29/06/2020
The Message We Are Sending
The “church growth” movement of recent years has readied the church to take cues from what’s marketable, what appeals to the masses. We have distilled our Christian purpose into palatable phrases that the world won’t be ashamed to wear on a t-shirt.
The power of the crucified life is little known in a generation where people are too busy to tarry—a good old-fashioned word that has no place in a culture of expediency. The depth and breadth of our confession and sanctification cannot be summed up in a slogan like or .
A hashtag is easily misunderstood—there’s not enough information to know what it stands for.
A slogan is open to interpretation—it depends on who is saying it and who is hearing it.
A movement is prone to morph into something else—it starts one place and ends up in another, depending on the elements that join it and the forces that drive it.
But not Truth.
Truth is eternal. Immovable.
Truth is the same yesterday, today, and forever.
Because Truth is not a slogan. Truth is a person, and that person is Jesus Christ.
So, in this day of hashtags and slogans and catchy messages, let us once again become people who tarry. Let us ask the questions and linger on the answers.
WWJD?
We wore it on our wrists and the words slipped so easily from our lips.
What would Jesus do?
We even answered the question, sometimes without much thought, because we thought we already knew.
What WOULD Jesus do?
How can we know?
How can we know what Jesus WOULD do…if we don’t really know what He DID do?
Not just what He did in the Gospels, but what He did in the life of the church after His death and resurrection. And what He did in creation, the fall of man, and the subsequent generations of humanity that longed for a Savior, promised to a people set apart for God’s redemptive plan.
If we want to know what Jesus would DO, we must first know who He IS. To know Jesus is to look into His face every day in the word of God, to recognize Him there, to see God’s hand move, to hear His voice when He speaks on those pages, and in our very hearts at the same time. And when we recognize Him there in the Bible, when we know who He is there, we can then recognize Him in this world today.
Then we will see where His hand of blessing is. And where it isn’t.
Then we will hear what His voice says. And what it doesn’t.
Then we will know what justice is. And what it isn’t.
We will know what matters. And what doesn’t.
Not because a hashtag tells us so.
The proclamation of the church is not a hashtag.
The world doesn’t need to hear a hashtag coming from the mouths of Christians, or from the pulpits of our churches. It needs to hear what it has always needed to hear—the good news that is always bad news first.
We are wretched, all of us.
We have sinned, all of us, and fallen short of the glory of God.
There is none righteous among men, not even one.
Man sinned and that sin separated us from the holy God, the Creator.
But God, because He so loved the world—loved us—gave His Son to pay the price for man.
The sentence for sin is death.
Jesus served that sentence on our behalf.
Jesus died, once for all. And then He rose from the dead, conquering death, the enemy we could never conquer apart from Him. THAT IS THE GOOD NEWS!
This is what pulpits must proclaim. This is the message we must live.
This is what the world needs to hear:
We are dead in sin, but life is in Christ alone.
The debt has been paid.
The free gift of God is salvation for all WHO BELIEVE—who believe that sin requires death, that my sin requires death, that God sent His only Son Jesus as a sacrifice for that sin. That Jesus died and rose again, and that in Him alone there is eternal life.
There is one name given by which men must be saved.
Jesus.
This is the justice the church should be occupied with—that God in His love gave the Just for the unjust. That in Christ, the Justice of God meets the Mercy of God.
We need a Savior. He’s the only remedy. Because a Savior saves for eternity.
What greater message could the world need to hear?
