The Spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak. Now for most of us in
this room, when I say this phrase, you understand what I am talking
about. But not everybody does. This phrase reminds us of a story of
a computer programmer who created an application that would
translate English into a foreign language and vice versa. I’m sure
you’ve seen these programs before. Well, he decided to create a
translation program for Russian. The day arrived when he felt the
program was ready. To test the program, he typed in this phrase,
“The Spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.” And out came this
phrase in the Russian cyrillic alphabet. Since he didn’t know the
Russian language, he asked the computer to translate the Russian
phrase back into English. And out came this phrase:
The whiskey is
stronger than the beef.
Now in one way it makes sense, doesn’t it? When I first said the
phrase, most, if not all of you instinctively placed the main words
here, spirit and flesh, within the context of the Christian life. In
fact, most of you know this phrase because it is what Jesus told his
disciples in Matthew 26:41 when they were having trouble staying
awake and praying: “Keep watching and praying, that you may not
enter into temptation; the spirit is willing, but the flesh is
weak.” So, we had no problem understanding the phrase because we
immediately placed that phrase within the right context. The
computer, however, did not have this context, or frame of reference,
to understand the true meaning behind those words.
One thing we’ve learned in missions over the last hundred years or
so is that when someone takes the gospel to a new culture, he needs
to find appropriate ways to communicate that message so that it is
clear and cogent; in short, comprehensible and understandable to the
people in that context. So much time is spent learning the language
and culture of the new context so that the missionary’s words are
clear and appropriate. And herein is our challenge.
Dr. Horton earlier in our conference used a striking analogy to
describe the task of those witnessing to the gospel. He said, “We
are ambassadors, sent on a plane, into hostile territories, to
declare a peace treaty of the Great King.”
More and more, our hearers, not just overseas in foreign countries,
but all around us, are hostile. That is, they have developed
worldviews, views of how they understand and relate to their world
that are no longer influenced by a Judeo-Christian worldview. In
light of the massive shifts that have occurred in the last
century—like religious pluralism, the death of God, and the loss of
a sacred canopy—we don’t have to go very far to discover that many
of our neighbors around us are not mere blank slates waiting to have
the good news of Jesus written into their hearts and minds. Rather,
they have a variety of conflicting worldviews that need to be
challenged.
Furthermore, another challenge of doing missions in the twenty-first
century is that older methods of sharing the gospel—like Campus
Crusade’s “Four Spiritual Laws” that start with man’s need and
Christ—don’t make sense in light of the non-Christian worldview.
Larger questions regarding man’s origin and man’s purpose presuppose
a particular cosmology, or a view of time, space, and history.
Simply put, many twenty-first-century humans whose core view of life
is utterly existential and subjective—in short, post-modern and
post-churched—need an alternative worldview where the cross of
Christ makes sense.
Walter Truett Anderson humorously gives us an insight into this in
his book
Reality Isn't What It Used to Be. He reflects on our
predicament by pre¬senting an analogy from baseball. A premodern
baseball umpire would have said something like this: “There's balls,
and there’s strikes and I call ’em as they are.” The modernist would
have said, “There’s balls and there’s strikes, and I call ’em as I
see ’em.” And the postmodernist umpire would say, “They ain’t
nothing until I call ’em.”
So, we cannot assume people who are unchurched as well as radically
affected by postmodern ways of thinking have the categories they
need to understand the gospel. Evangelism needs to start farther
back. People won’t be able to make heads or tails about the solution
Jesus provides for their sin if they have no understanding of the
creator God who gives meaning to all of life and reality. That is
why I believe, along with ministries like the
Two Ways to Live
evangelism program, that our witness in the twenty-first century
must be “worldview” evangelism.
1 We need to find bridges to the core
values, thought patterns, life principles—in short, worldviews—held
by people today.
Now, why all this talk about contextualization and worldview? I’ve
been assigned the task to give you my thoughts on the future of
evangelism and missions in the twenty-first century, thus the title
of my lecture, “Mission and Missions: Evangelism in the 21st
Century.” As I’ve been thinking, reading, and teaching on this very
subject, I’ve come to some conclusions about Mission and Missions,
that is, the Mission of God to save a people for himself, and our
role as individuals and the Church in carrying that task in our
Missions.
Much, as you can imagine, can be said on this topic. What I’d like
to do is make this more practical for you as individuals. Because at
the end of the day, as you catch the vision of what God is doing in
the world through the gospel of grace, I want to help you more
effectively witness to this gospel of grace in our increasingly
post-modern, post-churched culture.
