The "heresy" of accepting Jesus.
Since the late 1990s, church attendance in America has been decreasing. At the same time, the gospel has been watered down to an easy-believe gospel of “accept Jesus who loves you.
Repentance, walking a holy life, sinfulness of man, and sanctification have been forgotten. We are all about church “growth.” Back in the 1950s and 60s Tozer was warning the church that its emphasis on “accepting Jesus” was all wrong.
“The trouble is that the whole ‘accept Christ’ attitude is likely to be wrong. It shows Christ applying to us rather than us to him. It makes him stand hat-in-hand awaiting our verdict on Him, instead of our kneeling with troubled hearts awaiting his verdict on us. It may even permit us to accept Christ by an impulse or emotions, painlessly, at no loss to our ego and no inconvenience to our usual way of life.” www.azquotes.com, Tozer, p. 22.
If you thought those words by Tozer were harsh, there is more to come.
“I must be frank in my feeling that a notable HERESY has come into being throughout the Evangelical Christian circles—the widely accepted concept that we humans can choose to “accept Christ” only because we need him as Savior and that we have the right to postpone our obedience to Him as Lord as long as we want to. The truth is that salvation apart from obedience is unknown in the sacred scriptures. Apart from obedience, there can be no salvation, for salvation without obedience is a self-contradictory impossibility.” www.azquotes.com, Tozer, p. 23. Salvation without discipleship obedience is not Christianity. However, much of modern Christianity has no discipleship or sanctification for new believers.
