the world’s counterfeit, namely sensuality and power. Yes, Hollywood is the worldwide distributor of counterfeit sources of love and belonging, namely sex and violence. God created us for love and belonging in Him, but the devil, the world, and the flesh have corrupted that desire into the soul-corrupting substitutes of illicit sex and violence.
The most convincing false source today of the integration and satisfaction God’s love and belonging are designed to bring is porn. A false source of integration has been man’s problem from the beginning. He takes his spiritual needs to fleshly desires, to false integration points. Porn is a bunker-buster smart bomb which enters deep within the masculine soul and wreaks havoc there. Thus, porn is the spirit of Jezebel, a ‘castration device’ uniquely designed to cancel the exercise of true masculinity. Men are neutered by porn; it blunts their moral authority and brings the conscience into bondage.
Porn use drags the conscience into a cycle of accepting defilement as ‘normal’. It sets up a corrupt objectifying worldview about the human body. And when habitually used by members of a society it produces the pornification of a culture (Grk. Pornea itself becomes the object of worship). A tragic consequence of pornified culture is that women are indirectly in competition with the raunchy idealized sex goddesses of porn. We see it in the immodest trends in fashion and in the gross sensuality of the female icons of pop culture. This truly is an evil generation and an age of rampant darkness.
An evil conscience is not merely ‘guilt feelings’—an evil conscience testifies that its owner possesses real legal guilt before God.
A defiled, or ‘evil conscience’ as it says in Hebrews 10:22 is a more serious matter than men imagine. For an evil conscience cannot see any beauty in God’s holiness, therefore it is repelled by who God is, and consequently becomes ever more resolute in its enslavement to idolatry. Sin has the personality of Satan; it possesses seething hatred for God’s holiness and would rid the universe of God if it could do so. Therefore, all sin is against God and opposes who He is. The sinner’s heart is filled with enmity—a word that means enemy-ship—the settled disposition of an adversary (Col 1:21). How horrifying this is, sin is a sickness unto death and damnation; that is the human condition.
Only the power of the gospel can penetrate this culture-wide fortress of sinful passions raised up against the knowledge of God. For this fortress or walled bastion of lies is set up in the institutions of our society and it is set up in the hearts of men. The walls of this fortification have written on the outside, ‘Stay away God, sin is freedom and fulfillment’. Like a tagger with his can of spray paint, the use of porn ‘graffiti’s this slogan of false liberty’ on the walls of the fortress and on the walls of the mind and heart.
The raw sewage of porn incarcerates its users like captives behind steel bars, and those confining iron bars are formed in the foundry of a perpetually defiled conscience. The solution to this soul-damning condition is found only in Christ. The Great Physician entered history by His incarnation to seek and to save that which was lost—those who did not have a normal relationship with God—the very relationship for which they were created. But in order for the Son of God to become the Great Physician, He had a great work to accomplish.
Christ’s redemptive work is the ‘equipment’ He earned to save.
This work involved earning the equipment that would enable Him to save to the uttermost (Heb 7:23-28). He was born of woman and born under the law (Gal 4:4-5). He had to keep the law perfectly and lay His life down as a ransom for many. He shed His blood to give life to the spiritually dead. No priest but Christ ever offered His own flesh and blood as the sacrifice. Our Great Physician took His perfect righteousness, His suffering, His shed blood, and His torn flesh, and made these into healing medicine for ruined helpless sinners.
Our Savior’s glory is not only found in His beauty as the God-man in whom majesty and meekness meet, but in the equipment He earned to save even the worst sinner. What does it take for a polluted sinner to be put on the path of being perfected in love? Of walking in love so that he will have confidence in the day of judgment (1 Jn 4:17)? Answer: so full and comprehensive is this substitution that Christ has made for His people that the regenerated sinner is regarded as a new creation (2 Cor 5:17). And his Savior, as the Head of His people answers in His own Person for the legal guilt of their sin (Rom 4:7-8), and clothes them with His own righteousness (2 Cor 5:21). There can be no confidence before God in prayer and on judgment day without the soul-ravishing cognizance of these blessings of cleansing (Col 2:13-14).
The believer is a new man with new desires and new powers.
The biblical concept of the new man, alive in Christ must be taught to our sheep, to every growing Christian. For, what is sanctification but the new man asserting himself? “Put off, put on” Paul says in Colossians chapter three. Put off the deeds of the old self and put on the deeds of the new man. Those who walk by the Spirit are engaged in these replacement behaviors—they are always replacing the deeds of the old man with the deeds of the new man (Eph 4-5; Col 3). The new man lives by the desires of the Spirit, the old man lived by the desires of the flesh (Gal 5:16-18).
Now regarding the new and old man, a vital theological point that is immediately relevant to the Christian life is found in the following question. ‘Is the old man as powerful and influential as the new man?’ The answer is a resounding ‘no’! For Paul states unequivocally, “I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me; and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself up for me” (Gal 2:20). The old man was crucified with Christ so that his sinful tyranny would be cancelled. “. . .knowing this, that our old self was crucified with Him, in order that our body of sin might be done away with, so that we would no longer be slaves to sin” (Rom 6:6) (see also Col 2:11).
There is a rising generation of new believers who have never been taught the realities of the new man. Consequently, they are tempted to go by their feelings—imagining that the desires of their lower nature are as potent as the desires of their new nature. No. We must teach them the source of their ‘superpowers’ against sin found in Christ. With our new identity in Christ comes obligations to live as a new man in Christ (Rom 8:12-13). The new man has everything needed to live as Christ’s disciple, as a Christ-learner. “For the love of Christ controls us, having concluded this, that one died for all, therefore all died; and He died for all, so that they who live might no longer live for themselves, but for Him who died and rose again on their behalf” (2 Cor 5:14-15).
Your sanctification is closely tied to what your response will be at Christ’s return.
You are going to see the Lord someday and Scripture is quite definitive on what a man’s reaction will be. This takes us back to our initial passage in First John. “By this, love is perfected with us, so that we may have confidence in the day of judgment; because as He is, so also are we in this world” (1 Jn 4:17). Those who love fulfill the law (Rom 13:8-10). Those who love will have confidence in the day of judgment. Those who love are those who habitually abide in Christ. “Now, little children, abide in Him, so that when He appears, we may have confidence and not shrink away from Him in shame at His coming” (1 Jn 2:28). Those who have hope are those who are pursuing purity. “Beloved, now we are children of God, and it has not appeared as yet what we will be. We know that when He appears, we will be like Him, because we will see Him just as He is. And everyone who has this hope fixed on Him purifies himself, just as He is pure” (1 Jn 3:2-3).
The rising generation of new believers need to be taught what is meant by radical identification with Christ. Being radically identified with Him was how the Father saved us. “He made Him who knew no sin to be sin on our behalf, so that we might become the righteousness of God in Him” (2 Cor 5:21). See also Colossians 2:9-16. Ephesians was written to unfold the believer’s mystical union with Christ (Eph 1:13-14; 2:10). ‘Mystical’ only in the sense that there is nothing in the creation that resembles this shared life the believer enjoys with Christ. And what a deep mystery this is, that Christ’s death was my death to sin, that His resurrection was my rising to newness of life. In Ephesians Christ and the believer are ‘chock-o-block’ together in almost every verse!
Christ is the ultimate source of the believer’s sanctification (1 Cor 1:30). But we work out our sanctification by submission to Him.
Reckoning our radical identification with Him is how our sanctification moves forward. But this reckoning is more than simply informing ourselves of a spiritual truth. Reckoning the spiritual reality of union with Christ involves daily appropriating by faith and obedience what Christ has purchased. Here are some of the words which make up these appropriation imperatives: present (Rom 6:11-13; 12:1-2); put on (Col 3:12ff.); let (Col 3:15); walk (Gal 5:15); be filled (Eph 5:18); put to death (Col 3:5); etc. Consider that our union with Christ must have a transformative impact upon us so that we truly grasp what it means to be a member of His body (1 Cor 12:12-14) and members one of another (Eph 4:25).
The Lord considers His people to be ‘His hands and feet’ on earth (1 Cor 12; Rom 12). He desires to express His personality through His people, “… because as He is, so also are we in this world” (1 Jn 4:17). As His disciples who follow Him, we are committed to His cause—to building His church by means of the gospel and the Great Commission. This is the opposite of lone ranger private piety. Christ is raising up theologizers who study the Word in order to invest in others. With premeditation, they determine to build up others as a lifestyle. “Let us consider how to stimulate one another to love and good deeds, not forsaking our own assembling together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another; and all the more as you see the day drawing near” (Heb 10:25).
Christian men have a unique calling to be theologizers.
Theologizers are men who are available to the Lord, as Scripture states, “useful to the Master” (2 Tim 2:21). They strive to be faithful in their spheres of influence, as ambassadors of Christ. They are ‘men on target’ which means that they understand the principle of the enlarged sphere. That principle, simply put implies that when a Christian man is faithful within his immediate sphere, God will enlarge his spiritual sphere of influence. For example, faithful family men, become faithful edifiers of Christ’s body. These men understand that keeping their vessel clean is a prerequisite for usefulness (2 Tim 2:19-22). In addition, they see all of life as under Christ’s cosmic rule. Therefore, they are observant and creative in drawing biblical lessons from all aspects of life.
Countless experiences in life provide material for the ‘spontaneous classroom’ of a theologizer (see Deut 6:5-7). A theologizer is ready to contribute to or begin a conversation explaining the following: this is who God is, this is why life is moral and ethical, this is why suffering is temporary, this is why there is presently evil death and suffering, this is what it means to follow Christ, this is what prayer is, this is why heaven will be a place of endless bliss, etc.
In our circles of discipleship regarding the call to theologize, we have coined the term ‘dead gopher talk’ to describe the theologizer’s commentary on any aspect of life. We drew the term from the role of a father in explaining to his son the reason why he trapped and killed a gopher, and why it’s time to bury it. But the answer is far more than a secular humanist would give. The biblical theologizer uses the occasion of the dead gopher to teach his son about the entrance of death in Genesis, and about the ultimate deliverance of creation from corruption and decay. We recently added another kind of talk to the theologizer’s arsenal. We’re calling it ‘a dead possum talk.’
Like a pastor discovering a juicy sermon illustration, we were quite elated by the analogy provided by one of the men in our discipleship group. The ‘dead possum talk’ came about because a brother in our group has a large dog, a rottweiler that killed a possum. In a humorous twist, the dog placed the rotting possum in his cluster of dog toys. What a graphic picture this is of playing with sin instead of slaying and burying it! If we nestle sin amongst ‘the toys’ of our activities and recreation, it will produce a stench in our lives. The moral of the story is that a faithful theologizer will in love admonish his brother if there is a sin his fellow believer is tolerating.
Admonishment ought to be the regular activity of members of Christ’s body (Rom 15:14). For ‘friends of the cross’ love what Christ intends His cross to produce, namely friends of God who love the brethren and love holiness. A friend of the cross overflows with gratitude that the Son of God was sent to pay the ultimate price—the cost necessary to cut the chains of our sins and set us free to love and serve. But our admonishment must at times take on a tone of imploring and warning. For Scripture describes an enemy of the cross as follows. “For many walk, of whom I often told you, and now tell you even weeping, that they are enemies of the cross of Christ, whose end is destruction, whose god is their appetite, and whose glory is in their shame, who set their minds on earthly things” (Phil 3:18-19). But true believers are living honorably in accordance with their heavenly citizenship and are eagerly waiting for the return of their Savior who will transform their bodies into a body like His! (Phil 3:20-21).