Evangelizing In Its Most Basic Form

How do we get across to a person about God in the form of Jesus Christ? The first chapter of Romans says that everyone knows deep within them that there is a God. The creation itself reflects a Designing God. Everyone knows it, but some people suppress this knowledge for their own motives and even call themselves “atheists”.

Let’s travel in our minds eye for a moment to a land and culture far removed from the spreading urban, technological society in which we live to the lonely pastoral culture of tribal Africa.

Missionaries to this culture discovered that before they could evangelize these raw peoples, it was necessary to peel away like an onion from the layers of centuries of tribal religion and from the layers of centuries of Western, white European-type Gospel. A Christian missionary, seeking to translate the concept of Jesus in terms these people could relate to, found that he could not speak in terms such as Messiah, Incarnation and other Western theological terms. Even the idea of salvation was often meaningless to them. He had to rethink who Jesus was without the trapping of nineteen hundred years of theological reflection.

Here was his approach:

“God has no arms, no legs, no body,” he explained to these tribal peoples.

“God is like breath, like wind – invisible.”

“But God wanted us to know about Him. How could God become visible in the midst of all the things God created?”

“But you might ask, ‘How can God really know what our suffering is? How can God feel merciful, compassionate toward our suffering? How can God share it?”

“If God wants to be visible,” the missionary went on, “to appear in the midst of creation, there is only one thing God can do. God must take on human flesh. God would have to create human flesh in God’s own image and likeness – and God did!”

“God made humans in God’s own image and likeness to walk the earth, to subdue the earth and to make it whole.”

“And then God came down and took the form of a man, Jesus Christ, who walked and talked the human life many centuries ago.”

“This Jesus has shown us, not only about God, but also about how humans are meant to be like Him.”

“So not only is God different than we thought, but so are humans.”

“Humans are not just like a fire, sputtering for a few moments, then fizzling out – darkness before and after. Humans are not the plaything of the universe – not a thing to be teased with happiness and crushed with sorrow, a thing with no more meaning than the other things of the earth.”

“Rather humans are meant to be, like Jesus, God appearing in the universe, appearing visibly in all the midst of what God created. That changes the meaning of humans, doesn’t it?”

The missionary went on to say, “I can see you people shaking your heads and saying, ‘No! No! – humans are not God! Humans are filled with evil! They fight! They kill! They destroy!’”

He said, “I say to you people, you have not known a human! You have never seen a human! Creation is not yet finished. What you see is creation groaning and moaning and struggling and yearning to be finished and completed – to be the body of God.”

“But suppose that the right time had come and there appeared a human who was perfectly a human according to the plan of God. A real human totally and completely human. Suppose than once upon a time there was such a human who was so completely a human, that there would be no other way to describe that human than to say – this human is God appearing in the universe.”

“JESUS WAS THAT HUMAN,” he told them.

The missionary went on, “Perhaps the really surprising thing that the Man Jesus did in His lifetime was to show us not only what God is, but what humans are. As His early followers, called Christians, studied the life of Jesus, they found that the only way they could describe the man they’d encountered was to say that He was God appearing in the universe.”

“And then this man, Jesus, did a surprising thing – even with all His wonderful power, He allowed Himself to be horribly executed. Brutally killed! Jesus said that it was so other humans might live – He took the punishment for all the human evil, the fighting and the killing that you talked about.”

Then the missionary’s eyes brightened, “As the greatest surprise of all, this Jesus, this human Jesus, ROSE FROM THE DEAD! You’ve never seen anybody in your lives rise from the dead, have you? But Jesus DID IT! No doubt about it. Many eyewitnesses confirmed it. It really happened.”

“Now what has this to do with you people today living in your tribes and going about surviving in a tough world? What you must do is simple really.”

“This Jesus, the perfect man, said that if you believed in Him and wanted to follow His leadership, He had the ability as God to come and live right within you to guide your life, give you power and strength that you don’t now have, and to carry on in union with you forever – after you die and beyond.”

“Is that a good deal or what??”

“Just believe what I told you – you don’t have to do anything yourself to earn it – just believe!”

I often think that we may have made evangelizing for Christ a little too complicated. As this missionary proved, a basic message about God and man can be a powerful incentive for people to turn to Christ. In some ways, the most basic form may be very applicable to our sophisticated urban culture today also.

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