A wise pastor and mentor once said to me, “Clay, the gospel is like a beautiful diamond…just keep holding it up and turning it different directions so that the light will shine off it… and people will be inspired and transformed by it.”
In addition to those who are inspired and transformed, there are two other responses to the gospel that always occur.
Romans 6 begins with a question:
What shall we say, then? Shall we go on sinning so that grace may increase? (Romans 6:1)
Now, why would Paul feel it necessary to raise such a question as that? It’s because he had learned that preaching the gospel was risky. Whoever takes a stand for the gospel gets shot at from two sides: from the grace opposers and the grace abusers.
The grace opposers are long-faced legalists who are all about rules and regulations. They don’t want to hear anything about grace because their emphasis is works, works, works… “Hiho, hiho, it’s off to work we go!” Paul encountered plenty of grace opposers (the book of Galatians written to those folks)…and they’re still around today.
At the other extreme are grace abusers. Wherever grace is preached there will be some who determine that since their acceptance with God is not based on their behavior, then it doesn’t matter how they behave! Party on!! The attitude is — “Who cares if we sin, God will forgive and forget.”
Preaching the gospel is risky because it flushes out grace opposers (and they can be mean. And then there will be some grace abusers who cast reproach on the gospel by their careless attitude and actions. But just because it’s risky, didn’t stop Paul from preaching it or lead him to water it down one bit!
The word “gospel” means good news. How good is the good news? It is so good that when it is preached clearly and consistently there will be some who use it as an excuse for sin.
In fact: If no one is taking it to an extreme than we aren’t preaching and teaching the gospel clear enough! The fact that some take it to an unwise extreme is proof that we are presenting the true grace of God.
The late Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones states this startling truth with clarity. Keep in mind that Martin Lloyd-Jones was a respected, conservative, British pastor and evangelical theologian. As pastor of the Westminster Chapel for decades, he spent twelve years teaching through the book of Romans. This guy was about as far from being a liberal as you can get. But listen to what he wrote concerning Paul’s question at the beginning of Romans 6: “… Shall we go on sinning so that grace may increase?”
“The true preaching of the gospel of salvation by grace alone always leads to the possibility of this charge being brought against it. There is no better test as to whether a man is really preaching the New Testament gospel of salvation than this, that some people might misunderstand it and misinterpret it to mean that it really amounts to this, that because you are saved by grace alone it does not matter at all what you do; you can go on sinning as much as you like because it will rebound all the more to the glory of grace.
“That is a very good test of gospel preaching. If my preaching and presentation of the gospel of salvation does not expose it to that misunderstanding, then it is not the gospel. Let me show you what I mean.
“If a man preaches justification by works, no one would ever raise this question. If a man’s preaching is, ‘If you want to be Christians, and if you want to go to heaven, you must stop committing sins, you must take up good works, and if you do so regularly and constantly, and do not fail to keep on at it, you will make yourselves Christians, you will reconcile yourselves to God, and you will go to heaven.’ Obviously a man who preaches in that strain would never be liable to this misunderstanding. Nobody would say to such a man, ‘Shall we continue in sin, that grace may abound?’, because the man’s whole emphasis is just this, that if you go on sinning you are certain to be damned, and only if you stop sinning can you save yourselves. So that misunderstanding could never arise….
“…Nobody has ever brought this charge against the Church of Rome, but it was brought frequently against Martin Luther; indeed that was precisely what the Church of Rome said about the preaching of Martin Luther. They said, ‘This man who was a priest has changed the doctrine in order to justify his own marriage and his own lust’, and so on…. That is the very charge they brought against him. It was also brought against George Whitefield two hundred years ago. It is the charge that formal dead Christianity — if there is such a thing — has always brought against this startling, staggering message, that God ‘justifies the ungodly’….
“I would say to all preachers: If your preaching of salvation has not been misunderstood in that way, then you had better examine your sermons again, and you had better make sure that you really are preaching the salvation that is offered in the New Testament to the ungodly, to the sinner, to those who are dead in trespasses and sins, to those who are enemies of God. There is this kind of dangerous element about the true presentation of the doctrine of salvation.” (Romans: The New Man, An Exposition of Chapter 6, pp. 8-9).
Did you get the powerful point he was making? Why did Paul have to answer the charge, “Are you saying we can sin all we want?” Because he preached the Gospel of Grace with such clarity. If no one ever raises that question, or takes it to an extreme, we aren’t presenting it hard enough or strong enough.
Please don’t misunderstand me—I’m not encouraging anyone to become a grace abuser. I echo Paul’s sentiments “By no means!” “God forbid!” “Of course not!” A Christian who adopts a flippant, “who cares” attitude about sin is either sadly deluded or driven by the flesh—perhaps not genuinely converted.
But the good news is so good that some will choose to abuse the freedom it offers. Nevertheless, we must never back away from declaring the gospel
I am not ashamed of the gospel, because it is the power of God for the salvation of everyone who believes… (Romans 1:16)
