proclaiming good news that’s actually good news

“therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ, God making his appeal through us.”
2 corinthians 5:20a

in exploring what it means to follow Jesus, i concluded earlier that the journey must begin within each one of us. we are to be His followers first. but this is not meant to be an exclusively introspective quest as individuals or as a faith community. we are instructed to make followers out of others. in a privitized climate, this indeed is difficult. but, faithfully following Jesus means we must be making followers because this is what it means to follow Jesus. followers make followers.

the prosepect of this is scary for many of us. we must live our lives in ways that go against the grain of the culture that we are all conditioned to follow. putting the ways of Jesus on display are difficult for a couple of reasons. first, because we are conditioned to do otherwise and so we must overcome ourselves. this is an ongoing project. practicing the ways of Jesus means breaking habits and creating new ones. secondly, practicing the way of Jesus is a form of resistence to the broken order of things within the world. this is often not received well. practicing Jesus’ ways then are an excercise in trying to live so free that we are not burdened by the chains of self-preservation. practicing His ways are tremendously difficult. and yet, making followers of Jesus by allowing our lifestyles to act as a demonstration of an alternative to the ways of the world is not all that it means to make followers of Jesus.

i hear what you’re thinking. there’s more??!! i know. i feel this intense pressure too. but it means more than putting our lifestyle on display for the world to see, which is difficult in and of itself. we are to advocate for others to follow the ways of Jesus in submission to the God that is revealed to us in the person of Jesus. and this means bold proclamation of the good news of Jesus and a call to swear complete allegiance to the king of all kings. as much as i love francis of assisi and the wisdom he shared about “preach[ing] the gospel always and when necessary, use words,” it does not let us off the hook from proclamation. i suspect his statement was meant as a corrective to folks who know all the right things and yet, their lives do not reflect such truth.

so what is meant by proclamation of the good news of Jesus? before i provide my (an) answer to this question, i want to state that i think that often, the answer for many is very narrow. put another way, it is portrayed in too simplistic of terms due to the fact that it is presented with broad brush strokes. when appropriated this way, it’s simply about shouting from the roof tops that Jesus is God and that He saves us from our sins and so we need to repent. while this is true and important, it tends to place importance upon the cognitive side of the gospel without really tapping into its emotive side. so instead of being specific and a provision of hope, it is general and inconsequential or not contextually applicable to the average person. so, when the good news is expressed in such vague terms, it lacks the necessary depth to truly make Jesus good news to the person who lives within the details of their life. the good news has to make sense.

the good news of Jesus is fully comprehensive. Jesus saves us from all the things that we need to be saved from. western christianity has primarily focused upon Jesus saving us from sin, where sin is viewed as strikes against the creator. in this understanding, Jesus must pay the penalty for such transgressions so that the cosmic balance sheet reads that we owe nothing. this sort of salvation is transactional. while i won’t dismiss what theologians call penal substitution (despite it being my least favorite lens), this theory lacks any sort of sense that Jesus heals us from our sin.

i prefer to define sin as the way things aren’t supposed to be. in some ways, penal substitution is more like saying Jesus covers our sins so that we don’t have to be punished for our wrong doing. but i don’t simply need Jesus to hide my errors from the eyes of the Father. what i need is the Jesus that saves me from continuing to make the same errors. i don’t need a bandaid. i need to be healed.

the good news of Jesus is that i’m forgiven for my sins and that Jesus can heal me so that i won’t continue to sin. what Jesus accomplishes by beginning to usher in His kingdom is holistic. so when we talk about proclaiming the good news, and therefore continuing His work, we don’t proclaim a rote message because the shape of the proclamation will depend upon the person, who has distinctive things from which they need to be saved. this is why the gospels, when speaking of Jesus proclaiming the good news, speak of how the kingdom of God is here and what the manifestations of it look like. the picture is all encompassing:

“the Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
because he has anointed me
to proclaim good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives
and recovering of sight to the blind,
to set at liberty those who are oppressed,
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”
~Jesus
luke 4:18-19

this sort of proclamation requires that we have relationships with those who need to hear the good news of the Christ. relationships where we have earned the right to speak because we have built a friendship in love. relationships where we have the sort of priviledged knowledge that makes us able to breathe the life of Jesus into the details of our friends’ lives. surely, part of what gives us the right to speak will be our observable lifestyle modeled after the ways of Jesus. we certainly can gain credibility through how we live. but we must remember that the ways of Jesus expressed in our lives are a product of the good news interacting within the details of our own lives. this is why transparency is important. we don’t do the saving. Jesus does. yet, the authority that we have to proclaim and participate in being good news is given to us by Jesus.

while i don’t want to belabor the fact that following Jesus begins with us, we must remember to practice His ways while we are being transparent about how the good news has saved us, is saving us, and will save us. it’s here then that we can boldly proclaim good news to a world of people that need good news that is specific to their own lives and not general religious platitudes.

so, be thinking about how the gospel has been good news for you and how it is still working itself out within you. in what ways, and to whom, can you be speaking words of life into the milieu of others’ lives that would be good news? as followers of Jesus, we must be proclaiming good news. so let us proclaim good news.

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dependence through prayer

one of the things that i have found to be most difficult in following Jesus is the level of dependence that we are to place upon the Father through prayer. no doubt, we all find it difficult. but Jesus is the perfect example. in the person of Jesus, we can look into the eyes of God, the Father, and see the community that exists within the Triune God. in the person of Jesus, we completely see perfect humanity and the type of relationship that humanity was created for with the Father.

now i’ll admit upfront that i feel inept at how to pray. also, so as to avoid hypocrisy, i’ll state that as far as my prayer habits go, i’m quite poor. however, i press on so that we as followers may encourage one another toward greater dependence upon God and into a prayer life that has more substance to it. for if we are to be His disciples, we must be people of prayer, because Jesus was.

so as we look at Jesus, what do we see? i recently had a conversation with a friend of mine about the nature of Jesus’ divinity and humanity. one of the things we discussed was how believers generally have a tendency to play down Jesus’ humanity. we often limit His humanity to two different times in His life. the first, at His birth as a baby in a manager. our time of christmas warm fuzzys. and second, at the cross when we need to acknowledge His humanity inorder to justify that His sacrifice qualified on our behalf (while His divinity gives His sacrifice the umph to actually atone for the sins).

for the most part though, His life is seen primarily through the lens of His divinity. case in point: the uproar from a recently uncovered ancient papyrus scroll that contains the notion that quite possibly, Jesus could have been married, which, for many, opens up a whole lot of uncomfortable ideas about Jesus and His humanity. if we neglect to see Jesus in His humanity though, we can miss out on what Jesus teaches us about living life. paraphrasing my friend: “if Jesus is only divine, then Jesus really doesn’t have much to say to me about how i should live because His divine nature makes living the way He did totally unobtainable.” in other words, we would have to be divine and something beyond human ourselves to be His disciples.

so we need to embrace Jesus as completely divine and completely human and we need to do so responsibly. this means we must see a Jesus who is fully human and completely dependent upon the Father for life and direction and not simply because it is an expression of His divine essence. with that said, i want to throw out some passages concerning Jesus and His prayer life for you to chew on, along with a few of my own comments:

luke 22:39-46
in the gospel of luke, the author records Jesus’ time of prayer before His betrayal. His prayer certainly illuminates the humanity of Jesus and luke even goes further in his remarks about Jesus sweating blood. however, the more poignant point that luke makes is in regard to Jesus’ habit of praying. the esv says, “as was His custom.” Jesus prayed very regularly. it was a habit.

luke 5:15-16
here, Jesus is recorded as withdrawing from the masses inorder to pray. as i read this passage, i see a human Jesus who finds solitude out of necessity so as not to become too overwhelmed by the needs of the many. basically, Jesus is going back to the well to recharge. if Jesus is doing it, then so should we.

luke 6:12-13
life contains all kinds of decisions. some of them are big decisions and some of them not so much. Jesus would spend time in prayer before making any types of decisions. in this particular passage, Jesus spends time praying before choosing the apostles.

matthew 14:22-23
Jesus sent his disciples (and the crowd) away so that He could be alone to pray. this is much like the luke 5 passage above, but i share it for two reasons. first, it demonstrates Jesus’ need to spend time in prayer to recharge, and secondly, i want to point out the need for private prayer. we certainly need corporate prayer (which is a blog post for another time), but stealing ourselves away to pray on our own is vital if we hope to sustain ourselves for fruitful kingdom living.

matthew 26:36-37
when life gets hard, we need to be in communication with God. prayer is an act of dependence. further, it is an act of obedience to the Father as we seek to follow His will for the type of people we are to become. Jesus prayed when He was troubled and did so becaue He was dependent upon the Father. the Father gives us hope and direction for how to maneuver through the heat that comes our way as we follow Jesus.

matthew 11:25
prayer isn’t a last resort when life gets rough. prayer is also a time for when things are going right. Jesus prayed to give thanks too. what we ought to see, is that prayer is about the communication that we have with the Father. it is a relationship. we talk to Him, not because He doesn’t already know what is going on with us, but because it is an act of submission to Him. therefore, we pray when things are going well and when life seems to have handed us a pile of shit. either way, we wait to hear from our source of life. so within prayer, we learn obedience and we feel intimacy.

Jesus, in His humanity, provides us with the key for kingdom living and fellowship with the Father. He does this by the way in which He demonstrates His communion with the Father through prayer. i believe that we often think that Jesus had it within Himself to be obedient to the Father as it appears to us that He lived with such a clear understanding of His purpose for His life and death on earth. His life was certainly sinnless and He did live with a clear understanding of His mission, but as i read about the life of Jesus in the scriptures, i see a man who is able to do all that, not because His divinity overtook His humanity, but because in His humanity, He was dependent upon the Father at every turn as represented in the richness of His prayer life.

Jesus maintains a prayer life that keeps Him focused and strengthens Him for the work of the kingdom. it would seem that paul has this same sense of prayer when he instructs the early thessalonian church to “pray without ceasing.” it is with this in mind that i encourage all followers of Jesus, including myself, to invest more time in fostering our prayer lives, corporately and individually.

there is certainly more to be said about prayer and even Jesus specifically has more to say on the matter. perhaps i will write more another time, but for now, that will suffice. in the meantime, especially for those who consider themselves to be novice in the practice of prayer and for those who have doubts about the usefulness of it, here are my words of encouragement: do it anyway. if you don’t know what you’re doing, then that’s okay. just be honest about where you’re at in life as you pray. and if it seems like you’re only talking to yourself, that’s okay too. God is faithful to His promises and He loves you. He is listening. keep sharing your mind with Him.

while there are things we can learn about prayer through reading the scriptures, we can only learn how to truly pray and to hear His voice by actually praying. if we never pray, then we are sure to never learn or to hear His voice. so keep at it and so will i!

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hospitality & attentive presence

there are many dimesions to hospitality that Jesus followers must understand, but one that i think is worth being singled out is the aspect of being fully attentive in one’s presence to the other. this is the one facet of hospitality that has always struck me as particularly difficult for those of western culture and yet completely necessary in that it is the mark of truly making room for the other. i’ve always been in awe of how abraham is recounted to have provided hospitality to angelic guests. while abraham is far from perfect, he seems to get hospitality and and being attentive. we are often far too busy and absorbed in what’s going on in our own lives to be fully present to the other, even though we continue to interact with others without making ourselves fully available.

the practice of being fully attentive to the other is very difficult to achieve when we live in a world of task orientation and view time as a precious commodity. then there is the fact that we live within a world of high stimulation that condition us to have short attention spans. you may have dozed off already. and let’s not forget to mention that in an entertainment culture everyone’s story is not cinema worthy (by holly wood standards). in the time and place that i live it is nothing short of amazing that i’m able to be attentive to anything, save for that which i can manipulate to my own advantage, but even that is not making yourself fully available. the act of being fully attentive will certainly need to be a discipline to be practiced within our context.

i could recount for you some examples of my own inattentiveness (and they’re numerous), but i won’t bore you with my dirty laundry. we have plenty of examples of our own inattentiveness or that of others toward us to draw upon. i would rather explore the root cause(s) of such human ineptitude. as i think about it, much of my own inattentiveness is caused by the agendas that i hold to be important. and i deem important that which usually raises my own level of significance and purpose. theologically, the root of it all stems from our lack of trust that God is good and that He will be present with us and provide us with all that we need daily. if God provides for the birds of the air all that they need, then how much more should we trust that He will do the same and more for us (matt. 6:26)? we should be free to practice hospitality by being attentive to those we encounter but we cannot do it when our own existential anxst is getting in the way.

this is not to say that we should ignore our human finitude and the inherit limitations and boundaries that come with it, but to say that we ought to be discerning how we might be making ourselves more fully available to others without worrying about all the tasks that are upon our plates, whether by our choice or not. we cannot give our full attention to everyone we meet, nor can we offer hospitality to everyone likewise. but i do think that as we embrace the position of foriegner and alien, as i discussed sometime ago, we begin to lean more heavily upon God and we seek His voice as we try and figure out to whom we need to be more attentive in our lives.

but when we do discern clearly who we ought to provide hospitality to, how are we at being fully attentive? how are you at giving your full, undivided attention to someone else as you encounter them? i encourage you to make it a practice to be more fully present to those who are in your life already, but with more intentionality, to those who God brings into your life. it definitely will be a challenging discipline as you seek to extend hospitality, but it can also be a rewarding one as relationships can become stronger and strengthen communities which offers the world around us an alternative to the way things are currently.

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