Peacemaking in the Church and Beyond - Lesson 3

Dr. Rick Sessoms
Peacemaking in the Church and Beyond
MC613-03
Discussion of the Gospel
Lesson Transcript

Now I'm just going to stop there and ask the question, how do you respond to that? How do you respond to this description of the gospel? I see smiles - are those smiles like, you've got to be kidding me? 

STUDENT:  I like it, Rick. You haven’t preached it that good; you’ve got it! You’re excited about this! 

Can you tell I believe this? 

STUDENT:  You’re excited about this, though! That's pretty cool. Sounds a little bit like John Calvin and Abraham Kuyper all wrapped up in one. 

But seriously, what is going on inside of you as I say this? 

STUDENT:  Well, we need the gospel every day, every minute. It's not “once saved, always saved” something like this, it is applicable to every part of our lives. We forget how to do that.

It's so true. It's applicable to every part of our lives. 

STUDENT:  And yet Jesus knew that we had to live in the world, but not be of the world, but there is church and there is state, so I have a little bit of confliction of thought as I'm listening to you. You're talking about heaven, and we’re here on Earth, and this is the way I kind of see it. 

Yeah. 

STUDENT:  This is a hard gospel to live.

Boy, isn’t it? 

STUDENT:  But I don't think it's just heaven; I think it's here, because we are to bring reconciliation here. It's not just some pie in the sky type of thing. See, that's what's happening in Rwanda. That's what's happening in other places. It has been truncated because it's just easier that way to individuals. We come from a Western mindset, “individual.”

I think your point’s well taken in Rwanda. What I didn't say is that when the missionaries decided to sort of side with the government, their feeling was, well, if we don't do that, it might compromise our ability to proclaim the gospel, and over time, we see the devastating effects of not living out the whole gospel, but focusing on the gospel of sin management ended up with such tragedy of proportions that you and I can't imagine, and yet we see this repeated over and over and over again that sometimes we say, well, we'll focus on this because, you know, if we really get into these issues about reconciliation and justice and questions of really being ambassadors, of redeeming agents, then it may compromise our ability to really be good witnesses, and sometimes that comes back to bite us. I think that's kind of what you were alluding to there. 

STUDENT:  It's interesting when you look at Christendom, there are like two streams of the church; there's the social action, social justice kind of stream of churches that kind of move in that direction, and as good as that is, some of those churches have lost the gospel in the process; they’ve focused on social actions -- social, you know, justice -- but they've lost the message of Christ on the way. 

That's a great point. 

STUDENT:  And then there's the evangelicals, and I think we've held firmly to the gospel. We’ve held firmly to personal holiness, spiritual growth, but we've lost -- maybe we've never had -- the social action/social justice stream. 

That’s a great point. The turn of the last century, the 20th century, when the ”liberal element” began to invade America, the fundamentalists began to separate from that, and what eventually happened, in simple terms, is that the more liberal element of the church began to focus, as you say, on social gospel and did not preach redemption, salvation, etc., basically had a lower view of Scripture and the person of Christ and so forth. The fundamentalist approach was to go the opposite direction because anything that was identified with social action and social work was perceived as liberal, and so the focus became personal piety and individual salvation. 

The interesting thing is that when I was in Bible school in the early ’70’s -- it seems like a long time ago now -- but I remember in my first year of Bible school being handed a book by a man named Sherwood Wirt, and he worked for the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, and the title of the book – it was one of the most controversial books of its time -- it was called The Social Conscience of the Evangelical, and he was one of the first that began to try to bring these two issues back together, and of course, the Lausanne movement under Billy Graham had started it, and there have been others, but there's been a real effort to try to address what we call the whole gospel in this time, but in many respects, the church is still struggling with feeling that evangelism proclamation, getting people saved, is the gospel, and these other issues are kind of secondary; they're kind of supplementary, and what I'm proposing to you here is there is no word, necessarily, in the New Testament for evangelism. The word is gospel, and under ‘gospel’ fits all these things that we have come to understand to be this living out the kingdom of God in the presence of one another here, and so this is why I'm making this emphasis at this point is for us to understand that this issue of reconciliation is the very core of what we understand the gospel to be. It's on the same level as these other issues that we have traditionally seen as the primary role of the church.

STUDENT:  I recently read -- if you’re familiar with the movie “The Blind Side,” about the Tuohy family -- there was a movement to remove that movie from a major Christian bookstore which was successful because it showed inner city life that would be contradictory to how Christians should live. So you can no longer find that that movie or book in a major Christian bookstore, because I think we have truncated this gospel so much that it's just us, and we don't deal with the world, and that's totally, in my opinion, opposed to what Christ would have us to do.