Law and Gospel Confusion

Last Lord's Day I listened to a sermon by a National Baptist pastor with a few African American Calvinistic Baptists (all friends of mine). After the sermon, one of my friends made an astute and biblical ctiticism of the sermon. He said that the pastor never made a distinction between the Law and the Gospel. The pastor gave many imperatives in the course of the sermon assuming that everyone in his audience were Christians. (This is interesting because after the sermon he "opened the doors of the church"). Also during the course of the sermon the pastor never shared that only true Christians have the spiritual wherewithal to carry out these imperatives he issued based upon his reading of the biblical text. He never preached the gospel.

The gospel used to be at the heart of African American Baptist preaching, but since the rise of the Full Gospel Baptist movement within the National Baptist Convention especially, African American Baptist churches have lost the gospel largely. I remember something Luther once said, "You have to preach the gospel to the baptized." We all need the gospel. I need to and I want to hear the gospel every Lord's Day. I need to be reminded of my native inability to carry out the Law's demand; I need to be reminded that only through faith in Christ am I justified; and I need to know that only through and by the power of Christ's Spirit can I obey the Law in a feeble way.

Without hearing the gospel but only hearing the Law I would become presumptuous. Hearing the gospel without the Law, I would become profligate. I need the gospel and the Law to trust in Christ's person and work, and to live holy in the power of the Spirit.

One more thing to note about that sermon: it really isn't in accord with Baptist preaching according to the New Hampshire Declaration of Faith, Article XII. I've summarized above the gist of this article. Here it is verbatim:

12. Of the Harmony of the Law and the Gospel
We believe that the Law of God is the eternal and unchangeable rule of his moral government;62 that it is holy, just, and good;63 and that the inability which the Scriptures ascribe to fallen men to fulfill its precepts arises entirely from their love of sin;64 to deliver them from which, and to restore them through a Mediator to unfeigned obedience to the holy Law, is one great end of the Gospel, and of the means of grace connected with the establishment of the visible Church.65

Pastors must keep this emphasis every Lord's Day in their preaching.