It isn’t easy selling something that’s broken. For the last few months I’ve been, with no success, trying to sell two items. One that is damaged; It is a stove which is missing the front glass from the door (otherwise works fine) Also for sale, is an item which is going to need some repair work; It is a truck which is showing low compression in one of the engine cylinders, but otherwise is in great mechanical shape. It even looks really good, but it is broken inside. It’s hard coming up with a good sales pitch to make people feel like these are items that they need. After all I don’t want them myself.
Growing up in the church, there was always this pressure from pastors and leaders to witness to my friends and neighbours. “How many people have you told about Jesus this week?”, was the guilt inducing question that I constantly dreaded. You see, even from a young age, I didn’t feel motivated to tell others of the “gospel” I was taught. You would think that if one had good news to share, it might just come out naturally, unless that good news maybe isn’t totally good news after all. I’ve always had a hard time feeling good about the typical evangelical “gospel” sales pitch. It goes something like this:
You are a sinner, separated from God and destined to be tortured in hell forever unless you ask God to forgive you and then clean up your act and become a morally pure person, which of course will show us all that your repentance was sincere. You see, you deserve to be punished for your sin by God, but God loves you and sent Jesus to be punished by God so that you don’t have to be…if you ask for forgiveness. Oh, and this is a limited time offer. Take it now before it’s too late!
It’s like trying to sell a defective product. There are so many problems with this sales pitch, I’m not sure where to even start. How about I’ll start with the obvious.
The Gospel, which means “good news” was never intended to be a sales pitch. The Gospel is not transactional. It is transformational. It’s not potential good news—something we can have if we buy into the sales pitch. It’s just good news plain and simple! Hearing good news tends to change people.
The first thing we need to understand, is that God is just like Jesus. God has always been just like Jesus and always will be. In John 14:9 Jesus tells Phillip that if he has seen Jesus, he has seen the Father. The writer of Hebrews in 1:3 tells us that Jesus is the exact representation of the Father. If God the Father was so offended by our sinful immorality and needed to punish somebody to “make things right”, shouldn’t Jesus also have been equally offended by our immorality and needed to punish someone for it…just like the Father…instead of Himself being punished in our place. I could go deeper, but I wish to simply write a blog post here…not a book. Already you can see John Calvins Penal Substitutionary Atonement theory collapsing like a cheap shanty in an earthquake of revelation.
The next thing we must understand is that sin is not a moral failure to be punished. We are created in love, for the purpose of relationship, to be loved by a God who’s essence is a love that is other thinking, self emptying and unconditional (Agape). Sin is “missing the mark” (the literal meaning of “sin”), therefore a relational failure in which we live apart from our design. This brings us sickness and brokenness, which cannot be remedied by punishment. It can only be cured by the divine doctor. God does not punish us for our sin. Sin brings its own punishment. If you eat nothing but potato chips and drink nothing but sugary soft drinks and lie around on the couch watching T.V. all of the time instead of eating healthy food and exercising, you will become sick. Is it God punishing you? No! It’s the result of your own poor lifestyle choices that punish you.
In stark contrast to the typical “Evangelical” gospel, the true and beautiful gospel starts out with us being created in love, in perfect relationship with our maker. We each choose to decide what good and evil (morality) are apart from God. We choose independence. This is against our design parameters and makes us sick. With our sin consciousnesses, we begin to think that we are separated from God. We begin to see God as one who is not only disappointed with us, but downright angry with us. We ourselves embrace a false identity and become violent and selfish as we believe the lie that we are now worthless. After all, we cannot attain moral perfection on our own. We fail in our attempt to become acceptable to God. We feel shame. In our twisted thinking, we believe that we are so powerful that we can cause God to change His mind about us. God sees us withering away in our sickness and becomes one of us, proving that our thoughts of separation were always just a lie, and He restores the dignity of the human project. He lives among us, loving, forgiving and healing. Jesus shows us who God really is. The God we had forgotten. He shows us that God never stopped loving us.
When I am sick and feeling miserable, I tend to push people away. I am irritable and become angry easily, this is when I’m most likely to lash out at those that I love. I just want to be by myself in my misery and pain. The presence of healthy people only reminds me of what I am not. The sickness of sin does that to us and more. We not only pushed away God Himself, we viciously mocked, tortured and killed Him. God didn’t punish Jesus. We did. Our sin did. As He hung there on the Roman torture device, dying, He did the only thing that God can do as God is love. He loved us. He forgave us. He showed us that no matter what we did to Him, we are not so powerful as to change His mind about us. We have always been loved, accepted, included, forgiven. He took our fatal virus, our sin into Himself and took it to the grave with Him…and left it there. He came back from death, bringing us new life. 1Peter 1:3 says, “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ who according to His great mercy has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.” This is something that was done to us and for us without our knowledge or consent. It’s a done deal.
What’s the difference between a believer and an unbeliever then? Belief. The gospel, therefore cannot be a sales pitch as there is nothing to sell. There’s nothing to buy. There’s nothing you can do to affect your forgiveness. You already possess it. There is only belief. You cannot possibly enjoy something that you have unless you believe you have it.
The Gospel then, is a proclamation of what has happened. All you need to do is to believe. It is something you awaken to. When you believe, the natural result is to surrender and become dependant on the God who has always loved and accepted you. Living as you were designed to live. This becomes easier as you understand who God really is. He is not an angry judge who is looking for someone to punish. He is the loving doctor, the rescuer who can’t stop thinking of you. This is the process of salvation. The root word for “salvation” is of course “save”, which literally means “healing” in the original language of the New Testament. When you believe who God really is and what He is like, when you believe that you are forgiven, loved and accepted, healing can begin. You cannot possibly begin to heal with the false message of the “Evangelical” gospel. There’s too much poison in it that will make you sick from the distorted image of God that it promotes.
Let’s stop with the sales pitch already. The harmful endeavour of trying to sell a broken product to a world that really needs the healing and life that can only come when people understand who God really is. Let’s proclaim the good news that we already have everything that we need. The good news of God revealed to us in the person of Jesus who has already forgiven us, who has always accepted us, who has always loved us and will never stop!
“This is eternal life, that they may know You, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom You have sent.” John 17:3