Recently, I attended the funeral of a very precious lady. This precious lady was a member of the same denomination that I was born into and which I was a member of for most of my life. Attending her funeral prompted me to write the following.
I recognized one of the preachers that preached her funeral. I had spoken to this preacher by phone about five (5) years ago. I called this preacher because the church that he preaches at is the same church where I met my wife. My wife and I have been married for 44 years. I wanted this preacher to preach the “gospel truth.”
When I spoke to this preacher, I asked him to preach only the gospel of the grace of God that our Apostle Paul preached, and not combine it with the gospel of the kingdom which was preached by Jesus, Peter and the eleven. During our phone conversation, he never tried to defend what he preached as the gospel. No, he just ignored what I asked him to do and just sort of laughed me off. That is how that I would describe our conversation.
When I saw him speak at the funeral of this very precious lady, it really hurt me to hear him say that she had questioned if she had been good enough to go to heaven. This preacher did not give the family the certainty that their loved one would spend eternity in heaven. It would have been easy for him to do so if he preached the truthful word of God to her. No, he never did that. Instead, he added water baptism as a requirement to the gospel of the death, burial and resurrection, which is the gospel of the grace of God.
By adding water baptism to the gospel, this preacher preached a “false gospel” to this very special lady. This preacher preached a “false gospel” to this very special lady, and then he preached her funeral.