Some Thoughts From India on the Gospel and the Kingdom of God

I am wrestling with a lot of things as I recover from jet lag and settle back into my normal life. I have been greatly impacted by the Christians in India that we are working with. They have a perspective on life that does not exist here, at least in the people that I know.  They are Kingdom people. They use their time and their resources to bring glory to God. They think a lot about how they can help others and see people come to Christ. They sacrifice and face persecution. They continue to believe God and rejoice in Him. They are brilliant, talented people, and they are using their gifts so that more and more people might be helped and come to faith. When they receive resources, they do not use the resources on themselves, even though they have great needs. They continue to creatively think about how they can bless others and they use their resources for that purpose. They are taking the gospel into unreached mountains and are beginning to see real fruit. They are a tiny minority in a very hostile culture, but they do not complain nor do they focus on the blatant evil all around them. Their focus is on Jesus.  They are far from perfect and they can struggle like anyone else, but God is definitely at work in them.

Their Christian experience is very different from what I see here in the States. It has taken me four trips to realize that when they talk about education, health care, or economic development, they are not leaving out the gospel. For them, sharing Jesus with people is a given. They talk about the other things because people have real needs and they recognize that Christians are supposed to lay down their lives to meet the needs of others. There is no "social gospel" dichotomy. Helping lift others up out of poverty is just what Christians do, they tell me. They are confused when I keep bringing up evangelism as a priority, as if the fact that they are doing development work somehow cancels out the gospel. The two go hand in hand. Of course they do evangelism. How do you think they have all these baptisms and new church starts all over? I have realized that the separation of good works and gospel proclamation that we have here in the West is an anomaly. It is not a given elsewhere. As Christians in the West, we overspiritualize things. We separate spirit from body into a false dichotomy. We break man up into a bunch of little pieces and then pick and choose which ones to address. As conservative evangelical Baptists, we address man's eternal state, and then if we get to it, we address his physical state. But, the two remain separated. The "gospel" addresses the spiritual nature of man, and then the act of doing good deeds addresses the physical state of man, in our view. But, doing good deeds is considered largely optional, or subsequent to the "real" work of preaching the gospel.  I am coming to believe that separating things out like this is a terrible mistake.

Don't get me wrong: I fully understand that the gospel is the message of objective truth concerning the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus from the dead. Through the work of Jesus we are forgiven of our sins. Salvation is received by grace through faith. It is the gift of God. It brings about conversion, the new birth. But, the gospel is more than just forgiveness of sins. It is more that just the message of how we get into heaven - it affects all of life, including the life that we are presently living. I am beginning to believe that we are getting it all wrong. We are chopping the gospel, which is the power of God unto salvation for all who believe, into pieces and calling it truth. The result of this is that we have created a church in America that is primarily focused on whether or not they are getting into heaven. I use the term "church" loosely, because the vast majority of people who claim to be Christians in America do not participate in church. And, many who claim to be church members do not attend very regularly (see Southern Baptists). Yet, we have little to say to them because they all claim to be going to heaven and to have accepted Jesus. When the rich young man went to Jesus and asked what he must do to inherit eternal life, Jesus told him to sell all he had and give it to the poor. That doesn't make any sense to us. We say that he just meant that he could not have attachments to wealth. Maybe so, but you have to really discount Jesus' plain words to get that meaning. My conservative theology has no room for the very words of Jesus in our understanding of the gospel in passages like this. There are many, many other hard sayings of Jesus that we do not have much room for, so we just ignore them or explain them away.

I think that the answer to our problem is that we must enlarge from a gospel of only personal forgiveness of sins to the gospel of the Kingdom that Jesus preached (Matt. 4:23), which of course, includes forgiveness of sins and so much more. Jesus' message was for all of life.  He proclaimed the in breaking reign and rule of God through Himself. He did not just bring a teaching, but He appeared to take away our sins and destroy the devil's work (1 John 3:5,8).  Jesus does not call us to a teaching or a set of facts, but He calls us to Himself. As we repent (turn away) from our old life, we are called to embrace Jesus, not just a doctrine about Jesus. When we embrace Jesus, we embrace all that He is. His life becomes our life. We become His disciples. If we see things this way, then it makes sense that we begin to address all of life, because Jesus did. His Word comes alive and begins to mean something more to us than just a personal devotion book to make us feel better. The Gospel of the Kingdom sets itself up against all of the other kingdoms of this world. We realize that the Man, the Message, and the Mission are intricately intertwined and we dare not separate them into stages for our convenience. When we come to faith in Christ, we come to truly know HIM, not just a few teachings about Him that get us into heaven.

I have come to believe that the Christianity that we are proclaiming in the West has enfolded itself into our individualistic culture so much that it has become terribly weakened. My professor, Thom Wolf, used to say that most Christians are so subnormal that when a believer approaches normalcy he appears to be abnormal.  I think that I am seeing normal Christianity in India among the believers and it looks abnormal because we are so subnormal. I am really not trying to be critical and I have a lot of compassion on American believers. I love the American church. I just think that as pastors, we need to make sure that we are not truncating the true gospel of Jesus Christ to replace it with only part of the message. The good news of Jesus is that He makes all things new - our whole lives can come under His reign and rule.  The Christians in Northern India are demonstrating that. Praise God. 

   

Comments

[A S "Scotte" Hodel]

Alan,

Thank you for writing about this false dichotomy. The first step to "healing" is for us to recognize the disease. I hope this thought takes root in me and around us.

Yours,

Scotte

[sean m]

Interesting. I think you're right in many ways. The Scriptures certainly show that Jesus had compassion on people and met their physical needs when he encountered them.

But just like when he fed the 5000 and taught them too, they quickly became all about the bread, and he uses this to teach that He is the Bread of Life & the other bread is not the point at all, but He is.

These are good questions to wrestle with. I've come to think that if we have ANY resources that can meet a need of others we should meet that need & use it as a bridge to Jesus.

[Steve Walker]

Great post, Alan! I hope I'm not violating some blogging rule here by quoting another blogger on your blog -- delete my comment if this is inappropriate.

After reading your blog, I went to my next blog feed, The Gospel-Driven Church, where he was posting on NT Wright's lecture last night. http://gospeldrivenchurch.blogspot.com/2008/04/agents-of-new-creation.html

Here is the gem that connected precisely with your post --

"We are his workmanship, created for good works in Christ Jesus, that God created for us beforehand, that we might walk in them. Wright casts that using the Greek behind it -- we are his poema, his artwork, his "poem."

And then of course this means what many of us have been saying for quite some time: the radical implications of the gospel are that we are set free to be the tangible presence of Christ in a world caught up in the brokenness of the fall. It is our duty and should be our delight, as ambassadors of heaven and agents of the new creation, to bring glory to the God who is setting the world to rights by healing the sick, feeding the hungry, bringing freedom to the captives, comforting the distressed, forgiving debts, grieving with those who mourn, etc etc.

The motivation and power for this ecclesiological movement of new creationism is, of course, the amazing gospel of Jesus Christ's atoning death and resurrection."

I agree with you that modern Evangelicalism has really truncated the gospel here in America.

BTW, Thom is here right now, and will be preaching Sunday. I'll have to tell him your story about the roach. :-)