Objection: Teaching Grace Gives People a License to Sin
You’ll see a theme throughout this book that healing is a gift provided by the Lord on a 100% grace basis, not as a reward for good works. In other words, your healing is not predicated on how “good” or “bad” you are, or how much or how little you sin. That sounds like a sweet deal to me, and one worth proclaiming all over the world. However, if you start teaching about the grace of God, it won’t be long before someone accuses you of giving people a license to sin.
I’ve preached for years and pastored for some of those years, and I’ve never carried licenses to sin in my pocket to hand out at church. People sin without anyone handing them official licenses. In fact, I’ve only been ASKED for a sin license twice at this writing. Those requests were from couples who wanted to have an “in God’s eyes only” marriage ceremony where they would not be legally married. My response to such requests was that I do not hand out fornication licenses – if you want to get married, get REALLY married or forget it. It’s two-faced to tell the government one thing (possibly to keep two checks coming in instead of one) and tell God and His Church the opposite. So I don’t even give out that kind of license to sin.
The usual objection continues in this vein: “If you teach that people’s sins don’t affect their righteous standing with God because all their past, present and future sins are forgiven, that means that they can just go out and sin any old way and it doesn’t matter. So you are encouraging people to bar-hop and abuse drugs at lewd parties, all the while thinking that they are Christians and that there is no problem with what they’re doing because they’re pre-forgiven!”
I have never encouraged anyone to sin, and despite the rumor-mongering that goes on, you would be hard-pressed to find a case where a “grace teacher” tells everyone that sin is OK. I’ve never heard ANY preacher say that sin is OK myself, though I’ve heard it from deceived Christians who apparently listened to some flakes out there who do teach that. But such people are not in the mainstream today, nor should they be. The devil loves to “stuff words in the mouths” of teachers and tell the world that they said ridiculous things that they never said.
Sin is NOT OK. Sin still sends an invoice for you to pay in this life. Even if God doesn’t have a record of it in heaven for all people to know about for all eternity, sin still costs you something in this life. Consider fallen ministers whose ministries are a fraction of what they could be – or were years ago. Even if they’ve repented and their sins are not on record in heaven, the record of their sins on the earth has brought them a reproach that will never be wiped away in this life. Sin does matter, and you should repent of it and flee from it.
Any “grace teacher” who tells you that you don’t need to repent has obviously not read Revelation 3:19 where Jesus commanded a born-again pastor to repent under our New Covenant of grace. You don’t repent to get forgiven (you already are); you repent to get sin out of your life so that it cannot destroy and degrade your life! Sin is no less serious than it ever was; the difference is that New Testament saints, who are under grace, have dominion over sin. Sin has no dominion over them (Romans 6:14).
Consider the modern “grace teaching” error that it is unnecessary to preach against specific sins from the pulpit, lest we make people sin-conscious and preach a mixture of Law and grace. The following verse is offered as a proof-text:
Titus 2:11-12:
For the grace of God that bringeth salvation hath appeared to all men,
Teaching us that, denying ungodliness and worldly lusts, we should live soberly, righteously, and godly, in this present world;
The erroneous teaching takes this passage to mean that if we just preach grace, grace itself will teach people to deny ungodliness and worldly lusts and to live soberly, righteously and godly. Therefore (supposedly), we’ll never need to preach about individual sins!
While grace certainly WILL teach these things, saying that we never need to preach denial of worldly lusts or preach godly living is at odds with a truckload of New Testament Scriptures. Paul named a LARGE number of SPECIFIC sins that believers are to avoid, and he was the foremost “grace teacher” ever other than Jesus! Evidently Paul did not think that grace alone would warn people away from these sins if he just taught grace. Paul preached specifically against the sins of lying (Ephesians 4:25, Colossians 3:9, 1 Timothy 3:8, Titus 2:3), stealing (Ephesians 4:28, Titus 2:10), using corrupt words (Ephesians 4:29, Colossians 3:8), bitterness, wrath, anger, clamor and evil speaking (Ephesians 4:31, Colossians 3:8), being men-pleasers (Colossians 3:22), pride (Romans 12:3, Romans 12:16, 1 Timothy 6:17), fornication and adultery (Colossians 3:5, 1 Corinthians 6:15, 1 Corinthians 6:18, 1 Corinthians 10:8, 1 Thessalonians 4:6), lasciviousness, uncleanness and greed (Ephesians 4:19, Colossians 3:5, 1 Timothy 3:3, Titus 1:7), loving money (1 Timothy 6:10), backbiting (1 Corinthians 10:10, Galatians 5:15), covetousness (Ephesians 5:3), blasphemy (Colossians 3:8), envy (Romans 13:13), filthiness and foolish talking (Ephesians 5:4, Colossians 3:8), getting drunk on alcohol (Romans 13:13, Ephesians 5:18, 1 Timothy 3:3, 1 Timothy 3:8, Titus 1:7, Titus 2:3, provoking children to wrath (Ephesians 6:4, Colossians 3:21), bitterness against your wife (Colossians 3:19), threatening underlings (Ephesians 6:9), worry (Philippians 4:6), laziness in business (Romans 12:11, 2 Thessalonians 3:10), argumentativeness (Romans 13:13, 2 Timothy 2:24, Titus 3:9), resisting authorities (Romans 13:1-2), cursing others (Romans 12:14), causing others to stumble (Romans 14:1, 1 Corinthians 8:9) and too many other specific sins to warrant listing them all here. (I think I’ve listed enough to make my case emphatically!) If you want to accuse Paul of preaching a mixture of Law and grace, you’ll do it without me. If you never preach any of these Scriptures about specific sins, you are not a “full gospel” church even if the sign out front says that you are. Obviously, Paul did not simply expect grace alone to teach people right and wrong conduct. He preached explicitly what right and wrong conduct were. You would have to be ignorant of a large proportion of the New Testament to think otherwise.
I’ve heard the teaching that under grace, only our consciences convict us of specific sins; the Holy Spirit supposedly does not. But who do you think inspired Paul to write all these verses against specific sins? At least indirectly, the Holy Spirit convicts believers of sin as He illuminates to us the Word that He wrote that talks about specific sins! Also, it seems a bit silly to me to think that while God the Father would correct you for specific sins (Hebrews 12:5-13) and Jesus Christ would point out specific sins in the churches in Asia in the book of Revelation, that the “Spirit of Christ” would NOT point out specific sins.
Paul did not even allow grace to teach Timothy how to behave. He wrote to him about how to behave:
1 Timothy 3:14-15:
These things I write to you, though I hope to come to you shortly;
But if I tarry long, that thou mayest know how thou oughtest to behave thyself in the house of God, which is the church of the living God, the pillar and ground of the truth.
Paul exhorted Titus to affirm constantly to those who heard him to maintain good works:
Titus 3:8:
This is a faithful saying, and these things I want you to affirm constantly, that those who have believed in God should be careful to maintain good works. These things are good and profitable to men.
He certainly did NOT tell Titus, “Just preach grace, and let grace tell people that they should maintain good works.”
Also note that you have to take an active role in denying ungodliness and worldly desires – God and grace do not deny them for you.
Not only is my list of sins that Paul wrote about incomplete – I haven’t even gotten into the specific sins mentioned by Peter, John, James and the writer of Hebrews!
So pastors who never teach Christian conduct (from both the “do” side and the “don’t” side) from the New Testament are not preaching anything resembling the full gospel, to the detriment to the hearers. I think some preachers are afraid of being labeled legalists who preach “a mixture of Law and grace,” and they’re afraid to “preach dos and don'ts” because the New Covenant is about a relationship with Jesus rather than ONLY a list of legal do’s and don’ts. I don’t advocate standing up and reading the Ten Commandments and the rest of the Law at Christians, but the New Testament has a LOT to say about what to do and what not to do. People need to hear these things! The New Testament speaks of the royal law of love rather than the Ten Commandments, so Christians need to hear what the New Testament has to say about our love walk! The difference from the Old Testament is that we want to please God and be good witnesses; we don’t try to earn our salvation through works.
If Peter could exhort people to holy conduct, preachers today should too!
1 Peter 1:15:
But as he which hath called you is holy, so be ye holy in all manner of conversation;
If you engage in certain sins, the church is instructed to shun you, not encourage you – a point Paul had to make to the Corinthian church, which seemed be proud that it was so “tolerant” (1 Corinthians 5:11-13).
Some people slanderously accused Paul of preaching that we should sin so that good would come. So accusing a grace preacher of promoting sin is nothing new. Paul taught grace, and yet he wrote in Romans 3:8: “And not rather, (as we be slanderously reported, and as some affirm that we say,) Let us do evil, that good may come? whose damnation is just.” Beware lest you also be found to be falsely accusing a grace teacher. Not everyone who preaches grace preaches that sin is OK; I certainly don’t think it’s OK. I preach Romans 6:1-2 and Romans 6:15 on the subject and so should everyone else who takes the Bible seriously.
Galatians 6:7-9 contains a warning to Christians about reaping corruption if they sow to the flesh!
John, who had just declared that the blood of Jesus cleanses us (believers) from all sins, went on to write in 1 John 2:1: “My little children, these things write I unto you, that ye sin not.” So John, who taught grace, did not condone sin either. The rest of 1 John makes that abundantly clear. John was just as against sin as Paul was.
So when you read in this book that healing is based on grace and has nothing to do with how much or how little you’ve been sinning, it’s easy for someone to conclude that I’m promoting sin by saying that it doesn’t matter. Actually, when it comes to your family relationship with God, sin doesn’t matter because Jesus took your sins out of the way. (See the discussion What If You Sin? for more details.) However, that doesn’t mean that sin has no earthly consequences or that sin is now OK. You should want to please God and avoid doing things that displease Him. But you need to know that His love for you and His acceptance of you in the Beloved (Ephesians 1:6) do not depend on how much you’ve been sinning lately. You are not on a works basis with God! Healing is rightfully yours because you are the righteousness of God in Christ, not because you’ve earned it with good behavior.
Sadly, I have seen various people whom God has healed through us go right back into the same worldliness they were in before they showed up for healing. What is sad is that they sometimes get sick again and it is really hard to get them healed the second time around. They needed to go to a good church and get built up in the Word, but in many cases, they just found other things to do that they loved more than Jesus and forsook church completely. Even then, God is merciful. I remember a woman who came to our church for three Sundays and got healed of fibromyalgia. The service when she got healed was the last of our services she ever attended. She went back to a no-healing church because that’s where her friends still were. Then she got sick and wanted us to come visit her in the hospital. Well, my wife did, and God healed her. Her operation scheduled for two days later was canceled. That’s God’s mercy! He was more merciful than I would have been, so I’m glad that He’s God and I’m not. On the other hand, some of these people died without setting foot in a church again, or without setting foot anywhere where divine healing was being taught. Too many people are like the nine lepers who never even came back to say thanks to Jesus.
If you think that healing being 100% grace-based gives you the ability to just go sin every which-way and still get healed every time, think again. You won’t be built up in your faith at a bar. You won’t even grow in grace and in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ taking your bike or your boat out every weekend and skipping church. Healing will still be offered to you on a 100% grace basis – the issue is that you won’t be in a position to receive it and hold onto it.
Even under the Law, there was a difference between willful, deliberate, premeditated sin and accidental sin. If a foul word slips out of your mouth in traffic, chances are you didn’t plan to do that ahead of time. But if you KNOW that God is against lasciviousness and you presumptuously CHOOSE to go to a strip club anyway (maybe thinking that grace will let you get away with that), it is a different story. How can you affirm God’s will (healing) in one area of your life and refuse His will in another at the same time? That’s going to be hard. So be it not said that the teaching of grace is the same thing as encouraging sin. NOTHING in this book encourages sin, as you may determine for yourself.