Proclaimer Blog
The small print of the gospel
This week, cycling to work, I was confronted with a huge e.on advert proudly telling me that for 2012 it would not put prices up. Brilliant. Only I've just got a letter through the post from e.on saying my prices are going up by 10-11%. Not so brilliant. As always, the devil is in the detail. Cycling a bit closer to the poster I saw that it said at the bottom "does not apply to contracts ending in 2012". Yep, that's us. So, we'll have to go through the rigmarole of switching provider again because e.on won't give existing customers whose contracts are ending the same promise. Small print, huh?
There's small print in the gospel too. Or at least, there is in the way we often present it. Last week, in an evangelistic preaching group, one brave soul chose to preach from Mark 8.34-38. When it comes to Jesus teaching (and Paul and Peter) you can hardly say that he made suffering into the small print. No, there it is writ large. TAKE UP YOUR CROSS DAILY. But we've made it so. Like the caveats and conditions that pepper the end of radio ads and spoken at one hundred miles an hour, we don't think that suffering will attract anyone to the gospel.
But suffering is part of the gospel. It's part of the way that salvation was achieved and it is part of the life where salvation is appropriated. "Anyone who wants to live a godly life will be persecuted." Clear enough? And because we relegate this to, at best, something of secondary importance, we struggle to pastor people effectively. Think about your pastoral ministry. How many situations and difficulties would be avoided, or at least changed for the better somewhat, if people knew and believed that to follow Christ is to choose his path.
We tut at the prosperity gospel but the truth is many of us, and our people, believe a version of it. And our pastoral ministries are almost certainly littered with the remnants of such a faith-lite. Preaching the whole counsel of God must surely mean that we must preach Mark 8 too. No small print, please. We're not insurance salesmen.