I normally write in Bahasa Indonesia. But this one is pure gold that I cannot help sharing it in its original form without any modification. It is taken from an expository sermon on Romans 6:1-2, delivered by the great Martyn Lloyd-Jones (MLJ) somewhere between October 1958 and April 1959 in Westminster Chapel. For the sake of clarity, the context of this two verses is found way back in the previous chapter:
Moreover the law entered, that the offence might abound. But where sin abounded, grace did much more abound: That as sin hath reigned unto death, even so might grace reign through righteousness unto eternal life by Jesus Christ our Lord. (Rm 5:20-21)
Without further ado, lo and behold!
Exposition
What shall we say then? Shall we continue in sin, that grace may abound? God forbid. How shall we that are dead to sin live any longer therein? (Rm 6:1-2)
First of all let me make a comment, to me a very important and vital comment. The true preaching of the gospel of salvation by grace alone always leads to the possibility of this charge being brought against it. There is no better test as to whether a man is really preaching the New Testament gospel of salvation than this, that some people might misunderstand it and misinterpret it to mean that it really amounts to this, that because you are saved by grace alone it does not matter at all what you do; you can go on sinning as much as you like because it will redound all the more to the glory of grace. That is a very good test of gospel preaching. If my preaching and presentation of the gospel of salvation does not expose it to that misunderstanding, then it is not the gospel. Let me show what I mean.
If a man preaches justification by works, no one would ever raise this question. If a man’s preaching is, ‘If you want to be Christians, and if you want to go to heaven, you must stop committing sins, you must take up good works, and if you do so regularly and constantly, and do not fail to keep on at it, you will make yourselves Christians, you will reconcile yourselves to God and you will go to heaven’. Obviously a man who preaches in that strain would never be liable to this misunderstanding. Nobody would say to such a man, ‘Shall we continue in sin, that grace may abound?’, because the man’s whole emphasis is just this, that if you go on sinning you are certain to be damned, and only if you stop sinning can you save yourselves. So that misunderstanding could never arise. And you can apply the same test to any other type or kind of preaching. If a man preaches that you are saved by the Church, or by sacraments, and so on, this kind of argument does not arise. This particular misunderstanding can only arise when the doctrine of justification by faith only is presented.
Le me put this in another way. You remember what the Apostle says in chapter 4 in the fifth verse:
But to him that worketh not, but believeth on him that justifieth the ungodly, his faith is counted for righteousness. (Rm 4:5)
It is when a man says a thing like that – that God justifies the ungodly – that the misunderstanding is liable to arise. Or when a man says what we found in chapter 5 verses 9 and 10:
Much more then, being now justified by his blood, we shall be saved from wrath through him. For if, when we were enemies, we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son, much more, being reconciled, we shall be saved by his life. (Rm 5:9-10)
It is when we preach things like that, that this misunderstanding tends to occur. So this is a very good test of one’s preaching.
There is a sense in which the doctrine of justification by faith only is a very dangerous doctrine; dangerous, I mean, in the sense that it can be misunderstood. It exposes a man to this particular charge. People listening to it may say, ‘Ah, there is a man who does not encourage us to live a good live, he seems to say that there is no value in our works, he says that “all our righteousnesses are as filthy rags”. Therefore what he is saying is, that it does not matter what you do, sin as much as you like’. There is thus clearly a sense in which the message of ‘justification by faith only’ can be dangerous, and likewise with the message that salvation is entirely of grace. I say therefore that if our preaching does not expose us to that charge and to that misunderstanding, it is because we are not really preaching the gospel. Nobody has ever brought this against the Church of Rome, but it was brought frequently against Martin Luther; indeed that was precisely what the Church of Rome said about the preaching of Martin Luther. They said, ‘This man who was a priest has changed the doctrine in order to justify his own marriage and his own lust’, and so on. ‘This man’, they said, ‘is an antinomian; and that is heresy.’ That is the very charge they brought against him. It was also brought against George Whitefield two hundred years ago. It is the charge that formal dead Christianity – if there is such a thing – has always brought against this startling, staggering message, that God ‘justifies the ungodly’, and that we are saved, not by anything that we do, but in spite of it, entirely and only by the grace of God through our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.
That is my comment; and it is a very important comment for preachers. I would say to all preachers: If your preaching of salvation has not been misunderstood in that way, then you had better examine your sermons again, and you had better make sure that you really are preaching the salvation that is offered in the New Testament to the ungodly, to the sinner, to those who are dead in trespasses and sins, to those who are enemies of God. There is this kind of dangerous element about the true presentation of the doctrine of salvation.
Now let us look at the answer which the Apostle gives in verse 2: ‘God forbid’, he says. We have already met that expression in the third chapter and have seen that it is not a strictly literal translation. The Apostle did not use the word ‘God’ at all, but the Authorized Version translators wanted to bring out the emphasis strongly, so the said ‘God forbid’. What it really means is ‘by no means’, ‘let it not be’, ‘it is unthinkable’, ‘it should never even be suggested’. It is a very strong term, and in a sense the translators were justified in rendering it as ‘God forbid’.
Why does the Apostle put it as strongly as that? Clearly for this reason, that to put that question, or to raise that matter at all, simply shows a complete failure to understand everything that he has been saying about justification by faith only. If a man raises this question about continuing in sin, it means that so far he has not grasped what the Apostle has been saying in chapters 1 to 5. That is why it is unthinkable, that is why it should not be mentioned for a moment. Such a man has not only misunderstood justification, he has entirely misunderstood the doctrine of our union with the Lord Jesus Christ. If he had understood that, he would never raise a point like this.
Let me make the same point in another way. A man may say to me, ‘You teach that where sin abounded, grace did much more abound; shall we therefore continue in sin that grace may abound?’ What this man is really saying is that he has completely failed to understand the whole meaning and purpose of grace. What is that? The Apostle, one would have thought, had put it quite plainly in last verse of chapter 5, ‘That AS sin hath reigned unto death, EVEN SO might grace reign through righteousness unto eternal life, by Jesus Christ our Lord’. What is the business of grace? Is it to allow us to continue in sin? No! It is to deliver us from the bondage and the reign of sin, and to put us under the reign of grace. So when a man asks, ‘Shall we therefore continue in sin that grace might abound?’, he is merely showing that he has failed to understand either the tyranny of the reign of sin, or the whole object and purpose of grace and its marvelous reign over those who are saved. Or, to put it positively, a man who really understands justification, its meaning and its purpose, will never think like that and will never speak like that. But I want to put it even more strongly. A man who is justified, and who is under the reign of grace, cannot think like that, still less act like that.
Personal Comments
You may be wondering why I took the trouble of rewriting the MLJ’s sermon in my blog? It is simply because many devout Christians out there accuse me of sharing a cheap gospel, or a cheap grace just because I share the unconditional love of God to my fellow Christians. They even label the gospel that I believe in as hypergrace, i.e. grace without law, or grace without works which gives a license to sin. Quelle horreur!
To be quite honest, I had the same suspicion when I first heard the doctrine of justification by faith alone in its purest form from the highly controversial (hypergrace) preacher Joseph Prince. Back then, I thought that this whole grace message is so scandalous: too good to be true. But then that is what makes the gospel good news. No, it doesn’t make grace look hyper, but simply amazing!
Please note that the sermon above was delivered in 1958. Joseph Prince, Paul Ellis, and most of the so called hypergrace preachers were not even born yet! And oh, MLJ died in 1981… long before the hypergrace message became notorious. I don’t know about you, but I now wear the label hypergrace with PRIDE! Let’s put the amazing back into grace!
Additional Info:
In case you are curious, you can find the full-blown sermon above in this book: Romans: Exposition of Chapter 6: The New Man.
What a great explanation. Looking forward to read your new article, keep up the good work and God bless!
SukaSuka
*KONTROVERSI HYPERGRACE*
Istilah dan pemberian Label ‘Hypergrace’, adalah suatu bentuk cemoohan, dan penilaian sepihak yang keliru, khususnya dari DR. Michael Brown(MB) penulis buku Hypergrace, yang isinya bertujuan mendiskreditkan ajaran yang disampaikan Joseph Prince(JP) pada buku Destined to Reign, tapi kemudian istilah Hypergrace itu terus berlanjut dan digunakan oleh pihak2 yang juga tidak sepaham.
Jadi alih-alih kontradiksi doktrin, sesungguhnya hanya kejadian perdebatan bedah buku antara 2 buku, dgn doktrin yg dipegang oleh masing2 penulis. Dalam hal ini Joseph Prince(JP) tidak terpancing meladeni perdebatan, yang ribut jadinya adalah semua pihak, dan orang2 percaya dari yang memegang doktrin Grace dan Anti-Grace.
Masalahnya: *tidak menyambungnya KOMUNIKASI
itu yg saya sampaikan dalam satu Seminar, saya bilang, _”ini sebenarnya adalah spt bedah buku, Destined to Reign (JP) dipandang dari HyperGrace (MB), pandangan saya dari sudut apostolik ini hrs diluruskan demi pembangunan gereja, secara fair berimbang, agar iblis tidak mengambil kesempatan”._
Situasinya begini:
Persepsi MB thd buku DtoR menghasilkan penilaian, bhw JP doktrinnya ‘X’, dan MB memberi label *aliran dan kelompok kasih karunia modern* ini sbg HyperGrace.
JP melihat tuduhan bahwa doktrinnya ‘X’ tsb, di dalam buku HB, karangan MB, adalah tidak benar,
dan merasa itu hanya persepsi MB sendiri, tidak sama dg pengajaran JP yg sebenarnya sebut saja doktrinnya ‘Y’, jadi dia tidak menanggapi ttg tuduhan HyperGrace tsb.
Tambah kacaunya kemudian ada pihak diluar MB dan JP, yg membaca buku HG, menyatakan tidak setuju juga dg doktrin *’X’ dari JP* tsb (yg sebenarnya JP juga tidak merasa doktrinnya ‘X),
maka *sebagian* pihak diluar ini yang sejalan dgn paham MB mendefinisikan lagi bhw doktrin yg benar *yg anti-‘X’ (dari pihak anti HyperGrace) adalah doktrin ‘Z’* yg diklaim sbg Biblical Grace (BG).
Padahal di komunitas dunia, kekristenan dan gereja2 modern, juga memiliki *doktrin kasih karunia ‘G’* yg tidak didefinisikan dan diumumkan secara spesifik, menurut catatan berkembang sejak 1888 tapi belum, dan merasa
tidak perlu diekspose, dimana doktrin G ini, yang *substansinya mirip tapi tidak persis sama dg doktrinnya ‘X’, ‘Y’ dan ‘Z’.*
Untuk itu dalam strategi apostolik hrs dijernihkan situasi ini, dgn menyampaikan ke publik, dan mengkomunikasikan secara terbuka, fair, dan konstruktif, demi kesatuan umat, pembangunan gereja, dan kedewasaan tubuh Kristus.
Saya memiliki keyakinan dan percaya bahwa Grace atau Kasih Karunia di dalam Yesus adalah BUKAN Grace over-dosis atau HyperGrace, TAPI bahkan TERLEBIH BESAR lagi, yaitu istilah saya adalah THE UNLIMITED GRACE of Jesus, that’s it!
SukaSuka
Mau nanya bang Erwin Sianturi..(keren kali nama kau bang…hehheh…)..cekidootttt…lanjut ke pertanyaan….apakah Abang dari kelompok Hyp-G ?…so..lepas dari itu..aku tertarik kali atas tulisan2 Abang….milenial theologic……thx…and Jesus bless…
(Klo bisa yg pake BHS Inggris nya di translate ya bang… Hehee maklum..agak o’on nih di bahasa asing..wackkk….)
SukaSuka
Sebenernya pigimane ye jawabnya? Saya sebenernya Calvinist (hard core). Tapi setelah mendengar khotbah² Joseph Prince, dan cross check buku² orang calvinist/puritan, ternyata soal kasih karunia (grace) si JP emang spot-on, alias emang bener. Kasih karunia Tuhan itu memang radikal dan tidak masuk akal. Tapi khotbah pendeta jaman sekarang kan rada membingungkan, karena seringnya menitikberatkan kepada usaha manusia. Seperti yg dikatakan pendeta MLJ di tulisan ini: “Kalau kalian berkhotbah tapi para pemirsanya nggak sampe salah paham karena dikira kita bisa berbuat dosa seenaknya supaya makin disayang Tuhan, maka sebaiknya Anda periksa kembali khotbah Anda!” Nah, saya termasuk org yg menganut paham MLJ ini. Kebetulan dalam hal ini, JP masuk kriteria ini, dan pendeta² HyperG masuk dalam kriteria ini. Cuma di sisi lain, para pendeta HyperG ini agak kurang fair mengenai kedudukan dan fungsi hukum Taurat. Saya jarang dengar ada pendeta HyperG yg berkhotbah mengnai fungsi dan kedudukan hukum Taurat (ya ini saya pengen salin juga tulisan MLJ mengenai fungsi hukum Taurat).
Kalau boleh saya ambil kategori, mungkin saya adalah Calvinist yg berteologi Lutheran. Karena dalah Lutheran, dikotomi kasih karunia dan hukum Taurat sangat jelas. Tapi kalo ada yg ngecap saya beraliran HyperGrace, ya gapapa juga. Malah saya sekarang bangga dicap begitu, wkwkwkwk.
Saya kepikiran sih terjemahin ke bahasa Indonesia, tapi bahasanya rada teknis, jadi ribet juga. Sebagai info, tulisan “Missundaztood” sebagian besar adalah tulisan MLJ yg saya terjemahkan ke bahasa Indonesia.
Saya sadar kok, bnyk yg gak setuju dgn tulisan saya. Tapi yg namanya pemahaman iman itu kan nggak bisa kata orang. Musti digali sendiri. Jadi kalo pemahaman orang berbeda², ya wajar saja. Saya hanya berharap, apa yg saya tulis ini bisa membantu orang lain memahami betapa dalamnya cinta Tuhan kita Yesus Kristus kepada umatnya yg bengkok ini. Soli deo gloria!
SukaSuka
Kadang kok pada buat uraian ikut Tuhan kok beribet dan ksh banyak celah keributan dan perdebatan.
Intinya kita hidup dlm kasih karunia. Tempatkanlah kasih karunia itu setinggi mgkn. Hargai dan isi dgn hidup penuh ketaatan. Dan jgn sekali2 merendahkan yg 1 . Semua sebanding, hy ksh karunia inilah alasan kita utk hidup dgn segala damai dan ucapan syukur senantiasa.
Jangan sampai 1 iota pun dlm firman dihilangkan atau ditambahkan. Tuhan ga suka…
SukaSuka