Sermonette for Saturday
I marvel that ye are so soon removed from Him that called you into the grace of Christ unto another gospel. Galatians 1:6
Many years ago, when I was a young man working in a department store, the manager called a group of us employees into the back office. We were in the room where the clerks sorted and stacked the money that came into the cash registers every day. On the table in the middle of the room were two twenty dollar bills. But something wasn’t right; they did not look identical. The manager passed one of the bills around to all of us, and asked if we could see or feel anything wrong with it. None of us could. It looked like a good bill to us. Then he passed the other bill around. This time, we could tell that it was a fake. The paper had a different feel about it, almost greasy, and the colour was a bit off, and the design didn’t look much like the real bill. The manager had wanted us to see the difference in the bills, and he was pleased to see that we had no problem detecting which one was the counterfeit. Well, we worked with money all day long, and we knew what real bills looked and felt like. So when a counterfeit came along, we were not going to be easily fooled. But somebody was, one of the checkout clerks had accepted the fake bill. Just like so many people around us are accepting the fake gospels that are so prevalent in our day.
The term ‘another gospel’ is a sad one. The word Gospel means good news, or glorious glad tidings. And the true Gospel is just that, a message that lifts poor lost sinners into the glorious light of God’s eternal salvation. The Gospel is wonderful to hear, wonderful to sing about, wonderful to share. And it’s true. It leads to life everlasting. But any other message than the true Gospel is bad news because it is not true. A message that people can be saved by good works, or church attendance, or religious activities, or any other means, might sound good but it does not lead to life. Neither does a message that reciting a prayer, signing a pledge card, singing a lively worship song can bring eternal life. Only faith in the finished work of Christ can do that. Only the message of the Gospel of Christ. How can we make sure we never are led away by fakes?
The truth is only the truth if we know the truth well enough to reject the false. Just as familiarity with genuine twenty dollar bills prevents being fooled by counterfeit bills, so familiarity with the true Gospel will keep us from being fooled by the fakes. The more we read our Bibles, the more we listen to the preaching of the Gospel by men we can trust, the more we will be preserved from false gospels. – Jim MacIntosh