Why Churches Fail So Many

Rod Rosenblatt delivered a message, The Gospel for Those Broken by the Church, in 2010.  In this message, he looks at the tendency for churches to settle into law even if, for a season, they visited the gospel.  He traces the problem thus:

"We start to imagine that we need to be born again again. (And often the counsel from non-Reformation churches is that this intuition of ours is true.) Try going again to some evangelistic meeting, accept Christ again, surrender your will to His will again, sign the card, when the pastor gives the altar call, walk the aisle again. Maybe it didn’t “take” the first time, but it will the second time? And so forth.

"In a Christian context, the mechanism of this can be, I think, a very simple one:

1. You come to believe that you have been justified freely because of Christ’s shed blood.
2. Freely, for the sake of Jesus’ innocent sufferings and death, God has forgiven your sin, adopted you as a son or daughter, reconciled you to Himself, given you the Holy Spirit, and so on. Scripture promises these things.
3. Verses like, “Be ye perfect as your Heavenly Father is perfect” seem now—at first read—to finally be possible, now that you are equipped for it. Or you hear St. Paul as he writes, “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.” Same thing.
4. You realize that you might have had some excuse for failure when you were a pagan. But that’s over. Now you have been made a part of God’s family, have become the recipient of a thousand of His free gifts.
5. And then, the unexpected. Sin continues to be a part of my life, stubbornly won’t allow me to eliminate it the way I expected.
6. Continuing sin on my part seems to be just evidence that I’m not really a believer at all. If I were really a believer, this thing would “work!”"

The realization of the impossibility of the task at hand, the understanding that we will never measure up weighs heavy and when Christians can't do it, they leave.  They cannot bear up under the weight.  

He goes on to say, "I hope that most of us would say that the shed blood of Christ is sufficient to save a sinner? All by itself, just Christ’s blood, 'nude faith' in it, 'sola fide,'  'faith without works,' 'a righteousness from God apart from law,' a cross by which 'God justifies wicked people,' etc. So far, so good, right?

"But is the blood of Christ enough to save a still-sinful-Christian? Or isn’t it? Does the Gospel still apply, even if you are a Christian? Or doesn’t it? It seems to me (1) that the category 'sinner' still applies to me, (2) that the category 'sinner' still applies to you, (3) that the category 'sinner' still applies to all Christians. (If you are a Wesleyan and have reached perfection, what I have to say here doesn’t, of course, apply to you.) But for the rest of us, it seems that what Luther said of the Christian being  'simultaneously sinful and yet justified before the holy God' is critical. Is what Luther said Biblical? Or isn’t it? Is it Biblical to say that a Christian is 'simul justus et peccator' or no? Are we Christians saved the same way we were when we were baptized into Christ, or when we came to acknowledge Christ’s shed blood and His righteousness as all we had in the face of God’s holy law? That all of our supposed 'virtue'—Christian or pagan—is just like so many old menstrual garments (to use the Bible phrase)? But that God imputes to those who trust Christ’s cross the true righteousness of Christ Himself? We are pretty sure that unbelievers who come to believe this are instantly justified in God’s sight, declared as if innocent, adopted as sons or daughters, forgiven of all sin, given eternal life, etc. But are Christians still saved that freely? Or are we not? We are pretty clear that imputed righteousness saves sinners. But can the imputed righteousness of Christ save a Christian? And can it save him or her all by itself? Or no?"

I confess that for me, this idea of grace is so radical, so unbelievable that I think to myself, that can't be right.  Surely there must be something I bring to the table.  Frankly, it leaves me feeling a little uncomfortable.  I desparately want to believe it and when I read God's word (particularly Galatians), I see it there, but the legalist inside of me insists that I must do more, that I should trust in my hard work rather than Christ's finished work, and so back to the cross I go again.