The Slogans
If you came of age in evangelicalism during the early 2000s, you probably remember the slogans.
“The gospel is not just the ABCs of the Christian life. It is the A to Z.”
“Preach the gospel to yourself every day.”
“Religion says, ‘I obey, therefore I’m accepted.’ The gospel says, ‘I’m accepted, therefore I obey.’”
Those sentences became the common language of what was later called the gospel centered movement. Through pastors and writers like Tim Keller, John Piper, D. A. Carson, and many others, a generation of evangelicals rediscovered the centrality of justification by grace alone through faith alone. The gospel was not simply how Christians began. It was how Christians grew. That conviction reshaped preaching, counseling, discipleship, and the Christian life for countless churches, including my own.
The Question
Working as a chaplain in a homeless shelter has forced me to think carefully about how people change. Every day I sit with addiction, trauma, broken relationships, relapse, shame, and the slow work of rebuilding a life. I spend my days assessing people, planning interventions, and trying to understand why some people gradually become different while others remain trapped in the same patterns. It is impossible to do that work for long without asking how lasting change actually happens.
That question slowly changed the way I listened to my own theology. Whether the conversation was about obedience, holiness, fighting sin, perseverance, or virtue, I found myself reaching for the same answer. “Because you’ve already been accepted.” It is a wonderful answer. It protects the gospel from legalism, reminds us that God’s favor cannot be earned, and keeps justification where the Reformers insisted it belongs. What unsettled me was not the answer itself, but how quickly I reached for it. Before I had fully understood the question, I already knew what I was going to say.
When Answers Lose Their Questions
I recently came across one of those internet lists about forgotten sayings. One that caught my attention was, “Great minds think alike.” It turns out the older proverb continues, “and fools seldom differ.” What stayed with me was not the missing half of the proverb but what its disappearance revealed. Sometimes a sentence survives long after the conversation that first gave it meaning has been forgotten. Detached from its original setting, it begins answering questions it was never meant to answer.
Something similar has happened, I think, to one of Protestantism’s favorite slogans. “Religion says, ‘I obey, therefore I’m accepted.’ The gospel says, ‘I’m accepted, therefore I obey.’” That sentence is a modern way of answering one of Protestantism’s oldest questions. How can a guilty sinner stand righteous before a holy God? The Reformers answered with remarkable clarity. We are justified by grace alone, through faith alone, because of Christ alone.
The Heidelberg Catechism not only asks that question but answers it. Twenty-six questions later it asks another. “Since we have been delivered from our misery by grace through Christ, without any merit of our own, why then should we do good works?” Its answer is equally clear. We obey “so that with our whole lives we may show ourselves thankful to God for His benefits.” My concern is not with that answer. My concern is what happens when an answer forged for one question gradually becomes our instinctive answer to several others.
The Carpenter
Imagine asking a carpenter, “Why do you build houses?” The answer depends entirely on the question hiding underneath the question. If you are asking about his livelihood, he builds because someone hired him. If you are asking about his vocation, he builds because that is what carpenters do. If you are asking about his character, perhaps he builds with excellence because he is grateful to the man who first taught him the trade. None of those answers compete with one another because each explains a different aspect of the carpenter’s life.
Now imagine responding to every question with the same answer. “He builds because he is grateful someone taught him carpentry.” The answer remains true, but it no longer remains sufficient. It explains one motive without explaining his vocation, his identity, his skill, or the relationship between becoming a carpenter and practicing carpentry. The answer has not become false. It has become overextended.
The same danger exists in theology. Gratitude beautifully answers the Heidelberg Catechism’s question, “Why then should we do good works?” But Scripture asks many other questions about the Christian life. How does a sinner become a saint? What does union with Christ accomplish? How does the Holy Spirit transform desire? How are virtue and holiness formed? Why does obedience increasingly become the natural expression of the new life God has given? Those questions are related, but they are not identical. When they all receive the same answer, the answer itself begins to lose the precision that once made it so helpful.
The Reformers
The obvious objection is that everything I have described is simply historic Protestantism. In one sense, it is. The Reformers fiercely defended justification by grace alone through faith alone, and they consistently taught that good works never earn God’s favor. The Westminster Confession describes good works as “the fruits and evidences of a true and lively faith.” Calvin repeatedly speaks of obedience as the fruit of our acceptance in Christ. On that point, there is an unmistakable line running from the sixteenth century to the gospel centered movement.
The continuity, however, is only part of the story. Read the Reformers, and the language of gratitude is surrounded by a much larger vocabulary. They speak constantly of union with Christ, regeneration, adoption, mortification, vivification, communion with the Holy Spirit, new affections, new creation, and the restoration of the image of God. Gratitude is never absent, but neither is it expected to explain the whole Christian life. It is one voice in a much larger theological choir.
Calvin illustrates the point well. He does not begin his account of sanctification with gratitude but with union. “As long as Christ remains outside of us,” he writes, “all that he has suffered and done for the salvation of the human race remains useless and of no value for us.” Everything else follows from that union. Participation precedes transformation. Identity precedes conduct. Obedience is the fruit of sharing in Christ before it is the expression of gratitude toward Christ.
The same pattern appears throughout later Protestant theology. John Owen explains holiness through the Spirit’s work in mortification. Jonathan Edwards roots obedience in holy affections. Herman Bavinck describes sanctification as the life of Christ unfolding within the believer. None of them diminishes gratitude. They simply refuse to ask it to carry the weight of every theological question about Christian growth.
Becoming
The carpenter illustration is helpful, but it also has limits. If someone says, “A carpenter builds because that is what carpenters do,” the Protestant instinct immediately asks another question. How does someone become a carpenter? More importantly, when does someone become one? Is it after building a first table? A tenth house? When the quality of the work reaches a certain standard? The moment identity is grounded in performance, assurance quietly gives way to introspection. The question is no longer, Who am I? but, Have I done enough?
That is precisely the question the Reformers refused to answer by pointing to human effort. A Christian is not someone who has finally obeyed enough to deserve the name. A Christian is someone who has been united to Christ by grace through faith. Justification, adoption, regeneration, and union with Christ are gifts before they become experiences. God establishes a new reality before He calls us to a new way of life.
The New Testament follows that pattern with remarkable consistency. Before Paul commands believers to live differently, he reminds them what God has already done. In Romans 6, Christians have already “died to sin,” have been “buried therefore with him,” and have been raised “to walk in newness of life” (Rom. 6:2–4). Only then does Paul say, “So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus” (Rom. 6:11). The command rests upon a reality that grace has already accomplished.
The same pattern appears throughout Paul’s letters. In Colossians, “you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God” before believers are told to “put to death therefore what is earthly in you” (Col. 3:3, 5). In Ephesians, Christians are reminded that they have “put on the new self, created after the likeness of God,” before they are commanded to “put away falsehood” and live accordingly (Eph. 4:24–25). Reformed theology has long summarized this pattern by saying that the indicative grounds the imperative. Scripture first declares what God has done before it commands what Christians must do.
This is a richer account of sanctification than a single appeal to gratitude can provide. Sanctification is not the construction of a Christian identity but the progressive expression of one. The Holy Spirit conforms believers to the image of Christ through the ordinary means of grace, teaching them to become in practice what they already are by union with Christ. Identity does not emerge from practice. Practice expresses identity.
The carpenter’s question, therefore, remains indispensable, but it belongs in the right place. Once someone has become a carpenter, it is entirely appropriate to ask how skill is formed, what habits produce excellence, and why good craftsmanship increasingly becomes second nature. Those are no longer questions about becoming a carpenter. They are questions about growing as one. Protestant theology has always insisted on exactly the same distinction.
A Larger Vocabulary
This matters because pastors, counselors, chaplains, and disciplers spend their lives helping people change. We sit with addiction, resentment, lust, fear, anxiety, despair, and the thousand ordinary sins that refuse to die quietly. Our task is not merely to explain justification. It is to help people understand how God conforms them to the image of Christ. That requires more than one question, and Scripture gives us more than one answer.
When every question receives the same answer, our pastoral vocabulary becomes smaller than the Bible’s. We instinctively answer with acceptance when Scripture speaks of union with Christ. We answer with gratitude when Paul speaks of the Spirit. We return to justification when the New Testament is describing adoption, mortification, new creation, perseverance, wisdom, virtue, hope, and the slow formation of Christian character. None of those realities compete with the gospel. They are the gospel accomplishing what God always intended it to accomplish.
That, I believe, is the lasting weakness of the gospel-centered movement. It recovered one of the church’s greatest truths with remarkable clarity, but over time it allowed one answer to eclipse many others. The result was not a false gospel. It was a thinner account of sanctification than either Scripture or the Reformers actually give us.
Recovering those forgotten questions does not move us beyond the gospel. It returns us to the fullness of it. Grace not only declares sinners righteous. Grace unites them to Christ. Grace gives them the Holy Spirit. Grace adopts them into God’s family. Grace renews their minds, reorders their loves, reshapes their habits, and conforms them to the image of the Son.
The gospel is still the A to Z of the Christian life. We have simply forgotten how many letters are in the alphabet.