The Gospel is... Part 3

Part 3 – Implications

I want to start first of all with some organizational implications.  Since I can remember, churches that I have known and churches that I have been a part of have had “discipleship classes.” What that amounted to was 6-20 weeks (depending on how much the teacher liked to teach) of faith fundamentals.  They have always been structured essentially the same way – I talk, you listen. Then at the end of 6 weeks or 8 weeks or 12 weeks, you are discipled.  Or at least that is what is supposed to happen.

Not to go all “Dr. Phil” on you, but how is that working for us?  This reduces discipleship to teaching.  Discipleship should be awakening, empowering, and releasing people to live in the Kingdom – and then they actually go do it!  But we have done none of that within this discipleship class.  How do we know if they are applying it?  How do we know if their marriage is better?  How do we know if they are being more like Jesus in front of their friends, neighbors, or co-workers?  How do we know anything about their lives at all?  We don’t!  What we do accomplish is setting a foundation for knowledge about the Bible to stay conceptual. 

To take a brand new believer and help them feel like they have accomplished something by just finishing the class is catastrophic for their healthy spiritual development.  We have made people who are not creating the right culture for people around them to know who God really is and how they can have real peace in the midst of utter chaos.

The Kingdom – The Gospel – is about intentionally walking alongside one another so that we can encourage and inspire one another to put God’s peace on display to the world.  Jesus said, “If I be lifted up, I will draw all men unto me.”  This is our sacred task – to lift Jesus up in all aspects of our lives.

Discipleship then becomes the journey of walking alongside others in the process of letting go of those things in our lives that we have chased that we thought would give us peace – but haven’t.

This reality of the Gospel being a message about living in the Kingdom of God substantially changes another commonly misused term – accountability.  Typically, when someone “sins” or fails in some way, they realize that they don’t have the power to exercise their will over an issue. If they are serious about lining up with the moral code of their church context (which is different based on denominational affiliation, the part of the world you live in, and other factors), they ask someone they trust to hold them “accountable” to not doing that bad thing they did.

This has at least 2 negative consequences. First, it doesn’t actually empower the offender to have real freedom over that issue.  It just raises the consequence of failure because now I have to tell someone.  Second, the “accountability group” becomes a confessional session without any teeth to help one change.  So the group meets for coffee, tells their sins, or at least the ones they are willing to be honest with, then prays and moves on.

In a proper understanding of the Gospel, accountability becomes more about calling out what I see God has placed in you.  It is about coming to terms with what we see God doing around us and getting involved in His mission that is going on right here, right now.  Accountability is not about holding on ‘til “some glad morning.”  It is about journeying together to maximize our roles in God’s work right now – today.

The discussion of sin becomes a smaller part of this time together, not the point.  The point is finding God’s agenda in our context and aligning with it. Putting His peace on display to the world, lifting Jesus up, taking on His mission, however you choose to say it – accountability is not about confession.  Accountability is about helping all of us take responsibility for our role in the Kingdom.

In my opinion, the biggest organizational implication is how we introduce people to God for the first time. Too many of these kinds of conversations start with the brokenness of man.  We focus on how bad mankind is, how bad I am, and how bad you are if you are still listening by that time.  If you take the average person on the average street and try to convince them that they are bad, you are already fighting a foolish battle.  It is foolish on multiple levels.

First, when you open a relationship with “Did you know you are an abomination?” or some version of that, that conversation is most likely not going anywhere fast.  It demeans me as a person and put me on the defensive.  Even if I would have agreed with you, I am not going to now simply because of the approach.  If I am going to be a part of God’s Kingdom, then I have to care about what He cares about.  And God loves people!

Nowhere in any world or at any level of relationship does starting out with me pointing out how bad you are as a person show I value you in any way.  There has to be a better approach.

Second, my experience has shown that I do not need to tell people that they are bad.  They already believe that.  Show me one woman who is happy with herself.  Show me one man who at his core isn’t fighting insecurity about being man enough in something.  We all feel like we are insufficient.  This is at the core of advertising.  Advertising makes us feel like we would be enough if we just had “this,” or did “that.”

Our Gospel message cannot start with the fallenness of man.  It must start with the goodness of God.  And if you think about it, that is where the Scriptures start as well.  The story begins with a good God who creates a good world and creates man and woman very good.  Rebellion gets in the way of that in “the fall,” but the rest of the story is about a good God who is inviting us to trust His story and re-engage His mission.

This profoundly impacts sermons, conversations with non-believers, counseling, and just about every other aspect of how we communicate with people.  Our banner should be the goodness of God.  Consider the 10 commandments…

God says to the people, “Don’t take my name in vain.” Without going into a long explanation, this doesn’t have anything to do with swearing or cussing.  What God is saying here is that when you choose to call yourself a follower of God (a Christian), He doesn’t give you a t-shirt or a medal.  He gives you His name. This is what we are to strive to protect.  It is the precious token exchanged at the wedding ceremony in our covenant with God.  It is the most important thing He has.  We cannot take it without owning the responsibility of bearing that name.

Our sermons then, must be an upholding, celebrating, and praising of that great name.  We should always be putting the awesomeness, goodness, and peace of God on display.

This also affects testimonies.  Growing up in church, testimony night was part of the culture.  It always seemed that the best testimonies, the ones that attracted the most response, were always about all the gory details of what someone was saved from.  And the gorier the better.  With a proper understanding of the Gospel, our testimony is more about who saved us and what we have been saved for than it is about what we were saved from. 

Paul says that the old is gone and the new has come.  We are not what we were.  But when our testimony of the Gospel is about who we were, we keep fixating on things that God doesn’t even remember.  Realizing who we really are in Christ starts with letting go of what we are not.  In Christ, we are not what God saved us out of. 

I would like to wrap this all up with an example of how a discussion might go in the process of understanding the Gospel beyond salvation.  First, just a bit of context.  Jesus was a Jewish rabbi.  He spoke to a Jewish audience and with a Jewish approach.  I am not trying to validate or invalidate Greek or Hebrew teaching.  I am saying that this is how Jesus taught and understanding this opens up all kinds of insight into His message.

Every rabbi taught in parables. This was nothing new. And every rabbi anchored the parables they taught into the text. Each story contained a “hint” that set that parable in an Old Testament passage.  It is within that Old Testament passage that the meaning of the parable was found. This made a full and proper understanding of the text central to the Jewish life. Without that, no Jew would have ever truly understood the rabbi’s point.  This “hint” was called a remez.

The discussion that ensued after the rabbi taught was about where the remez was and why that was the remez and what the implication was to the rabbi’s yoke (his particular interpretation of the text). When we approach the parables of Jesus understanding this, it opens up a very lively discussion that throws us neck deep into the scripture.  And it shows how well or how “not well” we know our text.  But I can attest to the fact that it will absolutely force people to not only know the story, but to wrestle and process it as well.

It is not unique to Jesus that He doesn’t tell people the point of His parables.  He says, “He who has ears let him hear.”  He who has ears, not only knows the point the rabbi is trying to make, but also the Old Testament text that the point is found in. 

A rabbi never speaks in front of people without it coming from the text or in response to the text.  This is why Jesus floored people when He would say things like, “You have heard it said…, But I say…” No rabbi would ever speak on his own authority. He was always tied to the yoke he had been given. This new teaching – though anchored to the text – was a revolutionary take compared to the rabbinic contemporaries of Jesus’ day.

Mark 4:30-34 New International Version 1984 (NIV1984)

Again he said, “What shall we say the kingdom of God is like, or what parable shall we use to describe it? It is like a mustard seed, which is the smallest seed you plant in the ground. Yet when planted, it grows and becomes the largest of all garden plants, with such big branches that the birds of the air can perch in its shade.”

We all know this as the parable of the Mustard seed.  I have heard many sermons given on this passage.  And many good points were made about living the Christian life in a godly way.  But I am not sure that they get at the point that Jesus Himself was trying to make.

Some initial observations about this parable: first, go to Israel and ask any Israeli today how they feel about mustard trees.  These trees are considered a weed.  They move in and take over.  You can go there today and see whole hillsides that have been overrun by mustard trees.  Think of the most aggressive, obnoxious weed that you can think of and you are getting at how the Jewish people felt and still feel about mustard trees.

Second, no rabbi would waste words on meaningless details.  So whatever Jesus means by this parable, it has to involve the birds resting in the shade of the branches.

This then would be the kind of thing we are looking for when we begin our search for the remez of this passage. We have plants that grow and take over and birds resting in branches.  Does anything like that exist in the Old Testament? Of course it does.

Ezekiel 17 New International Version 1984 (NIV1984)

The word of the Lord came to me: “Son of man, set forth an allegory and tell the house of Israel a parable. Say to them, ‘This is what the Sovereign Lord says: A great eagle with powerful wings, long feathers and full plumage of varied colors came to Lebanon. Taking hold of the top of a cedar, he broke off its topmost shoot and carried it away to a land of merchants, where he planted it in a city of traders.

“‘He took some of the seed of your land and put it in fertile soil. He planted it like a willow by abundant water, and it sprouted and became a low, spreading vine. Its branches turned toward him, but its roots remained under it. So it became a vine and produced branches and put out leafy boughs.

“‘But there was another great eagle with powerful wings and full plumage. The vine now sent out its roots toward him from the plot where it was planted and stretched out its branches to him for water. It had been planted in good soil by abundant water so that it would produce branches, bear fruit and become a splendid vine.’

“Say to them, ‘This is what the Sovereign Lord says: Will it thrive? Will it not be uprooted and stripped of its fruit so that it withers? All its new growth will wither. It will not take a strong arm or many people to pull it up by the roots. Even if it is transplanted, will it thrive? Will it not wither completely when the east wind strikes it—wither away in the plot where it grew?’”

Then the word of the Lord came to me: “Say to this rebellious house, ‘Do you not know what these things mean?’ Say to them: ‘The king of Babylon went to Jerusalem and carried off her king and her nobles, bringing them back with him to Babylon. Then he took a member of the royal family and made a treaty with him, putting him under oath. He also carried away the leading men of the land, so that the kingdom would be brought low, unable to rise again, surviving only by keeping his treaty. But the king rebelled against him by sending his envoys to Egypt to get horses and a large army. Will he succeed? Will he who does such things escape? Will he break the treaty and yet escape?

“‘As surely as I live, declares the Sovereign Lord, he shall die in Babylon, in the land of the king who put him on the throne, whose oath he despised and whose treaty he broke. Pharaoh with his mighty army and great horde will be of no help to him in war, when ramps are built and siege works erected to destroy many lives. He despised the oath by breaking the covenant. Because he had given his hand in pledge and yet did all these things, he shall not escape.

“‘Therefore this is what the Sovereign Lord says: As surely as I live, I will bring down on his head my oath that he despised and my covenant that he broke. I will spread my net for him, and he will be caught in my snare. I will bring him to Babylon and execute judgment upon him there because he was unfaithful to me. All his fleeing troops will fall by the sword, and the survivors will be scattered to the winds. Then you will know that I the Lord have spoken.

“‘This is what the Sovereign Lord says: I myself will take a shoot from the very top of a cedar and plant it; I will break off a tender sprig from its topmost shoots and plant it on a high and lofty mountain. On the mountain heights of Israel I will plant it; it will produce branches and bear fruit and become a splendid cedar. Birds of every kind will nest in it; they will find shelter in the shade of its branches. All the trees of the field will know that I the Lord bring down the tall tree and make the low tree grow tall. I dry up the green tree and make the dry tree flourish.

“‘I the Lord have spoken, and I will do it.’”

Here we see all the connections to the major points that Jesus puts into the parable of the mustard seed.  And I can tell you with absolute confidence that if you give this story to any orthodox Jewish person even today, they will know exactly what is being referred to.

Now, back to the broader question: What is the point of the parable? I would suggest that the point of the parable of the mustard seed is not the mustard seed or the tree that it turns into.  And while it is true that the Kingdom of God grows and expands when it acts like the Kingdom of God, that is not what Jesus is trying to point out.

In Mark 4, this is the last in a series of parables that Jesus is telling the crowds.  All the parables have a farming/ seed scattering theme, but this parable would have been His big “in conclusion” for this section of teaching.  I think Jesus is brilliant in this section of teaching for lots of reasons, but probably the biggest reason in my mind is how He uses the remez in this parable.  He changes the plant just to make sure that we know that His point doesn’t rest with the plant, but with the birds resting in the branches.  Yet He still uses a plant that has all the properties needed to fulfill His purpose in telling the story to begin with. 

Jesus uses seeds and sowing to explain all kinds of principles in this section of teaching, and then He makes one final point about the Kingdom again using seeds. His point is that if we as Kingdom residents are going to actually walk this stuff out, then everyone receives the benefit, even if they just rest in the shade of the branches. This leads me to some important conclusions concerning the Kingdom, the Gospel, and how we live within the communities where we reside.

First, the Kingdom is the plant, not the birds.  Second, while the birds are not part of the Kingdom, they receive the benefit of the Kingdom’s activity.  In an extremely hot and dry climate like the Middle East, shade is a precious commodity.  And it is the greatest gift that a plant can give.

So how does this play out? Let me first say that these kinds of applications of Jesus’ teaching on the Kingdom is exactly the kinds of conversations that your church body should be laboring over.  Believers should always be diligently studying the Scriptures and finding ways to apply the principles they find at work there.  “How does this play out?” should be a question at the core of all our conversations.

This is how I see this parable playing out in our context. Too many churches are measuring the success of the activities of the organization based on how many people “come to church” or how many people “became a Christian.”  I am not knocking these measures at a certain level because these are certainly goals of what we do as the church in our community.  However, I do not observe a lot of measuring how well we live out Kingdom Principles in our context.

The church I work at has a high value on generosity.  We are called to be generous – period.  Even if no one ever came to know Christ through it or no one ever came to church because of it, we are called to be generous because we are Kingdom residents, and our King is generous. We must be generous because we represent a King who is so generous he pays a whole day’s wage to people who work only one hour.  So, our church has done some things intentionally to be generous in our community.

My good friend, Jim Putman, used to say all the time, “If you want to show me that you really love me, love my kids.”  I see a lot of truth in that and so as a church we have taken that idea seriously.  We have adopted 2 schools now and are working on a third.

We have purchased school supplies for every student that goes to those schools.  No kids that goes to those schools has to purchase anything.  There are some dynamics there that have proven to be the parable of the mustard seed lived out to the tee.

We are not able to advertise in any way that the church is responsible for doing this.  Other than the announcement that the school itself makes about the fact that we are purchasing the supplies, there is no way that we are actually engaged with the families receiving the benefit of the school supplies. But in this time of economic uncertainty, it has been a welcome reprieve to many struggling families. And there was a fascinating thing that happened as a result of all this that we had not planned.

We have a saying in our church that goes like this… We must do our part, they must do their part, and God must do His part.  I cannot do God’s part, and I cannot do their part.  I can only do my part.  But I must do my part.

We did our part.  We were generous because it is a principle that Kingdom residents live by regardless of the result. The result is God’s part. And as you might imagine, God did His part.

We got more good press from people in the community writing the local newspapers (who refused to do an article on us) and from the word of mouth that spread from people talking about it than we ever could have gotten if we had put some flyer in with the supplies for every student.

If we had tried to force everyone to recognize our church for what we did, there would have been tremendous backlash and people would have said that we were doing this act of kindness just to get people to come to our church. But because we simply gave without strings, which is what generosity really is, we saw more positive response to the church as a whole in the community (not just our church, but every church) and to God’s people than we ever could have imagined. And yes, even those who weren’t part of the Kingdom of God got to rest in the shade of its branches.

We have adopted this idea in just about everything that we do in our community.  We are not measuring how many people come to church as a result of the things we do in the community.  We are measuring how true we are to living out Kingdom principles in our context.  And, for what it’s worth, we haven’t had any trouble having more than enough people coming to church.  It reminds me of the verse where Paul says, “I planted, Apollos watered, but God made it grow.”

My friend Brian Mavis said something to me once that shaped me heavily.  He said that instead of thinking about how to be the best church in the community, we should spend our time thinking about how to be the best church FOR the community (my paraphrase).  The Gospel message is a message of that conversation taking place over and over and over again. 

The Gospel message is not simply about salvation.  It is a message of the Kingdom of God living out God’s principles and inviting others to be a part of that reality right here and right now.  The Gospel is not a message of “some glad morning” and the action being somewhere else. The Gospel is a message of every moment being pregnant with importance and the presence of God.  And it is an invitation to those around us to awaken to that reality and see God’s goodness playing out around them everyday.

The Gospel of the Kingdom takes us to places where we must trust God more, live in faith more, and engage the people around us more every day.  It calls us to let go of everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles us and to run with perseverance the race marked out for us.

The Gospel calls us way past a decision to follow Christ.  The Gospel is not simply saying yes to Jesus.  It is an invitation to engage the world from a particular perspective; to walk out the principles of God without reservation or concern for the outcome. It invites us to trust that God is telling a good story in the world right now. And we can see pain and suffering and mourning and victory and blessing and rejoicing through that lens.  And it is good! 

The Gospel invites you way Beyond Salvation.  And so do I…