This week we’ve been looking at the things we need to stop believing. There are things in our heads and our hearts that we believe to be true that really aren’t. These false ideas we believe contribute to a church culture in which we don’t talk about Jesus with others the way we used to, the way we’re called by God in Christ to. The things we hear and the things we pass on that aren’t true — we start to believe those things the more we hear them. And it has the potential to shut us down.

The last thing we’ll consider is the idea that The Gospel is Too Complicated to Share.

The Good News of salvation from God in Christ is not hard. It’s simple. But for several generations now, especially in Churches of Christ, I think, we’ve put too much emphasis on knowing all the details of our rules and regulations and on being able to explain and proof-text all our inconsistencies and loopholes that we’ve made sharing the Good News kinda scary. We’ve turned into a people who’d rather not say anything to our friends about Jesus than risk saying something and not be able to answer a tricky question. For a variety of reasons, we’ve come to believe it’s a sin to say to somebody, “I don’t know.”

The Good News is not complicated. It’s the very simple and beautiful truth that God’s eternal salvation through his crucified and risen Son is a gift. It’s a loving gift. And his loving grace continually washes us and covers the stuff we don’t know.

If we believe what the culture tells us about church, if we believe only what we see with our eyes and what we read and hear from others, then, yeah, we can start believing that we’re just hanging on to a dying brand and that our message has no power and the world has passed us by. Who wants to have me try to push that on anybody? See, if we believe these things, we’ll stop talking.

You know, it looked bad when the world crucified Jesus. But God used that to save humanity. It felt bad when the world executed Stephen and scattered the Church. But God used that to expand the borders of his eternal Kingdom. Today, we know our God is using the circumstances in our culture and the conditions in our world — right now! — to do more through his Church than we could ever possibly dare to ask or imagine.

The question is: What do you believe?

Living in the middle of this world that resists Jesus and his Church, living in a society that rejects salvation from God in Christ, we need to believe the Good News. We have to believe that God lives in us and his Son is our Lord. The government does not have control over how we live our lives. Technology does not define our existence. Postmodernism doesn’t determine how we think. News and entertainment does not account for who we are. We must break the faithless habit of letting the journalists tell us what’s really real — we should at least give the Scriptures equal time!

Just like Moses in the Midian desert, just like Isaiah in the Temple, just like John on the Island of Patmos, in chains, guarded by Roman soldiers, watching the trade ships of the Empire sail by, hearing the reports of increased persecution, we, too, have been given a vision and a task. We’ve been given a picture of the way things really are: God on his throne, Christ Jesus by his side, and the Holy Spirit inside his people, filling us with courage and working in us and through us so his eternal will is done on earth just as it is in heaven.

May we believe the Good News.
May our words be fueled by the Spirit and filled with boldness.
And may our risen and coming Lord Jesus receive all the glory forever.

Peace,
Allan