It’s interesting to note that Jesus’ final commandment to evangelize never mentioned ministering to the hungry and sick. Before his crucifixion he had pictured the last judgment as a time when his true disciples would be separated from the unfaithful. He made one distinction between the faithful and the unfaithful. The true disciples would be those who have carried out his great commission to care for the distressed (Mathew 25: 31-46): “Just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.”

Yet his test of true discipleship never referred to evangelizing. Did Jesus not know his own mind? George Sweazy insists there is no contradiction here. “There is just one commandment by which all will be tested – the commandment to care for those in need. There is no great commission without the great commandment.” Looking out over the city in all its misery, it was physical suffering that Jesus mentioned. At his departure into the heavenly glory, it was spiritual needs of which He spoke. Each implies the other. Those are the twin aspects of the Gospel. 

“Our talking so much about a polarization between personal evangelism and the social gospel is absurd. The church was born out of concern for the whole person, the whole world, the whole gospel. We are not allowed to choose whether to be an evangelistic or a social gospel Christian. The world can never have enough of either.” (The Church as Evangelist, San Francisco: Harper and Row; 1978. p. 21)

Throughout my ministry I have reminded my congregations and the students at Asbury Seminary that Methodism at its best has always held these two aspects of the gospel together. John Wesley said, “The Gospel of Christ knows of no religion but social; no holiness but social holiness.” There was no holiness apart from the community. It doesn’t hurt us to be redundant and keep telling the folks that well-known historians believed that England escaped a revolution like that in France only because of the Wesleyan combination of evangelism and social action. The English trade union movement started in Methodist meeting houses. The Wesleyan revival roused concern for public health, hospital care, prison reform, public education, and the abolition of slavery.

So, again, maybe the local church needs to be evangelized to evangelize. We need to be deliberate in our churches in “making disciples” who will in turn “make disciples.” We must nurture and cherish the bond between word and deed, ideas and consequences, beliefs and actions. And the primary place where this kind of evangelizing can and must take place is the local congregation.

I think of the last congregation I served. A young man, Don, was converted, made his profession public and was baptized. During the Christmas season, soon after his profession he played his guitar and sang,”Gentle Mary Laid Her Child.” What a witness! On the following Sunday, he was singing, “There’s one who is greater, there’s one who is waiting, just let Jesus take your hand”- singing about the Messiah. 

When he sang for us in that worship service, I thought about how he came to be in our church. It wasn’t this preacher who won him to Christ. It was Martha and Don, a young lay couple who had had a transforming conversion experience in our church. They were this young man’s neighbors. Their lives were so transformed by Christ that they captured Don’s attention; their performance and their profession spoke to this young Jewish person, and their witness is really what won him.

Martha and Don embodied the personal kind of evangelism as a crucial part of what we have talked about: the congregation as evangelist, with persons witnessing in word and deed, centered in Christ, waiting on the power and timing of the Holy Spirit, growing in the grace of full discipleship, sharing in the congregation as evangelist.

How could Jesus be truly human and truly divine? That’s a question commonly asked. Theology calls it INCARNATION. In fact there is often talk of the Scandal of the Incarnation. After a little reflection, we may best put the question, not how but why did Jesus become both human and divine?

Let’s think about it.

Few men in the twentieth century seemed as immortal as Mao Tse-tung. Chairman Mao became the incarnation of a movement, a system of thought, and a revolution that affected 900,000 people. He lived to be eighty-three and was China’s leader for over three decades. It was difficult for even the most astute observer to imagine a China without Chairman Mao. Yet he died. An admirer wrote, shortly after Mao’s death: “He conceived of the Chinese Revolution, and then helped cause it to happen, and in the process, the thought of Chairman Mao became the primary thought of almost every Chinese. The word almost literally became flesh.” 

Note the conditional word: almost; “the word almost literally became flesh.” The apostle John, writing of Jesus, said, “The Word became flesh.” No reservation, no conditional definition. And Paul wrote, “The light of the knowledge of the glory of God [shines] in the face of Jesus Christ” (2 Corinthians 4:6).

I was in China two years after Mao’s death. His likeness in pictures and statues was everywhere. The little red book of his quotations was still in all the bookstores. Chairman Mao will take his place in history with great shapers of national life, but the limitation is still there. When I was in China, the magnificent mausoleum they had built for Chairman Mao was closed. The official word was that it was closed for repair, but the informal word passed on among the guides was that it was a deliberate effort to diminish Mao’s presence in the minds and hearts of people; and that diminishing work goes even today.

In Mao, powerful man that he was, the word of Chinese commitment and dogma almost became flesh. But with Jesus, the Word of God’s creating and redeeming love became flesh and dwelt among us. We beheld his glory, “the glory as of the begotten of the Father… full of grace and truth” (John 1:14 KJV). This is the scandal of the Incarnation. It is a scandal because it proclaims that in Jesus–the baby born in a barn, this poor preacher and carpenter who Christians praise and affirm as the ultimate revelation of God is the key to the universe and all meaning.

Don’t get stuck! We misrepresent the Church’s understanding of Christ if we oversimplify and define the Incarnation solely in terms of either Christ’s divinity or his humanity. The Incarnation actually means that Jesus of Nazareth was a man, known by his disciples as being fully human, a person who shared the limitations and temptations of common, ordinary human existence-yet was also the deliberate and unique self-expression of God. P.T. Forsythe, a preacher-theologian, put it in a gripping way: “Our real and destined eternity goes round by Nazareth to reach us.”

The first line in the Old Testament of the Bible is this: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” The first line in John’s Gospel of the New Testament is this: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” In the sentence from Genesis, the Source from which all comes is named. In the Gospel, John is making a decisive affirmation about who Jesus is. He is the expression of God’s own true self. Consider Jesus’ response to the question of Philip: “Lord, show us the Father.” Jesus said to him, “Have I been with you all this time, Philip, and you still do not know me? Whoever has seen me has seen the Father”(John 14:9).

Jesus, incarnate God and baby in a manger, the incarnate word, our King – Hallelujah!

We are in the midst of the Advent season. It’s Christmas time. Let’s stay with the story…at least reflect seriously a bit. 

A central figure is Joseph. He is perplexed, deeply perplexed. The woman to whom he is engaged is pregnant and he knows the baby is not his. He is wrestling with what to do. Will he expose her, making her a public example? He can’t do that; he loves her too much. He takes the only course acceptable to his conscience. He decides to divorce her quietly, privately, hoping to cause as little a ripple in the community as possible.

That decision, though it came out of the love and justice of his heart, didn’t set well. In the midnight watches and wakefulness of his wrenching heart, an angel appeared with the astounding news:

“Do not fear to take Mary your wife, for that which is conceived in her is of the Holy Spirit; she will bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus, for He will save his people from their sins.” (Matthew 1:20—23 RSV)

Jesus will be his name. It had been declared by the prophet, Isaiah, centuries before. The angel had announced it to Mary at the time of her Annunciation: “You will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus. He will be great, and will be called the Son of the Most High…and of his kingdom there will be no end.” (Luke 1:31-32, 33 RSV) So, the question, what’s in a name? 

“You shall call His name Jesus, for He will save His people from their sins.” That’s it and that is Good News!  Good News that is good for all time, and yet becomes good for me…you...anew when we accept this reality.

Accepting it begins with our accepting and admitting the bad news about ourselves. The bad news is that we are sinners.  We have bent, entangled ourselves against his unending kingdom. So let’s be very specific, name our common bondage and claim our deliverance:

Do you feel burdened down by  guilt? 

Have you started to realize that the guilt may be from unconfessed sins?

Do you feel pain in your heart because there is a severed relationship that needs reconciliation?

Do you feel helpless because you are held in the tenacious grip of a debilitating habit? Alcohol? Drugs? Gambling? 

Is your energy being drained because you live too close to the line of moral compromise —cheating in business? Preoccupied with sexual lusts?

Does your pride often put you in the position of thinking more highly of yourself than you ought to think, of looking down your nose at others?

Our ways are not His ways.  His goodness shines into lives lived apart from it and reveals this truth every day. We could go on and on, but you’ll have to do that personally.

Painful though the process of confession and repentance may be, the joy that comes as a result is “unspeakable and full of glory.” For the one whose birthday we are celebrating these days is JESUS. He will save us from our sins. If only we call upon his name…and what a name it is!

Life can be hard, like Joseph’s, but there remains a gift for us all to receive in the name of Jesus.

This is the sixth installment in Maxie’s series on Core Convictions.  You can find the first five articles here, here, here, here and here.

In previous articles, we explored the case that all need to be saved, all can be saved, all can know they are saved, and all can be saved to the uttermost. Having laid these forth, we now recognize that the big question is about salvation itself. Certainly Zacchaeus needed to be saved, Israel needed saving, and Charles Spurgeon knew he needed and sought salvation; but masses of people are thinking, maybe asking, “Me? I need to be saved?” At least a bit of that questioning may be yours.

We are exploring the dynamic of full salvation and need to stay focused on the relevance and context of our own lives. We need to keep asking whether we believe that we ourselves need saving.

The chances are that the question of the need for salvation is not a question that arises among you and your associates. It’s not even on the radar, especially for those who are educated, employed, housed, and well fed. For many, salvation has a distant, almost irrelevant ring.

What I have written about salvation may have little meaning to those who don’t feel that they need saving, but in truth, we all need to be saved. Perhaps not from the same thing, but I have never met anyone who is not in need of some dimension of the “fullness of salvation.”

To be sure, we all need “the new birth (justification), “for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23). But that’s the beginning. Some of us need to be saved from addictive behavior; that is, what we do to avoid feeling things. We want to avoid pain, including the feelings of low self-esteem. Our culture has led us to believe that pain is bad and discomfort is to be avoided. We seek to slice out the unpleasant pieces of life through drugs or obsessive behavior; in doing so, we become empty shells, incomplete, and broken. From this, we need to be saved.

There are the obvious addictions. Alcohol and drug abuse claim millions who need saving. Professionals call this “self-medicating” (habitually taking unprescribed, addictive substances to relieve stress or other conditions). What about overeating or obsessive physical exercise? Compulsive gambling and sex? Those could be self-medicating behaviors. In spite of our protestations, we need to be saved from all sorts of addictive behaviors, particularly those we can readily name.

As I write this, the daily national news confirms that people need to be saved from simply behaving badly. We have seemingly lost the principle of basic civility. We put ourselves first and ignore the needs and desires of others. We act as though we are all that matters, and we become mean-spirited. We see that when political discourse is reduced to shouting matches and name-calling. We may be able to excuse that on the elementary-school playground, but not online, on the floor of the Senate, the office of the President, or in our families. I don’t think I am misreading it: meanness is growing, not shrinking, and we need to be saved.

We could make the case in a lot of different ways, but what about this: Would God have expressed such great concern if we didn’t need to be saved? Would he have bothered to come among us in the flesh, in Jesus; to live, teach, and suffer and die on our behalf, if we were just fine and had no need? Who needs to be saved? Me?

This is part III of Maxie’s series on Core Convictions, you can find his prior articles here, here, and here.

I have long admired the great evangelist, Charles Spurgeon. I often wonder what it would have been like to hear him preach, He is high on any list of renowned preachers. People had to stand in line to get into worship in his church in London. The crowds were so great that sometimes he would urge the membership of his own church not to come to worship the next Sunday in order that there would be room for seekers, those who had not yet received the gospel for their salvation.

The Story of Spurgeon’s Salvation

It was only recently that I heard the story of Spurgeon’s salvation experience. As a young man, he was deeply convicted of his sin, but did not really know how to get his sins forgiven. He began to go to different churches, seeking salvation. He later shared that he heard some fine sermons on doing good and living right, but he never really heard anybody fully preach the gospel of salvation.

One Sunday, he had planned to attend a particular church but it had snowed so much he could not get there. He was walking on an obscure street in London and came upon a little Primitive Methodist chapel he had never seen before.

He went in and sat down. Only a few people were present, without the pastor. As Spurgeon started to get up to leave, a very thin looking man, a layperson, deacon in that church, walked into the pulpit, opened his Bible and read Isaiah 45:22: “Look unto me, and be ye saved, all the ends of the earth: for I am God, and there is none else” (KJV).

Spurgeon said that when the deacon finished reading the text, he lifted up both of his hands and cried out, “Look, look, look! It is only look” At that moment, after all his seeking, Spurgeon said, he finally saw the way of salvation. All he had to do was look, by faith, to Jesus Christ and he was gloriously saved.

Spurgeon’s experience suggests two critical considerations. One, all people need and many are seeking salvation. Two, the gospel is far more than “doing good and living right.” What is that “far more”?  

Justification: The Miracle of a Moment

The two pivotal dynamics of full salvation are justification and sanctification. Both are works of grace. In justification, we are pardoned and reconciled to God; the restoration of the image of God in us is begun, which is the beginning of sanctification.

Justification may be the miracle of a moment but sanctification is the process of a lifetime. As I suggested in my last article, “the dynamic process of sanctification is to work out in fact what is already true in principle. In position, in our relationship to God in Jesus Christ, we are new persons; that is justification and new birth. Now our condition, the actual life we live, must be brought into harmony with our new position. That is the process of sanctification.”

Sanctification: The Journey of a Lifetime

Justification comes when we recognize ourselves as sinners, separated from God, then repent and in faith receive his forgiveness. This is also the starting point of sanctification. As Wesley said, “It is the gate to it, the entrance to it.”

Sanctification is a continuation of our trusting God’s grace that has saved us, trusting him to shape our lives completely into the likeness of Christ.

Why not take some time now to reflect and identify the time, process, conviction, decision—whatever was involved—when, like Spurgeon, you knew and, by faith, you made some claim on Jesus Christ for your salvation.