MY
ROLE AS A WORLD CHRISTIAN
A.
– Maintaining God’s Perspective
A
Moment in the Life of a Disciple (10)
During this series, we have tried to
imagine ourselves in the position of an early disciple of Jesus,
starting with the initial encounter and the call to follow Him;
through the years of His popularity; to the cross of Calvary and
beyond, culminating in the baptism in the Holy Spirit and the launch
of worldwide evangelisation. The experiences of the first band of
followers of Christ were real and life-changing. Millions of times
since then men and women have heard Jesus’ invitation “Follow
me” and have left everything and done so. Sometimes, they got
it wrong. All too often they felt they were not living up to Jesus’
standard. Many of them paid the ultimate price of martyrdom to be
His witnesses. But they changed the world. The call of Jesus comes
to you and me. How we respond to that call will determine the rest
of our lives and our effectiveness as world Christians.
The
“Great Commission” that commands followers of Jesus to
“Go into all the world” and disciple the nations is one
of God’s “bottom lines”. We need to maintain God’s
perspective about life and our part in reaching others for Him.
It’s
God’s world
If
we are to understand and fulfil our role as world Christians, it is
essential that we start to see the world and our place in it from
God’s eternal viewpoint. We need a renewed mind, a paradigm
shift. The only way that can happen is if the worldview we have
imbibed from society around us is supernaturally excised and replaced
with God’s thinking. Let me explain.
A
child is run down and killed outside his school - his bewildered
parents ask “Why?” Forty per cent of the people living
in a village in Botswana suffer from full-blown AIDS. Who can
explain it? A teenage girl lies dying on a hospital gurney, the
victim of Avian Flu. She never hurt anyone, but she will die and be
buried – why should she join the misery of millions sick and
dying in poverty in the fourth world? Refugees live in burned out
shells of homes, afraid to cross fields littered with mines –
the cause of the conflict is religious tension. Whose fault is this
mess of humanity? Where is the Man in Charge?
God
has a perspective on the human condition and the disasters that
afflict us. An apartment building in the south of Lebanon is hit by
an Israeli missile and scores of civilians die - is it really the
will of Allah that the innocent pay the price of cross-border
conflict in which both sides commit war crimes? What about moral
tragedies? Theologians disagree on celibacy (God’s idea or
man’s?), homosexuality (which threatens to split the world-wide
Anglican community) and everything in between. What about capital
punishment, greed, degradation of the environment and other issues
facing Christians and non-Christians alike?
How
does God view our circumstances? How does He feel when good men and
women succumb to death because of preventable diseases? Does He
care? Does He despair that some things go from bad to worse? There
is plenty of money for the Western world so to indulge itself that
the average life expectancy is dropping because of lifestyle
diseases, yet hundreds of millions do not have proper medical care or
shelter and go to bed hungry each night. It is easy to abandon hope
because of the state of the human race and the inequalities and
sadness that seem to plague us. We need to see events “through
God’s eyes”.
There
is a God-view of the daily news that offers hope. It is not the CNN,
NBC, ABC, BBC or Al Jazeera spin; the versions of “truth”,
opinions and pre-dispositions of the far right or far left of
society, which are never unbiased or entirely objective. (It is
impossible to be objective if you are subjectively involved or have
an ideological barrow to push.)
Only
God is eternal. Only He will outlast the opinions of the most
cynical among us. Knowing this, if we are wise, we will seek to
interpret life in terms of His perspectives, in areas as diverse as
philosophy, ethics, finances, biology, psychology, sociology,
history, economics, the law and politics. In a post-modernist era
that lacks (but needs) anchors it is important to understand that God
and His word and character are absolute. Only He gives meaning to
life.
I
am reminded of a flight I once took up part of the Nile River in
Egypt. In the vast expanse of nothing, the things that stood out
were the water and strips of green on both sides. The river brought
life to the desert. Like a stream in a spiritual desert the
disciple’s mission is fed and directed by God’s
perspective. The life we enjoy in Him is sustainable, while human
perspectives are swallowed up by the surrounding heat and sand. Hope
withers without God in the frame.
Christians
in society – cultural vandals or Divinely inspired?
In
an article in the Sydney Morning Herald Magazine Good
Weekend,
dated July 22, 2006 (With
God on their side),
columnist Andrew Marshall wrote about current efforts by Western
evangelical Christian movements to reach the world with the Gospel.
Citing methodologies used by mission and aid organisations in the new
millennium, Marshall took aim at “tentmakers” (Christians
who use their professions to enter countries that do not officially
sanction missionaries), pejoratively calling such activity “stealth
missions”. He asserted that Christian aid organisations are
“cruising the disaster zone for converts” and “preying
upon populations least able to resist them”. He accused
Christian “entrepreneurs” seeking to carry out the Great
Commission of undertaking an “evangelical onslaught”.
Clearly Marshall did not understand the Disciple’s Mission.
The
article appeared on the eve of an appeal
by two Australian ministers, Pastors Danny Nalliah and Daniel Scot,
against their conviction in a Victorian court for “vilifying
Islam” by explaining the tenets of the Muslim faith at a
private Christian seminar, in the context of training those seeking
to reach their Muslim friends for Christ.
Is
Marshall correct? Do we accept that Jesus calls us to pursue an
“evangelical onslaught” on behalf of Wycliffe Bible
Translators, Samaritans Pursue, Youth With A Mission, Christian Aid
or particularist denominational interests, at the risk of “stoking
anti-Western sentiment and exposing indigenous Christians to greater
persecution”? Should we adjust the message and methods to make
them more palatable to others? Should we respond to those who take
cheap shots at Christians by silencing our witness, or should we
re-double our efforts to reach them because they simply do not
understand the issues involved.
God’s
perspective is “redemptive”. The human race is fatally
afflicted by sin. Christ died on the cross to save us from the
consequences of sin and set us free from its guilt and enslaving
power. If we will turn back to Him, that message, and the
opportunity to choose, remain to be communicated to the world. The
task and privilege of doing so have been committed to all Christians,
everywhere.
The
Biblical answer always revolves around mobilization to reach out to
the world. The Great Commission is not negotiable.
“Here
is a trustworthy saying that deserves full acceptance: Christ Jesus
came into the world to save sinners” (1 Timothy 1:15).
“The
Lord is not slow in keeping his promise, as some understand slowness.
He is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone
to come to repentance”. (2 Peter 3:9)
“In the
past God overlooked such ignorance, but now he commands all people
everywhere to repent. For he has set a day when he will judge the
world with justice by the man he has appointed. He has given proof
of this to all men by raising him from the dead." (Acts 17:30,
31)
While
I do not agree with Marshall’s underlying premise, and while
unwise approaches, gimmicks and misjudged zeal are sometimes employed
by Christians eager to extend their spheres of influence, build great
churches and do what they can to carry out Jesus’ command, such
actions do not (of themselves) invalidate the message in any way (nor
do they rule out the messengers).
Marshall,
and others like him, fail to realise (or reject, because it does not
fit their biased cosmologies) that the work of world evangelisation
was always at the heart of the life and ministry of Jesus Christ and
continues to be a powerful motivator in the Christian community in
our time
We
should not be surprised when we encounter non-Christians who are wary
of our witness. In my university days, sociology and anthropology
professors were frequently scathing in their attacks against
Christian organisations and missionaries in places like New Guinea
and Africa. Officials in Peru, Venezuela and Tanzania, whom I got to
know in an official capacity, were suspicious of the work of
Protestant missionaries. However, our world view cannot afford to be
moulded or hamstrung by the world. We are called to have the “mind
of Christ”.
God
loved so much that He gave of Himself. If we are to be effective as
Christians, we need to be moved by the same impulse. When we do so
we will more likely be impactful as a worldwide Christian movement
and not dismissed by cynics who think we are out of touch. Our
message must be a contemporary one of hope and renewal.
God’s
perspective in spatial terms – the view from above
God
is higher than us. He sees everything differently. Go to the top of
any mountain, tower, apartment building or castle rampart and you
will see things in a context those at ground level cannot begin to
imagine. During a visit to Taman Negara in the heart of Malaysia I
once negotiated the length of the world’s highest tree top
walk, far above the jungle canopy. From that vantage point I looked
down on rivers, sandbanks, tracks and the camp fires of the
indigenous “Orang Asli”. Height gave perspective. In
the same way, God is above us all. He sees life and eternity we can
only grasp with His revelation.
"As the heavens are higher
than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts
than your thoughts.”
(Isaiah 55:9)
I
will never forget a memorable hour when I lay on my back and stared
into the dark night sky above Gunnedah, in rural New South Wales. I
was all alone and far from the pollution of city lights. Above me I
could see countless stars, including the beautiful Magellanic
Clouds, two of the closest
galaxies to the earth, within our own Milky Way. They seemed so
close, but astronomers tell us they are some 100,000 light-years
distant. Dwarfed by this magnificent stellar show, I
followed the faint light of sunlight reflecting off a man-made
satellite that crossed the heavens. It was probably only a few
hundred kilometres away. The universe (that small portion I could
see) seemed so vast. I was humbled when I looked up and considered
how big creation is – and how intelligent is the Maker of it
all, and how foolish those who peremptorily deny His existence:
“God
looks down from heaven on the sons of men to see if there are any who
understand, any who seek God.”
(Psalm 53:2). What does God see when He looks down on creation? He
is infinite; we are usually less than two metres in stature and very
vulnerable. He knows everything; we know almost nothing and our
assumptions are limited and often faulty. I once stood on a
promontory at Finisterre in Galicia, Spain and tried to imagine what
it must have been like for Europeans who believed this was literally
the “end of the earth”. Until a Genoan sailor called
Cristobal Colon (now lying in a sarcophagus in the Seville Cathedral)
speculated that there was land on the other side. It took him
several months to complete a journey I once saw a Concorde covering
in 3 hours. That is slow compared to space travel. During its
journeys, the space shuttle orbits the earth every 90.35 minutes; the
crew are less than 300 kilometres above the ground. We are specks in
a mighty universe that God holds in one hand and maintains by His
word (Hebrews 1:3). Nevertheless, He passionately loves us, as
individuals. He knows every person by name; counts the hairs on
their head, notices when a sparrow falls nearby (Matthew 10:29, 30).
His perspective is “out of this world”.
Many
times I have flown over the world’s large cities (Calcutta,
Bombay, Mexico City, Tokyo, London and others) by night and seen the
unbelievable expanse of lights below. God’s perspective is
all-encompassing, yet He knows the state of every man, woman and
child in the dusty barrios, foetid slums, autobahns, jungle villages,
office blocks, assembly lines, railway terminuses, airports and
housing estates of the world’s six billion inhabitants. I flew
over Bucharest late one night. The city was snowed in and the lights
glistened, even at 35,000 feet. But God’s perspective drilled
down into every living room, kitchen and bedroom, where people lived
out their lives. They all needed Him.
Look
at what we value. Most of what we work hard to accomplish is gone in
an instant: fame, wealth, learning and power are nothing in the
context of eternity. Just look at the obituaries in the daily press.
And the tombstones! The first time I flew over the pyramids I was
amazed at their majesty, but as I stood in front of the sphinx I was
reminded that time erodes the glory of man. God’s perspective
is higher than ours. And yet He doesn’t remain there; He is so
close that we live and breathe because He gives us life; he hears our
prayers before we utter them.
God’s
perspective on the world - Divine love in action
This
is God’s world and those who operate out of His world view can
make a difference.
I
recently attended an event hosted by the Haggai Institute in
Singapore, to celebrate the end of a training program for fifty-four
Christian leaders from twenty-nine countries. Their theme was
“People need the Lord”. I met pastors from states as
diverse as Haiti, Sudan, Peru, Myanmar, Ethiopia, Vietnam, Sri Lanka,
Burkina Faso and Pakistan. Several came from (and were returning to)
societies plagued by chronic social unrest and persecution of
Christians. All of them came to be better skilled to do the work of
discipling others. Take Pastor Kwabena Asare, from Nigeria. When he
is not working as an engineer he is overseeing a church of more than
1,000 people, coordinating a church planting program and growing a
radio ministry. His vision is to establish twenty-five new home
groups by 2007, plant ten new churches by 2008, send six missionaries
to Europe and parts of Africa, establish a Bible school by 2010 and
develop a Christian school by 2016. Biju Thomas works as a business
development manager in Bangalore while he pastors a church in that
city. William Triana is an evangelist in Bogota, Colombia; he
supports himself working as an English school teacher. Pastor
Bagaramba works with the emotionally wounded in Rwanda, who
experienced the horrors of the Tutsi-Hutu genocide of the early
1990s. Hernan Corrales Rosas told me of the joy he experiences
working with young people in the Peruvian city of Arequipa, helping
them discover new life in Christ. The last time I was in Arequipa I
met Christians whose friends were being brutalized by the Maoist
Sendero Luminoso, or Shining Path. These men were looking through
God’s window on the world. (Every people group in every nation
is visible through that window.) Their historiographies were
divergent from the predominant Western discourse. Their passion was
to evangelize their own people and train others to do the same. This
is the essence of discipleship.
From
God’s perspective, the greatest blessing He bestowed on our
rebellious human race was to send His son to turn us away from sin
(Acts 3:26).
From
God’s perspective, the day is coming when all the nations will
bow to Him and acknowledge Him as Lord (Philippians 2:10, 11). His
rule will be supreme in all creation, when men and women from every
tribal, linguistic and social background will stand around His throne
and glorify the Son.
The
day of evil when Satan captures the hearts and minds of so many
hundreds of millions of people for whom Jesus died, will one day be
over and the enemy will be destroyed once and for all, even the enemy
of death (1 Corinthians 15:26).
Gaining
God’s perspective – gearing up for a paradigm shift
“The
man without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the
Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him, and he cannot
understand them, because they are spiritually discerned. The
spiritual man makes judgments about all things, but he himself is not
subject to any man's judgment: ‘For who has known the mind of
the Lord that he may instruct him?’
But we have the mind of Christ.”
(1 Corinthians 2:14-16)
We
are all offshoots of our cultures, social conditioning, historical
discourses, denominational hegemonic emphasises and ethnic and family
backgrounds. And yet we are called to unite in being Christ’s
representatives in the world. To bridge the gap, the disciple in
mission must have a mental renewal, a new hard-wiring from the Holy
Spirit, a dimension of thinking that is liberated from the way the
world’s wisdom operates. Only the Holy Spirit thinks God’s
thoughts. He comes into our hearts to give us insight into God’s
ways and priorities. Our responsibility is to “hear”
what the Spirit is saying, using our new genetic coding (2 Peter
1:14).
Jesus
lived in the world with God’s perspective (John 3:13). With
the mind of Christ we can likewise maintain an eternal perspective,
looking beyond the obvious and the current and “seeing”
in the spirit realm. We can think God’s way about the eternal
nature of truth, the intrinsic value of the individual, the sanctity
of every human life, economic issues, the real value of assets,
sickness, setbacks, relationships, feelings, work, possessions, the
environment, history, study, true and false friends, where we live,
what we wear, the trials we go through (why bad things seem to happen
to good people), persecution and death. We can see God in control as
circumstances sometimes seem to spin out of our control. We can pray
“Your Kingdom come; your will be done” with confidence
when it seems He is far away. We can “seek first the Kingdom
of God and His righteousness” when we see unrighteousness all
around us. We can interpret events according to the plan and power
of God. We can be set free from the negative rut into so many others
fall because they convince themselves that they “cannot”.
We can “know” that God is in control, while all the time
living out our lives as kitchen sink realists. As “world
Christians” we can be open, aware, switched on to God’s
plan and our part in it, participating in life without being
captivated and kidnapped by the world’s values.
How
we look at things makes a big difference in our lives. Millions of
Christian believers have triumphed over impossible circumstances
because Jesus rose from the dead. We can act differently because we
view things differently, according to God’s mindset.
Seen
from a human perspective, the entry of the Son of God into the world
in the form of a baby, especially a poor one, is illogical. From our
viewpoint, the cross makes no sense. But they were the “wisdom
of God”, the instruments by which He chose to bring the world
back into relationship with Him.
The
Mind of Christ is not natural, but spiritual. It calls for our
thinking to be re-created in the image of God. It is not a state of
mind, but the way Jesus lived, thought and taught. The only power
that can transform our way of thinking is the person of the Holy
Spirit. What is the
mind of Christ? It is to think as Christ would have thought. That’s
where Dan Brown’s Da
Vinci Code (2006) got it so
wrong, emphasizing as it did a human descendancy from Jesus; the real
descendants of Jesus are “ordinary” Christians, “born
of the Spirit” (John 3: 5, 6, 8) into God’s family (John
1:12). The mind of Christ ought to be rooted in the very nature of
every Christian.
Maintaining
God’s perspective – throughout life
How
do we assess God’s perspective and remain on course as
disciples of Jesus in a world that continuously seeks to lure us away
from what is eternally important?
When
I was little my parents used to take my siblings and me to the beach
for holidays every year. I still vividly recall walking along the
sand, putting my small feet into the depressions made by my father’s
feet. What a guy! He left me big holes in the sand for my little
feet to fill. Discipleship likewise involves walking in the
footprints left by Jesus, because He showed us how to live.
I
admire those who effectively communicate the Gospel as disciples of
Jesus. Over the years it has been my privilege to meet men and women
who have penetrated barriers and reached ones, twos and thousands
with God’s love. When I first met God’s Smuggler Brother
Andrew, I was powerfully struck by his commitment to reach people
behind the Iron Curtain with the Word of God, counting the risks but
taking them nevertheless. YWAM founder Loren Cunningham impressed me
as he spoke passionately and urgently about reaching our generation
with the message that God loved them. Every man and woman who has
ever been effective as a disciple in his or her generation has
started from the same point: this is God’s world; the key to
fulfilment is to die to self and live for Christ, faithfully carrying
out His will in the power of the Holy Spirit. You can make a
difference.
There
are threshold issues associated with discipleship, and they all have
to do with counting the cost and stepping out to be God’s
co-workers. Is your brand of Christianity based on commitment in
line with God’s perspective, or is it just a walk in the park?
It
is my sincere prayer that all of us who hear the voice of Jesus
Christ calling out “follow me” will count the cost, rise
up and walk in His footsteps, for His eternal glory.