The Old School and New School Gospel.

I spoke at Student Venture, Chattanooga last night. I always enjoy being with that group of believers. The staff walk by faith and challenge the kids to share their faith and disciple them.

I compared our cultural gospels (which is really no gospel at all) to the true gospel of Christ. We talked about the Old School Gospel and the New School Gospel. Here is how I broke them down:

The Old School Gospel says" What You Do" gets you to heaven. Read your bible, pray, don't cuss, quit dipping, pull up your pants and go to church. This is a more legalistic or Pharisaical type "gospel". How good can you look and be, determines if you can go to heaven, and then they add Jesus. This is not the gospel, but a man made attempt to get to heaven and add Jesus name to it.

The New School Gospel says "How You Feel" gets you to heaven. You see this in our culture and many churches when you hear an alter call and someone says to you, "You don't really want hell do you?" Then the person says, "No, of course not" Then the preacher or whoever is getting ready to lead them into a man centered "gospel prayer" says ok repeat after me and then proceeds to lead the person in a felt need prayer that has a lot to do with the persons emotions and little to do with the King Jesus. They just Him on.

The Biblical gospel says that salvation has nothing to do with you. The Bible speaks that we are dead in our sins (Romans 3:21-23), but God has given a gift of life. He actually became our sin. It has nothing to do about what we do or how we feel, but who He is.

If you have lived or are living in the Old School or New School Gospel, I pray that you would leave it and turn to the true gospel. If you are a pastor, church planter or a spiritual leader, lets keep the gospel about Jesus and not what we can do.