Do the Word

No–no cartoon charts, no explanations of esoteric passages from the book of Revelation, no  billboards announcing prophetic speculations. Just this, from Luke 10:1:

After this the Lord appointed seventy-two others and sent them two by two ahead of him to every town and place where he was about to go.

Makes sense, really, that a proclaimer of the gospel would proclaim something like, “And the reason I am here is because he is on his way to see you.” After all, “gospel” is:

an imperial pronouncement, an imperial decree, a proclamation of good news from the empire. News of the expansion of the empire, the vanquishing of her enemies, the ascension of a new emperor to the throne, a birth in the household of Caesar – all of these were ‘gospels.’

As we talked about earlier this month, the full proclamation of the gospel is tripartite: Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again. So anywhere the gospel is authentically preached, the result will be urgent preparation, expectation, and longing for Christ’s return.

Not seeing that a lot in gospel proclamations these days… Since the “gospel” preached by many evangelists is not the gospel but rather a plan of salvation, the presenting issue is the creation and satisfaction of existential angst in the mind (rather, emotions) of the hearer. But for the true proclamation of the gospel, the issue is not the generation of sufficient existential angst to trigger the decisional tipping point to say yes to Jesus but simply faithfulness to the imperial announcement entrusted to the messenger.

I was reminded powerfully and simply of what the authentic proclamation of the “Christ will come again” plank of the gospel looks like when I was doing discipleship training recently for underground Eritrean church members. (Eritrea is consistently regarded as one of the most persecuting nations in the world.) As part of the “do the Word” training, I sent them out into the community in teams of two to do good in Jesus’ name.

One of the women encountered a number of people to whom, some Christian, some nonbelievers, she would ask, “Don’t you know that Christ is coming again?” She said it like it was the most natural and obvious thing to ask in the world. She didn’t say, “If you died tonight, do you know where you’d go?” That’s contrived. She said, essentially, “I am a messenger. I was sent to you because he is coming to visit here soon.”

It reminded me of Paul’s announcement to the Athenians at the Aeropagus:

“In the past God overlooked such ignorance, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent. For he has set a day when he will judge the world with justice by the man he has appointed. He has given proof of this to everyone by raising him from the dead.”

The most natural gospel presentation in the world. No angst-inducing personal introspection required (or, for that matter, desired).

Perhaps the most obvious reason why Christians double-clutch on this third plank of the gospel proclamation is that we are two thousands years into this ambassadorial function of ours and we don’t want to look like Harold Camping, announcing the end of the world and constantly revising the timeline.

But who said anything about a timeline?

Well, the Apostle Peter did say just this:

Above all, you must understand that in the last days scoffers will come, scoffing and following their own evil desires. They will say, “Where is this ‘coming’ he promised? Ever since our ancestors died, everything goes on as it has since the beginning of creation.” But they deliberately forget that long ago by God’s word the heavens came into being and the earth was formed out of water and by water. By these waters also the world of that time was deluged and destroyed. By the same word the present heavens and earth are reserved for fire, being kept for the day of judgment and destruction of the ungodly.

But do not forget this one thing, dear friends: With the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day. The Lord is not slow in keeping his promise, as some understand slowness. Instead he is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance.

But the day of the Lord will come like a thief. The heavens will disappear with a roar; the elements will be destroyed by fire, and the earth and everything done in it will be laid bare.

Sadly, when the day of the Lord does come, I suspect it will be as much an intrusion for most Christians as it will be for nonbelievers.

But not for my sister from Eritrea. With the Apostle Peter she announces exactly what she should:

Since everything will be destroyed in this way, what kind of people ought you to be? You ought to live holy and godly lives as you look forward to the day of God and speed its coming. That day will bring about the destruction of the heavens by fire, and the elements will melt in the heat. But in keeping with his promise we are looking forward to a new heaven and a new earth, where righteousness dwells.

So then, dear friends, since you are looking forward to this, make every effort to be found spotless, blameless and at peace with him.

She is an awesome proclaimer of the gospel, that Eritrean sister. Everywhere she goes, people are looking up.

Pastors are only too willing to rail against performance-based Christianity as a serious ailment afflicting large numbers of Christians these days. But that railing is actually quite woefully off the rails.

By performance-based Christianity I mean a Christian life that apparently, according to these preacherly protestations, causes a person to be ground down into nothingness by excessive attempts to serve the Lord in a mistaken effort to earn his favor.

The problem is that when you frame the problem this way, the solution comes out sounding something like this: “I had to learn to stop doing and just start being. I had to learn how to just accept God’s love and know that there was nothing God was requiring of me in return other than to believe and trust in his grace. There is nothing I can do to earn his favor, and when I try to earn his favor it is an insult to the sacrifice of his son for me.”

This sounds good, but on closer examination such a solution is actually no solution at all. The being/doing dichotomy is a Buddhist concept, not a Christian one. So while “I switched from doing to being” sounds holy enough, unless your doing-to-being enlightenment entails you heading off to a mountain monastery for round the clock meditation under a vow of silence, you actually do still have about the same amount of doing in your life, even after your doing-to-being aha moment. You’re just choosing to do different things.

And therein is the rub.

The more honest, accurate way to express the “doing to being” transformation touted by many pastors is: “I stopped doing (or reduced the amount of time I devoted to doing, or decreased the seriousness which I associated with doing) discipleship activities that I did not enjoy or wasn’t very successful at.” Suddenly, daily Scripture reading becomes slavery to the law. Refraining from eating a second muffin becomes rank legalism. Confessing your sin to God and your spouse when you masturbate becomes aspiring to the righteousness of the Pharisees.

In this doing-to-being paradigm, when you sin you can actually feel quite good about it. It proves the pastor right: You are no Jesus. You’re the mess-up, not the Messiah. Jesus loves that role, pastor says, and you should, too.

But that overlooks one very central truth of Scripture that can be found on virtually every page of the Old and New Testament:

Enduring Happiness is Only Possible If You Live According to the Gospel.

Enduring happiness, in other words, comes from hearing and doing the Word.

So am I advocating that you “jump back on the performance treadmill”? By no means. But I am advocating that you discard this nonsense, non-Christian talk that opposes being and doing and instead trust—really trust—that everyone who hears the words of Jesus and puts them into practice is like a wise man who built his house on the rock.

Notice that there’s no caution or caveat here from Jesus about performance fatigue. The reason why is that the dichotomy we must attend to is not doing-versus-being but rather leading-versus-following.

Do you know what a performance-based Christian life really is? It’s a life where we attempt to lead, rather than follow, Christ. It’s a life where we regularly attempt to do the Word without first having heard it. If we let Christ lead, and if we hear his Word, we will recognize that he, not us, has already prepared good works in advance for us to do. Some of those works are just plain fun. Others are arduous or boring or tedious. But all have the effect of growing us into his fullness.

And that’s why his yoke is easy and his burden light: It’s not because a sloppy, sinful path leads to eternal life. (Sin, after all, means not trusting him to provide a way to overcome temptation.) Instead, it’s because his spirit is the one doing the heavy lifting. Like the disciples distributing loaves of bread that Jesus multiplied, our task is not to bake the bread but simply to share with others the loaves-and-fishes whole body grace and goodness and lovingkindness we receive daily from our master’s hand.

When we do that (when, in other words, we live according to the gospel), we discover that doing the Word is a means of grace—one more way we come to know, experience, and be blessed by God’s character—not be fatigued by it.

The gospel is the announcement of the rule and reign of Christ in three equally important and essential acts:

Christ has died.
Christ is risen.
Christ will come again.

Modern gospel formulations typically stress the first act and either go soft or quiet or queasy on the latter two. They either fail to mention those two acts altogether (i.e., “Christ died for your sins, and if you believe that, your afterlife will go down much more smoothly”) or  they subvert them to the first act (i.e., “Christ died for your sins; his resurrection proves it; and he’s gonna come back and be jolly decent to you if you believe it”).

But the latter two proclamations are far more than just struts and supports for the first. They are essential elements of the good news in their own right. When we fail to give them equal emphasis to the first in our evangelism, we end up with misshapen Christians living out a misshapen Christianity.

• “Christ is risen” reminds us that all power in heaven and on earth has been given to him. We can be set free from the sins that entangle us, not just forgiven for our entanglement. And we can move and act boldly without fear of those who can harm the body. It is this present earth, not only a future heaven, that Christ holds in his hands.
• “Christ will come again” reminds us that the remainder of our lives is to be devoted to preparing for his return. His return influences whether we marry, what job we do, how we do it, the kind of holy lives we live, and the content of the conversations we have. The wellspring of action for the Christian is not “I’m forgiven” but rather “Behold! He is coming soon!”
• Leave out or subvert the proclamation of Christ’s present reign and you get forgiven but woefully anemic Christians who continue to submit their bodies to sin even as they assure themselves that this is simply proof of God’s amazing grace that we need do nothing to earn our salvation.
• Leave out or subvert the proclamation of Christ’s return and you get Christians whose earthly hopes, dreams, goals and visions are virtually indistinguishable from their non-Christian counterparts. Worse, you get Christians who are ill-prepared for the acceleration of persecution that the Scriptures warn will attend the coming of the end of the present age.

That is why Paul insists in 1 Corinthians 15:3-4 that the gospel is always to be proclaimed “according to the Scriptures.” Absent a robust, tripartite proclamation that puts equal emphasis on each 1/3rd of the gospel–“Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again”–we leave even those who receive our truncated message trapped until death as forgiven sinners in an endless evil age.