Dever The Gospel and Personal Evangelism (Foreword by C. J. Mahaney)

1. Auflage 2007
ISBN: 978-1-4335-1879-9
Verlag: Crossway
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, 128 Seiten

Evangelism is not only misunderstood, it is often unpracticed. Many Christians want to share the gospel with others, but because those Christians don't grasp the fundamentals of witnessing, they feel intimidated and incapable of sharing the truth of the gospel. Yet those believers fail to recognize that God has already established who and how we are to evangelize. In The Gospel and Personal Evangelism, Dr. Mark Dever seeks to answer the four basic questions about evangelism that many Christians ask: Who should we evangelize? How should we evangelize? What is evangelism? Why should we evangelize? In his answers Dever draws on New Testament truths and helps believers apply those truths in practical ways. As readers understand the fundamentals of evangelism, they will begin to develop a culture of evangelism in their lives and their local churches.

Mark Dever (PhD, Cambridge University) is the senior pastor of Capitol Hill Baptist Church in Washington, DC, and president of 9Marks (9Marks.org). Dever has authored over a dozen books and speaks at conferences nationwide. He lives in Washington, DC, with his wife, Connie, and they have two adult children.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Dever, Mark

Leseproben

2: What Is the Gospel?

My friends know that I enjoy words, so sometimes for Christmas I’ll get calendars with interesting stories or word facts. I can’t remember on which calendar I read the following account, but I was so struck by it, I made a note of it. I don’t know if it’s true, but it’s a great illustration of the importance of getting your story right.

According to this account, a little over a hundred years ago the editor of an English newspaper opened a copy of his paper—after it was already for sale—only to find in it a most embarrassing, unintentional typographical conflation of two stories, one about a patented pig-killing and sausage-making machine, and the other about a gathering in honor of a local clergyman, the Reverend Doctor Mudge, at which he was presented with a gold-headed cane. A portion of it read as follows:

Several of Rev. Dr. Mudge’s friends called upon him yesterday, and after a conversation the unsuspecting pig was seized by the hind leg, and slid along a beam until he reached the hot-water tank. . . . Thereupon he came forward and said that there were times when the feelings overpowered one, and for that reason he would not attempt to do more than thank those around him for the manner in which such a huge animal was cut into fragments was simply astonishing. The doctor concluded his remarks, when the machine seized him and, in less time than it takes to write it, the pig was cut into fragments and worked up into a delicious sausage. The occasion will be long remembered by the doctor’s friends as one of the most delightful of their lives. The best pieces can be procured for tenpence a pound, and we are sure that those who have sat so long under his ministry will rejoice that he has been treated so handsomely.

Christianity is all about news. It is all about the good news, really the best news the world has ever heard. And yet that news—far more important than the story about the Reverend Doctor Mudge or the sausage machine—is often every bit as scrambled and confused. That which passes for the gospel too often becomes a very thin veneer spread lightly over our culture’s values, becoming shaped and formed to its contours rather than to the truth about God. The real story, the real message, becomes lost.

This idea of the good news isn’t some later Christian packaging scheme. Jesus Christ talked about the good news, and when he did, he reached back to the language of the prophecies of Isaiah hundreds of years earlier (Isa. 52:7; 61:1). Whatever Jesus may have said in Aramaic, the way the Christians, and even his own disciples, remembered it in Greek was with this word evangel—literally, good news.

Well, what exactly is this good news? In this chapter, we want to try to set the story straight; we want to get the news right. What is the message that we Christians have to tell? Is it that “I’m okay” or “God is love”? Is it that “Jesus is my friend” or “I should live right”? What is the good news of Jesus Christ?

The Good News Is Not Simply That We Are Okay

You may have heard of the book title of almost forty years ago now, I’m OK, You’re OK.1Some people seem to think that Christianity is fundamentally a religious therapy session, where we sit around trying to help each other feel good about ourselves. The pews are couches. The preacher asks questions. The text to be expounded is your inner self. And yet, when we have finished plumbing our inner depths, why is it that we so often feel empty? Or even dirty? Is there something about us and our lives that is incomplete or even wrong?

I remember hearing one celebrity being interviewed on television after the death of a close friend. Weeping, this celebrity exclaimed, “Why does everyone I love die?” Yes, why indeed. The Bible utterly rejects the idea that we are okay, that the human condition is just fine, that everyone is merely in need of accepting their current condition, their finitude, or their imperfections, or that we simply need to begin to look on the bright side of it.

The Bible teaches that in our first parents, Adam and Eve, we have all been seduced into disobeying God. We are therefore not righteous and on good terms with God. In fact, our sin is so serious that Jesus taught that we need a new birth (John 3), and Paul taught that we need to be created again (1 Corinthians 15). As we find in Ephesians 2, we are dead in our sins and transgressions.

You know what transgressions are—they are sins simply represented as going across a boundary. In our day and age, Michel Foucault would live, like the Marquis de Sade before him, in order to transgress boundaries. And so there is some thought that Foucault deliberately sought to infect others with the AIDS virus as he himself contracted it and died through it. The bathhouses of San Francisco became the place where Foucault not only transgressed the boundaries of respect for sexuality but also of respect for life itself. Transgressions. Crossings over the line.

Our transgressions may not seem so blatant and offensive, but they are surely no less deadly for our relationship with God. Paul says in Romans 6:23 that “the wages of sin is death.” We understand more of why and how that is the case by turning to the letter of James. James said, “For whoever keeps the whole law and yet stumbles at just one point is guilty of breaking all of it. For he who said, ‘Do not commit adultery,’ also said, ‘Do not murder.’ If you do not commit adultery but do commit murder, you have become a lawbreaker” (James 2:10–11).

Notice the seriousness of each sin. The point James is making is that the laws of God are not simply external statutes passed by some congress in heaven that God enforces. The law of God is the expression of God’s own character. To break out of this law, to live against it, is to live against God.

If my wife sends me to the store with specific instructions to get a particular item and I come back without having gotten it and with no good excuse (such as “They were out of it” or “I couldn’t find it” or “We shouldn’t get this”), but simply having decided not to get it, that will reflect on our relationship.

The Bible presents God not simply as our creator but as our jealous lover. He wants us—every part of us. For us to think that we can disregard him sometimes, to set aside his ways when it suits us, is to show that we haven’t understood the nature of the relationship at all. So, you see, we can’t claim to be believers and yet knowingly, repeatedly, happily break God’s law.

But this is our state. We have crossed over the bounds that God has rightly set for our lives. We have contradicted him in both the letter and the spirit of his instructions to us. And so we not only feel guilt, but we actually are guilty before God. We are not only conflicted in ourselves; we are actually in conflict with God. We break God’s laws again and again. And we do this because we are, says Ephesians 2, dead in our sins and transgressions.

Now all of this may seem to be too grim to have much at all to do with anything called “the good news.” But there is no doubt that an accurate understanding of where we are now is essential to getting to where we need to be. One of the early stages of becoming a Christian is, I think, realizing that our problems aren’t fundamentally that we have messed up our own lives, or have simply failed to reach our full potential, but that we have sinned against God. And so it begins to dawn on us that we are rightly the objects of God’s wrath and his judgment, and that we deserve death, separation from God, and spiritual alienation from him now and even forever.

This is what the theologians call depravity. It is the death that deserves death.

Do you see the reason that all of these wrongs are so tragic? These sins are committed against a perfect, holy, loving God. And they are committed by creatures made in his image.

True Christianity is realistic about the dark side of our world, our life, our nature, our heart. But true Christianity is not finally pessimistic or morally indifferent, encouraging us to merely settle in and accept the cold, hard truth. No. The news that we, as Christians, have to bring is so great, so tremendous, not only because our depravity is so pervasive and our sin so widespread, but also because God’s plans for us are so different, so wonderful.

And when we begin to realize it, we become thankful for the fact that Christianity is not finally about anesthetizing us to life’s pain, or even about waking us up to it and teaching us to live with it. It is about teaching us to live with a transforming longing, with a growing faith, with a sure and certain hope of what’s to come.

The Good News Is Not Simply That God Is Love

Other times we may hear the gospel simply represented as the message that God is love. Now, this one is sort of like the Oklahoma newspaper headline that read, “Cold Weather Causes Temperatures to Drop.” It’s not that it’s not true; it’s just that it’s so obvious that something is missing or left out.

That “God is love” is certainly true. It’s even in the Bible! “God is love” (1 John 4:8). But there is a danger in simply saying so as if it is self-evident.

Maybe we get a little sense of what this love is when, as parents, we tell our children that, for some good reason about which we are aware, they can’t do something they want to do. And what is an oft-heard response? “If you really loved me, you’d let me.” Now that’s just plain wrong! But it’s a falsehood that can be as subtle as it is significant. Love doesn’t always let....