Episode 2 - From the Bottom Up

          Welcome to Proverbs 9:10 Ministries Podcast, No Trash, Just Truth. Proverbs 9:10 ministries is dedicated to taking out the trash of false teaching, and replacing it with God’s Truth. We are your hosts and the co-founders of Proverbs 9:10 ministries, Rose Spiller and Chris Paxson.

Today we begin a series called No Half Truths Allowed, which is loosely based on our upcoming book, No Half Truths Allowed – Understanding the Complete Gospel Message due out in early 2020.

For the next several weeks, we will touch on some of the points from the book. Hopefully, our podcasts will entice you to want to dig in even deeper. We begin in this episode with From the Bottom Up

 Rose, we alluded to this in our first episode, but one thing we’ve both noticed in the now over 20 years of teaching Bible studies is that what a person believes affects every area of their life – every single day! Even if you don’t use words like doctrine and theology, you do live by doctrine and you have a theology. Some may think those words sound stuffy and like they are for old bearded men, let’s simplify them. Doctrine is your set of beliefs and theology is what you believe about God.      

Yeah, every single person has a set of beliefs about faith, salvation, Christianity, and certainly everyone has a set of beliefs about God, even Athiests.  What you believe to be true is the foundation of how you will live your life, therefore we need to make sure our doctrine and Theology is correct.   Over the years, we’ve seen all kinds of wrong beliefs and lack of Biblical knowledge in people, pastors and churches. This has really saddened us, and angered us when it is coming from the pulpit.

          So, Chris, when it comes to our faith and our beliefs, why do we need to begin at the bottom?

           We would probably all agree that any quality project requires careful planning and skill. This is true whether you are making a quilt, building a deck, or refinishing furniture. Any project requires a “blue print” of sorts – one that includes a plan for the finished project, the proper tools, the skill to carry out the project, and most important a solid foundation on which to begin. For example, with a deck, you need to have footers. Without digging down and pouring the concrete, you might find your next party on American’s Funniest Home Videos watching your guests tumble down your yard as your deck collapses. 

While almost every Christian would SAY they know what the Gospel message is, and what they believe, as we found out when we did research for our book, when asked, Christians give a whole host of completely different answers.

Yeah. And as important as it is to get the complete Gospel message right, we also  need to be able to share it, and other Biblical truths, with anyone on a moment’s notice. This requires knowing how to adapt our witness to different audiences without changing the actual message, and being ready for the questions and pushback that will surely come after we share it. There are things our listeners should be asking themselves right now: Do I really know what I believe and why I believe it? Am I sure I understand the complete Gospel message? Am I able to articulate it to different people without changing the message? And, am I prepared for questions and pushback that will inevitably come? 

If you are listening to us right now and you are not confident about how to answer those questions, you are not alone! This is exactly why its so important to start at the bottom. Chris, most of us would probably say that every Christian needs start by understanding the Bible and Jesus. How is Jesus and the Bible starting at the bottom?

           We are going to spend an entire episode on Jesus in a couple of weeks, so today, let’s just look at why we need to have Scripture as our foundation. 2 Peter 1:20 – 21 says, “No prophecy of Scripture comes from someone’s own interpretation. For no prophecy was ever produced by the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.”

And 2 Timothy 3:16 - 17 says, “All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work.” Let’s dig into these verses to understand what they are saying.

God, through Peter and Paul makes it very clear that we are to use the Word of God as our authority and foundation, not our own interpretation.When it comes to witnessing the complete Gospel message, or any other Biblical truth, we can’t make it up! It’s too important to not get it right – after all, we’re talking about where people will spend their eternity! Sadly, there are many professing Christians, even pastors and entire churches who are using other like tradition, experience, emotion, and their personal testimonies for their foundation.

Yeah, there is such an epidemic of this garbage, it needs an entire episode! And we will spend the entire next episode talking about it, so we won’t go into any detail about now, but strongly encourage you to catch episode 3. 

 So back to only using Scripture, we need to make sure our doctrine (our set of beliefs) and our theology (our belief about God) lines up with what the Bible says. Jesus knew how important this was. He told a parable about it in Matthew 7:24 – 27, 

“Everyone then who hears these words of mine and does them will be like a wise man who built his house on the rock. 25 And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house, but it did not fall, because it had been founded on the rock. 26 And everyone who hears these words of mine and does not do them will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand. 27 And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell, and great was the fall of it.”

These verses are probably a familiar story (and song!) for many of us.  But this parable is often taken out of context.  Many think the two houses represent believers and non-believers, but that’s not the case at all. This parable is from the Sermon on the Mount in which Jesus is specifically speaking to believers. Jesus uses this as an object lesson about the foundation of two houses to illustrate what a believer’s foundation must be. 

Just like doctrine and theology, whether people recognizes it or not, everyone’s life is built on a foundation.  If you are building your foundation on church tradition, for example, this may look like you attending church every Sunday and serving on multiple committees. Seems like the perfect church member, but this is your foundation, then when the church does away with your committee or asks you to step down, it causes anger, resentment, and often leads to leaving the church because you are standing on the sandy ground of what you have always done, not what Jesus has done for you.

Good example. And if you’re foundation is your experiences, then when you have a spiritual dry spell (and you will) and you don’t feel God’s presence, you’ll be disillusioned with God, and you will think He has abandoned you.

And probably the most common sand foundation is emotion, which is another kind of “feeling”. This can take the form of getting your self worth from the approval of others, family, personal gratification; and other things.  The problem with this is that emotions shift like the sand, pun intended! There is no consistency with emotions and life is tough - people betray you, loved ones can disappoint you or die – we could go on and on. 

Absolutely, and if you don’t have a solid foundation of Biblical knowledge, you can, and probably will, fall prey to any of these sand foundations. I don’t believe any Christian would intentionally build their house on a bad foundation. The problem is not that they deliberately seeking out a bad foundation, the problem is that they are giving no consideration to their foundation. 

 The man in the parable just wanted to get his house up.  Building a house on sand is a lot easier that building a house on solid rock.  For sand, you just need to dig down in the sand, and put the house up.  A foundation built upon rock would require heavy equipment and a lot of hard work to dig down deep to get to the bedrock to put a foundation in.  

And that digging, of course, represents the hard work of reading and studying the Bible. But that is what is needed to keep your faith firm through whatever comes your way. And when we are talking about understanding the complete Gospel message and being able to articulate it, having a firm foundation is essentional, so it’s worth the work!.

When we have a strong foundation, we understand that the Bible is both simple and complex. The Gospel message is the simple message of grace that all of our hearts long for if we are God’s people.  We are great sinners against a Holy and Almighty God, but through grace, we have been saved by the blood of Jesus Christ. 

Which should cause us to repent and live in gratitude for all that Jesus has done for us, cooperating with the Holy Spirit as He transforms us to be more like Jesus, knowing we have the promise of eternal life in heaven. 

          Exactly.  but while the Bible and the Gospel message is a simple one, there are many complex facets in it. And the more we delve into all of those facets and gain an understanding of the theology and doctrine behind each of them, the clearer and simpler we will be able to articulate that message to others.

 It’s just a fact that the more you study and know about something, the simpler and clearer you can explain it to others. We will spend the coming weeks looking at each of these facets.

And a strong foundation is not just crucial for understanding and articulating the Gospel message, its essential for everything! There is a lot of garbage being pedaled as Christian out there.  Having a foundation built on Scripture will help us recognize false teaching when we hear it.  

There still may be some of you who are wondering, why go to all of this work? I don’t need to know the complete Gospel message, witness it to others, or even study the Bible to be saved. 

That is true, since salvation is completely from God, our understanding or lack of understanding of Scripture is not essential to salvation, but there are good reasons to do the work. First, because God tells us to. One of the last things Jesus said to His disciples while on earth was, “Go into all the world and preach the good news to all creation.” It wasn’t a suggestion, it was a command! 

Second, the Gospel message and the entire Bible is the life saving, life transforming message of God! And it’s what we need to grow in our faith and have an intimate relationship with God. And while God does not need us to save anybody, He gives us the privilege of being part of the process through witnessing the Gospel message to others! Rose, I think we should spend some time talking about that witness

I agree! If you have ever been a part of someone coming to Christ, you know it is the most rewarding thing that you will ever experience. And although the Holy Spirit has to regenerate a heart before a person is able to come to Christ, we have no way of knowing whose heart He may be regenerating at that very moment! Therefore, we need to spread the Gospel to as many people, and as often as we can. We owe it to the person we are witnessing to and, more importantly, to God to present an accurate and complete Gospel message.  

Some of you may have never thought about this, but the Gospel message is offensive and humbling. Coming to the realization that you were so sinful, you deserved God’s wrath and that you need someone to save you because you have no hope of doing it yourself is hard to initially accept even for someone with a regenerated heart. What Jesus did, and why He had to do it, can be a stumbling block for some. Let’s not make our poor and incomplete witness of the Gospel be another one!

Being a stumbling block and presenting a poor and incomplete Gospel message brings us to another important point. There are a lot of Christians who aren’t comfortable giving the complete Gospel message –they don’t feel right telling people they are dead in their sins deserving of God’s wrath. Or that if they don’t accept and acknowledge Jesus as Lord and Savior, they will go to hell. Instead, they want to just focus on God being love – which He is, but they ignore the rest of it. So, Chris, do you think there is any danger in saying to people things like,  “God loves you,” or “ Jesus is just waiting for you to come to him?”

          First of all, think about it, Rose … even from just from a common sense standpoint – what is someone actually supposed to do with either of those statements alone? If someone gets told “God loves you.” What’s the response? “Great!” or “Awesome!” But the Bible never says “thinking that it’s awesome that God loves you is how you are saved.” And the other statement is not any better, even though Jesus is mentioned! If you say to someone “Jesus is just waiting for you to come to him?” Their first thought is probably going to be “Why?” or “What for?” If I didn’t know anything that would be my first thought! In neither case has  anyone told why Jesus died, let alone anything about salvation. But this is the type of crap people pass off for actually sharing the Gospel message! When you logically think most of these one-liner “gospel” messages through, they’re almost laughable – except that it’s SO SAD because of what we’re talking about! 

One of the things we stated at the beginning of the show was that it is important to be able to articulate the Gospel to different audiences without changing the message. Paul gives us an excellent example of how to do this in the Book of Acts and His epistles. He used different methods of witnessing depending on his audience, but the Gospel message never changed. 

Chris, What are some of the different types of audiences we may find themselves witnessing to and what are some alterations they may need to make in our delivery?

Well, since we just talked about one-liners, let’s talk about a popular one-liner taught to children in evangelical Christianity. Many Pastors and Sunday School teachers tell children to “just ask Jesus into their hearts.” That might actually be one of the worst one-liners out there! And it’s not the gospel, and it doesn’t save children (or adults, or anyone for that matter!) Small children get told to ask Jesus into their hearts, and older children get taught to have a good moral character and act like Christians to be saved – or that’s effectively what a lot of them get taught today, even in Sunday school. 

Okay. So how should we tailer our Gospel message when speaking to children or teens?

Children are sinners, just like you and I – they’re born that way. I’ve even heard them referred to recently by some pastors as “vipers in diapers”, and there’s truth to that in some ways! Regardless, they’re not born innocent like the world tells us they are. No one has to teach a child to do bad things. 

No sane parent WOULD do that! 

Children do bad things without being taught, because like us, they have an inborn sin natur. We need to tell them this so that they come to understand that they need forgiveness from God for their sin so that they can have their relationship with Him fixed. They need to understand that the only way that can happen is by accepting that Jesus paid the penalty for their sin IN THEIR PLACE, and that by believing and trusting in Jesus’ perfect righteousness is how they are saved. We need to tell them that they could never be good enough, but Jesus already was perfect for them, and He died in their place. That is what their hope needs to be based in, just like adults. 

And how do we incorporate this into the Children’s Bible Stories that are taught in Sunday Schools every week around the world?

We still need to teach them the children’s Bible stories, but those stories should always point to Jesus and His finished work on the cross; not to the moral behavior of the central character in the story. Daring to be Daniel won’t save them. 

So while our delivery is age appropriate, children deserve and need to hear the true Gospel message, not a watered-down one liner that they won’t understand anyway.

That’s an excellent example. Let’s end this episode by reiterating that while you don’t need to know the complete Gospel message or even study the Bible to be saved, you do need both in order to grow in your faith. If not, to quote another parable of Jesus, you will be like the seed the farmer through on the thorny ground. The seeds sprung up, but because they had no roots, when the sun scorched them they withered and died. Our foundation, our roots, our bottom, is our faith and knowledge of what we believe and what we know about God. To quote Charles Sprugeon, “If you sincerely believe a lie, you will suffer the consequences. You must not only be sincere, you must be right.”

Spurgeon always nails it.

He does. Thanks for tuning in. Join us for the next episode as we look at how tradition, emotions, experiences, and personal testimonies have perverted the witness of the complete Gospel message. If you have any questions or feedback from this episode, please comment below.

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Have a blessed day!