Blogosphere

I’ve written often on how the message of the cross -  the message “come and die (to yourself and to your sin), so that you might live”  - is the center of the gospel. 

I’ve also written about how I believe there is a difference between joy and happiness and that the gospel offers joy but does not promise us happiness (which is dependant on circumstances).

Today I read a blog that cited an article from Mission Frontiers that I want to share with you, along with another article from the same publication.  Below are mixed excerpts from both articles and at the bottom is a link to both articles, in their entirety.

Is the Gospel message that hundreds of thousands of missionaries are proclaiming around the world defective? Have hundreds of millions of people bought into a Gospel message that is, at its heart, unbiblical?

Have millions of ‘believers” simply hired God to make their lives complete?

Have we given people (false) expectations that do not line up with the Scripture?

If our view of God is that of a loving Heavenly Father who will rescue us from all pain and suffering in this life and shower us with good things, then we are setting people up for disillusionment and failure.

As Ray Comfort explains, “Those who come to faith through the door of seeking happiness in Christ will think that their happiness is evidence of God’s love. They may even think that God has forsaken them when trials come and their happiness leaves. But those who look to the Cross as a token of God’s love will never doubt His steadfast devotion to them. (p. 44)

The Gospel is a promise of the righteousness of Christ for all who will repent of their sins and trust Christ as their Savior. To have a right relationship with God, people must come to the understanding that they are lost and doomed to suffer the wrath of God unless they repent of their sins and trust Christ for their salvation. This must be at the heart of our Gospel message. The Gospel is not a promise of a happy, problem-free life - just the opposite.

They [people experiencing suffering and disappointment] don’t realize that they have been born into a world at war where our loving God is doing battle with an evil adversary who seeks to destroy their lives.

But if people who come to Christ are not told of this spiritual reality then there will be tremendous confusion and disillusionment when the truth of this unknown spiritual reality breaks in upon their lives. 

It is like a person who buys a vacation package to the French Riviera expecting a wonderful time of fun and relaxation only to discover upon his arrival that there is open warfare taking place with bombs going off, bullets flying and the wounded littering the sandy beaches. Such a person would naturally think: “What is going on here? This is not what I signed up for.

Until we realize that we are in a war for our lives, we will be sitting ducks for Satan’s attacks and schemes. We will continue to lose those people who were never adequately prepared for battle. We must proclaim a true Gospel of grace and forgiveness of sin and stop trying to market the Gospel as the solution to all of our problems. It is already the greatest gift anyone can receive.

Read the full articles: Are We Proclaiming a Defective Gospel and Why Are They Walking Away by Rick Wood  here

• -He provided a very nice place to stay for these next two weeks as we pack up our house,
• -He provided two other places to stay after our time is up at the previous place,
• -We have been using borrowed furniture our whole time here; the owners will come pick them all up at no charge!
• -A moving company is coming out today to give us a visual estimate on the cost of shipping our goods,
• -Our landlords are letting us break our lease at no extra charge,
• -They told us an inspector would have to tell us if we did a good enough job cleaning at the end of the month...then they called back and told us WE DO NOT HAVE TO CLEAN ANYTHING!!  Yea, we just meet the inspector for him to take assess any damage and take our keys.  All cleaning and damage will come out of our deposit.
• -Our 3 house bills (elecric, water, & gas) will all be summarized the same day as the inspector, and we just pay for all them at once,
• -Our chapel secretary will be getting our final internet & cell phone bills and will pay them for us after we leave (of course we are leaving her money),
• -Initially airline tickets were over 2K each one way, but round trip tickets cut the price in half...gee, what are we going to do?

So those are some of the many ways our God has been working things out for us (not forgetting the other things that are happening stateside...like getting a car and having a garage to fill with our stuff).

Thank you, God!

• I do not own the internet.
• I value spare time.
• Facebook
• Cooking for yourself is difficult.
• The Multnomah Bloggershere hates fallacy driven posts.
• Creativity + Academics = Maybe Next Time
• I cannot spell.
• I am often on the fence.
  
• I am literally "between" my job.
• I once ran for president
• took dating nominations
  
• and tire of tooting my own horn.
• I went to Germany again, which has become an annual post stopper.
• I buy books faster then I read them.

Somehow I got on the OneNewsNow mailing list and am all of a sudden getting a daily bulletin from them... Anyhoo, today there was an interesting link to an article describing the religion of our youth as Moralistic Therapeutic Deism. One of their best descriptions of that term, in my opinion, was that God is seen as nothing more than "an instrument of personal growth." I think that could describe the faith of more than youth!

It reminded me of an article my mom read me a month or so ago out of her Mission Frontiers newsletter. I've tracked down a link, if you click here you can look at the whole newsletter <March-April: Are We Losing More Than We're Gaining>.

The article I found most profoundly impacted me, and indeed I wish was required reading for all Christians, was "Are We Proclaiming A Defective Gospel." Basically the article discusses our efforts to market the Gospel, rather than simply tell it like it is. Jesus Christ came into this world to save us from our desperate sinful situation and make atonement for the wrath of God -- but it's too edgy, too politically incorrect to talk about people's sin. Instead, we talk about God's wonderful plan and how He can make your life better.

And of course, when people become Christians with the understanding that God's main job is to make them happy...well, it's no wonder they quickly fall by the wayside or lose faith when the tough times and hard questions come.

The best quote in the article, to me, comes near the end after the author has discussed the true reality of our situation, that it is one of warfare and combat, where earnestly following after God puts a literal target on your back:

It is like a person who buys a vacation package to the French Riviera expecting a wonderful time of fun and relaxation only to discover upon his arrival that there is open warfare taking place with bombs going off, bullets flying and the wounded littering the sandy beaches. Such a person would naturally think: "What is going on here? This is not what I signed up for." 

Until we realize that we are in a war for our lives, we will be sitting ducks for Satan's attacks and schemes. We will continue to lose those people who were never adequately prepared for battle. We must proclaim a true Gospel of grace and forgiveness of sin and stop trying to market the Gospel as the solution to all of our problems. It is already the greatest gift anyone can receive.

Amen. 

Growing up in a strict, fundamentalist church in the Deep South, a young Philip Yancey was impelled to view God as an abusive parent—rigid, legalistic, angry, ready o bring the gavel down for one wrong misstep. Perhaps the most confusing aspect of Yancey's early years was that a residue of Christian mercy remained in his church. If a neighbor's house burned down, Yancey's congregation would be the first at the scene to show charity—if, that is, the house belonged to a white man and someone who shared his church's unbending theology. His church leaders even urged Yancey's ailing father to take himself off of the iron lung machine that kept him breathing, assuring him he would be healed. The elder Yancey died a week later, when Philip was only one year old.

Yancey's only window to the real world as a young man was reading. So, he devoured books—books that opened his mind, challenged his upbringing, and went against everything he had been taught, like 1984, Animal Farm, and To Kill a Mockingbird. The more he read, the more frustrated he became. A sense of betrayal engulfed him. "I was an angry, wounded person emerging from a toxic church, and I've been in recovery ever since," says Yancey. "I went through a period of reacting against everything I was taught and even throwing my faith completely away at one point. I began my journey back to faith mainly by encountering a world that was quite different than I had been taught about; a world of beauty and goodness. As I experienced that, I realized maybe God had been misrepresented to me. So, I went back, warily circling around the faith."

I am sure some people shrug off a fundamentalist childhood like Gore-Tex in the rain, but Philip was not one of those. He absorbed its ardent narrowness, its fortress mentality, and its angry clasp on truth. Then he rejected it. When I met him, Philip had deliberately escaped fundamentalism. (So had his brother, but that is another story.) Philip had left that world, but I do not think he had gotten away clean.
The strength of fundamentalism is its forcefulness and purity. Fundamentalists know what they think, and they are fierce in promoting it. They can usually tell you what you think, too; they are often better at defining and critiquing others' positions than they are at listening to how others understand themselves.What seems to stick with ex-fundamentalists is a sense of principle, a willingness to fight for the truth, yet also a strong reaction to the rigid all-knowingness of the fundamentalist mindset...

Philip's special gift is to communicate grace to people in pain, coming alongside them in a gentle way, not pushing too hard, not pronouncing, but offering. Of course, everybody experiences pain, so in a sense his message is universal. Yet the most visceral response comes from Christians bruised by life, those hurt by the church's failings, those who wonder whether God can possibly care for them while permitting the suffering that has come their way. Philip understands pain. And he works hard, excruciatingly hard, to inscribe the simple message of God's love into the heart of pain.