Live your best life now. God wants us to live a life of health and wealth. Speak it into existence. Pray your way to a better life. I’m sure you’ve heard some of these taglines before. Last week, we spoke about the importance of knowing your Bible, and knowing the full counsel of God’s word so you won’t be led astray by false gospels and teachers that peddle an inferior version of the Way, Truth, and Life. Now, the Lord has been weighing heavily on my heart for some time that we need to meet some of these false gospels head-on. Unfortunately, the American Church is full of “gospels” that lead people away from Christ in droves, and it’s not because they are outwardly evil or obviously false. They often preach things that people love to hear and subscribe to.

The struggle between works-salvation and faith-salvation is one that I find many Christians grapple with. Like it or not, many in the church pew tend to think that their ticket to heaven gets upgraded based on how many good things they can do for the world and other people. And don’t get me wrong, sometimes I get in my head like that too because this whole world runs off of a performance-based lifestyle. How many likes can I get on this post? How can I excel at work to get a promotion? How can I excel at school to get good grades?

Look, no one likes to fail. And as a self-proclaimed overachiever and perfectionist, I super-duper HATE failing. Just this past week, I had a really, really big and difficult licensing test. It was something I have been studying for over the past 9 weeks. So last Tuesday, while everyone was opening their Soul Deep devotion and sipping on their morning coffee, I was sitting in a small cubicle, laboring over 150 multiple choice questions.