REACHING Out!

12/5/1995

George Bowen, in a writing, asks why Christians should be hated by the world, when they are loving in disposition and always desirous of redemption. He then proceeds to answer his own question. Keep this in mind as you search the highways and byways and work environments for those with God’s Call on their lives...

“Consider this: the mission of Christians is to take from men something that is unutterably dear to them, to reduce them to a condition that seems to them worse than slavery, to carry them away into perpetual exile, to foil them in every enterprise that they have at heart, in fact—we may as well say it—to kill them.

“There is not anything so dear to the man of this world as the idea of his own unblamableness. Every day of his life he has been engaged in building, in his inner thought-world, a lofty edifice—a tower of Babel—to answer at once the purpose of a monument in his own praise, and to enable him, when the time shall come, to step from its pinnacle into Heaven. Every day he has been busy carving to some answerable shape the stones of his daily experience. He has diligently, all his life long, done battle with the insolent voices of a miscreant conscience, establishing by successive victories the difficult fact that he is, take him for all in all, one whom God must look down upon with admiration.

“You come to him in the name of Christ for the very purpose of this idea of his own goodness. Your aim is to do what that tormenting conscience of his, with all its advantages of time and place, failed to do. Do you think that he has fought with the Goliath of his own conscience so many times, and so successfully, to be now discomfited by you? Will he allow you to be victorious over him, and take from him the idea of his own integrity in the sight of God, after he has gone through a thousand fights to obtain that pearl of price?

“You tell him that he is a mere rebel against the Most High God, that he has never been anything else, that all his righteousnesses are contemptible in the sight of Heaven, that he deserves the wrath of God, and you ask him to take this same view of himself. You ask him to adjudge himself to be worthy of everlasting punishment. How easy were it for him in comparison to surrender all his worldly substance! Self-esteem permeates his whole nature like the fibers of a cancer, and to bid him part with it is like bidding him surrender life.”

See why people often don’t want anything to do with you or with Jesus, no matter what a nice person you are?! That is, if you ACCURATELY represent the Gospel to them. “No man is greater than his Teacher!”

P.S. to “Reaching Out”

[Jesus did not TREAT people in a rude way, in the sense that He was repulsed at them or their sin, or any such thing! He loved them deeply. But He was very much aware of the fact that SIN is what separates all men from their Father and their inheritance, and THAT thought underpins the only SOLUTION. “Son, your sins are forgiven.”

What Bowen wrote is not an “ATTITUDE” (like a pharisee) that we carry, but a knowledge of where the real difficulties lie. Men MUST turn from self-life. NO one can ADD some neat spiritual experience to their self-life and rebellion and pride, and be saved. The “rich young ruler” and many others illustrate this point. Mercy and Love are the doorway, but God help those that cannot add, “Go and sin no more” and “Stop sinning or something worse will happen to you.” THAT is religion - to misrepresent or neglect Romans chapters 2-5 and think that Romans 8 is possible. As Bonhoeffer would say, “cheap grace.” OF COURSE we cannot be self-righteous, but the problem of rebellion and pride that got Adam thrown out of the Garden and Lucifer from heaven will still keep ANY man from God, regardless of a little religious experience. If we will not communicate that Truth to all men (while “all men speak well of US” and they never find the “times of refreshing that come from repentance”) -- we are of all men most “religious.” When men were looking for sympathy for human tragedy in Luke 13, Jesus responded with, “You all deserve the same, don’t you? Unless you repent, you’ll all perish as well!” He has not changed from the days of the “Old Testament” or “Ananias and Sapphira” in the sense that his regard for human life (as opposed to spiritual true life) is not as mere men view it. I’m sure this is what Bowen was saying. I did not sense any malice or haughtiness in Bowen’s writing. Only a Roman’s 3 - “Let’s get clear about what the real problem is here!”]