A Faith Worth Fighting For - Part One Series

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You can’t add to it. You can’t improve on it.

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I love Oreo cookies. Occasionally my mother would bring home these - Hydrox cookies. They look like Oreos but they are not. You can make them look like Oreos but they are just cheap imitations. Others try to do that as well- take a well-known brand and copy it. We call them knock-offs. Here are some examples:

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Kat Kot bars – a knock-off of Kit Kat bars.

Here’s a 7 Evelyn – a knock off of 7-Eleven

Here’s a favorite – I think it tastes like butter – a knock-off of I Can’t Believe it’s not Butter

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There are some people peddling a faith that has some similarities to Christianity but simply is not. And they have slipped into the church.

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Jude 4 (NIV) — 4 For certain individuals whose condemnation was written about long ago have secretly slipped in among you. They are ungodly people, who pervert the grace of our God into a license for immorality and deny Jesus Christ our only Sovereign and Lord.

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Who are these people? Likely itinerant preachers, not uncommon in the first century, have infiltrated these churches with a knock-off gospel. Now we don’t have that situation today but beware – there are lots of ways that false teaching can slip into a church and into your life. We have access to the teachings of so many people through the internet. So many books, blogs, sermons are at our fingertips. So may people trying to influence us – it’s a billion-dollar industry. We must beware. We must be on alert.

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These false teachers are described in three ways: (we will move through these quickly as these will be developed later in the letter.)

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(1) Ungodly – not just denying the existence of God, but a failure to recognize a spiritual authority over us.

(2) Pervert grace – they teach that since there is grace we are free to sin in any way we want. Somewhat of the same thought we see Paul addressing in Romans 6:1:

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Romans 6:1–2 (NIV) — 1 What shall we say, then? Shall we go on sinning so that grace may increase? 2 By no means! We are those who have died to sin; how can we live in it any longer?

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This is described by Dietrich Bonhoeffer as cheap grace in Cost of Discipleship.

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Cheap grace is the deadly enemy of our Church.

In such a Church the world finds a cheap covering for its sins; no contrition is required, still less any real desire to be delivered from sin.

Cheap grace means the justification of sin without the justification of the sinner. Grace alone does everything they say, and so everything can remain as it was before. Well, then, let the Christian live like the rest of the world, let him model himself on the world’s standards in every sphere of life, and not presumptuously aspire to live a different life under grace from his old life under sin.

Cheap grace is the grace we bestow on ourselves. Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, Communion without confession. Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate.