A few years ago, I began to ask a very serious question. It was a question that plagued me deep inside and I couldn’t get away from it. Everything that I did, everything that I thought, every person I met, or experience I had brought this question flooding to the forefront of my mind. So many different nuances, different angles, different answers depending on the person that I asked. I wanted more. I wanted to get to the bottom of it. From the very beginning, I knew that I wasn’t interested in simple answers but longed for deeper understanding.
The question, on the surface, isn’t all that complicated. For some, the answer seems really simple, but for me, it took on a life of its own. My question soon became my prayer and God and I began to discuss it. “Lord, why do people not want what the Church has to offer? Why do they not want what I have found in your Church?”
The more that I interacted with the church and the people who are the focus of my question, I began to see the answer. The two groups were so far apart that neither knew or seemed to care that the other existed. Both talked as if they knew the other, but they did not. The questions being answered in the church where not the ones being asked outside of it. The assumptions about the church were true of a few but not the whole of Christ’s body. The two had grown so far apart that both existed as if they were mutually exclusive.
I have arrived at a very important conclusion. I have come to realize that if the gospel of Jesus Christ is true at all, it is true for all. It is truth. Absolute truth. It applies equally to all and each person must reconcile their own lives to its tenants. The gospel fits every person. It is both the medicine that we need to be eternally well while at the same time the refreshing drink of water that our souls long for. In my prayers, I have been led to realize that while the gospel fits, the church does not. We no longer deliver the medicine with a concern for the sick nor offer the water to satisfy the thirsty. As one person said to me, Christianity has gone on the defensive. We have traded our unique responsibility of delivering the gospel offensively to instead, defend the church’s position, or our personal opinions, on the social issue of the day. It seems we have lost sight of the eternal for the fog of the temporal. Does that imply that the “temporal” doesn’t matter? No. But, in light of eternity, how much does it matter?
As a Christian and as a pastor of a church that desires to be viable into the future, I am convicted to surrender the responsibility of defending myself from the whiles of a world that needs medicine and water, to a life of delivering it as if eternity depended on it. My personal opinion, my political views, my preferences, none of that matters in light of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.