The Main Thing!

I regularly read biblical offerings from Bruce Collins, an evangelist here in Eastern Iowa.  In this week's meditation, he begins:

Galatians 1:8  But even if we, or an angel from heaven, preach any other gospel to you than what we have preached to you, let him be accursed.

Preaching an accurate faithful Gospel is important to the Lord and it needs to be important to us.  When we preach the Gospel we are dealing with the destinies of people for eternity.  Who would want to mislead anyone on that that important matter?  When we talk about the Gospel, we know we are talking about Good News.  Sometimes we use the word to include all or most of the doctrines of the Bible and sometimes we limit the term to the need to trust in the death, burial and resurrection of the Lord Jesus to be saved for eternity.  Whether we use the term in a broad sense or in a narrow sense, the end result is the same—we are preaching about the Lord Jesus Christ.  But if those who are preaching the Gospel are all preaching the same Gospel, why does what I hear today often seem so strange to me?

This is a good question.  Why do "Gospel" preachers have different messages?  Are they not all working from the same basic text?  If not, why not?  They claim to be preaching the same message from the same text, but what comes forth is something entirely different.

There are various reasons why the message is not consistent, but I would dare say they are all rooted in pride and promotion of a local church, a ministry within the church, corporate vision of the church, the preacher himself/herself, or some combination thereof. The point is that the message is not Christ.

But even when relating the gospel one-to-one, we can fall into this trap—of speaking more about me or my church than what Christ has done for me. In the e-mail Bruce goes on to relate the result of an encounter in a Chinese restaurant:

She invited herself and her daughter to sit with me while she ate, and we had a nice discussion.  I found out that this stranger that I had decided to help had been baptized by my own brother—she was friends with a lot of people that I knew though I didn't know her.  It sounded like she had had a rather hard life, but she couldn't forget what the Lord had done for her.  She didn't tell me about what she had done for the Lord, she told me about what the Lord had done for her.

Now that's what I'm talking about—not dwelling on me or what I have done but showing forth the Lord Jesus in simple conversation.