The Gospel of Me

What this is about

The author of this site puts it like this: “Modern Christianity has not necessarily stopped talking about Jesus; rather, it risks turning Jesus into the means by which the individual obtains an experience, identity, purpose, or fulfilled life. Jesus remains in the vocabulary while the self quietly becomes the subject of the religion.”

Take two sentences. “Christ died for me.” “I am using my faith to become the person I was meant to be.” Both have “me” or “I” in them, and a sincere Christian could say both on the same morning. In the first, Christ does something and I am the one it is done for. In the second, I am doing something, and my faith is the tool. The worry is that a lot of preaching and singing has moved from the first kind of sentence to the second without changing its vocabulary.

The short answer

What did they come for?

This is not a modern problem. The first person to describe it was Jesus.

He had fed five thousand people with five loaves and two fish. The next day the crowd crossed the lake to find him, and he told them why they had come:

Ye seek me, not because ye saw the miracles, but because ye did eat of the loaves, and were filled.

John 6:26.

He did not regret feeding them, and he did not say they were wrong to be hungry. He said they had mistaken what he was for. They asked for more bread. He answered, “I am the bread of life.” What he had come to give was himself. By the end of the chapter most of them had left. Peter stayed, and said why: “Lord, to whom shall we go? thou hast the words of eternal life.”

The church later gave this a name. Augustine, about the year 420, said that good people use the world in order to enjoy God, and that the wicked try to use God in order to enjoy the world. Luther, in 1516, said that human nature is so bent in on itself that it “even uses God himself” to get what it wants, and does not notice that it is doing so.

Here are six people or groups who came to Jesus or his apostles. For each, decide what they were looking for.

0 of 6 sorted.

News first, then advice

When Paul reminds the Corinthians what he preached to them “first of all,” it is a list of things that happened: “Christ died for our sins … he was buried … he rose again the third day … he was seen” (1 Corinthians 15:3–5). Christ does all four verbs. The hearers appear in two words: “our sins.”

Peter’s first sermon is the same. God approved Jesus, God raised him, God made him Lord (Acts 2). The creeds copy it. In the Nicene Creed the believer says “I believe,” and after that nearly every verb belongs to Christ: he came down, was made man, was crucified, rose, ascended, will come again. We come into it after the word “for”: “for us men, and for our salvation.”

The apostles did promise their hearers something. Peter says, “Repent, and be baptized … for the remission of sins, and ye shall receive the gift of the Holy Ghost” (Acts 2:38). So there is an offer, and it is to “you.” Look at what is offered: forgiveness, and God’s own Spirit. No sermon in Acts offers success, a destiny or a better self.

That is the difference between news and advice. News says what has been done. Advice says what you should do. The Bible has plenty of advice, and a preacher should give it. But in Paul’s letters the advice always comes after a “therefore.” Eleven chapters of Romans say what God has done, and then: “I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God” (12:1). Luther put it in a sentence in 1521: before you take Christ as an example, accept him as a gift.

A sermon of five keys or seven steps has cut the “therefore.” Here is a simple test. Take the cross and the resurrection out of the sermon. If the advice still stands, it was only advice.

Advice also needs someone to prove it works, and that is usually the preacher. His marriage, his income and his discipline become the evidence. Paul did the opposite: “We preach not ourselves, but Christ Jesus the Lord” (2 Corinthians 4:5). He boasted about his weaknesses. John the Baptist gave the rule: “He must increase, but I must decrease” (John 3:30).

Worship, church, and “my relationship”

Worship. Two descriptions of Christian worship survive from the 100s. A Roman governor reported that Christians met before dawn and “sang … a hymn to Christ, as to a god.” A Christian writer, Justin, described Sunday: Scripture was read at length, the leader taught from it, everyone stood and prayed, and bread and wine were given with thanks. Neither says anything about how the worshippers felt.

In the old service God speaks and gives, and the people answer with praise. So “I got nothing out of it” asks the wrong question. If Scripture was read, sins were forgiven and the Lord’s Supper was given, a great deal was put into your hands whether you felt it or not. Gladness is good, and the Psalms command it. It comes from looking at him. A service built to produce a feeling has people watching themselves.

“My personal relationship with Jesus.” At its best the phrase means something true: a Christian trusts a living person, and nobody can do that for you. But the words “personal” and “relationship” are not in the King James Bible. The New Testament’s own words are “in Christ” and “one body.” You are joined to Christ, and by the same act you are joined to everyone else who is joined to him.

The Lord’s Prayer shows it. It has “our” four times, “us” four times and “we” once. It never says “I,” “me” or “my.” A bishop called Cyprian pointed this out about the year 252: “we say not ‘My Father, which art in heaven,’ nor ‘Give me this day my daily bread’.”

Choosing a church. The old Lutheran and Anglican definitions say a church is where the Gospel is preached and the sacraments are given. They say nothing about whether it suits me. “Does this church meet my needs?” makes me the judge and the church the product. C. S. Lewis had a devil explain why that is useful to him: “The search for a ‘suitable’ church makes the man a critic where the Enemy wants him to be a pupil.” And a church full of customers will, in time, be given the sermon they are shopping for.

“God told me.” God’s fullest word is public: he “hath in these last days spoken unto us by his Son” (Hebrews 1:2). When the word a Christian most wants is one about his own job, house or future, the subject of what God says has become himself.

My story, my destiny, my sin

Testimony. In the New Testament a “witness” is someone who saw what happened to Jesus. When the apostles chose a replacement for Judas, he had to be “a witness with us of his resurrection” (Acts 1:22). Paul had the most dramatic conversion story in the Bible. He told it, and then preached “that Christ should suffer, and that he should be the first that should rise from the dead” (Acts 26:23).

Personal testimony is in the Bible too. Jesus told a healed man, “Go home to thy friends, and tell them how great things the Lord hath done for thee” (Mark 5:19). Notice who does the verb. The trouble comes when my story takes the place of his. Then my faith rests on my own experience, the person with a dramatic story counts for more than the person who has quietly believed since childhood, and the sick and struggling have nothing to report.

Purpose. The favourite verse for personal destiny is Jeremiah 29:11: “I know the thoughts that I think toward you … thoughts of peace, and not of evil.” It comes from a letter to a whole people in exile in Babylon. They are told to build houses, plant gardens and wait seventy years. Most of them would die there. It is a promise that God is faithful to his people. It is not a promise of a breakthrough for me.

When the New Testament says Christians are “called,” it nearly always means called to belong to Christ: “called unto the fellowship of his Son,” “called to be saints,” called “in one body.” What to do with your days is put plainly: “study to be quiet, and to do your own business, and to work with your own hands” (1 Thessalonians 4:11). Ordinary life is already what God has given you to do. You do not have to find something bigger for it to matter.

Sin. King David committed adultery and had the woman’s husband killed. When he confessed it he said to God, “Against thee, thee only, have I sinned” (Psalm 51:4). He was not denying what he did to the man. He was saying what made it sin.

The other view was put in print by a famous American television preacher in 1982: “Sin is any act or thought that robs myself or another human being of his or her self-esteem.” The same book says that theology has been wrong to be “God-centered” and should be “man-centered.” If sin is only what holds me back, then nobody has been wronged, forgiveness has nothing to do, and the cross becomes a tool for self-improvement. The old words are all still used. They mean something else.

“For me” is in the Bible

None of this means a Christian should stop saying “me.” Paul wrote, “the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself for me” (Galatians 2:20). Luther told his readers to read “me” and “for me” in that verse “with great emphasis” and to print it in capital letters in their hearts. His catechism for children says, “Jesus Christ … is my Lord, who has redeemed me, a lost and condemned creature.” At communion the minister says to each person, “given for thee.” Psalm 23 says “I,” “me” or “my” seventeen times.

So what is the difference? Look at who is doing the action. “He loved me.” “He gave himself for me.” “He has redeemed me.” “He leadeth me.” In every one, Christ acts and I receive. Now a made-up modern line: “I am stepping into everything God has for me.” I am the one acting, and what I am after is God’s gifts.

Three questions tell the two apart.

Here are six sentences. Every one says “me” or “my.” Three are from the Bible, a catechism or a hymn. Three are made up. Sort each by who is really the subject.

0 of 6 sorted.

Count the pronouns

The author suggests a test anyone can run. Take a sermon, a song or a church advertisement and count. How often does it say “I,” “me” and “my”? How often does it name God? The box below does the counting. Try the samples, then paste in something of your own. Nothing you paste is stored or sent anywhere.

Two things show up quickly. At the extremes the count works at once: the Lord’s Prayer has no “I” at all, and the made-up advertisement never names God. In the middle it fails. Psalm 23 has more “I” words than the made-up sermon. So does one of the greatest hymns in English, “When I Survey the Wondrous Cross.”

The reason is the verbs. In Psalm 23 “me” is nearly always on the receiving end: he maketh me, he leadeth me, he restoreth my soul. In the made-up chorus “I” is the one acting: I am stepping, I am chasing, I am claiming. The pronouns are the same. Their place in the sentence is opposite.

One caution. A single song or sermon proves very little. The test is fair when it is run on three months of a church’s songs, or a year of its sermon titles. The first thing to run it on is your own prayers.

An old fault, and a recent method

The fault is ancient. Jesus saw it in the crowd, Paul saw it in his fellow workers (“all seek their own, not the things which are Jesus Christ’s”), and Augustine, Luther and many others saw it in the church of their own day. The older church was no less selfish than we are. What it had was a name for the fault, and a way of worship built to work against it.

What is recent is that parts of the church stopped resisting it and began to recommend it. The people who did so wrote down their reasons.

There were warnings in the same years. A New Testament scholar wrote in 1923 that real Christianity “begins with a triumphant indicative,” a statement of what God has done, and that a religion made only of commands is a different one. C. S. Lewis ended his best-known book like this: “Look for yourself, and you will find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin, and decay. But look for Christ and you will find Him, and with Him everything else thrown in.”

Check it yourself

Five things. The first takes ten minutes. The last is the one that matters.

1. 1. Read John 6 from beginning to end. Why did the crowd come, what did Jesus offer them, and why did most of them leave?
2. 2. Read 1 Corinthians 15:1–8 and Acts 2:22–39. Underline every verb and write beside it who is doing it.
3. 3. Read the Lord’s Prayer (Matthew 6:9–13) and Psalm 23 side by side. One has no “I” and the other has seventeen. What do they have in common?
4. 4. Read Galatians 2:20 and Daniel 3:16–18. The first is the Bible’s “for me.” The second is “but if not.”
5. 5. Take the words of the last three songs your church sang and the last sermon you heard, and run the two-step test. Do this one. If Christ is doing most of the verbs, be glad of it and say so. Then try it on what you prayed this week.