Missional Evangelismعينة

Pithy, Memorable A generation ago, mission statements became trendy, and companies and organizations scrambled to distill their purpose into a handful of pithy, memorable (too often alliterative!) phrases. More recently, even personal mission statements have come into vogue. As we’re thinking and learning about missional evangelism, we’ve landed on two pithy, memorable phrases that combine to sum up our purposes. In the first reading of Luke 19, Jesus is, as usual, on mission. He’s looking for the biggest social outcast He can find. And in what seems a socially awkward and potentially offensive approach, Jesus seems to stalk that marginalized person, and press Himself upon him, even inviting Himself over for lunch! In what turns out to be, as Luke frames the episode, a living parable, the host ends up getting saved! And then Jesus drops the pithy, memorable mission statement on us: “The Son of Man came to seek and save the lost” (Luke 19:10). His mission of evangelism is ours. While Jesus came to seek and save the lost, He sends us to seek and save the lost. We’re to search for people who are lost without Jesus and introduce them to His forgiveness and salvation. And sometimes it might be, as it was for Jesus in this story, socially awkward or even potentially offensive. The second pithy, memorable statement of mission comes in 1 John 3, in which John is teaching us about holiness and the demonic threat to our holiness and even our salvation. And in the second half of verse 8, John sums it up like this: “The reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the devil’s work.” That word ‘destroy’ – luo – is to ‘loose, unleash, let go, release, unbind so something no longer holds together’. What happens when something ‘no longer holds together’? It falls apart. The devil’s work in your friend’s life falls apart. You might read it as unravelling the devil’s work. This becomes a process explanation in our mission. How do we seek and save the lost? We destroy the devil’s work. One of the devil’s works is to blind the minds of unbelievers so that they cannot see the light of the Gospel (2 Corinthians 4:4). So we unravel the binding and the blinding so that they can SEE the light of the Gospel. And then we introduce them to the Lord Jesus Christ. Destroy the devil’s work. Seek and save the lost.