Save Me From...

Greetings to all, FilmCritic here, contributor extraordinaire (you heard me-"extraordinaire") with a little something for your wandering eyes. Snuggle up with something warm and fuzzy now, cause I don’t have any thing in that category for you today. Now with your expectations thoroughly lowered, I can begin.
My church recently rewrote our statement of faith, not to change anything exactly, but rather to change the wording to reflect the growth and vocabulary of the pastoral staff. We felt the old wording, for instance, was a little too “Saddleback” for our current persuasion (our current persuasion being…you know…biblical).
In preparing to preach from our section on the church I decided I wanted to preach on the last sentence, which reads, “We believe that the church is called to be a faithful witness of the gospel of Jesus Christ.”
Since I began reading Christless Christianity (maybe some of you have heard of it) I’ve admittedly been a bit jacked up about the prospect of preaching with this sentence in mind. However, it wasn’t this book that gave me the desire to preach on it. It was primarily two things. First, in the past year a new and fresh appreciation has grown in me for Paul’s masterful summation of the gospel in I Corinthians 15. So much so, I wrote a series of church newsletter articles interpreting and explaining the passage one statement at a time, occasionally stopping to point out a few false modern gospels along the way. 15:1-5 reads as follows,
“1 Now I would remind you, brothers, of the gospel I preached to you, which you received, in which you stand, 2 and by which you are being saved, if you hold fast to the word I preached to you— unless you believed in vain.
3 For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, 4 that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures, 5 and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve.”

The second thing that made me want to preach on this sentence was a book called, “Save Me From Myself.” It’s the memoir of Brian “Head” Welch, the former lead guitarist of Korn. It primarily tells the story of his addiction to meth and his eventual conversion to Christianity. It wasn’t what I was hoping it would be exactly. I think, all things considered, Welch presents, if not a false understanding of the gospel, certainly one that obscures the true nature of it according to I Corinthians 15. I want to tread carefully here because, for all I know, Welch could clarify himself if confronted and even retract certain things if compelled from Scripture. However, all I’ve got to work with is what he’s put in print.
The first example of the problem with Welch’s gospel is the title of the book itself. “Save Me From Myself.” What’s the problem? The problem is that the gospel doesn’t save us from ourselves. There are plenty of secular organizations and methods, not to mention religious movements that can provoke the change that Welch went through. Once again, I don’t want to down play the significance of Welch being freed from his addiction. I think we can all agree he’s better off and I’m thankful for that. However, plenty of people are freed from addictions that don’t give a rip about Jesus. Look at Robert Downey Jr. for instance. He’s been clean and sober for several years now and has even made something of a comeback for himself with Iron Man, Tropic Thunder and an upcoming inspirational tear jerker with Academy Award written all over it.
So, there’s nothing unique about the gospel if it’s about being saved from our selves. Actually, according to the gospel in I Corinthians, we could get “saved from our selves” and still be in a lot of trouble. Why? Because the gospel saves us from our sins! Much more than that, “for our sins, according to the Scriptures.” These are the same Scriptures that affirm mankind’s total depravity, the same ones that attest to the fact that all mankind stands condemned in our sin and needs to be saved, not from ourselves but from God’s justified wrath. Something outside of ourselves condemns us, and something outside of ourselves must justify us, make us right. According to the gospel, that’s Christ. The Son of God died for the ungodly, bearing the wrath of God, in our place, for our sin so that we might stand justified before our Great Judge and so that in his resurrection we might live with and enjoy him forever!
Many times Christianity is presented as the best solution for your personal problems, such as debt, obesity, or addiction. It’s designed to get you on a path to happiness and it’s still mistaken for Christianity because Jesus is the functional stepping stool to the coziest middle class life you can achieve.
So many times we confuse the symptoms with the disease. No one gets saved treating symptoms. Salvation is when God initiates, accomplishes, declares and applies something definitive in history. That’s what I Corinthians 15 is about.