After Jesus had recruited his disciples, and long before his death, he gave them a simple charge, followed by warnings and instructions (Mat 10:5-8). His charge at that time was to announce, heal, cast out, and give.
Four things.
He followed this with some expectations, like being beaten, rejected, and thrown in jail, but the charge was simple. ANNOUNCE that Heaven’s kingdom is near. HEAL people who are sick. CAST OUT demons. GIVE freely. And this seems like such a lost art.
My “evangelical” or “post-modern” or “emerging” community is good, and sometimes very rotten, at the announce part. We even do pretty well on the heal part, although lacking boldness and faith in many instances. We might even get a passing score on the give part. Most of us fail miserably on the cast out part, probably out of fear of looking weird. What is interesting in this is that the person Jesus was telling them to reach in this way was not all of the lost of the world, although he gives that charge after his resurrection. In fact he told them specifically not to take this to all of the world yet. The audience for this was Israel, who he calls “God’s lost sheep.”
I find it fascinating that the person who needed to be preached to, healed, have demons cast out of, and given to, was the religious one, the one who knew all of the “rules”, but do not have the love of God or the life that comes through the true kingdom in him. To the ones who don’t know, the message of Christ’s love is like a beautiful gift, and is often easily received, but those who have it all figured out are already off trail and about to careen off of the cliff while what they see in front of them is steady trail.
Who comes to mind in this is those that have heard Christ’s message or have lived in Western culture long enough to be affected by the activities and the resulting governmental laws of centuries of a mostly Christian society, and now think themselves “good persons.” They really believe that they don’t need Christ. They can do it themselves, and the sad reality is that from a perspective of just “doing”, many do it better than many followers of Christ. We are so scared that people are going to reject us, and in that we neglect the power of Christ.
And so this was the beginning and Christ was setting up his body of messengers. Take the village, and then take the state, and then take the country, and then take the world, but not as a ruthless dictator, but as the King of Love and Justice. Jesus needed to lay out a foundation, he had a plan, and he started in the hardest place of all, his own back yard.
It would have been easy to go out into foreign lands where people had varied beliefs and tell them that they could be saved through Christ, just as today we can take the message of Christ into underdeveloped places and be well received. But where it is the hardest is our own backyard, where we have a reputation, where we care what people think of us, where going out on a limb may cost us something. And that is where Jesus started, because that is where God’s chosen people were, and after all of the decades and centuries of making himself undeniable, the thickheaded were still thickheaded. When God’s lost sheep began to grasp this new manifestation of his love, he had something going that would affect eternity.
So to model that locally and now, would be a life lived unconventionally, not gong banging, but filled with outrageous love, unparalleled mercy. Those who don’t think they need God really want all of the things that actually are God.
God is love and who does not want love.
God is mercy, and who does not want mercy.
God is peace, and who does not want peace.
At the honest heart, where we were created to be in communion with God, we want God.
