Thursday, December 13, 2007
About The Boring Gospel...
Blue Fish quotes John Piper in a way that is amazingly reminiscent of Young Life's founder, Jim Rayburn who said, in the 1950's, "It's a sin to bore a kid with the gospel." Said Piper:
But then I remember the source of the problems, not the words, but the hearer. The hearer that takes the lazy way. The hearer that alters the gospel to make it appear not boring rather than rise to the challenge of being someone holding the gospel that is not boring.
Do you see the difference?
What makes something boring? Well, let's consider something I hold near and dear - comics. Comics tell the same story, over and over and over again. Not unlike the church, only without anything resembling holiness. Sometimes comics are boring and sometimes they are not. What the difference? The creative team!
When the creative team understands the story and loves it, they find new and creative and exciting ways to tell it. On the other hand, when the creative team is just running the story by the numbers, the comic is lifeless and dull. These latter teams always end up "reinventing" the character. Well, you can do that in comics, but you cannot with the God of the universe.
So what's the point? The point is simple, if we do not want the gospel to be boring, and it is not, then we need to come to fully grasp and love the gospel, and more importantly the Lord, ourselves.
Piper's and Rayburn's words are a challenge not to the gospel, but to us. Are we up to it?
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"...imagination is a Christian duty is that when a person speaks or writes or sings or paints about breathtaking truth in a boring way, it is probably a sin. The supremacy of God in the life of the mind is not honored when God and his amazing world are observed truly, analyzed duly, and communicated boringly. Imagination is the key to killing boredom. We must imagine ways to say truth for what it really is. And it is not boring. God's world - all of it - rings with wonders. The imagination calls up new words, new images, new analogies, new metaphors, new illustrations, new connections to say old, glorious truth. Imagination is the faculty of the mind that God has given us to make the communication of his beauty beautiful. Imagination may be the hardest work of the human mind. "Piper and Rayburn are both right, and yet I find myself terrified at the words. I have seen so much mischief, so much evil, pursued in the name of those sentiments that I am tempted to wish they had never been spoken.
But then I remember the source of the problems, not the words, but the hearer. The hearer that takes the lazy way. The hearer that alters the gospel to make it appear not boring rather than rise to the challenge of being someone holding the gospel that is not boring.
Do you see the difference?
What makes something boring? Well, let's consider something I hold near and dear - comics. Comics tell the same story, over and over and over again. Not unlike the church, only without anything resembling holiness. Sometimes comics are boring and sometimes they are not. What the difference? The creative team!
When the creative team understands the story and loves it, they find new and creative and exciting ways to tell it. On the other hand, when the creative team is just running the story by the numbers, the comic is lifeless and dull. These latter teams always end up "reinventing" the character. Well, you can do that in comics, but you cannot with the God of the universe.
So what's the point? The point is simple, if we do not want the gospel to be boring, and it is not, then we need to come to fully grasp and love the gospel, and more importantly the Lord, ourselves.
Piper's and Rayburn's words are a challenge not to the gospel, but to us. Are we up to it?
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