Seven Ways We Can Improve Our Proclamation Of The Gospel, Introduction: This Is Not Exactly The Great Age of Discipleship

Posted on August 12, 2011 by Pastor Foley

Call me crazy, but something tells me that—should Jesus tarry—our Christian era won’t exactly be remembered as “The Great Age of Discipleship.”

There’s a new documentary out called “Divided”—you can check it out at http://dividedthemovie.com/. It talks about the percentage of kids leaving the church today. Experts are saying that somewhere between 40% to 88% of Christian kids are abandoning the faith. Not exactly a rousing endorsement of how we do children’s ministry, that.

Then there’s a new Pew Research study that shows that Mormons did better on a test of Christian knowledge than white evangelical Protestants did…and white evangelical Protestants did only slightly better than atheists on the test. For example, only 67% of white Protestants knew that the Golden Rule isn’t part of the Ten Commandments. Hm.

Of course it’s possible to downplay the results like one columnist in Christianity Today did by noting that the Last Judgment is not a quiz show where you have to get the answers right and saying, “Jesus compares all of us to sheep, who are not known for their smarts.” But it’s probably not accidental that Mormons did better on the test and that Mormonism is growing at a faster rate. Not much good can come from ignorance, any way you look at it.

A generation ago we could (and did) blame the declining numbers on outdated music and the services being too formal and not enough emphasis on age-appropriate programming or outreach to seekers or getting men back in church or… Well, we blamed it on a bunch of things. But now that most worship is led by guys with holes in their jeans playing guitars while congregation members sip coffee and kids go off to “the children’s experience,” it seems like we may have been blaming the wrong stuff.

What if it turns out that the problem isn’t related to the form of our faith—things like casual versus formal worship services—but rather to the foundation of it? What if we simply don’t know how to proclaim the gospel well?

And what if the problem is not just that we don’t proclaim the gospel enough (though that’s probably true, too) but that we who are proclaiming the gospel may not be capturing the full essence of the gospel message in our proclamation and subsequent discipleship and, thus, we may be producing weak anemic Christians who become more immune to the gospel than attuned to it?

So in the spirit of semper reformanda, let’s consider seven ways we can reform—and thus dramatically  improve—our proclamation of the gospel.

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Proclaiming The Gospel, Part VIII: Miss This Point And You’ll End Up Despising The Kingdom

Posted on August 10, 2011 by Pastor Foley

In our last post, we came right up to the point of revealing the central mystery about proclaiming the gospel.

So what was this mystery that Jesus shared with those who believed? 

He shared with them the specific answer to the question that was troubling John the Baptist, the Pharisees, and the religious leaders! (Notice that he didn’t share the answer with the people who were asking the question, by the way…)

And what was the answer that Jesus gave?

He spoke in parables.

In Matthew 13 and in Mark 4, he lays out a series of parables. Now because we don’t understand the question Jesus’ hearers were asking—the main question his ministry raised—we tend to misunderstand these parables, and we make them into sweet generalizations about life and spiritual growth. But if you re-read the parables with the questions in mind that we’re talking about here—namely, “How can Jesus be the Messiah if fire is not falling from heaven and the world is not ending?”—they make tons more sense.

Take, for example, the parable of the seed and the sower in Mark 4:3-9, the parable of the seed growing in Mark 4:26-29, and the parable of the mustard seed in Mark 4:30-32. Notice anything in common there? 

Jesus is saying, “The secret that I am revealing to you is that the kingdom of God and the day of the Lord come in seed form. They can’t begin by bursting onto the scene with the sky being torn apart. That time will come, but it is not yet. And if you don’t understand this, you’ll likely overlook the kingdom. You’ll miss it altogether. You may even despise it. And then when that seed has fully grown and the harvest comes—when the sky is torn open and the reaper descends with fire from heaven—then you may find yourself on the wrong end of the sickle.” 

There’s a fascinating saying about this in Luke 17:20-21. It says there:

20Being asked by the Pharisees when the kingdom of God would come, he answered them, “The kingdom of God is not coming with signs to be observed, 21nor will they say, ‘Look, here it is!’ or ‘There!’ for behold, the kingdom of God is in the midst of you.”

So the Pharisees are looking for the observable signs that the prophets have promised: enemies destroyed. Fire falling from heaven. God’s people raised up. And Jesus responds by saying, “The kingdom of God is not coming with signs to be observed.” Instead, he says, “the kingdom of God is in the midst of you.” As in, “I, the king, am standing right here in front of you.”

So does that mean that the prophets were wrong when they predicted that the world would end with a bang? Not wrong at all, says Jesus. In fact, right after he rebukes the Pharisees, he turns to his disciples privately in Luke 17:22-37—remember, to the one who believes Jesus, to that one and only to that one are the secrets revealed—and Jesus shares with them that, yes, the time will come when the mountains will tremble and fire will fall from the skies, just like the prophets have said.

But that time is not yet. Why? Because, as Jesus would later show his disciples (including the two on the Emmaus Road after his resurrection), there’s a theme that runs through all of Scripture—a prophesy—that the Pharisees and John the Baptist and the religious leaders failed to see; namely, that the Messiah must suffer and die in order for the day of the Lord to be inaugurated. 

To put it very bluntly, for the day of the Lord to come, first the Lord must die. 

In John 12:24, Jesus reveals another piece of the mystery that he talks about in the parables: he says that he himself—the Son of God—is the seed. “Truly, truly, I say to you,” he says, “unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.”

It turns out that each of the eighteen dimensions of what the Lord would do on the day of the Lord is absolutely dependent upon the Lord himself laying down his own life. For example:

  • How will the Lord defeat death? The only way is for him to swallow death up in his own eternal life.
  • How will the Lord forgive sins and yet uphold his justice? The only way is for him to pay the penalty himself.
  • How can we come to obey the Lord’s commandments with a new heart? The only way is for the Lord’s own heart to be placed inside of us, which can only come from us being joined with him in his death and resurrection.
  • How can the Lord raise up the righteous? It turns out that, as Paul says in Romans 3:10, quoting the Psalms: “None is righteous, no, not one.” Or, as Alexander Solzhenitsyn puts it, the line between good and evil runs down the heart of every human being. So if the day of the Lord came like the Pharisees and John the Baptist had wanted, everyone—everyone—would have been destroyed. Only through God himself coming and being planted as a seed could his life be placed in ours through the Holy Spirit so that we could become righteous and stand at the last day.
  • How does the Lord heal? As Isaiah 53:4 tells us, he bears our diseases. Sin, sickness, and death—the unholy trinity, are joined at the hip. He must plunge all three down into death—and only his own death can accomplish this, because he is the only one on whom the unholy trinity have no claim because of his sinlessness.
  • And how can we live righteously? Some Christians today say it’s impossible—that Jesus only gave us the Sermon on the Mount so we would recognize that it’s impossible for us to love our enemies and overcome the lust and anger in our hearts. But they say these things because they believe too little. They do not believe all that the prophets have spoken. They can believe that Christ forgives our sins, but they cannot believe that he creates a new heart in us—his own heart—that, in response to our believing him, we accomplish things by the power of the Holy Spirit that are beyond the human imagination. It’s the worst theology ever to think that we earn his forgiveness by doing these things. Of course we don’t. We can only even do these things because we have freely received not only his forgiveness but also his Holy Spirit working in us.

So why doesn’t everyone get healed when we pray for them, and why do we still struggle with lust and anger, and why do our enemies still triumph over us, and why is the world still so hopelessly fallen? Because, says Jesus, the kingdom of God is a seed. It takes root and grows and spreads. It sanctifies us. The end has not yet ended—sin, illness, and death still hem us in on every side. But the new beginning has begun, and the victory is assured by his resurrection from the dead.

All of this has tremendous implications to how we are to proclaim the gospel, and we’ll talk about this beginning in our next post. For now it’s enough to remember that we are called to proclaim the same gospel the same way he did and to understand who we are as we proclaim it. We are the first fruits of a new creation. Members of his body. We ourselves are parables, really. Signs—and proof—of the ending of a very old and tired and evil age, and signs of the coming of a very new and perfect and eternal one. 

That new creation will finally come with a bang when he returns in glory. One of the errors we Christians sometimes make is to think that because the kingdom comes as a seed, it will just keep on growing until it is fully grown right here in the world. But as Jesus makes clear, the old heavens and the earth must finally be rolled up like a scroll and the sin, death, and evil that infect every seam of God’s good creation must be destroyed. The universe can’t just grow out of sin, death, and evil.

But until the “end of the end” comes, in this old creation we are the sign that the ending is beginning and the beginning is ending. We mirror his proclamation into the world so that when people see us and hear us they believe him and are drawn to him. Like him, we don’t chase after or try to convince those who doubt or reject us, and we share the mysteries only with those who believe. 

And because you have believed, even more will be given to you—insight, provision, care, sanctification, growing awareness of the love and power of God—in this age and all the way into the age to come.

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Proclaiming The Gospel, Part VII: If What You Believe Costs You Nothing, You’re Believing Too Little

Posted on August 8, 2011 by Pastor Foley

Evangelical Christians have a problem today: we believe too little.

We believe the things about Jesus that are important to us personally—we insist that these are the essential things—and we leave everything else in a category called “optional” or “for extra credit.”

Most Evangelical Christians believe, for example, that Jesus is loving, that he has personally forgiven them for their sins, and that as a result they will go to heaven when they die. 

But there’s something interesting about that belief:

It costs us nothing. It changes us not at all.

It can exist as pleasant background noise, like leaving the TV on while we get ready for work in the morning, or leaving the radio on in the car during our commute.

But once we get to the office, the gospel is a difference that makes very little difference in most Christians’ everyday lives. Like the two disciples on the road to Emmaus, we can walk away from Jerusalem more or less believing that Jesus’ tomb is empty, and yet we can still be sad. Our eyes can still be blinded because we may believe that Jesus saved us, but we can’t believe that he has redeemed Israel—meaning, we can’t believe that the day of the Lord has been inaugurated and all eighteen dimensions of what the prophets foretold are exploding around us as one age grinds to an end and a new one begins.

And we’re not alone in that. In fact, if you read the story of Jesus carefully in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, you’ll see that from the very beginning of Jesus’ ministry, people struggled to believe that all that he was saying was true. There were parts of it that they found easy to believe. If all Jesus had shared was the gospel that many evangelicals believe today—“I am God in the flesh. I have come to die for your sins. Load them up on my back and I will carry them to the Cross where God will punish me instead of you”—I think he would have been the most popular man in Jerusalem! I think people would have carried the cross for him! “Go Jesus go!”

But from the very outset, it was Jesus’ insistence that all that the prophets had spoken was being fulfilled in his ministry—that all eighteen dimensions of the day of the Lord were being inaugurated by him—that caused people to stumble and ultimately reject him because they didn’t see all these promises coming to pass in his ministry.

Remember, for example, the first public announcement of his ministry in Luke 4. That’s the one where he was in his hometown synagogue and he said, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor,” etc—“today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” When he finished his message, his hearers first “spoke well of him and marveled at his gracious words” (v. 22)…and then they literally tried to throw him off a cliff (v. 30)!

And remember what we mentioned earlier: Even after Jesus was raised from the dead, amidst reports that he might yet be alive, his disciples were sad—because from what they could see he had clearly failed to redeem Israel.

Even the guy you would think would be Jesus’ biggest supporter—John the Baptist—the forerunner—the prophet—the Elijah sent to prepare the way for Jesus—was confused by Jesus’ insistence that the kingdom of God was at hand. Check out Matthew 11:2-6:

2Now when John heard in prison about the deeds of the Christ, he sent word by his disciples 3and said to him, “Are you the one who is to come, or shall we look for another?” 4And Jesus answered them, “Go and tell John what you hear and see: 5the blind receive their sight and the lame walk, lepers are cleansed and the deaf hear, and the dead are raised up, and the poor have good news preached to them. 6And blessed is the one who is not offended by me.”

Don’t misunderstand this Scripture. It sounds like Jesus is saying, “Hey, come on, John—I’m doing the best that I can here! Isn’t this impressive enough for you?”

But that’s not at all what Jesus is saying. To understand John’s confusion—and the confusion of many (including perhaps even Judas, who betrayed Jesus)—you have to go back to the expectation of the prophets about “the great and terrible day of the Lord.”

You don’t even need to go back to the Old Testament for such prophecies; John himself repeats these same messages when he is preparing the way for “the one who is to come”. Let’s look at John the Baptist’s prophecy in Matthew 3:10-12. John says:

10“Even now the axe is laid to the root of the trees. Every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.

11“I baptize you with water for repentance, but he who is coming after me is mightier than I, whose sandals I am not worthy to carry. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. 12His winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will clear his threshing floor and gather his wheat into the barn, but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.”

Like all the Old Testament prophets, John saw “the day of the Lord” as the end of history. The earth would shake, stars would fall from the skies, and fire would descend from heaven to consume the unrighteous. Then Jesus shows up, and John recognizes him as the one who is to come—in John 1:29 he says, “Behold, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!” And in 1:32 he says, “I saw the Spirit descend from heaven like a dove, and it remained on him.” And then in 1:33-34 he says, “This is he who baptizes with the Holy Spirit. And I have seen and have borne witness that this is the Son of God.”

But then as Jesus’ ministry gets underway, John can’t help but notice that the earth isn’t shaking and the stars aren’t falling from the skies. No sign of burning chaff or unquenchable fire. The world was continuing on as it always had…yet Jesus insisted that the day of the Lord was at hand at the kingdom of God had come. John couldn’t figure it out. And neither could the religious leaders. It violated everything they knew from the Old Testament about the day of the Lord. So it’s no wonder that the religious leaders rejected him so completely.

It was in fact quite ridiculous if you think about it: Jesus claimed that the very kingdom of God was at hand and that the day of the Lord had come…and all that he had to show for it was a small band of tax collectors, prostitutes, and fishermen who didn’t even wash their hands before they ate! These were the “chaff” that were supposed to be consumed by the fire, poked by the winnowing fork! Instead, they were the only ones who believed Jesus, and he insisted that they were entering the kingdom of God ahead of the righteous (cf. Matthew 31)! Worse, he insisted that they were the righteous ones because they believed in him! 

We are wrong to simplify this by saying, “The Pharisees and the religious leaders were trying to work their way to heaven. They rejected Jesus because he said you could only get to heaven by grace.” The concept of grace runs way, way deep in the Old Testament. Jesus’ challenge to the Pharisees wasn’t faith versus works; it was his claim that the kingdom of God had come in him—that he was inaugurating the day of the Lord—that all that the prophets had written was coming to pass in him—despite the fact that everything the Pharisees and John the Baptist and the religious leaders knew about the day of the Lord wasn’t happening. God’s enemies remained in power. Fire did not fall from heaven. Mountains did not shake. Not everyone who came to Jesus was healed. And he surrounded himself with those whom the Old Testament prophets had clearly said would not inherit the kingdom of God:

  • tax collectors who had collaborated with God’s enemies;
  • prostitutes who had defiled their bodies for money;
  • ordinary people who hardly even knew God’s law and who often did not obey it.

And in response to it all, Jesus talked about a mystery. He said to his followers in Matthew 13:11-12, “To you it has been given to know the secrets of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it has not been given.”

In other words, to those who believed him, Jesus explained things. To those who didn’t, he never sought to justify or explain himself. Not even to John the Baptist! He just pointed to what could be seen. And in fact he goes on in Matthew 13:12 to say, “For to the one who has, more will be given, and he will have an abundance, but from the one who has not, even what he has will be taken away.” Believe Jesus even when you don’t understand, and he’ll open the mysteries to you. But if you struggle to believe in him or what he says, even what little faith you have will evaporate.

So what was the mystery he shared with those who believed?

We’ll save that for our next post. After all, what would a good mystery be without at least a little suspense?

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