Living and Loving Out of Good News
Last week, I was facilitating a commissioning with a volunteer for the prayer line. Our volunteers typically come to these meetings with enthusiasm and urgency to share the good news they know, love and live. During this particular meeting, the volunteer was recounting her first encounter with Jesus.
“I was raised culturally Catholic. All of our Bibles were glued shut and put on display. Eventually, I went to an evangelical church so that I could know what the Bible actually said. I grew to love the community and did life with Christians for 13 years, but nobody ever took the time to share the Gospel with me. Finally, I think the Spirit had enough of that. and so one night I had an encounter with the Holy Spirit and was led to the Gospel for the first time and haven’t stopped sharing it since.”
Her experience is not an isolated one. Even as a leader of faith, I am certain I’ve neglected the good news that is worth sharing. The synoptic gospels all share the story of Jesus asking His disciples, “Who do you say that I am?” In each of these accounts, Jesus desires to hear not only what the crowds have to say, but what the individual says. While these conversations preceded the gospel as we know it today, they are just as important for people like us who choose to follow Jesus. This question not only demands an answer, but it also implies that who we know Jesus to be is something we actually talk about. I imagine some of us privately delight in the answer we have to that question, while others struggle to form an answer they call their own, and some still miss the best parts of the answer.
Many people share in the company of Christians, and yet they may not know the Gospel is for them. There are many reasons why this is true for some, and I want to suggest a posture of living that can help us bear witness in more consistent ways. If we truly believe that the Gospel of Jesus is good news, then it only makes sense that we would orient our lives in such a way as to see the world and others through this lens.
During my freshman year in college, I was asked to memorize the Sermon on the Mount for my final exam. This assignment was one of the most formational disciplines I’ve practiced. After months of memorization, it was so ingrained in my brain that I couldn’t help but see the world through the lens of Jesus. His gospel was everywhere, and I had words and truths I could point out regarding it. Later in life, I would learn this practice to be called “Beatitude Evangelism.”
Living and loving out of good news requires us to be people who notice and speak out when the Gospel is at work. When we see someone or something that reveals the kingdom establishing itself here on earth as it is in heaven, that is something worth pointing out and celebrating. Beatitude evangelism is bearing witness by identifying and celebrating the ways the good news about Jesus is manifesting itself in someone’s character and values. In order to see the world in this way, it requires that we know who Jesus is and what He is about. One of the best ways to understand Him better is to understand what He has said. Taking a note from Psalm 119:9-16 (NIV), we could benefit from being people who yearn for the way of Jesus in the same way the psalmist expresses:
“How can a young person stay on the path of purity?
By living according to your word.
I seek you with all my heart;
do not let me stray from your commands.
I have hidden your word in my heart
that I might not sin against you.
Praise be to you, Lord;
teach me your decrees.
With my lips I recount
all the laws that come from your mouth.
I rejoice in following your statutes
as one rejoices in great riches.
I meditate on your precepts
and consider your ways.
I delight in your decrees;
I will not neglect your word.”
The Sermon on the Mount is a great place to start in practicing this posture of abiding in God’s word because it helps us build a vision for what the Kingdom of God is like and how we can spot it emerging in our lives and the lives of others.
In my experience with beatitude evangelism, I have been surprised and in awe of how much my neighbors add to the kingdom and yet don’t know or follow Jesus. I believe the gospel gets to be bigger than just the death and resurrection of Jesus. The gospel gets to be about the life of Jesus, too, and often that’s the part of the story that paves the way for them to grow in curiosity about His death and resurrection.
Beatitude evangelism helps us practice seeing others, whether they follow Jesus or not, as true image bearers who have the capacity to magnify Jesus. In one of our conversations with our neighbors, I took the opportunity to practice beatitude evangelism, and it sounded something like, “I notice you are a very caring and compassionate person. You seem to notice the people who need help and are overlooked, and you step in with your own time and resources to help them. That’s a quality I know Jesus is really about. How would you recommend that I grow in that quality for the sake of the students I serve on campus?” What this does is say to someone: 1) I notice something in you that I want to grow in, 2) that “something” comes from the God I follow (and He loves it), and 3) I want to learn from you and grow with you in this kingdom concept. This kind of evangelism bears true witness to what the Kingdom of God is like, and helps others see that they are already imitating qualities of Jesus and are participating in His kingdom in redemptive ways. Often, these kinds of conversations build curiosity in others about God’s story, and they help them discover how they’re a character in it, too.
