“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.
matters of the heart 