|
Are We Ashamed of the Gospel?
10/08/2007
Romans 1:16 For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek.
This past Sunday I heard a good sermon from my Pastor on shame. He taught on how there are two different kinds of shame: the shame which we feel when God’s Spirit convicts us of sin and the shame which we generate ourselves or which the world brings on us when we attempt to honor God. One is a necessary step towards repentance and change…the other is destructive and unnecessary.
It made me think about the article I had recently read by Ray Comfort (below). Make no mistake, it is an obvious and inevitable thing for the people with whom we have relationships to notice Christ in us if we abide in Him in our daily lives. And it is a wonderful honor to have people approach us and ask us about “the hope within us.” But to think that this is the only way that God wants us to bring the Gospel to the world is ludicrous! And it’s not just the job of those who have taken up being a Pastor as a profession to PREACH the Gospel. Notice the emphasis on the word PREACH…it is not a bad or negative word. It is God’s COMMAND.
Mark 16:15 And He said to them, “Go into all the world and preach the gospel to all creation.”
We consider it to be an honorable thing to go to church and listen to a man preach to us concerning the Gospel and how to live a Christian life. Then satisfied that we’ve paid our penance for the week, we head off to the cafeteria hoping to beat the other denominations to the chow line. But no one likes to be PREACHED at, do they? I mean, that’s a given, right? We endure it at church (and most sermons today are not really preaching, per se, but sharing and teaching) but take it outside of the four walls of the church and it’s an entirely different thing. It’s offensive, it’s rude, it’s obnoxious…in fact it actually drives people away from God. Why intrude on people as they try and go about their daily lives? Why would anyone do such a thing unless they were mentally unstable or just looking for attention?
I wish we could take a video camera back into time and videotape the prophets Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel. Imagine having a video of Jesus, Peter, Stephen, and Paul preaching the Gospel! Then we would videotape a cross-section of leading Pastors today giving their Sunday sermons. And lastly, we would go out and videotape those fringe wackos…those guys who work normal jobs to support themselves and their families and have no formal training in public speaking or theology but take to the streets on a regular basis to preach the Gospel. Believe it or not, you can still find a few out there. You’ll find them in parks, on street corners, at concerts, sporting events, or college campuses.
Then we would compare the tapes of today’s Pastors and the street preachers and compare them to the videotapes of their predecessors. Where do you think we would find more similarities? Not only in style and delivery but in message and content?
How do you feel about street preachers? Could you ever see yourself doing such a thing?
What do your answers to these questions tell you?
So let me ask the question again…are we ashamed of the Gospel?
|
