The Gospel Coalition

“If you accuse, accuse from love.
If you correct, correct from love.
If you spare, spare from love.
Let love be rooted deep in you, and only good can grow from it.”

- Augustine of Hippo (from Sermon on 1 John)

In an increasingly materialistic and pagan environment, it is time that we reclaim the entire Christian Story, finding innovative and creative ways to tell people the Good News of our Savior and King! The Christian Story is not only for pastors to tell. All the citizens of God’s Kingdom are called to extend the reign of Jesus Christ into every nook and cranny of a society held captive to the forces of evil. The Story is true. The Story is ours.

Jesus told the Story of what God was doing by using parables, and His stories are still analyzed, discussed, and applied today. C.S. Lewis’ The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe cloaks the Christian message in beautiful allegory and still has the power to captivate children and adults more than 50 years later. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings communicates integral parts of the Christian worldview, showcasing the struggle against good and evil.

We must tell the Story in the business world, where the wisdom of the experts would have every worker living only to serve Mammon. Living out the Gospel Story would mean purposefully subverting the materialistic mindset, by living according to Another’s lordship, laying up treasure in heaven and seeking the justice, mercy and humility that God requires.

We must tell the Story in the political realm, where the kingdom of man and the Kingdom of God often collide. In a world known for corruption, struggles over power and holding onto authority through bribery of the electorate and special interest groups, men and women of God must be ready to show the world that there’s another way to lead, other ways to use authority, and an honest way to live.

We must communicate our worldview through the arts – music, television, movies, books – creatively communicating God’s truth to a world that desperately needs it. The people of God’s Kingdom must be shining light in every part of society. That’s how the Story can be told.

When Christians begin to tell the Story – all of it – highlighting Creation, Fall, Redemption and our Future Glory, we will see lost people repent, not in the way we usually use that word (a mere feeling sorry for past sins), but in the way God intends – a “turning around” and “changing of the mind.” Salvation is more than an emotional decision or intellectual recognition of the propositions on a commitment card. To repent means to turn around and go in the opposite direction – to change your way of thinking – to begin living your life in light of a Story different than the one you thought you knew.

The world is crying out for the Story. Will we be bold enough to tell it?

(Part 3 of 3)

A couple months ago I had a unique witnessing opportunity to a family with no Bible knowledge at all. They asked me to share the Gospel with them. How do you do that to someone with no Gospel knowledge at all? After all, “Jesus died for your sins” doesn’t make sense if you don’t know who Jesus is, what sin is, and why anyone would have to die anyway. So, in about an hour’s time, I took the family through the entire Story of the Bible from Creation to New Creation, hitting all the highlights.

As our culture becomes more and more biblically illiterate, the Story method of evangelism will be necessary. (See my two previous posts, and the one after this!)

My question for you: What would you throw in?

You have one hour to share the Bible’s worldview.

What stories do you include?
What do you skip over?
What theological teachings are necessary before you get to Jesus?

 Why do many of our methods of evangelism neglect the importance of the Story? In many evangelical churches, “witnessing” has been whittled down to nothing more than handing out a tract that shows stick figures jumping over a pit by way of a funny-looking cross. Or if it’s not the stick figures, it’s the ABC’s of salvation or the Four Spiritual Laws. Want to show others the way to heaven? Just memorize the Romans Road. Easy. Painless.

Of course, there is nothing inherently wrong with the above methods of Gospel-sharing. The Four Spiritual Laws are true. So are the brochures starring the stick figures. The ABC’s of Salvation may be Kindergarten truth, but truth they still remain. No one will deny that God has used such methods to bring people into His Kingdom.

But if God had wanted us to flatten the Gospel message into three or four abstract truths, why didn’t He give us a Bible that reads likewise? Why doesn’t the Bible teach us step by step how someone goes to heaven and then summarize those truths for speedy reference? Why didn’t Paul or Peter go through their well-polished ABC’s when they spoke to the Jews and Greeks? Puzzling, isn’t it? Instead of a numbered list of truths, God chose to give us a book that is made up mostly of narratives. Stories.

The Gospel message that “Jesus is Lord and God raised Him from the dead” doesn’t make sense if proclaimed apart from the biblical worldview in which that truth finds its proper meaning. Consider our society. Postmodernism rejects the whole notion of their being a Meta-narrative – one overarching Story that makes sense of the whole world. History becomes simply one person’s version of truth; thus the world has countless “histories” – stories that each group tells based on their common experience. None is right or wrong. All are subjective, changeable, and equally valid.

In this buffet of “histories,” people hunger for the Story that explains where we’ve come from, who we are, what’s gone wrong, what the solution is, and where we are going. Christians must come to the rescue, not by handing out a tract that reads like a 3-point sermon, nor by quoting verses at random. We must provide answers by telling people we know the Story.

 At Pentecost, Peter proclaimed that God had fulfilled the ancient Jewish prophecies in Jesus of Nazareth. Speaking to a crowd that upheld a basic biblical worldview, he could immediately begin proclaiming the message that Jesus was Lord and God had raised Him from the dead.

But fast forward to Paul in Athens. In a pagan environment with no knowledge of the One True God, Paul begins with creation. The opening chapter of God’s great Story. Paul’s sermon differs from Peter’s, not because the core truths have been altered, but because the worldview of those listening was different. Addressing his fellow Jews, Peter could jump right ahead to latest chapter in the Story God had been writing. But addressing the Greeks, Paul had to begin with Chapter 1, before going any further.

Part 2 of 3

“Tell me a story! Tell me a story!” From the time we can put together syllables and comprehend what other people are saying, we are fascinated by stories. Children want to hear bedtime stories, even if they are the same adventures they have heard hundreds of times. Teenagers flock to the local movie theater to experience the latest stories coming out of Hollywood. Even adults enter the world of stories, curling up on the sofa with a good book, whether a biography of some famous person, a fictional drama, a romantic fling or the history of a nation. From kindergarten on, we live for stories. Something deep within the human soul hungers for narratives and the truths they convey.            

But stories are not meant just to give us relaxation and entertainment in our free time. We do not only live for stories, we live by them also. The three major monotheistic religions of the world are each centered in a story, a grand narrative in which the modern-day adherent is expected to take part. Christians seek to live according to the biblical story as given in the Old and New Testaments. We cannot look to the Bible as simply an abstract treatise on systematic theology (even though it contains concepts that can be broken down and filed as such).

 Scripture is above all else a collection of stories that make up the Story – the grand narrative that explains our world. God has chosen, through his Word, to tell his children the Story, not a bedtime story that rocks us into a gentle sleep, but the Story that we awake to in the morning that explains why we exist. God’s Story tells us who we are, what has gone wrong with the world, what God has done to redeem and restore his broken creation, and what the future holds for his people. The essential questions for the framing of a worldview find their answers in the biblical narrative. We live for stories because we live by stories.

 Part 1 of 3.