A Wonderful Plan for Your Life?

What this is about

The author of this site set down a thesis: for fifteen centuries the Church proclaimed what God has done in Christ; much modern preaching proclaims what Christ can do for you. In the old message, the problem was sin, death and the devil, the hearer was called to repent, believe and be baptized into the Church, and the end in view was the resurrection of the body. In much modern preaching, he suggests, the problem is emptiness or a life that is not working, the promise is peace or purpose now, the response is a single private decision, and the judgment and the resurrection of the body fade away.

This page does not ask how a person becomes a Christian; earlier dossiers did that. It compares the message itself, in its preachers’ own words: what is announced, who it is about, what problem it names and what it promises.

The short answer

The case for continuity, and Pentecost

The other side first. The case that nothing important has changed is strong. Paul adapted his message to every audience: “I am made all things to all men, that I might by all means save some” (1 Corinthians 9:22). God’s love for the individual is biblical: “the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself for me” (Galatians 2:20). D. L. Moody’s preaching is remembered as “Ruin by the Fall, Redemption by the Blood, Regeneration by the Holy Ghost.” Billy Graham preached sin, the cross and judgment to millions. The best-known “purpose” book of its decade opens, “It’s not about you.” And the late medieval church, with its trade in indulgences, did not always proclaim grace clearly. All of that is true.

The question it leaves is whether changing the form of the message to reach someone is the same as changing its content. The test is what Paul kept at Athens. He began with an altar “TO THE UNKNOWN GOD” and a Greek poet. He ended: God “hath appointed a day, in the which he will judge the world in righteousness by that man whom he hath ordained; whereof he hath given assurance unto all men, in that he hath raised him from the dead” (Acts 17:31). They laughed at him. He did not change the ending.

Pentecost. The first Christian sermon (Acts 2) is almost entirely about what God did. God approved Jesus by miracles, delivered him up “by the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God,” raised him, exalted him, and “made that same Jesus, whom ye have crucified, both Lord and Christ.” The hearers act in only two ways: they crucified him, and they ask, “Men and brethren, what shall we do?” Peter answers: “Repent, and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the remission of sins, and ye shall receive the gift of the Holy Ghost.” Three thousand were baptized and “added” that day, and “they continued stedfastly in the apostles’ doctrine and fellowship, and in breaking of bread, and in prayers” (2:41–42).

Kept, changed, or missing?

Six features of Peter’s sermon. Is each one kept in the altar call above, changed, or missing?

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What the early Church put first

“First of all.” Paul told the Corinthians what he delivered “first of all”: “that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures; And that he was buried, and that he rose again the third day” (1 Corinthians 15:3–4). Four facts about Christ. In the eight sermons to outsiders recorded in Acts, the resurrection appears in every one, and the coming judgment or “the day of the Lord” in six. Before the governor Felix, Paul “reasoned of righteousness, temperance, and judgment to come” (24:25). None of the eight begins with the hearer’s life or promises that it will go better.

The Creed. The Nicene Creed, confessed by Orthodox, Catholics, Lutherans, Anglicans and the Reformed, is the message in a dozen lines: “Who for us men, and for our salvation came down from heaven … was crucified also for us under Pontius Pilate … the third day he rose again … he shall come again with glory to judge both the quick and the dead.” The person saying it has three verbs of his own: he believes, he acknowledges “one Baptism for the remission of sins,” and he looks “for the Resurrection of the dead, And the life of the world to come.” In the Creed, “for us” is everywhere and “about us” is nowhere.

Teaching new converts. Around 350, Cyril of Jerusalem taught candidates for baptism through Lent: repentance and baptism first, then every clause of the Creed, including the second coming (“We preach not one advent only of Christ, but a second also”) and the resurrection of the flesh (“The root of all good works is the hope of the Resurrection”). Around 400, Augustine told a deacon to tell beginners the whole story, from “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth, on to the present times of the Church,” so that the hearer “on hearing may believe, on believing may hope, on hoping may love.” Love for the hearer is ancient. What is new is making the hearer the subject of the story.

East, West and the Middle Ages. The East preached Christ’s victory over death (“Let no one fear death, for the Saviour’s death has set us free,” read every Easter); the West preached Christ’s payment for sin (Anselm, 1098). These are two sides of one act. Francis told his friars in 1223 to preach “vices and virtues, punishment and glory,” and English churches painted the Last Judgment over the chancel arch. But by the fifteenth century much preaching had sunk into fear of purgatory and paid indulgences. Luther protested it in the name of the same gospel: “The true treasure of the church is the most holy gospel of the glory and grace of God” (Thesis 62). Notice which way that failure ran: it made the believer’s own payments the centre.

The altar call. The modern invitation to come forward and decide grew from the “mourners’ bench” of early-1800s camp meetings and Finney’s “anxious seat,” defended in his Lectures on Revivals (1835). So the pattern is about two hundred years old. “Ask Jesus into your heart” usually rests on Revelation 3:20, “Behold, I stand at the door, and knock,” which is addressed to “the church of the Laodiceans” and calls a whole congregation to repent.

The modern summaries, in their own words

The Four Spiritual Laws (Cru, 1965): “God loves you and offers a wonderful plan for your life.” “We are sinful and separated from God.” “Jesus Christ is God’s only provision for our sin.” “We must individually receive Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord.” To be fair: it names sin, and under the third law it cites Christ’s death and resurrection. But “God’s love and plan” frames every law, and the judgment, the resurrection of the body and baptism are not there.

Steps to Peace with God (Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, 1954): “God loves you and wants you to experience peace and life—abundant and eternal.” It names sin, says “Jesus Christ died on the cross and rose from the grave,” and the prayer says “I turn from my sins.” Again, no judgment, no resurrection of the body, no baptism; the Church once, as advice for growing.

The Foursquare Gospel (1920s): Jesus Christ the Savior, Baptizer with the Holy Spirit, Healer, and Soon-Coming King. Christ is the subject of all four, and his return is kept, which counts for continuity; two of the four are benefits in this life.

What teenagers absorbed. In 2005 two sociologists summed up what most American teenagers actually believed, across all churches, as “Moralistic Therapeutic Deism”: God exists and watches; he wants people to be “good, nice, and fair”; “the central goal of life is to be happy and to feel good about oneself”; God is needed mainly “to resolve a problem”; “good people go to heaven when they die.” No sin, no cross, no resurrection, no Church. Nobody taught it on purpose. It is what was left.

Kept, added, or dropped?

Eight elements of the message. In the best-known modern presentations, has each one in general been kept, added, or dropped?

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The problem, the promise, and where it ends

The problem. Hebrews names it: Christ came “that through death he might destroy him that had the power of death, that is, the devil; And deliver them who through fear of death were all their lifetime subject to bondage” (2:14–15). The modern message often names emptiness instead, and credits the “God-shaped hole” to Pascal. Pascal never wrote that. He wrote of an “infinite abyss” that only God can fill, and called it the “empty print and trace” of a happiness man lost in the Fall. For Pascal, emptiness is a symptom of sin. As the headline of the message, it becomes the disease.

The promise. A promise about this life is tested by this life. If the message is “God has a wonderful plan for your life,” the year your father dies is evidence against it. If the message is “Christ is risen, and I look for the resurrection of the dead,” nothing that happens before the resurrection can disprove it. The apostles were plain: “we must through much tribulation enter into the kingdom of God” (Acts 14:22). And Paul: “If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men most miserable” (1 Corinthians 15:19).

Where it ends. In Acts 2, being saved and being added to the Church are one event, and the new believers continue “in the apostles’ doctrine and fellowship, and in breaking of bread, and in prayers.” Early catechesis could take years, but always ended at baptism and the Lord’s table. Many modern presentations end at the prayer, with the Church as a suggested next step.

Where you can still hear it. Wherever the historic liturgy is used, the old message is proclaimed every week, whatever the sermon says: the Creed is said, the Scriptures are read in order, and at the table the congregation does what Paul said it does: “ye do shew the Lord’s death till he come” (1 Corinthians 11:26).

Who is the subject?

A test you can run on any sermon: who does the main verb of each sentence? Eight sentences, four from Peter and four from a gospel tract made up by this page. For each, is the subject God or the hearer?

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What this shows, and what it does not

Check it yourself

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

1. 1. Read Acts 2. Underline every verb whose subject is God. Where do the hearers end up?
2. 2. Read Acts 17:16–34. Where does Paul start at Athens, and where does he finish?
3. 3. Read 1 Corinthians 15. What did Paul deliver “first of all,” and what follows if Christ is not raised?
4. 4. Read the Nicene Creed slowly. Count the verbs that belong to you.
5. 5. One sermon. Do this one. Take the last sermon or gospel tract you heard. Write one sentence each on what it announced, what problem it named, what it promised, what it asked and where it ended. Then do the same for Acts 2.