Grace Elements…Righteousness and No-condemnation

I have noticed that there are different aspects or elements to the grace message. There is the focus on righteousness and no-condemnation, as taught by Joseph Prince, Bertie Brits, Andrew Wommack and Paul White. Joseph Prince also augments his teaching with quite a lot of Old Testament symbolism which points towards grace.

Joseph Prince – The Mega Church Grace Preacher

I’ve noticed that Joseph Prince still has something of mega-church flair to him: this is understandable as he is senior pastor of New Creation Church in Singapore. There is a tendency for Joseph Prince to make the usual sensational promises that other mega-church pastors do.

Who is to say whether or not this approach is right or wrong? Joseph is popular and gets the grace message out to the world, so I’m okay with that. I think it comes down to how secure a person is: if a person is insecure they are much more likely to get obsessive about promises of wealth and miracles; whereas, a secure person may be encouraged by such promises, but will still value the everyday things in life and will have a balanced perspective. But I wonder to myself if such preachers should balance their teaching by informing believers that there is no guarantee that they will be made substantially wealthy and that they cannot dictate what they want and how they should be blessed from God.

Bertie Brits – The Travelling Grace Preacher

Bertie Brits tends to be more down to earth with his straightforward, no-frills teaching on grace. Bertie lacks the charismatic showmanship of Joseph Prince - perhaps this is the right way to go about teaching grace when you don’t pastor a mega-church like Joseph Prince does? Bertie does not refute prosperity in Christ, but he does emphasise contentment and speaks against seeking wealth and miracles through faith. Bertie teaches that we should have faith in Christ, rather than faith in things, knowing that everything else that we need in life flows from there.

Righteousness…A Cliché?

I will admit that although this branch of the grace message seems to be the most popular, and for many, it is the only grace message – I did not begin my journey into grace from there. I think what killed off the whole meaning of righteousness for me was the way in which the religious church just bandied the term about as if it was some sort of meaningless cliché. I mean, Christians would tell me that I am right with God, but then proceed to give me a whole set of rules to follow so that I would be right with Him – talk about being confused!

I thought that righteousness was living your life right. Then I came to see it as being a combination of right-standing and right-living. Nowadays, I see it as simply right-standing with God. The church tends to veer away from the concept of right-standing apart from works, because it seeks to manipulate and frighten people into committing to what is considered to be right living. Hence the term “license to sin” in relation to the grace message.

Righteousness is all about our right-standing with God through faith in Christ; it has nothing to do with our behaviour and performance. As soon as we focus on behaviour, our works, we immediately expose ourselves to guilt as we realise that we don’t have what it takes to please God and merit His approval and blessings. All of our wrong behaviour, our sin, is caused by us not knowing that we are right with Him, just as we are. If we believe that we need to keep rules to be right with God, our flesh nature becomes alive in us.

Am I The Only One Getting This?

When God started to reveal grace to me in 2005, I did not even think to call it “grace” and I had not even heard of Joseph Prince and other grace preachers like him. I thought it was just me receiving this message. This had two effects in that I felt excited at the thought of bringing something seemingly new life changing to the world; secondly, I thought that I was possibly going mad and was being misled. I did think to myself that if the devil was misleading me then it was a very elaborate rouse indeed because it was profoundly scriptural. Thankfully, I came across Joseph Prince’s teaching in 2006 and that confirmed that I was not going mad, after all!