I just read a blog by Krish Kandiah, whose writing and thoughts and initiatives I love. He’s been a big influence on me. The following section from one of his blogs (full blog can be found here) sums up a lot of the things I have been thinking recently, and in part the reason I’ve started my own blog.
When God sent us the gospel, it was not a list of bullet points to memorize, a contract to sign or even a book to read. He sent his fully-fleshed Son to spend 30 years on earth living out the gospel. The magnificence of his incarnation, the radical nature of his teaching, the perfection of his love for those around him and the selfless sacrifice of his death are incredibly difficult to summarize at all. In God’s wisdom there is not one, but four biographical accounts of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, put in the context of 62 other books that span history itself.
The gospel is bigger than we think. We need to offer something more substantial in our seminaries, in our sermons, and in our socializing. We need to revisit how Jesus embodied the gospel and begin to rediscover the gospel as it is presented on every page of our Bibles. We need to rise to the challenge of presenting the age old gospel in fresh new ways for our culture, simply but not simplistically. A gospel that is bigger than we think is good news: we have much to teach and much more to learn.
The gospel is huge! Far big and complex and beautiful to sum up in any words, let alone simple and concise formulas or clever constructions. God couldn’t sum it up in a book. It required a life. It required God Himself. And that is massive! We’ll never have it nailed.
One of the things that Krish hints at is that not only have we made the gospel too small, but also too tame. In our preaching and our churches and our lifestyles, I feel we need to be far more radical – and that will require holistic, enticing theology and huge creativity in living the gospel for all it’s worth. I’m excited and daunted to be trying to think through some of that theology and striving after creative and life-giving ways to follow the creator and the life-giver.
