Friday 11 April 2014

Working for the Gospel

This Easter, we at New Life Church are putting on a community 3 day Easter Event. We are a small church and so for us, this is a big deal. A small number of people will be working really hard over those three days to make the event the best event we have ever done. An even smaller group have been doing a lot of work behind the scenes.

Why do this stuff? That is an important question since we usually have mixed motives and sometimes, mainly wrong motives. An example would be - 

"We are doing it because we feel, we suppose we ought to. It is an obligation as part of the church."

That motive has nothing good about it in God's eyes because there is no heart or pleasure in it. It is like a burden that we reluctantly take on and look forward to unloading so that we have got it out of the way and done our part.

Another motive which seems better - certainly sounds good, but in the end is potentially no good at all is ... 

"We are doing it for the sake of the gospel, we want people to know about Jesus". 

How can that be a wrong motive? I can hear you say, "Julian, don't you often say things like, "this is for the sake of the gospel"?

The problem is, we intellectually agree the gospel is primary, but a lot of the time our hearts prefer other things. So we know in our heads we should do this or that for the gospel, but our hearts are not in it. We do it just because we know we "ought" to do it.

When we talk about doing something for the sake of the gospel, it becomes a right motive when our hearts are in it, when we mean something like,

"I have been captivated by Jesus, He is wonderful in my eyes. My heart is thrilled by Him. When I consider what He has done for me I just want to give myself to Him completely. And when I realise most people do not know anything about this wonderful treasure - Jesus and what He has done and what He is like, I will do anything to help them see what I see that they too may share with me in this joy."

In that situation a person is filled with the gospel, compelled by it, joyfully given to it and motivated by it, for it, they cannot think of anything better than the gospel, it makes their hearts fill up and overflow.

That is what you might call a gospel person. That is what every Christian should be. But to be a gospel person, we must fight battles and discipline ourselves to keep ourselves in the conscious love and joy of Jesus. That is what is meant by 'for the sake of the gospel'.

A gospel person with an overflowing heart sees the kind of events we are doing as an opportunity to do something with the overflow of their hearts. For a gospel person, doing something for the sake of the gospel is not even a sacrifice because it is where their hearts are at. It is a sacrifice when our hearts prefer other things to Jesus, because then we are sacrificing what we really love for something we feel obliged to do - that feels like a cost. But when the gospel person works hard for the sake of the gospel he says like Hudson Taylor, "I never made a sacrifice".

So as we engage in gospel work, check your own heart. if you're heart's not in it, what is the answer? We'll answer that tomo.