A whole gospel

What we focus on defines what we ignore? -- Brian M.

In the rush to summarize, in the rush to "keep is simple", we focus and lose something. The opposite often happens too - in "criticizing" someone's overemphasis on a point and following ignorance of another, we also force the loss of something.

It is hard, isn't it? No matter what we try we end up losing something, often without realizing it.

So, here I go, risking missing something in summarizing a "whole" gospel.

One could do this "doctrinely", and the closest I've ever seen referred to the gospel as being about:
1) relationship
2) forgiveness
3) healing
4) calling

In short, relationship is relationship with God, Jesus and others, forgiveness - forgiveness of sins, healing - most neglected, but about the healing of the brokenheart, and calling about finding a place in the world and the kingdom (often neglected, or twisted into 'filling in a role at church').

But there is a problem with such doctrinal approaches. They still fixate on items, and if a doctrinal approach was biblical, why isn't such a presentation in the bible itself? No, the bible presents it as story. Story is the language of the heart, not some dry doctrine. What sort of story are we in?

In the story of the gospel, we see the hearts of people of central - Jesus was concerned with the emotions and feelings of the hearts of people. He said he came to heal the brokenhearted - literally translated, this is "shattered in the heart" - in their very core. This story, you see, is a romance. Read the bible cover to cover again, and see it as such. The language is that of pursuing the heart, of a romantic adventure.

And there is an enemy in this story - so many presentations of the gospel neglect this part, or ignore what Paul wrote (I Cor 15:20-25) about the battle still ongoing, ignore the instructions to believers to resist the devil, on and on it goes.

Our approaches, our teaching, our methods, etc, betray this.

I write this to set the stage - I wanted to do a series of posts, probably one a week early in the week (I might do other posts mid-weeks on other topics), on how our methods betray this. Alan Hirsch and Michael Frost have written how our methods are the message - they recognize that our actions speak louder than our doctrinal words. We need to live it. So our methods speak differently. We'll look at that.
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