Podcast Ep. 9: The Gospel in a Post-Christian Culture

What is the Gospel?

A short 5 minute video clarifying what the message of gospel is according to Scripture.

Is Evangelism Unloving?

I sometimes get the question “Shouldn’t we just let people believe what they want to believe?” Or, put another way “Isn’t evangelism unloving because you are trying to force people to leave their beliefs behind and accept yours?” In this age of “tolerance”, as it is called, there is a growing notion that everyone ought to be able to believe whatever they want and that all beliefs are created equal. To tell someone that what they believe is wrong is unloving and, well, wrong!

Of course the contradiction here is obvious. If it is wrong to tell other people that their beliefs are wrong, and I believe that others need to believe in Jesus as I do, why are you telling me my beliefs are wrong!? Tolerance, after all, is not the idea that everyone’s beliefs and ideas are equally true, but that even when we disagree we allow people to continue in their beliefs without using pressure tactics or threat of harm to coerce them to change their stated view.

To be certain, to insist that you “see it my way or die!”, or at least that their will be some sort of retaliation on my part if you don’t change your view would indeed be unloving and intolerant. The question is this, is that what Christians do in evangelism? Absolutely not. Put all thoughts out of your mind about the inquisition and other such atrocities that have been done “in Jesus name” and yet in complete rejection of His own teaching. Such heinous acts are not biblical evangelism.

Christian evangelism, done by biblical methods, is a loving act of seeking to persuade through reason, evidence and  Scripture, the truth of the gospel (good news about  Jesus). As Christians we practice tolerance in the classical sense of the word and allow others to hold their beliefs which we disagree with. We do not threaten them harm in any way, but all the while we seek to show them that Christianity is true and that all people everywhere need Jesus for the forgiveness of their sins. No one is born a Christian and we are all sinners who need Jesus, I became convinced of the gospel as truth at a point in time in my life and believe that everyone needs to know Jesus just as I have come to.

Sometimes our efforts to persuade people towards Christ are seen as pushy or unloving, but the heart of our intentions is the good of those to whom we are sharing our faith with. Imagine with me for a moment that you saw a person who was both blind and deaf standing on a railroad track, unaware that a train was speeding his way, clearly under the impression that he is in no danger whatsoever. What would be the loving response on your part? Let him meet his fate with the train or try to move him out of harms way? Obviously the answer is to try to move him out of harms way. In fact, I would argue, that you have a moral obligation to attempt to save this man’s life.

Now it may be the case that when you come alongside this individual that he will resist you because, after all, he doesn’t know who you are or why you are urging him to move from where he is. You seem like an inconvenience at least and maybe even a threat to his well-being, but in reality you are performing an act of love with his best interests in mind.

This is a great example of Christian evangelism, not because people who don’t know Jesus are blind or deaf, but because they are either unaware or perhaps indifferent to the danger they are in. As such, if we love our fellow-man (or woman) then it our duty to share, encourage, persuade, etc., that they need Jesus in their life to avoid God’s just wrath against their sin. For us to simply keep this information to ourselves would be a heinous act of hate when you think about it.

We as Christians believe that all of us have sinned against God (Romans 3:23) and are guilty of breaking his commands. If you are unsure I urge you to read the 10 commandments in Exodus 20 and ask yourself whether you have loved God at all times more than other things, or if you have always honored your parents, ever lied, stolen, etc. We all have broken God’s law and are accountable to Him for what we have done. God is a good judge and he cannot and will not simply let us get away with lawlessness. Just as a judge cannot simply forgive a criminal for stealing because he said he was sorry or because he’s done more good than bad in his lifetime, so also God must judge us for breaking His law and hold us accountable for what we’ve done.

But God did not leave us alone in our situation, he sent His Son Jesus (John 3:16) who lived a sinless life, fulfilled the law of God to fulfill all righteousness and died on the cross to pay for our sins so that God could justly forgive us of our sin (Romans 3:23-26) on the basis of Jesus being an acceptable substitute for all who place their faith/trust in Him. Since Jesus is the one and only way God has provided to make us right with Him it is essential that we spread the message of what Jesus has done so that people may hear the message, believe and be saved (John 14:6; Acts 4:12 Ephesians 2:8-9). As Christians we want people to be able to come into a right relationship with God and know peace with Him.

Often people take offense to Christians sharing their faith and trying to persuade them to leave their belief system behind and trust in Jesus, but our motivation is love. If we really believe that Hell is real and that all people are on a path to go there apart from the provision found in Jesus alone then it is UN-loving to not share the gospel and not evangelize. We would be morally reprehensible people to believe in Hell and God’s just wrath against sin and to not share the hope of forgiveness found in Jesus alone. Evangelism is an act of love from your Christian friends and family. Regardless of whether you accept the message of Jesus (and I hope you will) know that Christians are loving you when they share with you the biblical message of Jesus.

Apologetics Is Worthless If…

There are some incredible apologetics arguments out there. I mean, truly, there are some mind-blowingly powerful arguments in defense of the faith. Arguments for God’s existence such as The Cosmological Argument (Kalam or otherwise), The Teleological Argument, The Ontological Argument, The Moral Argument and more. For the resurrection we have the Minimal Facts Argument which is, I think, the most persuasive case for the resurrection out there. For the reliability of the Bible we have an embarrassment of riches when it comes to the amount of extant manuscripts that show how the Bible has been preserved over the centuries, and we have incredible secondary sources from early church fathers to early enemy testimony that corroborates information in the Bible, and we have archaeological evidence that strongly supports many facts spoken of in the Bible about people, places and things. Truly the cumulative case for Christianity is impressive and, in my opinion, extremely cogent.

Not only do we have well formed arguments that have been tried, tested and found strong over the centuries which have been refined by fire to be even stronger today, but we also have some pretty incredible people who have utilized these arguments. Christianity has arguably produced some of the finest minds the world has ever known. Augustine, Aquinas, Pascal, Calvin, to name a few famous ones in the history of the church and, in more contemporary times, we have (or had) people like C. S. Lewis, Francis Schaeffer, Alvin Plantinga, William Lane Craig, Ravi Zacharias, J. P. Moreland, and more. All of whom no one in their right mind would call dimwitted or uneducated. And all of these men throughout the history of the church up to our present day have created, developed, perfected and/or delivered incredibly persuasive arguments in favor of Christianity.

The fact is, we have the goods. We have the real ability to compete in the marketplace of ideas and win. With some of the best arguments and minds on our side we can get fair minded people to accept core truths of Christianity such as God exists, truth exists, objective moral values exist, the Bible is a reliable witness to historical events, Jesus was a real person who lived, died and rose bodily from the dead, that Jesus is God, etc., etc. And all of these are incredibly important and impressively defensible. But all of this, all of our apologetics effort, is worthless if…

If we fail to defend the gospel itself.

It’s unfortunate that we can perhaps win people to propositional truth but fail to reach them with the gospel. The fact is a person can both believe all of those facts above and can even want to be a Christian but still have a wrong view of the gospel and be lost. If a person believes that God exists, truth exists, objective moral values exist, Jesus really lived, died and rose again bodily they can still be lost. They could still believe, like the Circumcision Party (Judaizers) in Galatians 1, that they have to have faith in Jesus but that they also have to work for their salvation and in the end be damned. Let’s face it, the people Paul was addressing were not denying you had to believe in Jesus, but they were adding to the gospel and the apostle Paul was rightfully concerned about this leading people to Hell.

Such being the case one of our greatest apologetic tasks is to articulate and defend the biblical gospel itself. Many apologists have taken on an overly ecumenical approach to apologetics and have affirmed a kind of “Mere Christianity” that is, I think, less than Christian. Not to knock on biblical ecuminicism, for their are many things that do not separate people from the body of Christ that we may disagree about. Whether you are a pre, mid or post tribulation rapture believer, or a Historic Premillennialist, Dispensationalist, Amillennialist, etc., you can be a Christian. Whether you believe in credo or paedo baptism, you can be a Christian. Whether you believe election is individual or corporate, you can be a Christian. But if you have the gospel wrong, if you think you have something to do with saving yourself with the help of Jesus, you don’t get the gospel and you can’t be a Christian.

We need to be very careful that in the midst of all our defending of propositions about Christianity that we don’t fail to defend the gospel itself. We need to not be so quick to look at all the the things we affirm together and say “I’m okay, you’re okay” if we have forgotten to check the most important of all issues which we need to be together on. Aspirin and Arsenic may look very similar, but in the end it is their contents that make the difference. So, are you defending the gospel itself in your apologetics?

“For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast.” – Ephesians 2:8-9