Thursday, July 15, 2010

Three 'evangelical lies' about reaching Muslims





Karim* grew up in an Arab Christian family in a Middle Eastern country — part of the “1 percent of Christians among the 99 percent Muslims,” as he describes it.

When you’re part of a tiny, historically persecuted minority, you tend to keep your head down and your mouth closed. You also tend to believe what your elders tell you about the majority, whether it’s true or not. Karim did — for a time.

Now an evangelical pastor in the Middle East, Karim fervently believes the Christians of the region “are responsible for reaching the 99 percent.” But too many still accept three “evangelical lies” that prevent them from sharing Jesus with their Muslim neighbors:

* A spirit of fear. “Most Christians are afraid to go and reach Muslims because of fear,” Karim declares. “We [Christians] say, ‘They will kill us. They will kill our family, our children.’”

* Muslims won’t believe. “Many, many Christians say that Muslims will not follow Christ” — ever. End of story.

* Christians lack the resources to evangelize Muslims. “We say we don’t have the money,” Karim says. “This is another lie, because if I have the heart to reach Muslims, I can go out and reach 1,000 people and share Christ with them. Maybe I need $5 to put gas in my car. If I go walking, I don’t need any money at all.”

But it took Karim a long time to reject the lies.

As a young man he wandered in the spiritual wilderness. He worked in a nightclub (“I was a big sinner,” he confesses). Weary of cultural Christianity, he even converted to Islam for several years. When he returned to Christ with his whole heart, a Muslim friend quickly noticed the change in his life.

“I was so excited about what happened to me, so the first thing I did was to share it with one of my best friends,” Karim recounts. “He said, ‘Karim, if Jesus did that in your life, I want to follow Him.’ I said, ‘No, no, no.’ You see, the fear is there inside us. He said, ‘But I want to follow Christ as you did because it is very good.’ I said, ‘OK, think about it, and we can talk tomorrow.’ The next morning at 8:30 he came to me and said, ‘I decided to give my life to Jesus and to follow Him with no conditions.’”

A second friend believed, and a third, and a fourth. All were Muslims. Not all decided to follow Christ as quickly as the first, but Karim could no longer deny Muslims wanted the priceless gift he had to share.

He began to sense what a Saudi friend later put into words: “We Muslims are beloved people, but we are cheated” — cheated out of knowing about the One who loves them because other followers of Christ are too timid or indifferent to tell them about Him.

“You know the difference between leading a Christian-background person to Christ or a Muslim?” Karim asks. “The first is like a tree planted in your backyard, and in six months you start to get fruit. But to lead a Muslim to Christ, you are digging in a mine. You may spend years, but what you find there is not fruit. It is diamonds!”

What keeps him digging? Every day he hears about — or personally witnesses — a Muslim coming to Christ.

“This is the fuel I’m getting from the Lord.”

*(Name changed)

Thursday, July 8, 2010

Cheap liberty and costly grace









Listen to an audio version of this post at http://media1.imbresources.org/files/113/11350/11350-61910.mp3

With Independence Day come and gone, I recommend two recently published books for your summer reading list. Both will challenge your ideas about freedom and how you use it:

-- Radical by David Platt (Multnomah, 2010)

Platt, the popular young pastor of The Church at Brook Hills in Birmingham, Ala., is using his expanding national platform to urge Christians to rethink the “American dream,” their faith — and whether the two can co-exist.

A gifted Bible scholar and preacher, Platt quickly achieved the mega-church leadership many ambitious pastors seek. But his heart longed for something more. He realized he was “on a collision course with an American church culture where success is defined by bigger crowds, bigger budgets and bigger buildings.”

His visits to underground house churches in East Asia, where persecuted believers meet for fervent worship, drove him to reexamine the Jesus of the Gospels. The encounter convinced him that Jesus still demands what He demanded of His earliest disciples: that we take up our crosses and follow Him in radical obedience.

Such obedience requires daily self-sacrifice, surrender of our “rights,” suffering of one form or another, poverty (at least in comparison to the riches many of us enjoy), perhaps death.

The Jesus who told prospective disciples to leave their homes and families, to sell their possessions in order to follow Him into a lost and hurting world has not changed. “But we don’t want to believe it,” Platt writes. “We are afraid of what it might mean for our lives. So we rationalize those passages away. … And this is where we need to pause. Because we are starting to redefine Christianity. We are giving in to the dangerous temptation to take the Jesus of the Bible and twist Him into a version of Jesus we are more comfortable with.

“A nice, middle-class, American Jesus. A Jesus who doesn’t mind materialism and who would never call us to give away everything we have. A Jesus who would not expect us to forsake our closest relationships so that He receives all our affection. A Jesus who is fine with nominal devotion that does not infringe on our comforts because, after all, He loves us just the way we are. A Jesus who wants us to be balanced, who wants us to avoid dangerous extremes, and who, for that matter, wants us to avoid danger altogether. A Jesus who brings us comfort and prosperity as we live out our Christian spin on the American dream.”

Such a Jesus, Platt contends, is not Jesus at all, but an idol molded in our own image. It’s high time we take “an honest look at the Jesus of the Bible and dare to ask what the consequences might be if we really believed Him and really obeyed Him.”

Platt cites one Christian who dared: Dietrich Bonhoeffer. The German pastor and theologian was hanged by the Nazis 65 years ago, at age 39, for publicly resisting their criminal rule. He bravely denounced Nazi usurpation of the German church — and even participated in a failed plot to assassinate Hitler — while many fellow believers stayed silent and did nothing. Platt quotes a famous line from Bonhoeffer’s classic, The Cost of Discipleship: “When Christ calls a man, He bids him come and die.”

My second recommendation for summer reading:

-- Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy by Eric Metaxas (Thomas Nelson, 2010)

This powerful biography shines new light on one of the giants of the 20th century. A bespectacled intellectual, Bonhoeffer was no revolutionary early on. But he rejected passive religion separated from action. And he despised what he called “cheap grace” — the grace we accept with our minds but not with our hearts or our wills, the grace that demands nothing from us. He considered it the “deadly enemy” of the church.

“Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate,” Bonhoeffer wrote in The Cost of Discipleship. “Christianity without discipleship is always Christianity without Christ. It remains an abstract idea, a myth which has a place for the Fatherhood of God, but omits Christ as the living Son.”

“Costly grace,” on the other hand, “is costly because it costs a man his life, and it is grace because it gives a man the only true life. It is costly because it condemns sin, and grace because it justifies the sinner. Above all, it is costly because it cost God the life of His Son … and what has cost God much cannot be cheap for us. … Costly grace is the Incarnation of God.”

Bonhoeffer not only believed in costly grace, he lived and died by it.

On July 4, a missionary who serves in one of the least-free nations on earth preached at my church. The people in the land where he works are oppressed by poverty, superstition, tyranny and terrorism, but they are seeking freedom. Not just political and social freedom — spiritual freedom.

“It’s great to be here in America on ‘Freedom Day,’” he said. “As kingdom people first and Americans second, we rejoice in liberty.”

But he reminded his listeners that followers of Christ have been given liberty for a purpose: to bless all nations with the news of salvation. If we don’t use it for that purpose, we don’t deserve it.

Bonhoeffer probably would call it “cheap liberty.” God help us to trade it for costly grace.