I'd like to take a look at some
things from a chapter in Rachel Held Evans' book Faith Unraveled. In
this chapter she writes about how the churches of her town did evangelism
during her youth. The event that she writes about was called 'Judgment Day'
which is also the title of this chapter.
Each year, on the Sunday evening
before Halloween, she and other teens would gather at one of the local churches
where there would be a dramatic presentation of the dangers of dying without
professing faith in Jesus. The play was about how not to end up in hell. The
climax of it all, according to Rachel, is when
the
pastor arrives to present the plan of salvation and conduct an altar call. “The
Bible says that God wants to save you from hell,” he says at the conclusion of
his remarks. “All you have to do is believe in Jesus as your Savior and you can
go to heaven. It’s that simple.”
And though many 'go forward', the
effort really isn't effective.
Unfortunately,
most of them [the converts of that evening] turned into what my friends and I
came to call “Judgment Day Christians,” new believers who spent about a week
dutifully abstaining from sex and alcohol but inevitably returned to their
previous lifestyles without much change in their behavior or outlook on life.
There were, however, some who stayed
the course. But there was a problem even here.
Even
those of us who tried to “walk the walk” by going to discipleship groups,
starting Bibles studies, and evangelizing got bored with our Christianity every
now and then. Sometimes it just seemed like all we were doing was killing time.
Sadly, this really does express much
of the evangelism of far too many churches back in the day - and, I suppose,
for some still today. And it didn't work then, and it doesn't work now.
There are many problems with this
kind of evangelism. Here's a rather large one. It isn't aiming at the right
target. The point of trying to scare people into heaven - which is what Rachel
wrote about - is to get converts, people who make some sort of profession of
faith. The goal of this scare tactic is to keep as many people out of hell. To
this way of thinking, everything boils down to what happens later, after you
die. Will it be heaven or hell?
But, surely, that isn't the goal of
the kind of evangelism that Jesus calls for. The goal isn't converts. It's
disciples. Isn't that what Jesus said?
All authority
in heaven and on earth has been given to me.
Go therefore and make disciples of all nations…
When the church does evangelism with
this goal in mind - Jesus' goal - it understands that the big issue isn't hell.
The big issue is sin. And it isn't about what sin might result in later, but
what sin is doing now. Rachel understands this.
Jesus
came to offer more than just salvation from hell. I realized this when I
encountered Jesus the radical rabbi and reexamined my life in light of his
teachings. … Following Jesus would mean
liberation from my bitterness, my worry, my self-righteousness, my prejudices,
my selfishness, my materialism, and my misplaced loyalties. Following Jesus
would mean salvation from my sin.
Sin, destroys - and it does that
now. That's the result of things like bitterness, worry and the other sins that
Rachel lists. I'm sure that you've met people who have become consumed by their
bitterness or their worry or some other sin. Life for them is isn't working.
It's nowhere near what it could be. Sin has done its ugly destructive work.
That's the problem. But Jesus has come. He has not come merely to keep us out
of hell later. He has come to rescue us now. He has come so that we can become
people who are freed from all of that, freed to become whole. He has come to
save us *from* our sins and save us *to* life, real life. The goal isn't about
what happens later. It's about what happens now.
Rachel perceptively writes,
If it’s
starting to sound like I believe in works-based salvation, it’s because I do.
While I don’t for one second think we can earn God’s grace by checking off a
to-do list, I do believe that there is liberation in obedience. When we live
like Jesus, when we take his teachings seriously and apply them to life, we
don’t have to wait until we die to experience freedom from sin. We experience
it every day as each step of faith and every good work loosens the chains of
sin around our feet. It’s hard, and it’s something that I fail at most of the
time, but it’s something I’ve experienced in little fits and starts along the
way, enough to know that it’s worth it. Jesus promises that his yoke will be
light, because he carries most of the load.
Let me add my hearty, 'Amen!' to
that.
What's the big deal about our coming
to Jesus and entrusting ourselves to Him? Is it that we avoid hell? Well, we
do. But there is so much more going on than that. The really big deal is that
we start to become freed from the sins that drag us down. We begin to enjoy
what we were created to be.
Let me express this in the way the
New Testament does. We were saved when we came to Jesus. Something
definitive happened. We are being saved as we learn to obey Jesus as His
disciples. Our lives change, bit by bit, as we learn to follow Him. We will
be saved when Jesus returns to usher in the new heavens and the new earth,
a place where we will be completely freed from sin in all its forms.
This is what Jesus is about. This is
the goal of real evangelism. And as we pursue now, in the present, this process of becoming
increasingly freed from our sins, we are able to help others also to be freed
from their sins. And in this way we change the world.