Relatively speaking, I am a nobody. I am nobody wealthy. I am nobody famous. Other than from the cover of this book, you have probably never heard of me. Having said that, I am a nobody who believes he has something significant to contribute to a discussion that has ensued for two millennia.
If you haven’t noticed, these days there are a lot of nobody’s like me – writing, speaking, blogging and pontificating about any one of a thousand different ideas. So why on earth would you drop a dime of your hard-earned cash for a book like this – written by a pastor you’ve probably never heard of and have no automatic reason to trust?
Perhaps the answer is that you and I are a lot alike, having snooped around the church world enough to develop some similar questions, discomforts and experiences. Maybe you are investigating Jesus or are new to the Christian faith, and you sense the goings on of a bait-and-switch scheme – a too-good-to-be-true offer of God’s grace and forgiveness on the front end of the deal that you fear will inevitably come with all sorts of religious fine print attached to the flip side. You’ve seen the dark side of religion and don’t want anything to do with it. I’ve known that eerie feeling all too well.
My parents became “Jesus freaks” in the mid 1970’s during the Jesus Movement. I was two years old when my dad and mom decided they were going to try to raise me with an awareness of Jesus Christ. They gave it their best effort – and for that I am grateful. My spiritual foundations were largely influenced by my exposure to so many people of faith.
Nevertheless, growing up in the church can be a very disillusioning experience. Perhaps you can relate to feeling as though God were something like a cosmic bill-collector constantly harassing you to make good on late payments and unfulfilled commitments. Or maybe you grew up envisioning God as a cranky parochial school teacher hovering over your shoulder just waiting to smack your knuckles with a yardstick for the slightest act of indiscretion.
Perhaps you have always wanted to believe that God really is the unconditional Lover you have often heard preachers talk about, yet you have unable to become convinced of it at the heart-level. And quite possibly – you find yourself today wondering how much of what you believe about God’s love is true and real, and how much is just a mess of debris you picked up along the journey.
Prior to my transition to the role of a lead pastor – I had served as a youth pastor for 14 years. Throughout my ministry to teenagers and young adults, I sought to proclaim and demonstrate a message of God’s grace to many students burdened by doubt, guilt, pain, rejection and legalism. As imperfect as my efforts undoubtedly were, one thing was certain: I always preached a far better message of grace toward others than I had actually embraced for myself!
This may sound disingenuous to you, for it raises the obvious question: “Was I being dishonest when I preached that grace message all those years?” I have asked myself that very question, and the answer is categorically “no”. For years, I truly believed that the Biblical message of the Gospel was one of irrationally free, infinitely available and irreversibly stubborn love, forgiveness and grace for all who would receive it by simple faith. But for reasons which until recently I did not understand, I could never fully accept those realities for myself.
Relentless perfectionism and self-criticism, haunting doubt and ongoing struggles with sin kept me ever questioning my validity as a Christian – much less as a vocational member of the clergy! Thankfully, I remained faithful to the public proclamation of grace, but my private inability to accept its reality on a deeply experiential level was quite another story!
As if these mounting inner conflicts were not enough, pressure was added by the fact that often my particular set of gifts and talents would tend to draw outward kudos from others. This may sound like a positive thing, but the fact is that when large numbers of people know you almost exclusively from the hour per week they see you on a stage using your God-given gifts and talents – it is easy to find yourself drowning in a sea of surface-level relationships. That’s how I felt during many seasons along the way.
Don’t get me wrong – this was not the fault of the wonderful people around me. In most cases their affirmations were sincere attempts to give God credit for the way He would use me to help them grow spiritually. They weren’t being evil by thanking or encouraging me. The problem was with me. When people begin to affirm and follow your leadership as a very young man, it is easy to fall into the trap of being the most popular guy in the room while simultaneously feeling like the loneliest.
The more I served and used my gifts, the more affirmation I received. And the more affirmation I received, the more validity I felt in my life and calling. And the more validity I felt in my life and calling, the more it freaked me out to be honest with anyone about my doubts, fears, sins and struggles.
While I am sharing a part of my spiritual journey here in the opening of this book, I want you to realize that the pages that follow are not primarily about me. I will share about some personal experiences along the way. I will strive to be transparent about my struggles so perhaps you can learn from my errors or take comfort that you are not alone in yours. And while my intense desire is that this will be one of the most helpful and encouraging books you will ever read – ultimately it is not about you either.
This book is about God and His Good News – the Gospel uncut – and about how easy it is for us to distort and diminish the purity, simplicity and beauty of that message by attaching to it the baggage of our own experiences, presuppositions, and legalism.
In the Book of Galatians, the Apostle Paul was writing to confront the false teachings of a sect which was spreading the message that a person had to be circumcised in accordance with the custom of Abraham in order to rest assured of their salvation and be a “good Christian.”
Paul passionately reassured the Galatians that there was absolutely no need for them to add circumcision – or anything else – to their simple trust in the resurrected Christ. Assurance of salvation and the joyous life that goes with it comes only through faith in the finished work of Jesus.
This was and is the uncut Gospel that Paul and the Apostles preached. And this generation is equally responsible to confront the modern “editors” of this Gospel who leave its simplicity on the cutting room floor. That is the aim of the pages that follow.
Although we will cover a lot of ground, this book is not an attempt answer every question or address every nuance related to the Gospel. Others have tried that approach and failed – and I want to attempt to avoid their ranks by admitting at the outset that I cannot in one volume (nor in one lifetime) exhaust the infinite splendor of amazing grace.
What I do hope to accomplish is this: that those who have been worried and wearied by the parched desert of legalism in any form – whether self-inflicted or otherwise – will receive from this book something that feels like a cup of cold water offered in Jesus’ Name. And with it, a refreshed mandate to cast off the shackles of burdensome religiosity in favor of an uncut Gospel that was never intended to confuse, mislead or become watered-down with the joy-robbing huffing and puffing so many of us have attached to it.