The Whole Gospel for the Whole World

Experiencing the Fourfold Gospel Today

Pyles, Beach

• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781498294751
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Like most Protestant denominations, the Christian and Missionary Alliance (C&MA) was founded upon ideas that shaped its vision and ethos throughout its history. Also like most denominations, over time the influence of these ideas on the movement tends to diminish. Denominations, like any organization, have to consistently revisit their original vision in order to remain vitally sustained by those things that gave it a reason for existing in the first place.This book addresses six key ideas that have shaped the Christian and Missionary Alliance throughout its history: Jesus as our savior, sanctifier, healer, and coming king, which are known as the "fourfold gospel," as well as the concepts of "Jesus only" and world mission. These ideas are at the heart of the C&MA identity. However, there has long been a sense within C&MA circles that these core ideas are not always given the kind of attention that they deserve so that they can dynamically shape the movement as it faces the challenges of being the church in the twenty-first century. This volume is a resource for Alliance churches that will help them re-engage with the central tenets of Alliance theology and spirituality in a way that will ultimately inspire greater passion for the cause of Christ in the world as it is uniquely expressed through the movement known as the Christian and Missionary Alliance.

1

Jesus Our Savior

Introduction

There is a book that was published several years ago called The Day America Told the Truth. In that book, the authors, James Patterson and Peter Kim, did a massive survey of the then current state of American morality. Among the questions they asked was, “What would you be willing to do for ten million dollars?”1 Their findings revealed that twenty-five percent of the people surveyed said they would be willing to abandon all their friends. Twenty-three percent said they would be willing to work as a prostitute for a week. Sixteen percent would give up their citizenship. Ten percent said they would withhold testimony that would allow a murderer to go free. Seven percent would murder a stranger; so if there are approximately three hundred of us here today, look around because more than twenty people here could have you in their sights! Six percent would change their race, and four percent would have a sex-change operation.

These responses remind us that people are capable of doing anything and that the old adage “everyone has their price” is truer than we may like to believe. At the very least, questions like the ones I’ve highlighted here cause us to reflect on what it would take for us to compromise our integrity. They cause us to wrestle with who we truly are deep inside.

Our world is full of things that remind us of what human beings are capable of. Month by month, we are told of even more shocking events, such as mass shootings, abductions and forcible confinement, abuse of children, not to mention the harm done to us all through various kinds of financial fraud. Things like these bring to the forefront of our minds the reality of the depth of human depravity.

True, on one hand, we can easily keep these things at arm’s length. None of us, at least I hope it is accurate to say this, have committed such heinous acts against another human being. Even the findings of Patterson and Kim might not necessarily connect with us personally. But if we are honest, and if we take a deep look into our own lives, we can see ways in which our own behavior and attitudes can reflect things that are very wrong. We may find ourselves in a broken relationship of one kind or another, and while the situation is most likely complex, if we are honest, we would have to admit that we have not always acted properly, and the brokenness of the relationship is at least in part the result of our poor behavior. We struggle with addictions and indulgences that we are not proud of and that we know are destructive to ourselves and maybe others. We have secrets that we keep, because we know that if they came out, we would be ashamed of things we have said, done, or thought.

I don’t raise any of this in order to inspire guilt in anyone; we are all in the same boat when it comes to these things, and that is the point. We all live with a sense that life is not what it should be, and we are not all that we should be. This world is less than it is intended to be, and we are less than what we are intended to be. Both individually and corporately, we recognize that things are not quite right. As I said, most of us sense this keenly.

This morning we are embarking on a short journey through a number of affirmations that define the family of churches that this church is a part of—the Christian and Missionary Alliance. Over the next several weeks, we will look at how these affirmations are relevant to our lives and how they need to be understood so that their power and meaning can shape us as a church and as individuals. This morning we begin by affirming, “Jesus Our Savior.”

Struggling with our own sin, surrounded by evil, we long for salvation, and our church proclaims, as a cornerstone teaching, every person can have salvation, for in response to the temptations, horrors, and struggles of our frail humanity, God offers us salvation through his son Jesus Christ. But why is this necessary, what does it mean, and how do we experience it? This is what I want to invite us to consider together this morning. Let’s begin by considering why do we need a savior in the first place.

Why the Need for a Savior?

I remember reading a story about a hiker who was trekking along the path of the canyon of the Grand Teton Mountain in Wyoming. While walking across one of the canyon’s hanging snowfields with a group of friends, he suddenly lost his footing and began to slide down the canyon wall. His friends watched him slide, expecting that he would eventually come to a stop so that he could be rescued, but he never stopped sliding. He slid further and further picking up speed as he descended until he disappeared out of the sight of his friends. His lifeless body was later discovered at the bottom of the canyon floor.

The hiker certainly did not start out expecting tragedy to strike; that was definitely not the intent of the expedition. All of us can tell a story like this about ourselves, a story of starting well but of taking wrong moral turns, of not paying attention to warnings, and of putting ourselves and the pleasure of the moment first and then experiencing dreadful consequences. How is it that all of us ended up in this story of dreadful consequences? To understand that, we must start at the very beginning when God created the world and then called it “good.” This evaluation is offered six times in the creation story of Genesis 1. Then we read in Gen 1:27–28,

So God created mankind in his own image,

in the image of God he created them;

male and female he created them.

God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground.

After the creation of humanity, God deems his creation to be “very good.” God has created a supremely good world, with human beings as the ultimate expression of God’s goodness. As the Genesis story continues, more description is added. In 2:7, we read that God formed the original human from the soil that he had created. Out of the “good” stuff of creation, God forms Adam, then in language that is powerfully dramatic, we are told that God blew life’s breath into the nostrils of the human, and the human came to life. This is potent language because it offers a vision of God’s breath, that is, his very life being breathed into the human so that he might live. This image is core to the biblical vision for the intention of creation—God sharing his life with humanity. It offers deeply relational connotations that draw our attention to the intimacy that is intended between God and human beings. The interchange between God and the original human demonstrates that God has created us for deep relational familiarity. Further, we read in 2:18 that there seemed to be one thing in creation that was yet to be completed, and it was that he sees Adam alone, and God judges it to be “not good.” The relational nature of the man as rooted in his relationship with God is unfulfilled without other human beings to share life with. Thus, God creates woman as a partner for the man. When presented with his partner, Adam declares,

This is now bone of my bones

and flesh of my flesh;

she shall be called “woman,”

for she was taken out of man.

Just as the original human being owes his life to the breath of God, his life-friend/partner/co-regent owes her life to God’s creative actions and also to her human partner. The relational closeness that this story depicts between God and humanity and humanity itself is central to the ideal of creation as God intends it. This is the basic stuff of life, we are created by God for God, our lives are born out of his life giving intentions, and our lives are intertwined with one another’s because God understands that human beings need relationship with other human beings.

But now, with all of this goodness, the disastrous wrong turn is made. Thus, we come to the next scene in the story that depicts the catastrophic severing of these relationships. As the scenario unfolds, the serpent whispers to Eve about the inadequacy of creation and tempts her and, ultimately, Adam, to reject the structure of creation as established by God and to set out on their own flight, thus rejecting God and establishing their autonomy apart from him. This is the essence of what is known as “the fall,” and it is what is at the core of what we call “sin”—that is, that we are prone to reject God’s creational intention for relationship with him and with each other. The result of the couple’s decision to rebel against God reflects the consequences of this propensity. Immediately, we are told that they become aware of their nakedness. Prior to their deciding to eat the fruit from the tree that God had instructed them not to eat from, the couple apparently lived together in complete comfort in one another’s presence. Nakedness depicts openness and ease between the couple; after the fruit is consumed, however, they immediately cover their nakedness because they are ashamed to be seen as they really are. Their ideal relationship has been disrupted by their choice to strive for self-sufficiency apart from God and each other. This captures part of the core of the human condition; we are afraid to be ourselves with one another. Of course, we are more comfortable with some than others, but at the core of human relationships is a striving for autonomy that makes us reticent to be in intimate relationship with those who we have been created to be in relationship with. The divine intention for relationship between people, in marriage and family, in community, and among the nations, was lost.

Furthermore, our relationship with God was deeply fractured. In Gen. 3:8, we read that, after the couple eats the fruit, God walks in the Garden, calling out for the couple, but they are fleeing from him, hiding in the Garden and hoping to not be discovered. The picture is one of God continuing to pursue relationship with his created beings; he wants to stroll with them in the coolness of the Garden, but the humans are now resistant to the pursuit. They have become afraid of God. The intimacy of creation is lost, and just as sin has brought disease to the human and to human relationship, it has also brought about a disease with God.

There is a legal aspect to sin, for it is breaking the law or missing the mark. To sin is to fall short. But, we must not think of...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Preface
• Back Story
• Chapter 1: Jesus Our Savior
• Chapter 2: Jesus Only
• Chapter 3: Jesus Our Sanctifier
• Chapter 4: Jesus Our Healer
• Chapter 5: Jesus Our Coming King
• Chapter 6: The Mission of the C&MA
• Appendix: Healing Seminar
• Bibliography