The Return of the Prodigal Son by Rembrandt (circa 1668)
When I was starting out in ministry, a major problem around me was a nominal Bible Belt Christianity that gained easy assurance by remembering a “sinner’s prayer” from vacation Bible school, followed by an utterly unchanged life. I decided to address that by preaching a series of messages on how to know if you’re really saved.
Here’s what I thought would happen: People who had heard only a “cheap grace” version of Christianity would see the cost of discipleship and come to know personally the Jesus about whom they had only heard. I was wrong.
Instead, after the service, at the church’s back door, the people I was most worried about would say, “That was an awesome sermon!” and then talk about the upcoming seafood festival or what the meteorologist on TV said about the year’s hurricane season. But the church’s godliest, most authentic Christ followers were the ones who would whisper, “I need to make an appointment with you.”
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When these people came to see me, they were in anguish. “There’s no way I can really be a Christian,” they would say. “I don’t love others that sacrificially. I am not progressing in holiness, as far as I can tell. I don’t have this sense of calm and peace that others seem to have. I must not have been sincere enough when I came to Christ.”
I realized in one of these conversations how catastrophically I had failed as a preacher. Apparently, I had convinced goats that they were sheep and sheep that they were goats.
In fact, the way I had preached the texts had caused people to fear they were lost for the very reasons that demonstrated they weren’t: They felt the weight of their own sin. They saw the gap between God’s holiness and theirs. They were not deceiving themselves by saying they had no sin, as the apostle John put it (1 John 1:8).
What I learned during that sermon series was how preaching can go awry—even when you’re saying the truth—when you address the wrong problem. A legalist does not need to hear, without qualification, “Commit more to obedience,” any more than an unrepentant sex trafficker needs to hear, without context, “There is no condemnation.” But I also saw something that has grown all around me in American Christianity in the 30 years since.
We still have—and always will—those who wrongly presume on the mercy of God, who sin all the more so that “grace may abound” (Rom. 6:1, ESV throughout). But I have found another kind of Christian steadily growing: the kind who is racked with guilt and shame before God, believing God is disappointed and angry. These Christians find hardest to believe not the words they repeat in the creed (“I believe in God, the Father almighty, creator of heaven and earth”) but the words they once sang in Sunday school: “Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so.”
Cognitively, these Christians know they stand before God by grace, not by anything they’ve done. They know God is gracious and “there is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus” (Rom. 8:1). They can answer all those questions the right way. The problem is deeper than that: They often have a deep, habitual, unspoken assumption—invisible to them and thus impossible to recognize—that God is happy with them when they are triumphant (overcoming temptation, praying frequently, doing daily devotions with the right zeal) and angry with them otherwise.
This assumption leads many of these Christians (again, unconsciously) to shrink back from the presence of God, especially in prayer, when they are falling to temptation. They think, as an alcoholic Christian once told me, “I’m going to get my life together, and then I will go back to praying.” What that Christian couldn’t see was that the presence of God in prayer is not the capstone reward for having conquered sin on our own. Rather, the presence of God in prayer is the only wayto conquer sin. Before being sent into the wilderness to be tempted by the Devil, Jesus heard the words that would be contested there: “You are my beloved Son; with you I am well pleased” (Luke 3:22).
This unarticulated fear that God’s love is conditioned upon our rate of spiritual growth cuts people off from the very source of spiritual power they need to go up against what the Bible repeatedly shows us is the root of all sin: the sense that, as the Serpent of Eden once told us, God is not really for us, and that, as the primal man and woman once did, the right response of a sinner to the presence of God is to hide in fear and shame (Gen. 3:8–11).
This belief about God’s love leads to the worst kind of works righteousness. Believing God loves me because I do good things in the world is spiritually disastrous for me, but at least it does some good for the neighbors I’m helping. Paying an indulgence to a medieval churchman to keep myself out of purgatory distorts the gospel, but at least the indulgence can be measured and seen.
But when we believe, even unintentionally, that God’s love is capricious, that error does all the damage of those other forms of works righteousness—only it does it too invisibly to even diagnose. How do I know if my repentance is thoroughly sincere or if I’m just acting in my own self-interest to stay out of hell? How do I know if my faith is going through a time of doubt or if I am a doubter with periodic spasms of belief? That kind of thinking leads to a labyrinth of despair.
And if we get to the assumption behind all this, we find the same problem that’s plagued believers of almost every age. Most people aren’t asking whether Jesus saves sinners. Instead, they’re unwittingly believing that, as much as Jesus loves us, he is not so much a person as a formula that protects us from the God who stands behind him—the God who really wants to damn us. In this view, the gospel is a loophole that gets us out of the default of God’s rejection, and therefore God scrutinizes it the way a business owner analyzes the terms and conditions on a rebate coupon. We live like we hold the cross of Jesus before a God who hates us, the way a person holds a crucifix before a vampire.
But Jesus tells us otherwise. When his disciple Philip asks Jesus to show him the Father, Jesus says, “Have I been with you so long, and you still do not know me, Philip? Whoever has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, ‘Show us the Father’?” (John 14:9). Jesus is “the exact imprint” of God’s nature (Heb. 1:3). When he speaks, he speaks the words of the Father—and those words are “Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden” (Matt. 11:28). This is not a trap. God is not standing back, asking you for a prolonged sense of guilt that is self-flagellating enough to count as repentance. God is not asking for a faith that is heroic enough for him to reward with himself.
You can’t be sure God is pleased with you simply by looking inside yourself or at a graph of your spiritual growth. You can “draw near” because Jesus can (Jer. 30:21). If union with Christ is true, God has already condemned your sin at the place of the Skull, and you are already, in Christ, raised and seated with him in the heavenly places (Eph. 1:20).
The pioneer—the firstborn among many—is already there, and you are found in him. That means God the Father is as happy to see you—as messed up as you are—as he is to see Jesus. Only when you know this can you really “with confidence draw near to the throne of grace, that [you] may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need” (Heb. 4:16).
There are many mysteries in the Christian life. We can debate those things, hold our conclusions loosely, and know we will only find answers to some of them in eternity. But here’s one reality that’s clear enough for a Sunday school child and strong enough to hold up through a whole life and beyond: “God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him” (John 3:17).
Yes, Jesus loves you. The Bible tells you so.
Russell Moore is editor at large and columnist at Christianity Today as well as host of the weekly podcast The Russell Moore Show from CT Media.