Free wallpaper download! Galatians 3:13. God has redeemed us by faith through the substitution of His Son on the cross!
Free wallpaper download! Galatians 3:13. God has redeemed us by faith through the substitution of His Son on the cross!
Free wallpaper download!
Finding our fill in Christ
I have been meditating on Luke 6:20-26, commonly known as the beatitudes. I’m tempted to go into a full blown dissertation of the passage, but I will treat it more like a summary. Let’s look at the verses:
20 Then He lifted up His eyes toward His disciples, and said:
“ Blessed are you poor,
For yours is the kingdom of God.
21Blessed are you who hunger now,
For you shall be filled.
Blessed are you who weep now,
For you shall laugh.
22 Blessed are you when men hate you,
And when they exclude you,
And revile you, and cast out your name as evil,
For the Son of Man’s sake.
23 Rejoice in that day and leap for joy!
For indeed your reward is great in heaven,
For in like manner their fathers did to the prophets.
24 “ But woe to you who are rich,
For you have received your consolation.
25 Woe to you who are full,
For you shall hunger.
Woe to you who laugh now,
For you shall mourn and weep.
26 Woe to youwhen allmen speak well of you,
For so did their fathers to the false prophets.
What instantly strikes me in the passage is how in either case of those who are in the kingdom (those who trust in Christ) and those who are outside of the kingdom (those who do not trust in Christ), there are virtually the same kinds of desires-
1) The desire to have poverty filled with riches
2) The desire to have hunger filled with nourishment
3) The desire to have sorrow filled with joy
4) The desire to have our rejection filled with approval
These are things that both the believer and unbeliever like to have. Jesus’ main point in this passage isn’t to say that these desires are wrong, but rather to bring out the reality of WHERE these desires are filled in.
Poverty, hunger, sorrow, and rejection don’t sound compelling, and by no means is Christ telling us that we have to fit these descriptions to be Christians, so the question is this: As a Christian, where should I ultimately be looking towards to fill these forms of deficit?
The answer is simply “Christ”. If my poverty is filled with the riches of Christ, it is a richness that never fades away, unlike the unbeliever. I may have money, but when I lose it all, I am still rich because my riches were never in my possessions, but in Christ. If my hunger is filled with Christ, the bread of life (the Israelites feasted off manna from heaven, which Christ said is Himself), then even if my stomach rumbles and I don’t have bread, I have my fill in Christ and my hunger for Him, my hunger to do the will of the Father consumes me more than hunger for food does. In my sorrow, if I find my joy in Christ, then despite what things cause injury to me or to my life, my joy was never in the temporary pleasures that can be experienced on this earth, but in the everlasting joy of Christ. And if my desire for approval is found in Christ, despite rejection of men, I know that on the basis of the righteousness of Christ, I will be approved, and my efforts for Christ will be found approved by God even though an unbelieving world has rejected me.
Where do we find our fill?
Psalm 37:25
I have been young, and now am old;
Yet I have not seen the righteous forsaken,
Nor his descendants begging bread.
The Scripture is still true. Though we may face hunger, with our fill in Christ, we, the righteous, will truly never beg bread or go hungry because the true bread of life-Christ-supplies us with a fill of Himself that can never be added to. Let us set our hope on this fill of bread!
Do I need to be like them to witness to them?
I’ve been in many discussions where the topic came up about relating to people that we witness to. Do I have to be like the people that I am witnessing to in order to witness to them? Is that a pre-requisite for successful evangelism?
When we look at the life of Paul, we see a man who is Jewish going into a wide variety of countries and cultures on his missionary journeys. Paul was a man who most definitely learned the cultures that he went to. But does that mean that we must be like the people that we preach to?
The distinction between missions and witnessing
Missions
What is a mission? I would define a mission as predominantly crossing a cultural boundary with the chief purpose of bringing the cross of Christ into that culture as an outpouring of Christ in your locality. I get this definition from Matthew 28:19-20 where Jesus says:
therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, 20 teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”
These verses show the perpetuity of the commission and the range of the commission. The preaching of the gospel starts where you are and spreads to where you’re not. Missions primarily take the gospel outside of a culture. A mission usually has more of a culture-drenching element to it, as you are typically living amongst the people. You will find that like Paul at Mars Hill, learning as much about your culture is beneficial for you to convey timeless spiritual truths relative to that culture’s current understanding.
Witnessing
Witnessing is the act of proclaiming the gospel. Witnessing should be the central thrust of every mission. Witnessing will involve me bringing a person into an awareness of sin, God’s wrath, and Christ- the provision for sinners that appeases the wrath of God.
Do I need to be like them to witness to them?
I think that to a degree when you are a missionary you will take on enough of your culture to properly engage it. For example, if they speak a language that we do not understand, you must learn a bit of their language so that you can properly communicate. If I want to show them what Christ looks like in the context of their culture, I’ll need to understand their culture so that I could show them what the Bible has to say about the good and the bad of their culture.
However, at the core of missions is the gospel- I do not need to be culturally similar to a culture to preach the gospel. If I want to live amongst them and disciple them, then I need to learn the culture. However, preaching the gospel does not require that I be like them to “relate”. We relate on the basis that, despite our cultural differences, we are identical in that we are sinners like our forefather Adam. We are culturally different, yes. The power of the gospel is equally experienced by the person in South America as it is by the person in Africa. The gospel is experienced by the Emo kid and the Hip-Hopper. The basis of our similarities shouldn’t be in our upbringing, our culture, gender, etc. but in the universal indictment upon all mankind- we are born fallen!
Let’s not be afraid to preach the gospel to people simply because we can’t relate on other levels, for we all are the same in our need for Christ!
