We need to proclaim that God is angry with the whole world. If you don't obey the Son then the wrath of God rests on you. There's so much mealy mouthed hesitancy to talk about the most important things in the world, namely getting right with a holy God who will crush you forever if you don't go to the Son he has provided. I came away feeling like i just don't want to play games anymore. Life is short. I don't know how long i have. Jesus as He stands supreme from the Gospels is spectacularly supreme and beautiful and glorious and tough and tender and worthy and attractive and satisfying. Why wouldn't you want to give your life to this?
Piper on writing 'what Jesus demands from the world' in The Supremacy of Christ in a Postmodern World' P150
2 comments:
When 'shock' is used over and over again, as a communicative vehicle it gets tired.
Piper is of course right, we need to communicate sin and the consequences of it, much better.
But, let's also turn to Jesus for our evangelistic metholodology, not Piper first and then Jesus 2nd, to justify what Piper says.
Using anger and judgement as a starting point in evangelism, is without good reason, unbiblical and insensitive. See Piper - we can all do it.
Tom
The Jesus described is the Jesus of Revelation 19 though - so that is Jesus' own revelation of himself...
Didn't Shaeffer say if he had like an hour to share the gospel he'd spend most of it talking about judgement.
Jesus himself was a pretty strong speaker about hell and judgement, mostly to the self-righteous and self-saving, but he talked about it nonetheless.
That said, I agree - it's best to wow and woo people with the glory of Christ. That seems to be the approach generally demonstrated by Paul and Peter and co. Though they too never shrink from speaking of Jesus as both Crucified-for-love and the Winepress-treader.
The above quote is one (striking) paragraph out of a very thick book which has a whole lot of good stuff to say. The paragraph itself being an example but not the only one.
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