Disciples of Jesus want to make disciples for Jesus.
This is not a matter of duty; it is the overflow of the life of Christ within us. Experiencing the love of God revealed to us in Jesus’s sacrificial death on the cross, we long that others will come to share God’s mercy in the personal knowledge of sins forgiven and peace with him. The joy that is our daily refreshment, as we trust Christ and walk with him, is something we long that others will share, in our culture of doom and gloom. The sure and certain hope of Christ’s return, in power and glory, to bring in his eternal kingdom of new heavens and a new earth, so transforms our prospects and outlook that we want many others to come to know this undergirding, shaping reality for life in the here and now.
Not easy
But making disciples does not happen easily. In a context like ours, where the tides of atheism are continually eroding what remains of our Christian heritage, we are becoming desensitised to our faith being routinely caricatured as unbelievable — at least for normal, reasonably intelligent, 21st-century people. The constant daily diet of the news bulletins is of war and violence, appalling atrocities and mindless slaughter, poverty and famine, disease and death. How can there possibly be a God of love and mercy in the face of such suffering, unprovoked and undeserved?
How can human beings ultimately have any lasting significance, if science has ‘disproved’ the Bible’s account of our origins and with it our destiny? How can the Person of Jesus possibly have relevance to life today, other than in some noble, but unworkable, ethical notions? As the coming revival of the rock opera Jesus Christ Superstar will remind us, isn’t he just a ‘jaded, faded, mandarin’, a superstar who overshot his zenith? Making disciples does not happen easily.
But God...
However, it does happen! What Paul observed in Colossians 1.6 is truer today than ever before. ‘All over the world this gospel is bearing fruit and growing’. What Peter exhorted his readers to be (in 1 Peter 3.15) is as much an imperative for us as it was for them. ‘Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you, to give a reason for the hope that you have’. Human culture has always been a battleground between the truth of the gospel and the lies of the devil, by which he blinds the minds of every individual until the light of Christ shines upon us. And it still is!
Yet many people are still coming to Christ from every ethnic background and in every part of God’s world. We must not lose our confidence in the truth of the message, the power of the gospel seed to produce a massive harvest. That was why Jesus told the parable of the sower and the soils (Mark 4.1-20). We may have particularly rocky and thorny soil to sow in here in the 21st-century Western world, but there is nothing wrong with the seed and our task is to continue to sow it.
Reason
But, to change the biblical metaphor, if the door of anyone’s life is to open to Christ, there may need first to be a removal of the undergrowth and brushwood, which otherwise will impede access. This is where ‘a reason for the hope’ comes in, which we are often not very good at. When people ask us ‘Why believe?’ we tend to answer them with what they should believe. Of course, the gospel has to be proclaimed, but the apostles did this by means of reasoning, explaining and proving (Acts 17.2-3), as well as by deconstructing the worldview of those who did not yet know that Jesus Christ is Lord. See, for example, Paul at work in Athens in Acts 17.24-31. This work is often vital if the gospel is to gain a hearing today, yet it is frequently downplayed and neglected.
Exposing the world
Traditionally, we have called this work ‘apologetics’ and it needs to be ‘rehabilitated’ in our evangelistic presentations. Because the term sounds like an ‘apology’, it is sometimes regarded negatively as a retreat from the clear proclamation of the truth. But that is to misunderstand its purpose. Of course, to rely on some rationalistic proof of the gospel, which we might think we could produce, would be to bow to the supremacy of human reason and so dethrone God. But to use the whole biblical revelation to expose the inadequacies of our cultural thinking, to question its presuppositions, to draw attention to its inconsistencies and to demonstrate its emptiness — that is something for all disciples to be doing wherever we have a cultural interface and whenever an opportunity occurs. In the next few issues, we will look at some of these issues in practice.
David Jackman is the past President of the Proclamation Trust.
