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 five (5) years ago. I had called this preacher because the church that he preaches at is the same church congregation where I met the beautiful girl that would become my beautiful wife of 44 years. The people that I met at that congregation loved my wife and her family. I wanted this preacher to preach the “gospel truth,” at this congregation, and I asked for him to do so.
Therefore, when I spoke to this preacher five (5) 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. 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.
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 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 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. However, he never preached the gospel of the grace of God to her. Instead, he added water baptism as a requirement for salvation to the gospel of the grace of God.
By adding water baptism to the gospel of the grace of God, this preacher preached a “false gospel.” This preacher preached a “false gospel” to this precious lady, and then he preached her funeral.