(Inspired by the writings of Henri Nouwen, A. W. Tozer, John Piper, and others)
What are the things that we fear the most? We fear spending our lives climbing up a ladder, and then getting to the top and realizing that we’ve been wasting our whole life climbing the wrong ladder, so we quiet our fears by climbing even harder and faster. I climb; therefore I exist. We fear being unknown and unnoticed and anonymous, so we fill our lives with activity. I act; therefore I exist. We fear that if we are not constantly fighting a battle, then we have no reason to live, so we define ourselves by what and who we oppose. I fight; therefore I exist. We fear getting to the end of our lives and wondering if our lives made any difference. Did my life matter to anyone at all? Is anything different in the world because I lived? Or did my life have no significance at all? I make myself important; therefore I exist. We are afraid of our own fears, so we fill our lives with noise so we never need to face our own demons that surface in the silence. We constantly fill our lives with noise and clutter and busy activities and phone calls and text messages and Facebook posts. We are constantly declaring our opinions. We are constantly making our existence known, because we fear that if we stop for a moment, then on some level we will cease to exist. It’s like a line from Dr. Seuss’s Horton Hears a Who: We’re here, we’re here, we’re here!!! Most of all, we fear our own death, and we fear that the consequences of our own sins will haunt us after death; we fear eternal repercussions that may fall from the hand of an angry God; so we tell ourselves either that God does not exist, or that He is not very important. We live as though God did not exist, but we fear that He might. This is the human dilemma. Enter Jesus Christ, the Son of God. God sees our dilemma and does something about it. He becomes one of us. God enters the human sphere in the body of man, bringing light to a dark planet filled with people with dark souls. This is the mystery of the Incarnation; God comes to earth as a man. God makes connection with humanity by coming to us as a human. Jesus lives his life on the earth in a beautiful display of unselfish, sacrificial love. He teaches us to love each other, to respect each other’s dignity, to go to bat for one another. He teaches us to love God with all that we are and all that we have. He teaches us that God loves us very, very deeply, with the tender love of a very good father, though He hates our sins because of the damage they do to us, to others arounds us, and to our relationship with Him. His life is a perfect picture of humanity the way it was meant to be. Paradoxically, his life is also a perfect picture of what God is really like. His message: “If you want to know what God is like, just get to know me. If you know me, you know the Father”. Jesus goes beyond coming to earth to show us how to live. He goes beyond showing us who God is. He dies in our place, as our substitute, to take away our sins. By taking the penalty for our sins upon himself, he overcomes sin and death. Our two greatest enemies, sin and death, are defeated. Then he takes it a step further. He proves that he has conquered death by rising from the grave, fully alive. Some day he will take it a step further by coming back to reign over his earthly kingdom. He will reign over all those who want him as their king. We will be raised after death, just as he was, to live forever with him as our king. In the meantime he is forming a community, the Church, which is the company of the redeemed. It is our task as the Church to proclaim God’s excellencies, both now and forever. We need to stop here and highlight three important implications of the Gospel that are often ignored or downplayed or misunderstood:
How should we respond to the fact that there is a false gospel being proclaimed as if it were the true Gospel?
What are the things that we fear the most? We fear spending our lives climbing up a ladder, and then getting to the top and realizing that we’ve been climbing up the wrong ladder. Jesus comes to us us and says to us “I am the way” (John 14:1-6). We fear being unknown and unnoticed and anonymous, so we fill our lives with activity. In Jesus, God visits us to tell us that we are more important that the birds of the air and the flowers of the field, because we have great value in God’s eyes (Mathew 6:25-34). We fear that if we are not constantly fighting a battle, then we have no reason to live, so we define ourselves by what and by whom we oppose. In Jesus, God visits us to show us that we are defined not by the battles we fight, but by the fact that we are loved immensely by our Heavenly Father (John 16:25-28). We fear getting to the end of our lives and wondering if our lives made any difference. In Jesus God visits us to show us that we are important simply because we are God’s children (1 John 3:1). We are afraid of our own fears, so we fill our lives with noise so we never need to face our own demons that surface in the silence. Jesus came to help us to face our fears and to rest in the all-sufficiency of his Father, who is also our Father (Matthew 11:28-30; John 3:19-21). We fear eternal repercussions that may fall from the hand of an angry God; Jesus came to take those repercussions upon himself, paying the penalty for our sins so that we might be forgiven and restored to right relationship with God, who is not angry with us because our sins have been paid for by His Son (1 Peter 3:18; Romans 5:8; Romans 6:23). We fear death itself; Jesus died and arose to conquer sin and death, so that the power of death is now broken, and we can live forever with him (Romans 5:17; 1 Corinthians 15:57). The Gospel addresses our fears in a way that points us back to God; and when we look to God, we look into the eyes of a compassionate Father who forgives our sins, loves us passionately, and enables us to live in a way that is full and meaningful by helping us to recover our true humanity. In Christ, God was reconciling the world to himself, and has given to us the ministry of reconciliation (2 Corinthians 5:17-21). Embrace it. Be sure that it is yours. Don’t settle for a counterfeit version. A trivialized and politicized gospel will do no good to anyone but will ultimately do great harm to all who come under its influence. Embrace the real deal. We can’t share it with others if we haven’t experienced it for ourselves.
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