The Big Idea

‘Jesus saves!’

How many times have you read that bumper sticker? But ‘save’ what?

I think if you ask most Evangelical Christians, the answer you will get is that ‘Jesus died on a cross to save us from our sins so we can go to heaven’. Whilst that statement may be true, our understanding of it has become so small and anemic that it now seems like mindless rhetoric when most people repeat it.

Is that all it is?

And who cares?

Lets be honest for a minute. Most people out there don’t care if they are ‘saved from their sins’. Its a nebulous concept to this generation which meets no felt need in their lives. In the previous generation where ‘good, moral, cultured living’ was held up as the highest standard, this kind of gospel did meet a felt need. But before you assume that your view of the gospel is the only, and right one, let me give you some interesting facts:

The ‘sinners prayer’ and ‘altar call’ idea of salvation has only been around for the last 150 years of human history. So what happened before then?

There is no where in scripture which mentions the idea of ‘personal salvation’ or ‘Jesus as our personal savior’. Over and over again we are told that God wants to redeem all things; ‘make all things new’.

I preached a message a while ago about the Palm Sunday account of Jesus walking into Jerusalem and people lining the streets shouting ‘Hosanna!’ The word actually means ‘Save Now!’ When we read that we assume with our western theology that these Jews knew Jesus was about to go in and save them from the ‘naughty things’ they had done by dying on a cross.

I am confident not one of them thought that.

The Jews had once been the people of God and a nation to be reckoned with. However, because they drifted from God and started worshipping other gods and idols, God sent the Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks and finally the Romans to rule over them. The people longed to regain their national pride, identity and standing with God. Thats why in John 6 the crowds plan to ‘make Jesus king by force’ after He had fed the 5000. Not because He makes good bread and thats a good quality for a king, but because this must be the Promised One, the Messiah, who will restore all things.

Jesus refuses and bows out.

They are left confused.

But as He makes His way into Jerusalem they are convinced this is the moment; He is going in to kick some Roman backside, and they are behind Him all the way.

Revolution time.

Save Now!!

Hosanna!

That’s what they meant. That’s why they cried out.

I think Jesus was doing something bigger though. I think when He tells people on the way to the cross that He is making all things new, I think He really meant ‘ALL things’.

But before we criticize the Jews of Jesus day for not getting what He was doing, I think we make exactly the same mistake by making Jesus message much smaller than it is.

This modern western gospel of Jesus saving us from our personal transgressions so we can enjoy celestial joy in union with God in the after life, is way too small. As one speaker put it, ‘Our view of the end game is like the opening credits of the Simpsons, with pretty clouds and blue skies, maybe some harps. But the bible paints a picture of a mended world, with cities and peoples’.

The problem with our anemic gospel is that it allows us to ignore the rest of the world. One of the reasons we get so locked off from the rest of the planet is that we think ‘us’ being ‘individually saved’ is the ultimate goal. Its not. Its why so many Christians ignore issues of the environment, because ‘hey, its all going to be destroyed any way’. Its why so may evangelical churches ignore the injustices in our society, because ‘hey, we’re saved in here, and trying to band together against the evil of the world out there’. But this is also all stuff Jesus came to rescue, and its His people’s job to do it.

Maybe this will help:

Billy Graham preached to millions of people, telling them how they could throw off the guilt that entangles them, bring their mistakes to God and start afresh with Him by taking the first step in relating to Him. This is the Gospel.

Martin Luther King Jr preaching to millions, telling them that the oppressive system of segregation in the States was not ‘of God’ and that His followers need to stand up and resist this evil systemic injustice, and fight to move society in a redemptive direction. This is also the Gospel.

I don’t think we can hold on to the first narrow definition and blind ourselves to rest. It makes us ineffective. It makes us a joke.

I worked for a church with a big board in their hall which had a score sheet to see how many people they had been visited that week, how many people had shared the gospel with someone else, and how many people had ‘gotten saved’ by saying a particular prayer. This is an antiquated method of doing ‘evangelism’, it rarely works any more.

I think that to reach a new generation we have to throw our definition of what Jesus came to do much wider than that. Perhaps this should include what He does in people’s lives too. In all my years of working in youth ministry I saw thousands of kids ‘come to front’ during altar calls. I also saw most of them give it up when something better came along.

Our generation doesn’t want to be nagged about being ‘saved from their sins’, it means nothing to them, and they are very suspicious of ‘conversion’. They know some of our churches have score boards, and they don’t want to be on them! They need to know that God is real and can be connected with. They need to know that God is on a mission to make everything right, and that connecting with Him means joining Him in that mission. They can catch up on the story so far in the scriptures, and should really dig into what Jesus did in life and death, because there is some great significance there that I am still fighting to understand. And if we could do this all without vomiting cliches all over them, that would be great:)

The good news is bigger than most of us know, than most of us live out. It can’t just be about  a few people procuring ‘afterlife insurance’. I think its time to reclaim some of the big-ness, because if this stuff we talk about isn’t good news to the child living on the street, to the oceans we’re polluting and the land we’re destroying, to the creatures we’re wiping out, to the homeless and abused, to the unjustly treated, to the harassed and war torn, to the poor and hungry, to the lonely… to everyone, then I don’t think its the whole story.

Feel free to ignore me. I’m obviously just a raving liberal:) Just evil ’social gospel’ stuff… or is it?

(To listen to an audio version of the message I mentioned earlier, go to www.budurl.com/savenow1.)