Jesus is the start of the Christian life. Jesus is the end of the Christian life. And he’s everything in between. The Gospel is the good news of Jesus:

Law – God gave us His law through Moses, which is summed up in the Ten Commandments. No one can keep the law. We continually sin. Since God is just, our sin (breaking his law) separates us from him eternally.

Gospel – God sent His own Son, Jesus, as a propitiation (payment) for our sins. He came to this earth, lived a perfect life without sin, and died as a sacrifice for all who believe in him, once and for all. He rose again and sits at the right hand of God the Father, interceding for us. When we believe and put our trust in him, God, in his grace and mercy, through the work of Jesus, forgives our sin and no longer sees it, but instead sees Christ’s perfect work and righteousness in us. When we believe, God sends His Holy Spirit to reside within us, bringing us from spiritual death to spiritual life, and he continues to work out our salvation, sanctifying us until the day we die (or he returns).

3 For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, 4 that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures… 1 Corinthians 15:3-4

The Bible says this message is foolishness to those who are perishing. It sounds grandiose, maybe even ridiculous, to many who hear it. Of course, there are those who can grasp it on a logical level. However, it takes the work of the Holy Spirit to illuminate the Scriptures, enhance our understanding, and open our spiritual eyes, so that we can actually grasp how miraculous and wonderful this is. When we truly understand it, we see the weight, heaviness, and dirtiness of our own sin, contrasted with the pure holiness, love, and mercy shown to us through God’s grace in Christ Jesus. It is not something we do or earn, it’s something we receive. We have no work in it; it is all of Jesus’ work, which we receive by his grace through the Holy Spirit.

Maybe that’s why many people don’t understand it. They can sit in church week after week, not hearing the gospel of Jesus, and aren’t phased by it. Or worse, stand up as a “representative” of Christ and preach another gospel with a different Jesus. This, my friends, is a false teacher.

“The government is sending out 87,000 IRS agents, and they’re coming after Christians…The public schools are stealing the souls of your children!” Pastor 1 bellowed from the pulpit. He had been at our church for almost one full year, but it was only the last couple of months that I started questioning his sermons. It started small enough, I guess, as he began his series that summer with “The Law of Love.” The only problem was that it was all law and no love. I instantly noticed a pattern. Law, law, law, and no grace. I shared my concerns with my husband and thought, ‘Well, maybe I wasn’t understanding.’ I was fairly certain I understood what grace and the Gospel were, and his sermons lacked both. However, I went back to my Bible, read it, referenced the Westminster Larger Catechism, and listened to several sermons/talks on grace and the Gospel, just to confirm.

“For if someone comes to you and preaches a Jesus other than the Jesus we preached, or if you receive a different spirit from the Spirit you received, or a different gospel from the one you accepted, you put up with it easily enough.” 2 Corinthians 11:4

Initially, I thought it might be a problem with legalism, so I brought this to Pastor 1’s attention and asked him to clarify a few things on grace. He asked me what legalism meant to me, and I think I said something like “believing we can earn something through our works.” The rest of the conversation was marked by vagueness and obfuscation (the start of another trend or something I had just now noticed). And we ended the conversation amicably, although I was somewhat confused.

The pattern of his preaching continued, actually getting worse. One elder thought that Pastor 1 sounded like a Christian Nationalist. This was the summer of 2022, and Christian Nationalism was just becoming a hot topic in our world. I still wasn’t sure what it meant at that time, or if I was one. Was I patriotic and considered it my duty to vote? Sure. Beyond that, I wasn’t sure what I thought, only that what was coming out of the pulpit was wrong.

Things hit a crescendo for me when, from the pulpit, he stated, “Grace runs out for the believer”… there it was, what he actually believed. It was woven through all his messages of law, law, law. He diminished what it meant to keep the law, thinking he could somehow attain it. And he stripped grace of its magnitude and beauty, because he had no understanding of it. He had no idea what grace was, and our desperate need for it in contrast to how great our sin was. Which led me to believe he had never experienced it. Sunday after Sunday, he continued to preach a graceless “gospel,” which was no gospel at all.

I shared my concerns with two of the elders, and they agreed it needed to be addressed. But then, a few weeks later, in the same sermon, he called out an elder for daring to ask a question; he said we’d be starting a new series in the book of John. He went on to say that he would be preaching a Jesus that we’ve never heard of in our homes, in our work, or in our church. And he was right. I looked around in a daze, wondering what was happening. I asked a couple of people after the service about it, and one told me that she thought he was using sensationalism to get us to come back and listen. I told her, if what he said about Jesus is true, then he doesn’t believe any of us are saved, or he’s preaching another Jesus.

I thought about the congregation. Those who had been regularly attending our church and visitors. I thought about the fact that (since I had not heard a gospel presentation in at least 6 months) if they had not previously heard the gospel of Christ, they certainly wouldn’t know it now. They would think Christianity was just like all the other religions of the world, and what humans are so drawn to, a religion of works touting the “One true way.” Works were being preached from the pulpit, and it made me sick to think of it.

At the same time this was going on, there was mention of the patriarchy from Pastor 1 and his wife, stating that she “loved the patriarchy.” Just like Christian Nationalism, I wasn’t sure what she meant by “the Patriarchy.” I didn’t really have the context for it. By this point, it was the end of the summer. Things were looking bleak for us.

My husband, who was a new elder (having served for only 6 months longer than Pastor 1’s arrival), was doing his best to bring up the concerns with Pastor 1 and the other elders, but was being quickly shut down. Elder 1 sent me a meme in answer to the statement “Grace runs out for the believer.” We were making little progress in our discussions, although Elder 2 and his wife agreed with us on many points, but it went no further than that.

I figured out by fall that this was going to be a lose-lose for us. Every Sunday felt like I was being berated from the pulpit. My body was physically in pain after every sermon. I couldn’t understand why no one else was hearing it or seemed concerned. I wrote out a letter to Pastor 1 (which I also sent to the elders) detailing my concerns. My main concerns in my letter were that the gospel was not being preached at all, that grace was being diminished, that the onus of our sanctification was being placed on us, and that Jesus was being reduced to a footnote or used to prop up his positions. The gospel was not being preached. A different Jesus was being preached.

The same week in November that I wrote my letter, Elder 2 (unbeknownst to me) had sent off a recent sermon from Pastor 1 to a neutral third party (whom he didn’t know) to try to get some clarity on what was being preached. After that week in November, when Elder 1 got a copy of my letter and feedback from the third party source from Elder 2, who (responding to the sermon he’d been sent and although he didn’t know it) agreed with the premise of what I’d said in my letter, along with mentioning Rome, Federal Vision (from Doug Wilson), and theonomy, Elder 1 called us wolves. He said he had to protect Pastor 1 from “the wolves,” referring to the other elder and me.

I knew we were done without some miraculous event, but we stayed through the end of the year. Then on Jan. 1, 2023, after Pastor 1 gave another of his bloviating sermons, saying that if Jesus were to come down, he would “whip us all,” and Elder 2 stating that no one else felt like we did, we left. My husband stepped down as elder, and we withdrew our membership from a denomination we had been a part of for 16 years.

This was my first real introduction to Christian Nationalism (as I’ve come to understand it), and it is this: the conflation of a political ideology and Christian lingo. In this particular case, with Pastor 1, the message was devoid of the true Jesus or the Gospel, instead focusing on using scripture to prop up political ideas, adding Jesus as a footnote, or worse, using his name in vain. It was not a one-off, but a pattern that continued there after we left (from what I’ve been told), although I stopped listening. Ultimately, (almost 1 1/2 years after we left) he split that church, taking about half of the small congregation with him.

This marked the beginning of my deconstruction, although I didn’t realize it at the time. The people who were supposed to guard the truth, Jesus, instead guarded their positions and reputations.

“I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting the one who called you to live in the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel— which is really no gospel at all. Evidently, some people are throwing you into confusion and are trying to pervert the gospel of Christ.  But even if we or an angel from heaven should preach a gospel other than the one we preached to you, let them be under God’s curse!  As we have already said, so now I say again: If anybody is preaching to you a gospel other than what you accepted, let them be under God’s curse!” Galatians 1:6-9