Recently, I attended the funeral of a very precious lady. What was said at her funeral service 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 six (6) years ago. I had called this preacher because he was preaching at the same church congregation where I met and fell in love with the girl that would become my beautiful wife whom I have been married to for the past 44 years. I wanted that congregation to know the “gospel truth.”
When I spoke to this preacher six (6) years ago, I asked him to preach only the gospel of the grace of God that our Apostle Paul preached, and to not combine it with the gospel of the kingdom which was preached by Jesus, Peter and the eleven. This preacher would not commit to doing so, and during our phone conversation, he never even tried to defend what he preached as the gospel.
Recently, when I saw this preacher speak at the funeral of this very precious lady, it really hurt to hear him say that she had questioned if she had been good enough to go to heaven. This preacher had not given her the certainty that she would spend eternity in heaven. It would have been easy for him to do so, if he had preached the “gospel truth” to her.
If this preacher had preached the gospel of the grace of God to her, it would have given her certainty that she was saved for all eternity by her faith in the finished cross work of Jesus Christ. She would have known that her water baptism was not a part of the gospel of the grace of God. However, he never preached the gospel of the grace of God to her.
Instead, he preached a works-based salvation plan that included water baptism as a requirement for washing away her past sins, and that all of her future sins would have to be confessed to God in order to have those sins forgiven. Isn’t it easy to understand why this very precious lady worried if she was good enough to go to heaven?