The Gospel in Twenty Questions (16 page)

So then, my brothers and sisters, when you gather to
eat, you should all eat together. Anyone who is hungry should eat something at
home, so that when you meet together it may not result in judgment. And when I
come I will give further directions. (1 Corinthians 11:33–34)

Communion at the Corinthian
church was a total fiasco. Paul said their meetings did more harm than good (1
Corinthians 11:17). He said this because their table manners made them a
disgraceful advertisement for the gospel. “When you come together, it is not
the Lord’s Supper you eat” (1 Corinthians 11:20). Indeed, it was not. It was
the potluck dinner from hell.

Paul wrote to
correct their poor behavior. He reminded them of the significance of communion
before giving them some practical instructions. He then finished by expressing
his hope that their meetings “may not result in judgment.” What is this
judgment Paul is speaking of? It is the same judgment of verse 29. It’s the
self-inflicted condemnation of unbelief. When you do communion so badly that
it’s no longer communion, you impede the gospel, and people suffer for it.

Imagine you
had never heard of Jesus and you visited the
Corinthian
church. You see these followers of Christ getting drunk, hogging the food, and
embarrassing those who hadn’t brought any. What impression would you leave
with? You may think, “These Christians are a joke. I want nothing to do with
them and their Christ.” Or you may say, “Pass the amphora. I like this drunken
Jesus a lot!” Either way, you’re going to get the wrong picture of Jesus.

As
Christians, our job is to reveal the Jesus who died and rose again. To the
degree to which we reveal another Jesus, perhaps a drunken Jesus or a Jesus
more concerned with behavior than love, we promote a terminal status quo.

Jesus
said, “Preach the gospel of the kingdom.” It’s the good news of another world
for the inhabitants of a condemned one. It’s the declaration that death no
longer has the last word from One who died and rose again.

Whenever
we meet, we have an opportunity to release either the grace of a risen King or
the condemnation of a fallen order. We will dispense either the flavor of
heaven or the swill of a corrupt world. In acting like pigs,
the Corinthians were doing the latter. They were
snatching food instead of giving thanks. They were humiliating others instead
of giving grace.

If the
Corinthians show us how
not
to do communion, then the Jerusalem
Christians show us how to do it right:

They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and
to fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer. Everyone was filled with
awe at the many wonders and signs performed by the apostles. All the believers
were together and had everything in common … They broke bread in their homes
and ate together with glad and sincere hearts, praising God and enjoying the
favor of all the people. And the Lord added to their number daily those who
were being saved. (Acts 2:42–47) 

When we reveal the real Jesus
at the table of grace, good things happen. Those outside are drawn in, the sick
and poor have their needs met, and the result is praise and thanksgiving to
God. What does communion look like when it is done well? It looks like heaven.

My three-year-old son is a
regular Michelangelo. The other day he drew a purple-crayon masterpiece on the
walls of his bedroom. Needless to say, I was furious. I told him he was a
vandal and I belted him within an inch of his life. Then I said if he did it
again I’d kick him out of the family.

Of course I
did no such thing! And yet this sort of over-the-top reaction is exactly how
some imagine their heavenly Father responding when they sin. They say things
like, “God convicted me with guilt and then he chastised me with scourging.”
Or, “God is disciplining me with sickness because I’ve done terrible things.”

This kind of
religious talk is based on chopped-up bits of the Bible but is completely
uninformed by the gospel of Jesus. It will cause you to look inward instead of
upward and to focus on your faults instead of his perfections. It will make you
sin-conscious instead of Son-conscious.

For thousands
of years manmade religion has preached against sin, and what has it gotten us?
More sin. “The fault is you,” cries religion. “You are not keeping the rules.”
So we try harder and fail bigger.

If you have
struggled to overcome sin and made
a purple-crayon
mess of your life
, understand that the problem is not your lack of
effort. The real culprit is religion that promotes confidence in the flesh over
faith in Jesus.

Did Jesus sneak out of heaven
against his Father’s wishes to come and die for our sins? Of course not. Yet
many seem to think that God the Son and God the Father are playing a good
cop-bad cop routine with humanity. God the Father is angry with us on account
of our sin, but Jesus stands between us, protecting us from his Father’s wrath.

I hope you
can see how ridiculous this picture is. The Father and the Son do not have
different agendas. They are united in heart, both full of grace and truth.

But what
about the Holy Spirit? Where does he fit in this picture? According to some,
the Holy Spirit is the sheriff of heaven, convicting us of our sins and making
us feel guilty:

But I tell you the truth: It is for your good that I
am going away. Unless I go away, the Counselor will not come to you; but if I
go, I will send him to you. When he comes, he will convict the world of guilt
in regard to sin … (John 16:7–8, NIV1984)

This is probably the number one
teaching on sin in the church: When you sin, the Holy Spirit will convict you
of your guilt in regard to your sin. But there’s a problem. How can the Holy
Spirit convict you of sins he chooses not to remember?

The Holy Spirit also testifies to us about this …
“Their sins and lawless acts I will remember no more.” (Hebrews 10:15, 17)

Under the law-keeping covenant,
you had to keep track of and account for every single sin. But the covenant of
God’s grace is characterized by divine forgetfulness:

For I will forgive their wickedness and will remember
their sins no more. (Jeremiah 31:34c) 

Why does God choose to forget
our sins? Has he gone soft on sin? Quite the contrary. On the cross God gave
sin such a smack-down that it will never get back up again. In honor of his
complete and total victory over sin, God can now dismiss sin as irrelevant to
his eternal purposes in Christ Jesus.

In choosing
not to remember sin, God is saying, “I have met the enemy, I have overcome the
enemy, and I will not honor the memory of my enemy.” Your old master sin has
been thoroughly defeated. He’s history.

So why does
the Bible say God convicts us of
guilt
in regard to sin? It doesn’t. If
your Bible says he does, chances are you have an old edition of the New
International Version.
The word
guilt
was
added to that Bible in the 1970s by translators working for the New York Bible
Society.
[31]

But the fact
is Jesus never said it, and the Holy Spirit doesn’t do it. He doesn’t need to.
We already know we’re guilty. Our consciences hammer us with guilt every time
we do something wrong. Guilt is a signal that our lives have been disrupted by
sin. It’s a sign that a hurt needs to be healed.

The problem
is we try to fix the hurt with dead religion. We take our sins and hurts to Dr.
Law and he gives us bad medicine. He says, “
You are
not good enough, you are not doing enough, and you need to try harder.” We
swallow his medicine, but the tumor of guilt gets bigger. So we go for a second
opinion. We visit Dr. Mixture and he says, “You’re forgiven, as long as you
don’t sin. God is so kind he will cleanse you from every sin that you
confess.”
Now we are not only guilty, we are anxious.
What if I miss one sin? Will God
be kind then?

With muddled
messages like these, is it any wonder that religious people are among the most
neurotic people on the planet?

You need to
understand that God is not the one making you feel guilty. God removes guilt;
he doesn’t give it.
To be guilty means to be held
responsible for your sin, and God doesn’t hold you responsible. Look to the
cross, where Jesus took responsibility for all our sin. He bore our sin so that
we might bear his righteousness. Under law, the best of us is charged guilty on
account of sin. But under grace, the worst of us is charged righteous on
account of Jesus.

You
may say, “I know I am righteous and justified, yet I still feel guilty.”
Connect the dots. If you are righteous and justified you cannot be guilty. In
Christ you have been judged and found not guilty for all time. That feeling of
guilt is a symptom of unbelief in the goodness of God. Don’t let that feeling
run around like a rat in the attic. Take it to Jesus and let him deal with it.
Do you believe that his blood is God’s cure for sin? Then believe it is also
his cure for guilt.

Let us draw near to God with a
sincere heart and with the full assurance that faith brings, having our hearts
sprinkled to cleanse us from a guilty conscience and having our bodies washed
with pure water. (Hebrews 10:22)

Recently, someone tried to
convince me that God makes us feel guilty for a season in order to bring about
his righteous purposes. He said the Holy Spirit uses godly guilt to lead us to
repentance. That sounds like religious double-talk to me. The phrase “godly
guilt” makes as much sense as “demonic grace.” The Holy Spirit and guilt go
together like the devil and love. He’s the Spirit of grace, not the spirit of
guilt.

Guilt
is the language of manmade religion, but it’s not a language they speak in
heaven. You are a citizen of a heavenly kingdom, so speak like it. When sin
points an accusing finger at you and shouts “Guilty!” point to the cross and
shout back louder, “Forgiven!”

Jesus did not
sneak out of heaven on a secret mercy mission, and God did not have a change of
heart after the cross. Your heavenly Father is not a guilt-dispenser. Neither
is the Holy Spirit.

“I know I’ve sinned because my
conscience has been pricked and I feel bad for what I did. This is evidence of
the Holy Spirit’s conviction.” No it’s not. It’s evidence of a conscience.

The Holy
Spirit will never condemn you or pile guilt on your head because if he did, it
would be an admission of defeat. It would be tantamount to saying Christ’s work
on the cross was an insufficient remedy for your sin.

As an
expression of his love and mercy, the Holy Spirit seeks to convict or convince
us that Jesus is the cure for sin.

And when he has come, he will convict the world of sin
… because they do not believe in me. (John 16:8–9, NKJV)

It’s not that the Holy Spirit
convicts the world of the sin of unbelief. Rather, his purpose is to get you to
believe Jesus has taken away your sin. “Concerning sin—see Jesus. Believe in
him.”

“But Paul,
I’ve got some serious sin.” That may be, but God has some serious grace, and
his serious grace is greater
than your serious sin.

It’s
really very simple. Either Jesus’ one-time sacrifice was the cure for the
world’s sin or it wasn’t. If it was, there is nothing you can do to improve
upon it. If it wasn’t, there is nothing you can do to complete it. Either way,
there is nothing you can do.

Why do we get
so confused about this? I think part of the reason has to do with the word
convict
.
In English, to convict someone is to declare them guilty of an offense. First
you are
convicted
, then you become a
convict
. But this is not
what the Holy Spirit does. He doesn’t fill prisons; he empties them.

I used to do
prison ministry. If I told the inmates that the Holy Spirit convicted me of sin,
they would think, “He busted you. You were caught red-handed, you bad sinner.”
What a slanderous portrayal of the Holy Spirit’s life-giving ministry. I would
have given the impression that he is like the law—or worse, the Accuser. The
Holy Spirit is nothing like that.

So what does
it mean to say the Holy Spirit convicts us? The original word means to expose
or bring into the light. The Holy Spirit convicts us by turning on the lights.
He does this not to shame you, but to show you the way to life.
[32]

We need a new
covenant definition of conviction, one that is not based on our sin and guilt.
The Holy Spirit’s conviction has nothing to do with your sin and everything to
do with God’s grace. It’s not about the bad thing you’ve done but the good
thing he wants to do in you right now.

Do
you remember the woman caught in adultery? Now there’s a guilty sinner, lost
and without hope. The facts denounce her, the law condemns her, and angry
religious men with stones are lining up to dispense a little Old Testament
punishment on her head. For this sinner, death is just moments away.

But
Jesus intervenes. He stoops to write in the sand, drawing attention from the
sinner to himself. Amazingly, all her accusers walk away.

Jesus straightened up and asked her,
“Woman
—
where are they? Has no one condemned you?” “No one, sir,”
she said. “Then neither do I condemn you,” Jesus declared. “Go now and leave
your life of sin.” (John 8:10
–
11)

This is what true
conviction looks like. It’s Jesus drawing your attention to the radiant light
of his love and acceptance. It’s the hand of grace lifting your head and
shielding you from the heavy stones of condemnation. It’s the Son of God
speaking in your defense and silencing your accusers.

Religion
says, “You’d better stop sinning or God will condemn you.” But grace says, “I
don’t condemn you; I am for you, and I will help you leave your life of sin.”
This good news is hard to believe. You probably wouldn’t be able to receive it,
except the Holy Spirit has turned on the lights and convinced you that Jesus is
faithful and true.

When
you sin, your conscience may condemn you, the law may condemn you, and the
Spanish Inquisition may condemn you. But while all of this condemning is going
on, the Holy Spirit will be there to remind you of your righteousness in Christ
Jesus.
This
is what empowers us to sin no more. Not the unsurprising
discovery that we messed up, but the outrageously good news that God justifies
sinners.