THE HISTORY OF the church, from its very first days until now, is riddled with disagreement over doctrine. It might be nice to imagine a church in which all believers believed the same thing in the same way for the same reasons — but that wasn’t even true in New Testament times. In that world, the good news was still… well, new. It was a world in which what we now know as the Bible was still being written. It was a world in which Jewish and Gentile converts alike were still working out what all this meant for what they had been taught from childhood to believe. Small wonder that the apostles’ teaching would get pulled this way and that, sometimes to the extent that something core to the gospel was at stake.

Take the apostle Paul as an example. Near the end of First Corinthians, having dealt with a variety of questions and concerns, Paul turns his pastoral attention to a new matter. He begins chapter 15 by reminding them how important it is to hold tightly to the gospel:

Now, brothers and sisters, I want to remind you of the gospel I preached to you, which you received and on which you have taken your stand. By this gospel you are saved, if you hold firmly to the word I preached to you. Otherwise, you have believed in vain. (1 Cor 15:1-2, NIV)

He urges them to remember Jesus’ death, burial, and resurrection. He emphasizes the latter by reminding them of Jesus’ many post-resurrection appearances, including to Paul himself. Only then does he come to the point: “But if it is preached that Christ has been raised from the dead, how can some of you say that there is no resurrection of the dead?” (1 Cor 15:12). For whatever reason that is now lost to us (possibly because they had misguided expectations about resurrection in the first place), some of the believers had begun to say that resurrection wasn’t part of the gospel message. Paul spends the rest of the chapter debunking that idea. He insists that the hope of resurrection is what empowers him and others to continue in the work of the gospel despite the setbacks and suffering such work entails.

There are other examples of believers getting things twisted in the early church. In his letter to the Galatians, for example, Paul opened with his customary greetings, then wasted no time getting right to the point:

I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting the one who called you to live in the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel—which is really no gospel at all. Evidently some people are throwing you into confusion and are trying to pervert the gospel of Christ. (Gal 1:6-7)

In these churches, believers were falling prey to the idea that in order to stand justified before God, they needed more than grace, more than mere faith, more than the cross — they needed religious behavior as well. Paul’s jaw hit the theological ground: How could anyone who truly receives a gospel of grace believe such a thing? And to the church in Rome, Paul wrote to combat another troublesome twist on the gospel message. Some, apparently, had begun to suggest that if grace abounds so generously, maybe it didn’t matter anymore if people continued to sin…

The issues John faced with his letters may have been different than those faced in Corinth, or Galatia, or Rome. But John’s situation was still just another instance of what Paul taught near the beginning of First Corinthians: from a heavenly perspective, the gospel of grace is divine wisdom, but from a worldly perspective, it’s foolishness. And sooner or later, that tension will give rise to dissent.

THE HARD TRUTH is this: we are a sinful people, every last one of us, no matter how spiritual a front we try to uphold. Do we believe that? I mean, do we really believe that?

Think, for example, of Jesus’ parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector in Luke 18. It’s one thing to come before God like the tax collector, carrying a burden of guilt and shame for what we’ve done. When we know our sin for what it is, the gospel of God’s grace and forgiveness is good news indeed! It’s another thing entirely to come before God like the Pharisee, like people who are confident in their goodness. They don’t have to think they’re perfect; indeed, they would correctly insist that only God is perfect! They only need to think they’re less im-perfect than the next guy — like that God-forsaken tax collector.

And honestly, I suspect that more of us receive the gospel in the spirit of the Pharisee than that of the publican.

The gospel is only good news because of God’s grace. And grace isn’t grace unless there’s something important to be forgiven. That something is sin. We will never fully appreciate the extent of God’s grace without seeing our sin as God does. The more we downplay the reality of sin, the further we stray from the gospel.

And John, of course, will have something to say about this.