Faithful Witness

I have been involved in a church all of my life. Some of the best experiences in my life have been in church. Yep, you guessed it, some of the worst have too. To be honest, most of my experiences in church have been neither great nor awful, they have simply been a part of the fabric of my life, a part of the way of life that is normal to my family, part of my identity. Because faithful people in church had clearly taught me the gospel and had transmitted the mandate to spread the gospel, I came to see the powerful truth that the peoples of the earth needed to be transformed by the gospel. The gospel became my way of life, and sharing it became my passion. In 1985, the centrality of the gospel carried me out to India where I unexpectedly discovered something very unsettling about people and churches and the gospel. I had to allow for the possibility that if the gospel did not spread beyond the churches, it would never spread to the entire world. In the last 26 years of trying to ...

"The Word became flesh and lived in our neighborhood." This is John 1:14 in the Bible translation called The Message. The more common translation is " The Word became flesh and lived among us." This is what is called The Incarnation of Christ. God became a human being, a man who was a carpenter, and lived with us and like us. He was God so he was morally perfect, which means he never did anything wrong. In that way he was not like us! If God wanted to be incarnated in the world, he could have been born in the Temple, raised by the Pharisees and when he was old enough, made ministry forays into the community and then returned to his Temple. But he didn't do that. He lived in the neighborhood. Why? This next bit is really shocking. God did not want to reinforce the religious establishment of the day. He wanted to be accessible to normal people. This is why he became like us and lived in our neighborhood, or the neighborhood of his time. I think he wo...

I am always sobered when I remember the actual meaning of the Greek word that underlies the word we translate as witness. The word in Greek, the language of the New Testament, is marturion, from which we get the English word "martyr." This puts an entirely different spin on being a faithful witness doesn't it, a sort of faithful unto death feel. I want to be a faithful witness. Of course I do not mean that I want to be a martyr, but I do want this truth about being faithful unto death to speak to me and shape me. I don't want to be intimidated. I have learned that a pushy sort of " turn or burn" witness usually does more harm than good, but sensitivity must never mutate into being intimidated by the mild tyranny against the gospel that exists all around us. Instead of intimidation, I want to be transparent, openly displaying what I learn about life from Jesus. That life is breathtakingly hopeful, inspiring and free. Whether my life speaks to one or ...