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What’s Missing in This Gospel?
I met Jesus when I was a little boy.
And then again when I was a teenager. And then again in college. And in YWAM (Youth With A Mission), too. And finally, when I moved to Beirut. We seemed to keep bumping into each other in this thing called Christianity. After running into Him for what seemed like the twentieth time, I invited Him to move in with me.
The problem was, after He moved in, He started throwing some of my stuff out, and I had pretty neat stuff. I had a college degree, I had a ministry, and I had a whole bunch of really valuable Christian things. Solid doctrines, good theology, and a vision for the lost.
And He threw them out.
I resorted to covert tactics. I would sneak out under the cover of darkness, wearing night-vision goggles and camouflage paint on my face, and I would rescue my valuables, hiding them in the garage where I could visit them when Jesus wasn’t looking.
But He found them and threw them back out on the curb again, ready for the garbage truck to haul off like sacks of trash.
Why would Jesus throw out perfectly good doctrines and sound theology? I had worked hard for those things, and He tossed them out as if they had no value at all.
Maybe He knows something I don’t.
I sometimes wonder, can somebody be “saved” and not even know it? Say a person meets Jesus and decides to follow Him, without having any concept of salvation, or heaven, or a moral code based on the wages of sin. What then?
What if our concept of salvation is based on a gospel that is the sum of its explainable parts? What if we consider ourselves “saved” because we have a dynamite explanation of salvation? We can correctly label and identify all the components. Sinners fallen away from God. God’s mercy. Sacrifice for man’s sins. The atonement. Justification by faith. Eternal life.
Let’s try a litmus test: Try to describe your salvation using only the four Gospels, without using any of the above terms. You have one minute. Go.
I recently visited a missions school at a large church in Waco, Texas, and decided to try a similar test in a class-sized proportion.
“Tell me,” I said to the group, “what is the gospel?”
A young lady raised her hand. “The free gift of God.”
“Good,” I said. I went to the chalkboard and wrote gift from God. “Somebody else?”
“Freedom from sin,” a man near the back called out.
“Eternal life,” said another.
“Keep going,” I said. I stayed busy at the chalkboard, listing the items as they came in.
Freedom. Righteousness. Moral purity. Grace. Unconditional love. Healing and deliverance. Redemption. Faith in God. New life.
After five minutes or so, we had filled the chalkboard with a list of things that we believed were the gospel.
“Excellent,” I said. “Did we miss anything?”
The room was silent for a minute. I could see heads turning. I could hear pages rustling. Everybody seemed to think there was something significant missing, but nobody wanted to volunteer to name the missing item.
Finally, after the second minute of silence, a girl near the front raised her hand. “How come none of us mentioned Jesus?”
“Exactly,” I said. We closed the session and went to a break. Point made.
I’ve been reading Donald Miller’s Searching for God Knows What. Miller took this point to an even further extreme. In his book, he tells a story about one occasion when he was speaking to a class at a Christian college. He stood in front of the group and announced he was going to share the gospel with them, with one difference: He was going to leave out one critical element. He warned them in advance that it was a major part and that he would require them to tell him what it was afterward. He went on to describe the rampant sin that plagued our culture: “homosexuality, abortion, drug use, song lyrics on the radio, newspaper headlines, and so on.”1 He said that, according to Scripture, the wages of sin is death, and he talked about the way sin separates us all from God.
He went on to describe “the beauty of morality,” and told stories, citing examples of how righteous living was better. He spoke of the greatness of heaven, and described it complete with a landscape of spectacular beauty.
He talked about teen pregnancy, sexually transmitted diseases, and all the supporting statistics.
Finally he shared the caveat: repentance. How it would make life purposeful and pure and full of meaning, going into detail about “what it is they would be saved from if they would only repent, and how their lives could be God-honoring and God-centered.”2
Describing what happened when he finished the lecture, Miller writes, “I rested my case and asked the class if they could tell me what it was I had left out of this gospel presentation.”3
He waited for several awkward minutes. Not a single hand raised. No one could identify the missing component of the gospel. As far as the students could tell, Miller had been complete.
Closing his case, Miller writes, “I presented a gospel to Christian Bible college students and left out Jesus. Nobody noticed, even when I said I was going to neglect something very important, even when I asked them to think very hard about what it was … even when I stood there for several minutes in silence” (italics mine).4
Miller concludes: “To a culture that believes they ‘go to heaven’ based on whether or not they are morally pure, or that they understand some theological ideas, or that they are very spiritual, Jesus is completely unnecessary. At best, He is an afterthought, a technicality by which we become morally pure, or a subject of which we know, or a founding father of our woo-woo spirituality.”5
I think that way often—more than I’d like to admit. Too often I try to win allies to my point of view rather than pointing to Jesus. I remember having lots of arguments with people of different perspectives. I exercised my tongue and my brain a lot in those situations. I fervently and (I hope) intelligently refuted arguments. I showed my mettle. I proved myself.
I proved that it was more important to me to win an argument than to be like Jesus—compassionate and loving. Kind and patient.
Twelve years in Lebanon broke the spine of the things I thought were important. You can only bang your head against a concrete wall for so long before it occurs to you, It would hurt a lot less if I’d quit doing this.
I am not sad to say that I was once a proud “missionary.” I am grateful for the lessons I learned from that time of ignorance. Like many others, I learned loads when I tried to pound the square peg of Western politics/freedom/democracy/human rights into the round hole of a society a thousand (or more) years older than the one I came from.
The next time you get into an airport queue for a departure, look at the ...