Welcome to Part 15 of the weekly release of my book, Unless God Builds It: A Proposal to Radically Rethink the Church.
In the last post, we closed out Chapter 4 by reframing our unmet church desires as gifts meant to be stewarded, and we looked at how a house-church network navigates the sensitive topic of women speaking in gatherings through active mutual submission and discernment.
If you have already read the book and do not wish to receive these weekly emails, simply click ‘Unsubscribe’ at the bottom of this email. It will only unsubscribe you from the Book section, and you will still receive my normal weekly newsletter!
In this post, we begin Chapter 5: The Gospel. We take a brief detour from church models to focus on the message itself. I share the story of the day God gently told me I didn’t know the gospel, and then we dive into the core theology of our present union with Christ—challenging the common belief that we are just “positional” saints or mixtures of good and evil.
The Gospel
It’s Better Than You Think
All true wisdom is wrapped up in the gospel of Jesus Christ (Colossians 2:3; 1 Corinthians 1:30). Yes, this book is about rethinking the Church, but there is no getting around the fact that we cannot fully understand God’s design for the Church unless we comprehend the gospel.
If you look closely at the New Testament letters, you can see that nearly every admonition, exhortation, and instruction is a “therefore” flowing out of some aspect of the gospel. God gave these writers a divine revelation pertaining to his eternal plan in Christ, hidden from both men and angels since the beginning of time (see Ephesians 3:3-11), and they believed this revelation to be the source of all real wisdom. They understood that it held the power to advance the kingdom of God. Therefore, it served as the foundation of everything they taught—how to think, how to act, and how to relate with one another. It became the source of their joy, their endurance, and their love for one another, the very substance of their ministry which they suffered greatly to share, knowing that it would radically transform anyone who would believe it.
To this point, I must say that nearly every Christian I’ve met thinks they know the gospel. And they do in part—usually the part about God’s love for the world, Christ dying for the forgiveness of our sins, and a lot of the other stuff you’re used to hearing. However, it is still quite rare—yet becoming less so, praise God!—to meet someone (let alone, an entire church) who is rooted in a truly firm foundation.
I use the word “foundation” because that is exactly what the gospel is. It is the only thing we can fruitfully build upon, both individually and communally. And like the concrete foundation of a building, whenever it lacks certain essential ingredients, it loses its strength and stability, jeopardizing everything that is built upon it. This is a picture of today’s typical Christian and today’s typical church. A weak gospel equals a weak foundation, which equals a lot of building in vain.
“You Don’t Know the Gospel”
Shortly before starting the house church, one day I was reading the first chapter in Ephesians, and something uncomfortable struck me. I realized that I never would have written what Paul wrote, or anything like it, really. This made me wonder: If I were in Paul’s shoes, writing a letter to build up a church in a different city, what would I write? What would I think is important? How would I present the gospel? Would I present the gospel at all, or would I assume they already knew it?
I encourage you to consider this same question.
That day, it dawned on me that I had read this passage and many others like it for my whole Christian life, and, instead of being in awe and wonder, instead of being stunned with humility that I didn’t understand much of what it was saying, I had always read it with some degree of presumption that I already knew it. I knew that it was about “the gospel,” generally, and I definitely knew the gospel. Right? I figured Paul just used a lot of flowery language, which isn’t how people talk nowadays, and that’s the reason I wouldn’t sound like him. Right?
But the truth is, the reason I wouldn’t have written any of what Paul wrote is not that we had different personalities, writing styles, language, or culture. It’s that he saw and understood things that I did not see and understand. Hence, he prays that God would enlighten the eyes of their hearts, that they would know the hope, the riches, the inheritance, the immeasurable greatness, etc. (see Ephesians 1:16-23). If the Christians that Paul was leading still needed the eyes of their hearts enlightened, I figured it must be possible that I still needed this, too. Perhaps I didn’t know the gospel like I thought I did.
And that’s when I heard in my spirit the sweetest, gentlest, most humbling words I have ever heard: “You don’t know the gospel.”
But I was a gospel preacher, for goodness’ sake! Isn’t the gospel the first thing that everyone learns?! And yet, I knew the voice was correct. So for the first time in my life (as far as I’m aware), I prayed, “God, will you teach me the gospel?” And remembering his promise to lead me into all truth (John 16:13), I thanked him that he would.
Fast forward a couple of months: I left my job at the previous church and started the house church, without any clue how to start it. The one thing I knew was that I didn’t know much of anything and that I needed God to show me. Determined to get all my direction from him, I spent the entire first month (December) in prayer, seeking him for guidance, for anointing, or for something to that effect. And then, on January 1, 2020, just after midnight, my life changed forever.
I had a dream—the details of which I will mostly spare you—in which I was filled with the Holy Spirit. From the pit of my stomach and out of my mouth came tongues I could not control. (I had never experienced speaking in tongues before.) Whether or not I was still speaking them as I awoke, I am not sure, but when I became fully conscious, I felt like my body had been plugged into an electrical outlet. There I lay, paralyzed, electricity surging through every part of my body. As it fizzled away, I was left trembling in the fear and awe of God.
I had no idea what just happened to me. I eventually fell back asleep, but when I woke up in the morning, something was different. I opened my Bible to a passage I had been reading in Romans, and I saw things I had never seen before. It’s hard to explain the experience, but perhaps there’s no better way than to say that God opened the eyes of my heart. Without doing anything of my own accord (besides waiting on the Lord), for the first time ever, I understood what I was reading.
From that day forward, piece by piece, scripture by scripture, God taught me the gospel in a way I never understood it before, and it totally reshaped my spiritual life and ministry. My wife was also a part of this incredible journey (as were others in our church), as we received these revelations together throughout the year 2020. We learned so much that I was inspired to write my first book, No Longer I, which has helped many people to understand the gospel and apply it to their lives, to walk in freedom from sin, and to bear the fruit of the Spirit.
I find it interesting, to say the least, that when I finally stripped away all my presumptions, my knowledge, my strategies and methods, and relentlessly sought the Lord’s empowerment to build the Church, the very first anointing I received was to see and teach the gospel more clearly. Honestly, I thought I was praying for signs and wonders, for the gift of healing, or something I could take with me to the streets for “power evangelism.” Instead, I got something more foundational, without which I would have no idea how to make disciples.
I understand that this story is anecdotal; naturally, since it happened to me, it holds more weight in my mind than it will in yours. However, if I didn’t believe that my experience and the revelations that followed it were biblically sound, it would mean nothing to me. And so I ask that you use the same standard of measurement, prayerfully weighing what I share with you against the Scriptures.
For the rest of this chapter, while I cannot go into immense detail about the revelation—that’s what my earlier book was written for—I will give you a brief summary of it and then offer what I think are two of the most important takeaways for the scope of this book, that is, for building the Church.
Our Present Union With Christ
What I’ve wanted more than anything since God took hold of my heart is to live a life pleasing to him, but sin was always in the way. For years, I was convinced that my failures to obey God were the result of my still-wicked heart, despite wishing I could obey. I thought: If I loved God completely, I would obey him. And how might I get my heart to love God today, at least enough that I’ll start living as I know I should?
I need to pray more frequently and for longer durations; be more faithful with reading and studying my Bible; try meditating or fasting regularly; pursue more knowledge in Christian literature. I need to make sure to have accountability partners and confess my sins regularly; practice Sabbath; don’t overwork myself. You know—the spiritual disciplines, the means of grace, basic training for righteousness, the must-dos of the Christian life. If I am faithful to do “enough” of these things, then I will stop falling back into the same sins, and I will experience the Christian life as I believe I should.
And so, I did all of this, with as much or more fervor than most people I knew. I also shepherded others from this perspective, simply presuming about them what I thought true of myself—namely, that they also didn’t love God enough and that the way to spiritual growth was to put more effort toward these spiritual practices. All my ministry revolved around this core theology.
Yet it wasn’t true. It was good for occasionally stirring people up, but not much for actually producing love and good works. I was, regrettably, a minister of mere doings—hardly different than my secular self-help counterparts. I had learned how to do, and I could teach you how to do; yet these doings will never do for us what they promise. They will not rid us of evil desires. They cannot save us from our addictions. More of them may just as well puff us up or harden us into the worst kind of religious folk as they may soften us to the grace of God.
But by the grace of God, my eyes were opened. I saw that the way to the transformation I desired, both in myself and in all my brothers and sisters, is none other than the way of faith. It isn’t about doing anything, but believing every word that God says, beginning with what he says about you and Christ. So then, let me tell you a little about you and Christ. If you are in him, then all the following statements about you are true:
You and Christ are one spirit—not becoming one, but already one (1 Corinthians 6:17).
You are not broken; you are healed (1 Peter 2:24).
You are dead to sin and alive to God (Romans 6:11).
You were crucified with Christ—no, not like him but with him. It is no longer you who lives but Christ who lives in you (Galatians 2:20).
You have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires (Galatians 5:24).
When you received Christ, you received not only his Spirit but a new heart (Ezekiel 36:26).
You have purified your soul by your obedience to the truth (1 Peter 1:22).
You were once slaves to sin but have become obedient from the heart; you are now slaves of righteousness (Romans 6:17-18).
Your sins are not only forgiven, but also forgotten (Hebrews 10:17).
You have been cleansed from all sin and unrighteousness (1 John 1:7, 9).
God doesn’t merely declare you righteous while leaving you inwardly unrighteous. You are righteous just as Jesus is righteous (1 John 3:7)—that is, to the core, through and through, in the most real way possible.
You cannot keep on sinning because you’ve been born of God (1 John 3:9; 5:18).
Christ is your life (Colossians 3:4; cf. 3:11).
Born of God, you are a new kind of creature that the world has never known (James 1:18).
You are no longer in the flesh but in the spirit (Romans 8:9).
As a new creation, you are not to regard yourself (or anyone) according to the flesh (2 Corinthians 5:16-17).
You have been created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness (Ephesians 4:24).
You are holy (1 Corinthians 3:17).
You are a saint (which over 60+ scriptures identify all believers as).
Notice above that I started with your present union with Christ. That’s because this is what makes everything else possible. Christ in you, Christ as your life, is the substance of all these other truths. You cannot understand them or see them while thinking of yourself as yourself. But you’ve become one with Christ. Therefore, you must “put on Christ” as Paul says (Romans 13:14) by realizing that you are defined by him, that there is no “you” apart from him. Only then will the other truths begin to make sense, and only then will you begin to walk in the garden with God as if before the Fall.
If you’ve encountered this general subject before, you may have heard it referred to as “Identity in Christ” or “The Finished Work of Christ” or “Victory in Christ.” I prefer to use the phrase that I’ve already used, which is “Our Present Union With Christ.” With regard to any of these labels, I would ask that you be generous to me and refrain from making presumptions based on any former encounters you may have had with them. My only comment here is that I had heard the phrase “identity in Christ” many times, and even heard some teachings on it, before I ever had the slightest clue what it meant or why it mattered so much. But it is not the kind of thing that suffices to teach in a sermon series once every few years. Neither is it the kind of thing that we should stumble across by happenstance in our search for edifying material. It is, rather, the kind of thing that deserves to be woven into every message, taught repeatedly until it’s learned, and then often brought to memory as long as the Church lives.
And yet, not only is the topic mostly absent in today’s Church, but the predominant belief is something altogether contradictory to it. Despite all this evidence in the Bible (and far more that I didn’t include) for our newness, our oneness, our righteousness, our holiness, and our sainthood, we’ve been trained to let the sin that we can see in our lives lead us to different conclusions—i.e., that we are still just sinners, that we’re still the old person, that we need to get this sin out of our hearts, etc. In believing so, we prove that we are walking by sight, instead of by faith (2 Corinthians 5:7).
Or we develop theological language that waters down what God says to such a degree that it no longer has the capacity to change lives. We say things like “God just sees me that way,” still believing that we are our old selves—as if God is somehow fooling himself or seeing something that isn’t true. We say, “Well, this is true positionally.” What does that even mean? Find me the word “positional” in the word of God, and I’ll give you a million dollars. We say that we are now both the old man and the new man—a mixture of good and evil—contrary to what God actually says. We erroneously translate “flesh” as “sinful nature,” a phrase totally absent from the New Testament. Again, all of these are ways of explaining away what God clearly says, because we’ve concluded that what God clearly says can’t possibly be true based on what I see.
This is all spiritual suicide. We habitually regard ourselves and each other according to the flesh (where sin resides) instead of according to the spirit (which is where we reside; see Romans 8:9). The result of identifying with the flesh, as opposed to identifying with Christ, is that we actually fail to walk by the Spirit, and we continue producing the works of the flesh (Galatians 5:16-17). The result of seeing ourselves as sinners is that we believe our temptations—which are superficial, lying desires—and we hide from God, thus continuing to sin. The result of thinking that we’re still the old man is that we continue acting as the old man.
Some Christians still see themselves as depraved, so they suffer a depraved existence. Other Christians see themselves as more of a cocktail with a bad garnish, and so, sin is a garnish on top of their otherwise fine existence. As a bad tree bears bad fruit, it’s very difficult to be something other than what you intrinsically are—whether wholly bad or just a little. But it also works the other way, too. A good tree bears good fruit (Matthew 7:17-18), which is why God has made us into good trees.
Someone who believes they’re still in the flesh and in sin cannot stand before God with confidence to access the grace they need for each moment (Hebrews 4:16). If we believe our hearts are still wicked, we cannot “draw near [to God] with a true heart in full assurance of faith, with our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience” (Hebrews 10:22). Thus, because we believe a lie about who we are—a lie which comes straight from the Accuser, by the way—the Cross, the Resurrection, and the Holy Spirit’s indwelling are more-or-less emptied of their power to grow us up into Christ.
Hear me now: If you’ve been born again, you don’t need to renew your heart; you need to renew your mind. You don’t need to just keep trying harder; you need to believe better. There is one path to a transformed life, to perfection, to bearing all the fruit of the Spirit, and it’s incredibly simple: learn the gospel (all of it, that is) and believe it with your whole heart.
< Previous Part | Table of Contents | Next Part >
Questions for the Comments:
Why do you think the Church tends to favor positional language (e.g., "positionally righteous") rather than believing that God has actually and fundamentally changed our hearts and identities?
Have you ever experienced a moment where you realized your spiritual disciplines (praying, reading, meditating) were being used as an effort to change a heart you still believed was wicked, rather than walking in the reality of what Christ has already finished?
Want to discuss these topics with other like-minded believers? We explore the theology of the Church, discipleship, and spiritual growth in our monthly Community Calls. It’s a great place to connect—upgrade to a paid subscription today to get access!
Like what you’re reading? You don’t have to wait for the next part. You can read the entire book right now in paperback, ebook, or audiobook format on Amazon. Buy ‘Unless God Builds It’ Here
In Christ,
Jake