Returning to the Gospel · Session 8
A Scripture-centered teaching study. Read it here, or download the full manuscript below.
Returning to the Gospel is not a retreat from love and justice. It is the recovery of the only message that produces them. A church returns by putting the proclamation of Christ crucified and risen back at the center, and letting justice and mercy flow as its fruit.
This is the final session, and it is meant to end the series with hope. Over seven sessions we have done a great deal of testing and contrasting. We defined the Gospel and saw why it must not be changed. We traced the Social Gospel to its origins and the liberal theology beneath it. We set biblical Christianity against the Social Gospel, watched the church divide over its mission, and tested liberation theology by Scripture.
The question now is constructive. If a church has drifted toward another gospel, how does it come back? This session is not mainly about what to reject. It is about what to recover, and how. The God who calls sinners home also calls churches home.
Before leading this session, read and meditate on:
Lead with humility and hope. Some in the room may love churches that have drifted. The goal is restoration, not the satisfaction of being right. Pray for a returning heart in yourself first.
Keep the tone constructive. This session calls people home; it does not merely diagnose.
Hold proclamation and fruit together. Returning to the Gospel does not mean abandoning justice and mercy; it means ordering them rightly.
Churches return as the people in them return.
In Session 7 we tested liberation and Black liberation theology by Scripture. It rightly insists that God is not indifferent to oppression, but it locates the deepest division between oppressor and oppressed and defines salvation as earthly liberation. Scripture locates the deepest division in Adam or in Christ, defines salvation as reconciliation to God through the cross, and gives the church the ministry of reconciliation. That is the note this final session builds on: the Gospel is the only thing that finally reconciles.
Before we look forward, it helps to see the whole road as one journey.
Session 1 asked what the Gospel is: the good news that Christ died for our sins, was buried, and rose again, and that sinners are saved by grace through faith, with good works as the fruit.
Session 2 showed why the Gospel must not be changed. Paul pronounces a curse on any other gospel, because to change the message is to lose the only thing that saves.
Session 3 traced the origins of the Social Gospel: a real concern for suffering that gradually moved the church's center from saving sinners to reforming society.
Session 4 uncovered the liberal theology beneath it, which lowered the authority of Scripture and remade Christianity around human experience.
Session 5 set biblical Christianity and the Social Gospel side by side, using four diagnostic questions about the problem, the Savior, salvation, and the mission of the church.
Session 6 watched the largest Black denomination divide over the church's mission, in the conflict between Martin Luther King Jr. and Joseph H. Jackson.
Session 7 tested liberation and Black liberation theology, and found that it redefines God, Christ, sin, and salvation around the category of oppression.
Every session has circled one question: is the proclamation of Christ crucified and risen still the central work of the church, with justice and mercy as its fruit? This session answers, and shows the way back.
Ask the group: if a church discovered it had slowly drifted from the Gospel, what would actually have to change?
Then ask: is returning to the Gospel mostly about removing error, or about recovering something the church once had? What is the difference?
A church returns to the Gospel the same way a person first comes to it: by remembering, repenting, and recovering first things. The Gospel goes back to the center, and justice, mercy, and good works return to their right place as the fruit of that Gospel rather than a replacement for it.
Have someone read the passage aloud.
The risen Christ speaks to the church at Ephesus. He commends them warmly: they work hard, they endure, they cannot bear those who are evil, and they have tested false apostles and found them liars. By every outward measure this is a sound, busy, doctrinally careful church. And yet Christ says, I have somewhat against thee, because thou hast left thy first love.
This is sobering. A church can be orthodox and active and still have drifted at the center, having lost its first love for Christ Himself. The remedy Christ gives is the pattern for every return. Remember therefore from whence thou art fallen, and repent, and do the first works.
Three steps: remember where you were, repent of the drift, and return to the first works. The warning is severe, that He will remove the lampstand, but the door home stands wide open.
Returning to the Gospel begins exactly where Christ tells Ephesus to begin: remember, repent, and do the first works. A church does not drift back by accident; it returns by deliberate repentance.
Have someone read the passage aloud.
Paul gives Timothy a solemn charge before God: Preach the word; be instant in season, out of season; reprove, rebuke, exhort with all longsuffering and doctrine. He gives the reason: for the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine, but after their own lusts shall they heap to themselves teachers, having itching ears. People will turn away from the truth and be turned unto fables.
This is a precise description of how churches drift, and of the remedy. The drift comes when the appetite of the hearers, rather than the Word of God, sets the agenda. The return comes when the Word is preached again as the central act of the church, in season and out of season, whether or not it is fashionable. A returning church is first of all a church that preaches the Word.
The single most important thing a drifting church can do is put the faithful preaching of God's Word back at the center. Programs and causes cannot substitute for the Word that makes sinners wise unto salvation.
Have someone read the passage aloud.
The risen Christ, holding all authority in heaven and in earth, sends the church into the world with one defining commission: make disciples of all nations, baptizing them and teaching them to observe all that He commanded. This is the mission that has run through the whole series. The church's central task is not to transform the social order but to make disciples of Jesus Christ.
This commission does not make the church indifferent to the world. Teaching disciples to obey all that Christ commanded will produce love of neighbor, mercy, and a hatred of injustice. But the mission is defined as making disciples, and a returning church measures itself by that definition. When a church has drifted, part of the way back is remembering what it was actually sent to do.
A returning church recovers its commission: make disciples. Justice and mercy follow as disciples are taught to obey Christ, but they are the fruit of the mission, not the mission itself.
Have someone read the passage aloud.
Paul writes that the grace of God that bringeth salvation hath appeared to all men, teaching us that, denying ungodliness and worldly lusts, we should live soberly, righteously, and godly in this present world. The same grace that saves also trains. Christ gave himself for us, to redeem us from all iniquity, and to purify unto himself a peculiar people, zealous of good works.
Here is the right relationship between the Gospel and good works, stated in a single passage. Grace saves freely, and that same grace teaches the saved to live righteous lives and makes them zealous of good works. Good works, including justice and mercy, are not the Gospel; they are what the Gospel produces. A returning church does not become less concerned with godliness and good works. It becomes more concerned, but in the right order, as the fruit of grace.
Returning to the Gospel is not a retreat from holiness or good works. The grace that saves is the grace that trains. Put the Gospel first, and zeal for good works grows from it as fruit, not as a substitute.
We can now set the drift and the return side by side. The point is not to condemn but to give a church a mirror and a map.
| Mark | A Drifting Church | A Returning Church |
|---|---|---|
| At the center | Social and political causes; the felt needs of the hearers | The proclamation of Christ crucified and risen |
| View of sin | Mainly unjust structures and conditions | Rebellion against a holy God, the root of every evil |
| View of salvation | Improved conditions and a transformed society | Reconciliation to God by grace through faith |
| The church's mission | Transform the social order | Make disciples of all nations |
| Justice and good works | Treated as the Gospel itself | Pursued as the fruit of the Gospel |
| Source of confidence | Programs, politics, relevance | The Gospel as the power of God unto salvation |
This series began by asking what the Gospel is, and it ends by calling us back to it. The Gospel that saves sinners, Christ crucified and risen, received by grace through faith, is the same Gospel that, kept at the center, makes a church just, merciful, and good. We do not have to choose between the Gospel and love for our neighbor. We only have to keep them in the right order, with the Gospel first and its fruit following.
To every church that has drifted, the word of the risen Christ is still the same: remember, repent, and do the first works. Return to the Gospel, hold it fast, and proclaim it.
There is no other message that can save, and there is no better news to give the world.
Some in the room may belong to or love churches that have drifted. Lead toward hope and repentance, not despair or superiority.
Returning is not pride. The same Gospel that calls a church back also humbles the ones who see the drift. Guard against a spirit of contempt.
Keep the call personal. Churches return as the people in them remember, repent, and recover their first love.
End on Christ, not on the failures of others. The last word of the series should be the goodness of the Gospel, not the badness of the alternatives.
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