The Tire Kickers

[Author's Note: This brief essay relates the fact of the admiring but unbelieving crowds around Jesus, while He walked on this earth, to the crowds in many of our large evangelistic churches. The same dynamic is at work. In many cases Americans, especially, are happy to be seen with Jesus. Sadly, they just don't want to be changed by Him.]

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John 2:23-25 contains some of the most interesting verses found in that Gospel. It reads as follows:

“Now when he was in Jerusalem at the Passover, in the feast [day], many believed in his name, when they saw the miracles which he did.

But Jesus did not commit himself unto them, because he knew all [men],

And needed not that any should testify of man: for he knew what was in man.”

What in the world was John talking about? Didn’t Paul say “believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and thou shalt be saved.”

I believe that John, the Gospel writer, was referring to the fact that most people can readily appreciate Jesus from a safe distance, and believe and declare that He is the Christ.

But they are not saved.

Why? Because their belief is nothing but an intellectual exercise, and being merely intellectual it does not penetrate beyond the soul into the spirit of a man. And it is only in the spirit of a man where real saving change can be effected.

Scores of people will crowd around the Savior, and even seek to identify with Him, as the Scriptures testify, but few actually seek to cling to him to be healed. And when they do, both He and they know it. (Luke 8:40-48)

Many of Christ’s hardest sayings follow immediately after the observation by the Gospel writer that a large crowd had gathered around Him. He did His best to confront the crowd, to separate the wheat from the chaff, and most all drifted away. But the “little flock” to whom the Kingdom is given remains.

Matthew 24:5 states:

"For many shall come in my name, saying, I am Christ; and shall deceive many."

Who are the “many” that shall deceive many? None other than “many” of today’s Christian clergy. They shall, like those referred to in the passage from John above, proclaim Jesus to be the Christ, and nevertheless proceed to deceive many in their congregation.

The modern churchgoer is led by many clergy to believe his own record is sufficient, he has faith in his own religiosity to save him, and he doesn’t really have an accurate idea of the Gospel, since it is rarely preached. To trust someone you have to know him, but many churchgoers either have no interest in the Scripture, or, worse, they spend their time studying and arguing peripheral issues of Scripture to impress others with their religiosity.

Often, Christ is perceived as nothing more than a potentially necessary get out of jail free card. There is no counting of the cost to follow Him because there is no cost to count.

The emphasis of many a modern churchgoer is on what he personally does instead of who or what he truly is. The focus is on attempting to improve his old Adamic nature to where it, hopefully, commits fewer of those sometimes embarrassing sins, not on changing it out. There is no repentance born of what he is deep down.

Justification before God, he believes, is to be attained "the old fashioned way" - through "earning" - self-effort, work, and will power. His pride demands improvement but his inner nature is as corrupt as ever.

Many people have been cleaned up and made to look nice by their school, their mother, their therapist, or their religion. But nothing has changed their inside, the inmost man.

In his deep heart and over time, such a person has labored mightily to excuse and justify all of his sins, so that real repentance, on the level of his spirit, cannot take place. He goes through the religious motions to fool God and impress man. In fact, many a modern churchgoer thinks he is being holy for apologizing to God, because he really doesn’t think he needs to.

A diluted Gospel, which emphasizes the problem to be what one does, as opposed to who one is, makes intellectual sense to him because he will always acknowledge a few shortcomings; but there is no desperation in his call to God, born of a revelation of his inability to change himself, but rather a self-generated assurance, encouraged by Satan and the modern clergy, of his innate acceptability to God, marred only by the occasional peccadillo.

The real Gospel – founded on the fact that the situation of all men is desperate and utterly hopeless, that all men are under imminent judgment, that no one is good or acceptable, not one - makes no sense to him because he knows he can do good. In fact, he thinks he does it all the time, and he rejects the need for spirit-level repentance, of what he really is deep down, as the whole concept of death to what he is deeply offends his pride.

“I’m not that bad” his soul whispers to him as he glances around at others and evaluates their status on some mythical scale, and certainly the world seems to agree, having affirmed him over and over as a success and the object of peer admiration. “Jesus died for those other people – the sinners.”

That is why the Gospel is rarely talked about. It is a deeply offensive message. It will alienate the modern churchgoer, but as always, exhilirate those who, in honest self-examination, had concluded that their plight, in fact, was hopeless.

Since many of the clergy themselves, unfortunately, have not been changed by the Gospel, they do not understand it and cannot articulate it. It is totally contrary to the inclinations of the natural mind, as Paul noted. (1 Cor. 2:14)

If the Gospel were preached in church, then the sinners would find their way to it. But instead the Gospel is seldom preached and the churches are filled with “the righteous” who cannot possibly be saved. (Mt. 9:13)