y challenge today is to adequately communicate the profound sense of revelation that settled in on me this morning, during my devotional time on the deck behind our home here in North Carolina (if I keep saying “home in North Carolina” often enough, it might sink in…).

I’ve been thinking a lot about the idea of “The offense of the Gospel.” During 2013 my expression of The Good News has offended people who are poles apart regarding their views about God, either because the Gospel is too narrow for their taste, or because the Gospel is too open and invitational.

Earlier this year, I carefully read the New Testament all the way through, perusing each book or letter several times and as a complete work. One benefit has been improved New Testament navigation; I’ve found myself drawn to re-read passages I’d possibly skipped in the past via piece-meal study.

So this morning I went back to the first chapter of First Corinthians. I’m going to quote a long section, but I know you’ll find the read worth your time:

For Christ did not send me to baptize but to proclaim the gospel, and not with eloquent wisdom, so that the cross of Christ might not be emptied of its power. For the message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. For it is written, “I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and the discernment of the discerning I will thwart.” Where is the one who is wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, God decided, through the foolishness of our proclamation, to save those who believe. For Jews demand signs and Greeks desire wisdom, but we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those who are the called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength.

GOOD NEWS: The Good News of the Gospel of Jesus cannot be appreciated according to the preferences, the values, and the social economy of secular culture.

Let that sink in for a moment, because what I’m going to say next will bother you if your faith-based values are in fact slotted in beneath – and subject to – the values of the ambient culture.

Here we go: Too many of us use religion as a tool to perpetuate the status quo, and we frequently re-calibrate the wide-open invitation of Jesus to the extent that our Christianity is almost never at odds with our comfort level as products of late 20th-Century western culture.

I have always been uncomfortable with the use of argument or debate to advance or “prove” the tenets of faith. Sure, First Peter 3 advises believers to have a ready testimony at hand, but not as an “I’m right, you’re wrong” response.

“Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have. But do this with gentleness and respect, keeping a clear conscience, so that those who speak maliciously against your good behavior in Christ may be ashamed of their slander.” 

SHARING JESUS: So I’m not interested in arguing my point so much as I’m interested in sharing Jesus. Here’s the evidence: I once was lost, but now I’m found; I was blind but now I see. My experience of life has taken on a dimension of joy that I can’t explain any other way than the open-hearted, receptive love of Jesus.

It’s what the writer of First Timothy 6 described as, “taking hold of the life that is truly life.”

I’m trying hard not to get caught in the trap of evaluating everyone else’s theology, or dogma, or doctrine, or denominational affiliation, or even their distaste for “organized religion.” But I will offer to introduce them to Jesus, and tell them how my experience of following Jesus in the context of a faith community puts me in touch with, “real and eternal life, more and better life than I ever dreamed of” (John 10:10).

Curiously, that openness offends people on both ends of the faith spectrum. My response? Get over yourself, embrace the possibility of New Life in Jesus, and then tell the beautiful truth about the Gospel of Love via the way that you live.

In love, and because of love – DEREK