Coming In Through Another Door (Part 2)
This essay is the second part of a two-part post by guest author Lynn Rhodes. You can find the first part of the post here.
God’s intent in creating a universe and placing human beings on this planet we call Earth was to have an eternal relationship with us. So long as these newly created people focused on their relationship with God, things went well. But when they began to focus on self, and to reach beyond the boundaries given by the creator, it all fell apart. No longer perfect and holy, they were cut off from the “Holy One.” Trapped in a world filled with the all-encompassing consequences of sin, many people found (and still find) themselves wondering what would make life good.
Solomon is probably the greatest example ever of the emptiness and failure in life that comes when we hope to find meaning and purpose in temporary things. God gave him wealth, long life, and wisdom. But Solomon became the ultimate illustration of what happens when we abandon a relationship with God and fail to have an eternal purpose in our lives.
As Solomon wrote Ecclesiastes, he was struggling to find what makes life good. He searched for the answer to his question, “What does a person gain for all his efforts that he labors at under the sun?”[1] With the limitless bounds given by his power and wealth, he explored every avenue of “wine, women, and song.” He filled his life with endless luxuries. He said that if he thought of it, he did it. But he found no satisfaction in these pleasures and concluded his experiment by saying, “When I considered all that I had accomplished and what I had labored to achieve, I found everything to be futile and a pursuit of the wind.”[2]
He then looked at hard work and found that it gave no real meaning to life. He decided that there is a time for everything, but when he realized that time runs out for all of us, he was left to wonder what he could do to give purpose to his life. Wealth was nice, but there was never enough silver or income to satisfy a person, and the intense pursuit of wealth only led to sleepless nights.
As he approached old age, Solomon finally found the one thing that gives us an eternal purpose and fills our lives with meaning. He ended Ecclesiastes by saying, “When all has been heard, the conclusion of the matter is this: fear God and keep his commands, because this is for all humanity.”[3] This leaves us to wonder whether, before his life ended, he turned back to God.
Does Solomon show us the door for effective evangelism? Will people with no genuine concern for truths they don’t like and no sense of sin be attracted instead to a way of life that gives every day a sense of eternal purpose and meaning rather than ongoing futility?
In what we call The Sermon on the Mount, Jesus does not give a listing of ways people were violating Moses’ law.[4] Instead, he talked primarily about the ways to find genuine happiness or blessing in life and to avoid the wrong focus in life. He says security in our physical lives is found in the principle of seeking first in our lives the kingdom of God and his righteousness. He taught about treating people rightly and trusting God to give us what we need when we pray. He acknowledged that his way is hard, but he points out that it is the road that leads to real life. In their versions of this sermon, Matthew and Luke[5] show the blessings that come from living God’s way, both in the present time and in eternity.
Somehow, we must get back to living as people who are totally committed to this kind of life, and to basing our evangelism on calling people around us to the lifestyle that Jesus advocated. This is a call to a total commitment to God, living every day in every way as a follower and representative of Jesus, and moving far beyond our comfort zone and our established way of life. Every aspect of our lives shows people the Jesus who is living in us. Doug Parsons put it well: “How we work is as crucial as how we pray. There is no greater testimony than the Christian mechanic at his bench, the Christian teacher in the classroom, the Christian secretary at the desk, the Christian nurse at the hospital, or the Christian accountant keeping the books.”[6]
When people see me, do they just see a better-than-average person? Or do they see me acting in the world around me in the same way Jesus would act? Do my moral and ethical standards match his? Do I treat all people the same way he did? The answers to these questions will determine how effective I am as an evangelist. Our evangelism must begin with a call for people to live life on God’s level.
At that point, we can begin to talk about how our lives have often hurt people. We have failed to live in the way intended by our creator. Inside us is that nagging voice that points out where we have messed up and that makes us feel guilty. We call that voice “conscience.” Failure to love all the people around us and failing to recognize and live for the one we call God is what we call “sin.” Only when we have opened this door are we ready to talk about such fundamentals as repentance, confession of Jesus as Lord, and baptism into Jesus himself.
For this approach to work, we will have to fill churches with people who are totally committed to seeking first the kingdom of God in every aspect of their lives. These will be people who have entrusted their lives to God and depend on him to care for them. They will talk about the blessings of living for God that come both now and in eternity. Such people will live in hope rather than despair. They will be committed to purity of life as they are enabled by the Holy Spirit to overcome the realities of sin, and they will want to be holy even as God is holy. These lives can bring people to God and the fullness of meaning he offers to people who are struggling with lives that are empty and void of a lasting purpose.
