Part 2: Evangelistic and Missional Living

No one can be evangelistic or missional at all without reflecting the love of Christ. As the Evangel Jesus Christ acts and interacts toward those He saves deliberately and unconditionally, in the fullness of Grace and Truth, meeting our deepest need (with His sacrifice) and our highest good (with His righteousness). The deepest need and highest good of every fallen image-bearer (that's everyone, me and you included) is intimate, personal, relational and re-forming union with the sacrifice (payment for sin of commission) and imputed righteousness (substitute for sin of omission) of Jesus Christ. All other needs are subordinate. All other goods are inferior.

The acts and interactions of Christ are deliberate in that they are not accidental or dependent on us. We are fully known by Him and His continual involvement in our lives is within the will of the Father, the work of the Son, and the operation of the Holy Spirit. The acts and interactions are relationally deliberate. Therefore, our acts and interactions should be within the boundaries of the relationships and responsibilities that are God-given. These boundaries protect us from temptations of the flesh, like for instance, developing a savior complex; not to give us an excuse to avoid evangelistic living in any appropriate scenario.

The acts and interactions of Christ are unconditional in that there were and are no personal pre-conditions within Christ that impacted or impacts His acts and interactions toward us. Christ's actions and interactions are all and fully in love of 1) the will of the Father, and then as a result, 2) us, as the recipients. Therefore, our acts and interactions should not be about any personal pre-conditions we have set for recipients that are motivated by our reactive and emotive flesh. They should be within and about the humility of understanding and reflecting the privileged relationship we have received in Christ. This is meant to protect us from reflecting more of our sinful self than we reflect of Christ; it is not to give us an excuse to avoid evangelistic living with those people or situations that we fear or dislike.

To reflect the Evangel is to become a messenger of deliberate and unconditional acts and interactions of grace and truth that are balanced by love toward 1) God first, and 2) then toward the receiver (our neighbor). The message is deliberate (as opposed to reactive and emotive) because it is intended (in love) to address the deepest need and highest good of the specific receiver in a specific scenario and it is unconditional in that it is crafted in the interest of the recipient, not by the reactive and emotive flesh of the messenger.

As far as the good news of Christ is concerned, we should always be "bringing it!" to any and every receiver with a consideration of the receivers deepest need and highest good in a particular situation. The how and what of the acts and interactions are determined by the situation, knowledge, spirit, willingness, culture, beliefs, aspirations, and affect of the recipient, and by the resources, gifts, responsibilities, and priorities of the messenger.

Note a few definitions:

Grace is an unmerited attitude of favor (Ephesians 2:8-9) motivated exclusively by the pleasure of God (1:5-6), and unbroken by any remaining corruption in the object of favor. God maintains this attitude (Philippians 1:6) until mortality and corruption put on immortality and incorruptibility (1 Corinthians 15:53). Grace is the attitude and sacrifice the resulting action of Christ toward me - to meet my deepest need. Evangelistically, grace is not to be merely nice or make things easy.

Truth is the eternal, unyielding, singular standard of "right-ness" by which fellowship with God is attained and maintained. Jesus Christ is truth and His righteousness is applied (imputed) to me - meeting my highest good. Truth evangelistically is not to provide a chronicle of personal (self)righteousness, to act hypocritically superior, legalistic, or controlling; all these are examples of reactive and emotive dominators of the flesh (Rom. 6:1–2).

Courage to speak evangelistically is not the absence of fear, it is the realization that something other than fear is more important, that is, to reflect Christ in Grace and Truth.

Wisdom is not intelligence. It is the result of walking with God in the Word, prayer and self-examination, which teaches us to speak the Truth fit to any situation with Grace, balanced by our love for God first, and the self and neighbor flowing from that.

The Exemplar:

"And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us,

(and we beheld His glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father,)

full of grace and truth." John 1:14

If John 1:14 were paraphrased as though we believed it had contemporary application to an evangelistic way of being, it might sound like this: “‘Christ continues to live through believers on the earth, (and the glory of God in Christ can be seen through them), because they are living in and then reflecting the fullness of His grace and truth.”

Notice a paraphrased example of Jesus’ “way of being” in Luke 15:1–3: “Then publicans and sinners drew near to hear Jesus. But the Pharisees and scribes murmured, saying, This man gives sinners access to Himself, and He eats with them. Then Christ taught them (all) with this parable, saying . . .etc.” Whatever the content was of Jesus interaction in Luke 15:1-3, it was deliberate and intentional to the time, place and recipients.

Many and various sinners drew near and were given access to Jesus. They did not feel sufficiently alienated to prevent such overtures. This speaks to us of His Grace. In the course of welcoming access throughout His earthly ministry, Jesus taught the religious, sinners, believers, self-righteous, and hypocrites (i.e. everyone!) without apology. This speaks to us of His Truth. Jesus way of being was graciously unapologetic. After the teaching of Jesus people either drew nearer, were repelled, or continued in compliant company. Jesus left the results of His graciously unapologetic (evangelistic) interactions to the will of the Father.

Note also that religious zealots (not necessarily zealots of true religion) in the Luke 15 exchange felt threatened by Jesus' evangelistic efforts in which He allowed the approach of all kinds of sinners. They murmured. Contemporary murmurs to avoid an evangelistic way of being are: “I would—really, I want to—but I have principles . . .”; “I want to be gracious, but there’s a limit, right?”; "I'm afraid", or "what if they are angry at me", and of course: “Our tradition . . .bla bla bla”.

Jesus though, in the hearing of all who had drawn near (which after all God the Father sovereignly designed in Jesus' life and in ours), Jesus taught without the fears that in us, result in barriers to approach like anger, defensiveness, cowardice, discrimination, insecurity, prejudgment or arrogance. As a result, the truth we tell reflects more of our own lack of grace than it does of the fullness of truth in Christ. Whether intentionally or unintentionally, we discourage approach (are not gracious) and/or use the truth as a personal hammer toward others, and not toward ourselves (not a truthful use of truth).

Case Study 2: An upper elementary student was outwardly well behaved because he was deathly afraid of anything that might precipiate an interaction between his teacher and his parents. On the rare occasions when such interactions had been necessary, the teachers and administrator were verbally bullied in return for their efforts on behalf of the child. As far as the teachers could tell, the boy lived in a hellish prison: an only child, plagued by the hovering, incessant presence of his angry, unhappy parents, whose sole aim in life appeared to be to fix all the failure and resentment of their own lives by re-creating their child in the image of what they had not become. It was a dismal, sad situation.

That much was fairly obvious through discerning observation, but the depth of this family's (and mostly the boy's) pain was most poignantly revealed when it was discovered that he was the boy that had regularly been smearing his feces on the wall of the bathroom stall. Imagine the extremeties of experience that necessitates the smearing of feces at school. Imagine if that were the only way you could exercise some control in your own life; or experience a sense of ownership over your own actions; or express your anger, frustration, helplessness, or powerlessness. At the time of this discovery, I considered the parents to be sociopaths and the idea of speaking truth to them, let alone with grace, to be less desirable than having my eyes poked out.  How to evangelize in that meeting?

Needless to say, the first thing I needed was prayer on my own behalf. My first emotion was fear; I had already had interactions with these parents in which I felt I had gone to battle with demons. My first reaction was to avoid the meeting altogether by telling the janitor to keep cleaning the smeared poop and then let the family progress on their merry way without addressing the problem (hiding like Adam did). After it's their problem, not mine (blame-shifting like Adam did).

To have this meeting I needed:

1) love toward the fallen image-bearers (whose need of Christ is not less than mine),

2) the grace to set aside my personal reactive and emotive tendancies (which afterall would not be reflective of my Savior), and

3) the wisdom and courage to tell the truth that is most needed in this situation.

I opted, following a lot of prayer (while hoping the Lord would return before I had to have the meeting), to address the following with parents:

• outlined the problem and how the behavior was discovered

• recommended Christian counselling to uncover the causes of the extreme behavior

• outlined the absolute power of Jesus to heal anyone temporally and eternally

• reiterated the Christ-centric intent of the school and communicated consequences

• expressed love for the child and the family

• prayer with and for them along the specific lines of the need

  
  

That situation had presented me with a God-given new opportunity to point to the good news of Christ, it also taught me more about courage and wisdom.

Speaking truthfully with grace in this case had several outcomes.

• I, the school board, and the student's teacher sustained vicious attacks in emails, in personal confrontations, and within the local newspaper.

• I personally was, and still am, sure that in this case, I did battle with one form of modern demon possession and I learned more deeply that "the name of the Lord is a strong tower, the righteous run into it and are safe" (Proverbs 18:10). Nothing but the power of God in response to prayer kept me from degenerating into the lowest of low reactive and emotive flesh.

• The meeting caused the parents to self-eliminate because they were repelled by the truth, even when graciously presented.

• Further communications, without evidence of their repentance would have been outside the bound of evangelistic living. It would have been to "throw pearls before swine". We had no guilt about deciding that we would not respond to attacks or seek any further interactions - they had "turned and rended the truth" and we determined not to give additional opportunities to do so. (Matthew 7:6-7)

That occurred in 2014. Everyone in the school staff and faculty that were involved with the family suffered (by Grace) sorrow and pain (instead of dominating anger and resentment) with those results and agreed to pray for the family and for God's power in their and our lives following that interaction. We didn't and still don't know why God brought that family to a Christian school. We only know that He did bring them and that we demonstrated love toward them in the reflected grace and truth of Jesus Christ to the best of our ability. How God used that evangelistic interchange in later years we will probably never know. No matter how we feel about it though, the results are God's. Evangelistic living is to obey, leaving the results to God, trusting Him.

And isn't that just exactly like our Lord toward us? Trusting and obeying the Father in the fullness of His Grace and Truth toward us?

Evangelistic living is not easy and there is no "arriving", or "I got this" or "been there done that". It is (one more time) a conscious, intentional, progressive, Biblically based attempt to reflect the grace and truth of Jesus Christ into an uncountable number of unique life scenarios designed by Almighty God.

And please, if you have questions or comments as a result of reading these two blogs on Evangelistic and Missional Living, email them to me (find my email on Breeze) or save them for discussion. We will begin our discussion time with your questions and comments.