LIFESTYLE ATTITUDES THAT PROCLAIM THE GOSPEL

DON'T READ THIS UNTIL YOU HAVE READ THE POST IMMEDIATELY BELOW!!!


It's a bit funny when you put posts on a blogsite. Your latest one comes at the top. That works fine except when you want to say something that assumes people have read what you have said before.

In this case it is necessary in order to see the context of what I am about to put together here from the book of James in the New Testament. Having been stirred by the story told in the book(and film) "End of the Spear" I went and read the letter of James three or four times just to get a feel for the wonderful spiritual values it speaks about. If you want to proclaim a message about Christ without mentioning his name I discovered eight values that are identified in the letter as uniquely Christian. Its not to say that every single one is only espoused by Christian faith, but the package is most definitely unique. What I did was to ask the quesiton of the material in James' letter, "If every believer fully lived what James was talking about what kind of people would we be?" What I came up with was a set of trademarks of genuine Christian faith. If you are a person who has been made new by the Spirit of God, this is a picture portrait of what you are like. I will set it up as eight statements that say what Christians do


1. We rejoice when we are experiencing hardships because of what we know (1:1-18)
2. We want to be changed by the Word of God not just educated by it (1:19-27)
3. We consider all people to be important and treat all people that way (2:1-13)
4. We indicate what we believe much more by what we do than by what we say (2:14-25)
5. We use our mouth only to bless and edify people (3:1-18)
6. We don't compete with or judge anyone or anything (4:1-16)
7. We place no intrinsic value on money (5:1-12)
8. We begin to resolve every issue in the presence of God through prayer (5:13-20)

HUGE APOLOGIES DEAR PEOPLE

I was just on the phone to Don Shingles who reminded me that there have been no updates to the blogsite post Uganda. This is a major source of embarrassment to me and I do apologies for the silence. Its one of those annoying things in life that I don't quite understand. We were incredibly busy in Uganda and I found the time to send off material almost every day. I come back home where I have more notional control of my diary and yet no time is spent putting bits and pieces up here. That is very bad practice.

I have been extremely impacted by the recent (early this year) release of a book, a documentary and a feature film released on the fiftieth anniversary of the death of five young missionaries in Ecuador in their attempt to reach one of the most ruthless people's ever known in history - the wooden (Auca) Indians of the Ecuador Oriente. The feature film has not been released in Australia yet, but you can get it from Amazon and other places if you have a player that is not zone restricted. It is called, "End of the Spear"

I don't know if I can do justice to the story in this post, but here is a brief. What impacted me was the end of the story, rather than the event that has been commemorated.

For people like me who are interested in cracking the hard and well developed barriers we find in western society. The Auca (as they were formerly known) name means "savage." It no longer applies. Think of a tribe of people with a homicide rate of 60% and everything that goes with that kind of super payback lifestyle. Think about the fact that they now have a new name and the reason for the new name is because they are totally transformed. The power of God transformed this tribe.

For people like me who are interested in the strategic shift from "nothing happening" to "establishing a beachhead." I want to know what creates that breakthrough. This story is amazing. It did not become known from the mid fifties when the five young men were killed to the nineties when Steve Saint, son of the MAF pilot who was killed, heard it from some of the men who killed his father.

The five men were killed because one of the women from the tribe told a lie to cover up something she should not have been doing. When the Auca warriors went to act on the lie and to spear the missionaries they embraced some things they had never seen before. They saw people who spoke kindly even though they were faced with death. They stayed and allowed themselves to be killed rather than running for safety. They could have defended themselves with firearms but chose not to - and at the end of the killing all of the warriors saw angels hovering over the river where the bodies lay....and one of the missionaries saw it also before death overtook him.

That would have been wonderful in itself, but the powerful thing was still to come. As the Waodani warriors told this story it was so different from the stories of other battles and other spearings. Every time they told this story there were things that profoundly refused to make sense. In fact the story bothered them so much that when one of their young women returned to the tribe from living with the missionaries (Dayuma) she began to tell them about the True God who "allowed his son to be speared but did not spear back." When she told that story it was the only thing that made sense of the story they had been telling about the death of the five young white men whose "wood bee" had landed on the beach.

Here's the thing that challenged me. The five young missionaries would have had no idea of the impact they were ultimately to have. The just had a huge impact to love them into the kingdom. The fact was that they kept the enterprise a secret just so that it would not be compromised by any action that did not emerge from a genuine godly love. They had previously agreed they would not shoot any Waodani on the basis that the Waodani were not ready for heaven and they were.

In laying down their lives in this way they were part of a parable of the gospel. It was first told without any reference to Jesus Christ or the cross. Every time it was told it had impact, if only to challenge the Waodani world view at its core. It served as the perfect foundation for when they received the key to understanding...namely the gospel story itself. If they hadn't died there would have been no proclamation and no invitation to the two women who later went and lived with the tribe, led them to Christ and translated the Bible into a language only fifteen hundred people in the world will ever speak.

I would like to know what I should do in the midst of the people lost from Christ in my spheres of influence that would tell the story of the gospel just by telling what was said and done, regardless of whether they mention the name of Jesus. I would like to do something like that in a way that would challenge the power of accepted forms of Aussie pagan world view. I would like to do things that would only make sense if people heard the story of Jesus. I reckon that might be what Jesus had in mind when he said "You shall receive power.....and you shall be my witnesses...." (Act 1:8)

What do you think?