The Wrong Gospel

What dreadful implications accompany the word wrong.

When I attend church in the United States of America we read predominately from a fifth Gospel not included in our canon textually but certainly implied with the largest pair of insinuative brackets I've yet seen. Those brackets personified: Modern Evangelism.

Every week at church at the end of the speaking and the rock n' roll Hallelujah chorus we are asked to bow our heads and close our eyes. And if we want to accept Jesus we timidly raise our hands amid prodding and coaxing, threat and bribery and we are assured that nothing strange will happen. We are assured that our sins will be forgiven and we will be saved from hell and we will belong to a group comprising 73% of our nation and our finances, home-life, relationships, school, work, golf game, and health will all improve in a sweeping storm of divine intervention. And if in a couple of months we feel we're up to it we can be baptized in a heated baptistry. Until then, let's enjoy the lights, music, facilities, and special events of a relevant church.

We've been reading the wrong gospel.

Because the way I read the gospel is the same way Leonard Ravenhill reads it. "It's a gory gospel! It's a bloody gospel! It's a sacrificial gospel!" It's not something for spiritual babies to play with and dribble over. It requires heroes and heroines. We sell it cheap these days and any dummy with a Bible in his pocket can wear the lable. I'm a Christian! I'm a Christian! Anyone can say it, we let anyone walk around with it, we give it to them! Force it on them even. Who do we think we are throwing all the chaff back in with the wheat? Our pastors are mothers who throw a bunch of toddlers in a rugby game and they just get in the way and make the team look bad. "Oh put little Johnny in! Let my boy play!" Well hang it all madam, Little Johnny didn't come to practise, Little Johnny was wiping his nose in the sand box while we were nursing sweat, blood, tears in preparation for the urgency that awaits us. We're luring in people with little chants and toys and any sort of entertainment we can conjure and they are muddying up the living water. At least when we get them there we could tell them the truth, the truth that they are going to have to pick up their cross and take the beatings that Jesus is no longer on earth to take and scream the message on pain of death and torture. It doesn't take bravery, it doesn't take the Holy Spirit to sit in a wading pool, but it takes an act of grueling courage to jump in a boiling channel of molten and take on the current for the lost souls of any given God-forsaken land. You're lukewarm! And you're going to be spit out for it. You can't live everyday like you are going to Heaven just because you say you're a Christian. That's why, even with the oversaturation of Christian resources, references, and places of worship we are still only fooling ourselves. Christianity in America is a joke. That's why our Evangelism is largely uneffective. We wear the name but don't live the life. We're ruining it. We preach the wrong Gospel, the Jesus of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John is the best kept secret and the Red, White, and Blue Jesus is at large and we're sending out missionaries on his behalf. We're all false prophets. "Jesus came to make your life on earth better." No he didn't! He came to tell you of a foreign government that we know nothing about and of a war that we have the power to win if we just follow Him! The Kingdom of Heaven is at hand! Between prosperity and freedom of religion we've made God in our image. Why aren't we the outcasts? Why aren't we weird? Why aren't we baptizing? Why are we making satistics instead of disciples? Why aren't we leaving everything we have? Why are we not selling all? Why do, when we preach these things, why do we make reservations in the end? I think I'm discovering the Jesus I never really knew.

Sometimes I feel like Jim Elliot did. I feel like Jesus is like the Yukon and He's saying:

Send not your foolish and feeble; send me your strong and your sane--

Strong for the red rage of battle; sane, for I harry them sore;

Send me men girt for combat, men who are grit to the core;

Swift as the panther in triumph, fierce as the bear in defeat,

Sired of a bulldog parent, steeled in the furnace heat.

Send me the best of your breeding, lend me your chosen ones;

Them will I take to my bosom, them I will call my sons;

The men of my mettle, the men who would 'stablish my fame

Unto its ultimate issue, winning me honour, not shame;

Searching my uttermost valleys, fighting each step as they go

Shooting the wrath of my rapids, scaling my ramparts of snow;

Ripping the guts of my mountains, looting the beds of my creeks

Them I will take to my bosom, and speak as a mother speaks.

Wild and wide are my borders, stern as death is my sway,

And I wait for the men who will win me--and I will not be won in a day;

And I will not be won by weaklings, subtle, suave and mild,

But by men with the hearts of vikings, and the simple faith of a child;

Desperate, strong, and resistless, unthrottled by fear and defeat,

Them I will gild with my treasure, them I will glut with my meat.

We are full of gimmicks and watered down doctrines. We can't go on like this unpunished. Where are the heroes? The martyrs, the saints, and the warrior poets? I'll tell you where the potential ones are. They're in a church pew listening to a man who is getting paid to do what we all should be doing. They are being inspired and fondled and taught by the wrong Jesus and the wrong Gospel.