Too Good to Pass Up

Sharing this transcript of Erwin Lutzer's statement on a major problem of the church today.

Dr. Erwin Lutzer message from the Understanding the Times Conference
April 26, 2014, Minneapolis, MN
This is this trouble, this is the rub. If you are 40 years old or younger, there’s the 40-40 split in
America. If you are under 40, you probably belong to a group of evangelicals who basically see
nothing wrong with same sex marriage. They are more tolerant, saying that there may be other
religions that lead you to God, so on and so forth. I say it humbly: They don’t have much of a
clue. Not everybody of course, but many of them have no clue what the implications are or what
the real issues are. They were reared by “Will and Grace” on television.
They are obsessed with technology. Many young people – not the ones that are here today by the
way; they are the exception – but many young people are so narcissistic. Yesterday I heard on
the news that one kid took 200 selfies – 200 pictures of himself in a single day. I mean the whole
technology world out there.
So there are those who say we can’t preach against homosexuality or mention Islam or anything
because we want to win these people to Christ, and that’s a barrier. So what we’ve found is that
the gospel and its implications are often dumbed down. Then you have a form of ecumenism that
compromises the gospel. And then there’s something else and that is it’s popular today to say,
“God loves you unconditionally.”
Now, to the one who’s sitting in the pew that’s sleeping with his girlfriend, he says to himself, “I
know exactly what that means. That means that it’s okay for me to continue to sleep with my
girlfriend because, after all, God loves me unconditionally. That’s His job. That’s who He is.
You see it used to be, and some of you who are older would remember this, that preachers used
to preach against sin, and then when people knew that they couldn’t live up to God’s standard,
and they were aware of their sin, then grace was offered to them. Thank God for amazing grace,
how sweet the sound.
Today grace is offered up front. Grace is offered to people when they don’t even know they need
it and whether or not they really care as to whether or not they want it because God loves you
“unconditionally.” Not to put too fine a point on it, but there are several different passages in
Scripture in the Psalms where it says that God says, “I am angry with the wicked every day.” Certainly, God loves the elect, those who are saved and He loved them, the Bible says, from the
foundation of the world. But to throw that out there for everybody to hear – that God loves you
unconditionally – is really to water down the seriousness of sin and the real understanding of
grace. Because you cannot understand grace until you fully understand sin and the better you
understand sin the better you will magnify grace. But we don’t have that today in our society.”