Preaching the Gospel to Ourselves

Recently there have been some good comments here, concerning the importance of encouraging others and ourselves with the Gospel. Under my brief post about C.J. Mahaney’s sermon on Encouragement at Bethlehem (my church), Alana Asby Roberts wrote:

That thought about speaking the gospel to other Christians is interesting. After my “new” and final conversion experience at nineteen, I found that I enjoyed the gospel as food, loved to sing its truths, etc.

When we got a new pastor, he began by preaching his first Sunday morning series on “The Nature of Saving Faith” and was going deep into the truths, usually neglected, of the full gospel. He abruptly switched, I am sad to say, to a series about the Ten Commandments (with all of their possible ‘applications’). We later found out that people had been complaining about having to listen to all these “salvation messages” when they were already “saved”.

But it is the gospel of the grace of Jesus Christ. What could be more edifying or encouraging? He comes to us in it again and again, no matter how long we have been walking in the Way.

And under the comments for my post on “The Gospel Song” , Capt. Headknowledge said:

Mahaney’s book [The Cross Centered Life] helped me realize I can preach the Gospel to myself when I find I’m going without it in my own “worship experience.”

Sadly, Alana’s experience is all too common, and Capt. Headknowledge’s discovery isn’t. Believers do not want to have the gospel preached at them, so of course they don’t preach it to themselves! The Gospel is just for the lost (they say), and of course once they pray the sinner’s prayer, then all is good and well, right?

The ESV and other modern versions capture the essence of the Greek of 1 Cor. 1:18 better than the old KJV. It says:

For the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. (emphasis added)

Salvation is in one sense a process. The common expression “whoever believes will be saved” in most of its occurences could be understood as “the believing ones will be saved”, based on the literal sense of the Greek. Belief commences when we convert to Christ but it is to continue our whole lives [see this post which emphasizes that]. And belief is nurtured through hearing the word of God (Rom. 10:17). And the phrase “word of God” most often in the NT refers to the gospel message of Christ–“the word of the cross”.

John Piper in his book When I Don’t Desire God: How to Fight for Joy encourages us to preach the Gospel to ourselves!

We must not rely only on being preached to, but must become good preachers to our own soul. The gospel is the power of God to lead us joyfully to final salvation, if we preach it to ourselves. (emphasis in the original)

Piper points out that Martin Lloyd-Jones emphasized this truth in his book Spiritual Depression: Its Causes and Cures. The book is…

“an exposition of Psalm 42, especially verse 5: ‘Why art thou cast down, O my soul? And why art thou disquieted in me? Hope thou in God: for I shall yet praise him for the help of his countenance’ (KJV).”

Piper and Lloyd-Jones point out that the psalmist is preaching the promises of the Gospel to himself. I will end with just a quote Piper gives from Lloyd-Jones and then point you to Piper’s book pgs 80-82 (and also 88-89) which is available online for free here. Lloyd-Jones, then will conclude this post for us:

The main art in the matter of spiritual living is to know how to handle yourself. You have to take yourself in hand, you have to address yourself, preach to yourself….You must turn on yourself, upbraid yourself, condmn yourself, exhort yourself, and say to yourself: “Hope thou in God”–instead of muttering in this depressed, unhappy way, and then you must go on to remind yourself of God, Who God is, and…what God has done, and what God has pledged Himself to do. Then having done that, end on this great note: defy yourself, and defy other people, and defy the devil and the whole world, and say with this man: “I shall yet praise Him for the help of his countenance, who is also the health of my coutenance and my God.” [Ps. 42:11b, KJV]

[For my treatment of how the Gospel should be the focus of each and every public sermon in church, see here]