But don’t mention sin or judgment, because it will only put people off.
This was the proviso included in the invitation which a friend of mine recently received, to speak at a university students’ meeting. Of course we know what the student writer meant. In our contemporary culture the concept that God would ever judge or punish is an anathema. Only the other day, after I had been preaching the good news of Christ crucified, against the bleak backdrop of God’s righteous judgment, someone came to take me to task for being so ‘negative’.
Instead of telling people that they are sinners needing to be rescued, it was argued that we should recognise that our society is much kinder, generous and more tolerant than it has ever been and build on that. The preacher’s task would be to encourage this development more and more, by looking to Jesus for the help to achieve our personal potential, as he did.
Heart of the faith
Of course, there is a real rescue issue here. The heart of the Christian faith is that ‘Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners’. Until we come to recognise ourselves as sinners Jesus came to rescue, we shall never connect with the Christian message, or the God who proclaimed it. Instead, it will always be reduced to a code of rules and regulations, which in its most dilute form is all about being nice to people and helping old ladies to cross the road. Such a message is inoffensive. Very few people are going to argue with the idea that the world would be a much happier place if love won over hatred and peace replaced conflict. But it is also unattractive, at least at the individual level, because it shuts you in to a moral system where you are trapped in the unattainable do’s and don’ts of an impersonal code.
That is what has been causing the haemorrhage of young people from the churches over the past two generations, at least; not the gospel of sin and salvation.
Reaching self-affirming Pharisees
But the pressing issue is how the true gospel can penetrate the defences of a culture that is sure it neither wants nor needs its message. In our ethos of self-affirmation, how can anyone be brought to cry out ‘God be merciful to me, a sinner’ (Luke 18.13)? The primary and essential answer to that is only by the gracious, convicting and life-giving work of God, the Holy Spirit.
The gospel is profoundly counter-cultural, as it always has been. Every new birth is a sovereign work of God, which is why prayer lies at the heart of all fruitful evangelistic endeavour. We cannot bring the spiritually dead to life. Only God can do that. He may choose to use us as channels of his grace and truth, as links in a chain by which he draws people to himself, but we cannot accomplish that work. We are utterly dependent on God, which is why we pray. For when God’s people pray, God works. And when we don’t pray, we work; but there is an eternity of difference in the outcomes.
What makes the difference?
People in our culture may not naturally think in terms of right and wrong, of sin and judgment, so that often gospel proclamation appears at first to be detached and critical, ‘holier that thou’. But they do think in terms of freedom and inhibition, fulfilment and failure. Why the connections to Christian truth so often fail to be made is because people have never realised that Christianity is all about a personal relationship with God, through Christ.
What makes the difference is seeing the change in life-style of those who realise how much they are loved by God and so live transformed lives, as those who know God. ‘This is how we know we are in him. Whoever claims to live in him must walk as Jesus did’ (1John 2.5-6). It is the freedom of reciprocal love which enables forgiven sinners to live as children of God – not because we have to, but because we want to. That is the difference between legalism and grace.
We engage with the spirit of our age, not by compromise on the hard truths which lie at the root of God’s gospel grace and love. If we do that we shall merely present an anaemic religious version of the culture’s own existing aspirations, which will deservedly be ignored or rejected.
Rather, we engage by living out the joy and freedom which are ours, since we know that, in Christ, God has nothing against us and that the message of the cross assures us, for all eternity, that God could not love us more than he does and that he will never love us less.
As the Christmas season once again provides us with arguably the best opportunities within the whole year to make Christ known, let’s pray that God will use our transformed attitudes and life-styles to get under the radar with our families and friends. Above all, that, as the lights shines in the darkness, we will bring the blind to see and the dead to life.
