Gospel Deficiency

The McClatchy Newspapers reported the following a few days back,

WASHINGTON—The biggest bedbug outbreak since World War II has sent a collective shudder among apartment dwellers, college students and business travelers across the nation.

The bugs—reddish brown, flat and about the size of a grain of rice—suck human blood. They resist many pesticides and spread quickly in certain mattress-heavy buildings, such as hotels, dormitories and apartment complexes.

Couldn't help but think of the current crisis sweeping the church here in the West when I read the words above. With a brief glance at a majority of what passes for gospel preaching, you'd be hard pressed to find much of anything that resembles the gospel (and I'm not calling out the countless "Christian" educators who long ago sold out and have subsequently done their due diligence in attempting to neuter the gospel of its intent, or the crafty "Christian" television miracle workers who preach a gospel devoid of our helplessness and sinfulness—or even "Christian" psychologists that for the most part spoon feed us large doses of psycobabble that passes as sound-biblical advice).

I'm calling out so-called gospel preachers here.

Jared Wilson writes in a post titled, "Dude, Where's My Gospel?",

Gospel deficiency is the biggest crisis of the American church. It has been replaced by many things, most commonly a therapeutic, self-help approach to biblical application. Bible verses are extracted to enhance calls to self-improvement and Jesus is preached as moral exemplar (which of course, he is, but then again, so is Mother Teresa). The result is a Church that, ironically enough, preaches works, not grace, and a growing number of Christians who neither understand the gospel nor revel in its scandal.

If that isn't an accurate assessment of the growing crisis here in the West I don't know what is. "Gospel deficiency" as Jared calls it, is epidemic.

Repackaging the gospel and redefining its radical implications is the equivalent of taking a prescribed anti-biotic and adding 99 parts water to one part medication and pouring the remainder of the medication down the drain, and then expecting the concoction to work it’s wonders of cure. Insane we’d say. But that’s what we do when we mix and mingle the gospel message with any other message that doesn’t support it’s outrageous claims, glorious freedom, inescapable hope, and amazing grace.

How does it come to pass that, with open Bibles before them, men and women should be wrong not so much about certain details with respect to the gospel, but about the whole thing?—wrong about its foundation, wrong about its central message, wrong about its objective, and wrong about how one comes into relationship with it. ~D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, The Kingdom of God

It was forty-five years ago Lloyd-Jones offered that assessment concerning the evangelicalism of his era. Not much has changed I'd say.

Isn't it time we who identify ourselves as gospel preachers reclaim a gospel that is potent for the healing of men's souls?