Listen or read the following transcript as D. A. Carson speaks on the topic of evangelism in this address from The Gospel Coalition Sermon Library.
When my wife was critically ill two or three years ago with cancer (she was so ill we almost lost her) I would have Christians writing in and saying that they were praying for her healing. Then I would have other friends from the larger world (some Christian, some not) writing in, “I would like to point out that I have a mother who had cancer, and she tried.… (You could fill in the slot with any number of herbs or any number of popular medicines or food supplements and on and on and on.) She ate them, and she got better. Do you believe in alternative medicine?”
It was that question that got me every time. “Do you believe in alternative medicine?” It was a belief commitment. It was a faith commitment. Not, “Do you believe in the importance of double-blind experiments to find out if something actually works?” It’s anecdotal and then, “Do you believe?” It’s a leap of faith, which depends on another approach to knowing.
This different approach to knowing is not based now on Western science with double-blind experiments to find out if there’s any statistical improvement, it’s an anecdotal thing of one person who has gotten better. “Whether it’s from that or not, it can’t be proved, but it doesn’t matter. I know! Do you believe?” It’s a deeply religious commitment.
In fact, for some people, it’s another god. So you can see now that in once sense, postmodernism has changed a huge amount. I should point out that there are a lot of very able thinkers around that don’t like to use the term postmodernism at all. They think of postmodernism, what I’ve just described, as late modernism.
There’s a certain reason for that. Because postmodernism is really taking the foundational perspective of modernism one step farther. That foundational perspective is, you begin with a finite knower. That was the huge change from premodernism to modernism. Instead of beginning with God, you begin with a finite knower.
Modernism began with a finite knower and still thought that you could get universal truth, the right methods, the whole bit. Postmodernism, or late modernism, has come along and gone one step farther and said, “Yeah, but if you really do begin with a finite knower, you’ve got a lot of problems there.” Then it comes up with a whole lot of other conclusions.
But at the end of the day, those conclusions are so radically different on all six of these axes that I’ve outlined to you, that I think it’s useful to invent another term for them. So I’ll stick with postmodern. There’s a postmodern epistemology that effects how you do a lot of stuff. “Ah,” you say, “Don, give me a break! This is for eggheads and people who write 600-page books that are better used as doorstops. For goodness sake, the gagging of God.… Who’s going to gag Carson? This is ridiculous. The ordinary person on the street doesn’t think like this.”
Nope, they do. They do because even if they’ve never used the word postmodernism, they watch TV and they go to the movies. As a result, the values that are endemic in any storyline begin to come across in the whole culture. About six years ago or whenever it was that the Star Trek: Voyager series first came out, my kids were still in high school.
We don’t watch a lot of TV in our home, and all through the growing-up years when the children were really small, we resolved on the one hand, not just to get rid of TV, (we just thought that was too anti-cultural) but on the other hand, we refused to use the TV as a babysitter. So they were never permitted to watch anything unless one of us was watching it with them.
That kept the number of hours of TV watching way down. It forced choices. It also meant that we would talk with the kids then about what they saw. They would choose this or that, fine, but we would watch it with them or else they couldn’t watch it. Likewise, when they started going to movies and they wanted to go to some movies that were just a bit over the top or in the wrong category.
Well, there were some that were just so far over the top that we said, “No,” and just gradually raised what we would allow as they got older. In many, many cases what we started to say was, “Sure, you can watch it under one condition.” “Here we go again.” I could just see Tiffany, “Come on, Dad.” “The condition is this: you can go and watch it with your friends after you and I have watched it first and talked about it.”
So we’d go and watch an R-rated movie when she was in her mid-teen years, and then we’d go to McDonald’s or some disgusting place and talk about it. About the age of 17 or 18, she went off to see some movie that I hadn’t seen, and then some weeks later, my wife and I went to see it, came home and Tiffany said, “Well, what did you think of it?”
“Oh, I’m not going to tell you.”
“No, come on, Dad, I want to know.”
“You’ve been bellyaching all the time. You keep telling me I’m ruining the movies. I’m not going to tell you.”
“No, no, Dad, I really want to know.”
“I’m not going to tell you.” This went on for about three weeks. That doesn’t work with my son, but with my daughter reverse psychology always works. With my son, you don’t try reverse psychology on him. If you say, “I’m not going to tell you,” he’ll say, “Okay” and walks out of the room.
Kids are so different, aren’t they? With my daughter, it always worked. She’s in her fourth year of college now, so we’ve gotten way past this stage. Then I’d say, “Okay, sit down. In this movie, who is presented positively? Who is presented negatively? Who is attractive? Who is unattractive? Why? Who is portrayed as mean? Why? What were the values? What do people think is good? What do they want?”
Gradually, then she’d worked it all out again. In that sense, we’re inevitably picking up stuff from the culture whether we like it or not. Likewise, when they were in high school then, I was looking through the paper and saw that Star Trek was coming out with a new series, Voyager, the sixth series. Voyager. Well, I had watched the original Star Trek. “To boldly go where no man has ever been.” Yes, Captain Kirk.
So we sat down and I thought, this would be a good one to sit with the family. We don’t watch much TV. We’ll turn this one on tonight and we’ll sit down and watch it. Voyager started. Well, I couldn’t believe my eyeballs. The acting was somewhat inferior. The graphics were considerably superior. But what was really striking was that the storyline was extraordinarily postmodern.
You get some bizarre culture in some planet on the backside of who knows what galaxy with an unpronounceable name where all kinds of bestialities and barbarities and cruelties and obnoxious obscenities were performed, and then the conclusion of the whole program was, “Well, it all depends on your point of view. In their culture, it was probably a good thing.”
I’d stop in the middle of it, “Remember that scene! We’re going to talk about that one!” I was ruining TV for them, as well. The point is that these sorts of things are going on in our culture all the time, aren’t they? In our movies, our programs, the way the news is told. There are agendas behind everything.
But of course as soon as I say that, aren’t I admitting the postmodernists are right? It all depends on your point of view, doesn’t it? How do you escape it? What that means, therefore, is that in a postmodern world, there are a whole lot of correlatives. This is the under girding epistemology. It needs to be said that not everybody buys into it.
Especially there are all kinds of scientists that think that in their discipline, they’re still operating out of a modern world. In their discipline, they’ve got the truth, but outside of their discipline they often have postmodern epistemology. So that when you’re doing particle physics, there’s truth. Outside of particle physics, who knows what’s out there.
Especially in the domain of religion, it is often perceived to be the case that religion is merely a preference. What does the word faith mean in contemporary culture? The word faith in contemporary culture means a personal commitment in the religious sphere where you cannot possibly know the truth.
Isn’t that what it means? “You’ve got your faith. I’ve got my faith.” It’s a very postmodern way of looking at things. There may be some facts in particle physics, but even in particle physics there are huge theories where it depends on Western science. Who knows what it would be in some other world?
When it comes to religion, there’s not enough stuff out there for you to talk about fact. There’s only truth for you, truth for your interpretive community. So to speak of “the faith once for all delivered to the saints,” to use the language of Jude, is bigoted, ignorant, modern, and doesn’t understand.
What that means is proselytism is wrong. That is, evangelism is wrong. Trying to win anyone to another point of view is morally wrong. Because as soon as you start trying to win somebody to another point of view, not least in the religious sphere where you can’t know anything for sure anyway.… If you try and win anyone to another point of view, then implicitly you’re saying that your view is better than their view.
That’s a put-down. That’s narrow. It’s bigoted. It’s intolerant. Now instead of evangelism looking in any sense heroic, or missionaries looking in any sense heroic, now they seem to be nineteenth-century throwbacks: ignorant, intolerant, narrow-minded, right-wing fundamentalist bigots. That’s the beginning point and it goes down from there.
Let me now suggest that out of this epistemological framework, which is not adopted by everybody in the culture.… I know that in the Bible Belt there are still enough people around with some biblical presuppositions here and there. I understand there’s diversity. Some disciplines have fewer of these people around.
History is messy, and there are still some reactionary modernists around. There are still some pre-moderns around, believe it or not. If you want to read a really funny book by a couple of modernists who are really taking the mickey out of this thing, read Higher Superstition by Paul Gross and Norman Levitt. They’re not Christians; they’re atheists.
They are so angry by what’s going on in universities (one’s in business, one’s a mathematician) they’re actually proposing that we divide universities in two between the departments that are doing real science and think that there is truth and all the anthropologists and literature and history and all the rest of the departments who go off and do their little thing and get their government grants but aren’t doing anything about truth and are just angry and stupid all the time anyway. They are extremely condescending. Blistering!
My speech, let me tell you, is immaculately restrained compared with what they’re saying. Before we go any farther, I do want to say this. I’ve tried to present the different portraits as fairly as I can. Let me just say this. I’ll be coming back to this tomorrow. It’s very important to understand that the thoughtful Christian should be neither a modernist nor a postmodernist. Some parts of premodernism we shouldn’t buy into, too.
Because premodernism, as it was often practiced, (although it began with God, which was surely a good thing) nevertheless belonged to such an open universe (that is, a universe of exchange between spirits and us) that it gave itself to a lot of superstition as well. It believed in God’s sovereignty, but it had endless superstitions because there was very little order to it.
Modern science hadn’t developed. Modern science developed out of a certain ordered view of God’s sovereignty after the Reformation. I don’t want to present the Middle Ages as the panacea to all our problems. It wasn’t. It was a very open universe that was full of superstition while still believing in the sovereignty of God, which is another way of saying that for a thoughtful Christian who’s trying to look at these things from the Bible’s perspective and over a long period of time, you don’t want to be quite a premodernist and you don’t want to be a modernist, and you don’t want to be a postmodernist.
In fact, there are some insights from all three of them. A Christian epistemology looks a wee bit different. I don’t have time to go into a full-blown Christian epistemology in these three hours. I’ve only got the three shots at you. I want to get at some other things tomorrow. But there are some ways of putting these things together, and I’ll be hinting at some of them in due course.
I don’t want you to think that the shots I take at postmodernism, precisely because that’s the culture that we live and move and breath in, makes me want to become a knee-jerk modernist. I want to go back to 1930 or 1920 or 1880 or something. That’s no answer, either. Modernism has often been an enemy of Christianity. Postmodernism has often been an enemy of Christianity. There are elements in both that are true. We’ll come to some of those first thing tomorrow morning before we start looking at the Bible.
Still, before I close, let me say that in addition to this fundamental structure, this postmodern structure of epistemology, there are what I call some correlatives to postmodernism. By correlatives I mean, they are not simply causes of postmodernism and they are not simply results. They can be either.
That is to say, they are all things which are furthered by postmodernism, and they are also things which strengthen the hands of postmodernism. When you have these things in a culture, they strengthen postmodernism and they are in turn strengthened by postmodernism. They affect all we do in evangelism. It’s important to think about. Let me mention four or five of them very quickly.
First, along with this rising spirituality, in some ways there is a rising secularization. Let me explain what I mean by secularization. Secularization does not mean the abolition of religion. That’s not what secularization means. Nobody in the field means that. Nobody in the field of sociology means that by it.
Secularization is that process by which religion is squeezed to the periphery of life. Instead of it being at the center of all that you do, it’s something that you do at the margins. Os Guinness tells of an interview he had with a McDonald’s executive, who was a Christian, 15 years ago. He asked this executive, “What are your priorities?” He said, “Well, on Sunday my priorities are in order: God, my family, and McDonalds. The rest of the week I reverse the order.”
Well, at least he was honest. That’s secularization, now, isn’t it? It’s squeezing God and everything to do with him to the periphery of life. Which means you can be ever so religious, you can keep all the national statistics up about who’s going to church on Sunday, and it doesn’t matter a bit. It doesn’t change anything. It doesn’t change how you live. It doesn’t change your morals. It doesn’t change how you think.
You’re religious. You’ve got a compartment for that, but it’s squeezed to the periphery. That’s really a return to ancient paganism, where you could be ever so religious, offer all the sacrifices, but it didn’t affect how you lived. It was Judaism and Christianity that insisted that if you were religious, in a Christian sense, you had to live a certain way, because it touched all of your living. It touched your pocketbook. It touched your use of time.
It touched your relationships. It touched your children. It touched your wife. It touched everything. It controlled everything, because Jesus is Lord! But if you lose that and spirituality is something that you experience on the margins that makes you feel good, if truth is not the dominant thing and lordship is a form of totalizing control, then you can be such a polite little sovereign grace person or such a polite little Baptist or such a polite little Presbyterian and do your thing, but it’s squeezed to the periphery and it doesn’t matter after that. That’s secularization.
What that means is that when you start preaching the gospel in that kind of world where people are influenced by the movements of secularization, then you’ve really got a job of convincing somebody that anything you’re saying is important. In the past, you argued for the truth of Christianity, the truth, for example, of the resurrection.
If you could convince someone that the evidence, the historical evidence for the actual historical resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead was true, you were 85 percent of the way of convincing that person to become a Christian. “He really did rise from the dead? Boy, there are some implications for that one.” The universality of it hits you.
But in this case, once religion has been squeezed to the periphery of life, “Well, okay so it’s true. True for you, anyway. You look at the evidence that way. Meanwhile, if I want to get drunk on the weekends, that’s my business, isn’t it?” It doesn’t mean anything. You’ve still got to say not only what is the truth and what is important, you’ve got to prove that it’s important. You’ve got to show its universality or you haven’t made any real claim in the person’s life.
Secondly, there is rising biblical illiteracy. Now of course you’re in the Bible Belt here. You’ve got a lot more people who are not quite biblically illiterate. They’re doing their best, but they’re not quite biblically illiterate. You still have a lot of people who were brought up in Sunday school somewhere along the line. How good the Sunday schools were varied quite a bit.
When I do university missions, (I’ve been doing university missions now for 25 years) I always expound Scripture. They never bring a Bible, so I print out the text in advance and put in the chapter and verses and whatever I’m going to do and distribute them as people come in. I have to begin nowadays with explaining the big numbers and the little numbers.
Of the non-Christians who attend such meetings, 80 to 90 percent don’t know the Bible has two testaments. They’ve certainly never heard of Isaiah or Abraham or Daniel. If they’ve heard of Moses, they either think of the recent cartoon version or the film 25 years ago. When you go to certain parts of the country, it’s more desperate yet.
You go to the New England states or the Pacific Northwest, which is the most secular part of the country, and the biblical ignorance is stunning. Even in metro Chicago, which is, after all, a part of the Midwest. One of my students some months back, a year and a half or so back, walked downtown with his fiancÈe who was wearing a gold chain with a little wooden cross hanging from it. A teenager stopped them in the street and said, “What are you wearing a plus sign around your neck for?”
In university missions, the religious vocabulary that people have in every case means something different from what I mean, with no exception. They mean something different by God. They mean something different by faith. They mean something different by hope. They mean something different by truth. They mean something different by Spirit. They mean something different by sin. In every case, they mean something different.
By saying this is a correlative of postmodernism, what again I mean is that clearly it’s not a cause and it’s not an effect, but it can be both or either. There’s a sense by which you have rising numbers of people in a Western country who are no longer reading their Bibles, then you have rising numbers of people who no longer are thinking in a Christian worldview and, therefore, are going to be more open to postmodernism.
In that sense, biblical illiteracy helps to further and foment postmodernism. Similarly once postmodernism is well and truly in place, then there becomes less and less incentive to read a religious text that is claiming to be authoritative. In that sense, biblical illiteracy becomes one of the effects of postmodernism. The same is true with all of these correlatives.
Thirdly, there is inevitably, out of this, a kind of moral openness. Your visions of morality are tied inevitably to your visions of reality. That is, to your truth perceptions. If, in fact, your truth perceptions depend on your interpretive community, on your particular background, then also your moral perceptions.
What’s right for you may not be right for somebody else. What’s wrong for you may not be wrong for somebody else. The Ten Commandments are no more than the ten recommendations, and only then for Jews, and Jews 3,000 or so years ago. So it all depends on your point of view, doesn’t it?
Thus in university missions today.… I use university missions as an example simply because that’s the world that I live in. When I do city missions or that sort of thing.… I have one over Easter. It’s city-based, not university-based, in French Canada in Montreal. It’s still the same thing. The hardest thing to get across to this new postmodern generation is not the doctrine of the Trinity.
It’s not the deity of Christ. It’s not the resurrection of Jesus. In all of those cases very often people haven’t heard of them. But if you explain them, they understand in general terms what you’re saying. Whether they believe it or not is another issue. They don’t have trouble with them conceptually. The hardest thing to get across, because all the resistances are up, by far is sin.
Now in a believing group, when I say the word sin, you immediately have mental visions of what is odious or heinous, what is corrupting, what is destroying, what is death-dealing, if you’re an informed Christian at all. But nobody uses the word sin in the broader world. If they do use the word sin in the broader world, it’s a snicker word. “She sinned.” Then everybody snickers.
There’s no shame to it. There’s no odium. If people do use sin in any serious sense, then it is so much on the horizontal level that it’s got nothing to do with offense before God. It’s got nothing to do with the wrath of God. It’s got nothing to do with holiness or justice. It’s sin in the sense that it does some damage in society. We probably shouldn’t do that. That’s the strongest negation you can get.
Unless you get agreement on what sin is, how can you possibly get agreement on what the cross is about? If you don’t get agreement on what the problem is, you’re not going to get agreement on what the solution is. You come to a relavist who’s a secularist who’s a postmodernist and who has a morally open view of sin, and then say, “God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life.” What on earth are they hearing you say?
“Man, I’d like a wonderful plan for my life. What does that mean? Better pay? Nicer job? More sex? More fulfillment?” What does ‘a wonderful plan for your life’ mean? No wonder then we get all kinds of spurious conversions. You cannot explain faithfully what the gospel is, the good news is, until people have a grasp of what sin is. It cannot be done.
Fourthly, in addition, there is increasing privatization of religion. It follows from the postmodernism. It follows from the rejection of universal truth. If you have universal truth, if something is really true, it’s true everywhere whether people acknowledge it or not. But once you say you cannot know that and it’s only true for you or for your interpretive community or for you as an individual, what’s true for you in your individual life is not necessarily true for somebody else.
The way Christians survive in that sort of culture is by going quiet, by going private. Thus Ms. Christian goes off to university and starts studying English literature. Somewhere along the line they’re reading T.S. Eliot or they’re reading one of the romantics who brings in some allusion to Christ or they’re reading one of the poets out of World War I writing in the trenches, Owen or Rupert or one of those who were writing out of a profound Christian basis, perhaps Jesus of the Scars.
Somewhere along the line, Ms. Christian, thinking that she’s going to be faithful, starts explaining that she’s come to believe in this Jesus and this Jesus has really changed her life. She’s trying to witness in this class. The teacher isn’t stupid. He might be mean. He might be polite. Let’s assume he’s polite. He’s going to say, “Ms. Christian, that’s very nice. I’m so glad that this Jesus has meant so much to you. Were you born in a Christian home?”
“Yes, I was.”
“Parents were Christians?”
“Yeah.”
“So the way you look at Jesus is largely how your parents look at Jesus?”
“Yes.”
“Have they influenced how you came to think of this Jesus?”
“Yes, in my church and stuff like that.”
“And you read your Bible?”
“Yeah.”
“Abdul, where are you? Are you Muslim?”
“Yes.”
“Your parents are Muslim?”
“Yes.”
“You were brought up in Islam?”
“Yes.”
“Ever read the Qur’an?”
“Not a lot, but yeah, I’ve read the Qur’an.”
“Do you think you’re a Muslim partly because you were brought up in Islam?”
“Yeah.”
“So you don’t look at things the same way as Ms. Christian, do you?”
“Well, no, I’m a Muslim. I think that Jesus was a prophet and all that, but the last prophet was Mohammad.”
“Ms. Christian, he thinks that he’s a Muslim because he was brought up in a Muslim home, and you think that you’re a Christian because you were brought up in a Christian home. Are you prepared to say that he’s wrong?”
Do you see how the pressures are now building? That goes on all the time across America. How does Ms. Christian protect herself? Well, if she’s the right temperament, she comes from a decent church and a strong family, she brings it home, and she argues about it. She gets some emails from Mom and Dad and she starts reading about Islam. She starts …
She might, she might, but an awful lot of them don’t. They either lose their faith in a weltering sea of relativism or they go private. They can hold on, just barely, by not telling anybody. Abdul can have his Islam. I can have my Christianity. Let’s agree to disagree. Be friends. Don’t rock the boat. Boy, that kills your evangelism, doesn’t it?
Finally, one of the correlatives of postmodern epistemology is pluralism. There are pluralisms of a different sort. What I’m referring to primarily here now is what I’ve called empirical pluralism, the sheer fact that the country is far more diverse today than it ever has been in the past. It’s no longer predominately Protestant. That changed at the beginning of the twentieth century.
It’s no longer primarily white and black. Nowadays for the first time, just a couple of weeks ago in California the biggest single population block is now Hispanic. Those of European descent are now in the minority. Then you throw in all the Asians on top of that. We have people from all over the world.
For those with my very broad taste, I think this is wonderful. I like the diversity. I’m much more comfortable in the city with all the different smells and sights and sounds and accents and so on than I am in rural Iowa. I like the diversity. After all, if God didn’t want to have all that diversity, why did he make so many Chinese?
Why should we object to the diversity when around the throne there are going to be men and women there from every tongue and tribe and people and nation. Might as well get used to it. In that sense, Los Angeles is more like heaven than Lincoln, Nebraska. There may be one or two other ways where it’s not so much like heaven, but on that front, it’s much more like heaven.
On the other hand, that same pluralism can get us to start thinking that it all depends on your point of view. As long as all the foreigners lived over there, we could send missionaries to Africa. Now suddenly when all the others are over here, who are we to tell them they’re wrong? They’re Americans just as much as we are.
Thus, empirical pluralism, far from opening our eyes to a vast and expanding mission field at home, can actually intimidate the socks off us until we’re no longer in a place where we ever want to say anybody’s wrong, which is an implicit part of all evangelism whether we like it or not. Last night at a lecture on pluralism, I mentioned on the side …
Just so that I’m not repeating the same stories, how many of you here were there last night? You guys can go to sleep for the next three minutes. That’s how I’m going to finish. The rest can listen. I became much more aware of the diversities of things when for 10 years I worked part time with World Evangelical Fellowship and that got me onto every continent except Antarctica, and into country after country after country.
Part of my job was to bring leaders together from different parts of the world. Just watching people from different parts of the world come into the room and greet one another is a whole culturally enlightening experience, isn’t it? The Germans will come in, will shake hands with everybody and so on.
Then the Indians will come in with their bowing with their hands together. And the Japanese with their bowing. How far down they go depends on who is perceived to be farther up or down the pecking order, who has more money or who’s older, whatever.
Then the people who come in from the Arab world. It’s usually three kisses. I never remember which one to begin with. There’s always a certain amount of tension, you know, as you’re getting closer, which one to do. Then in the francophone, in the Spanish world, and so on, it’s a big, brotherly kiss. I know which one to start. I was brought up in French Canada. I can do that.
Then there’s the cultural distance of how closely you stand to one another. You go to Korea and the students are still trained never to challenge a teacher. Their eyes are supposed to be kept down on the paper. They’re not to look you right in the face. That’s a challenge. Then you come to Trinity and the doctoral program. If you don’t argue with me, you flunk. That’s the way doctoral programs work. You have to argue with me! I’m going to keep saying more and more outrageous things until you do argue with me. That’s the way we.… It’s a cultural thing.
Then you have a Brit standing in the corner of this group. I could tell you his name, but I won’t. He was there in a Harris tweed sports coat looking bemused by this throng of humanity, these brilliant scholars and senior pastors coming together. A Mexican fellow came in and was about to embrace him with a great big brotherly hug. He looked up and said, “Have we been introduced?”
Then in comes the American and says, “Hi everybody! Sorry I’m late!” When the actual discussions get started.… I mean, I was always in the chair of these things, but that’s an education in itself. Part of my job was to make sure that everybody got his or her licks in. I would look around and see who hasn’t talked yet.
I might see someone from Japan and say, “You haven’t said anything on this subject yet. What do you think?” They might reply, “It seems to me that it might be possible for us to consider that perhaps the apostle may in this limited context have been suggesting such and such.” All understated, polite, not hurting anybody’s feelings.
The Norwegian comes back, “That’s not what it means at all. Everybody can see …!” The poor Japanese wonders what kind of barbarian mob he’s been dumped in. Meanwhile the Norwegian is convinced the Japanese are a bunch of wimps by definition. That’s before you’ve gotten to anything substantive!
Then you realize suddenly by this press of pluralism that has come to our shores, all these people are here now, aren’t they? They’re us! The very diversity can intimidate us, can’t it? Make us go privatized. Make us go narrow. “I always pray for the missionaries. Just keep them away from me.” May God have mercy on us, at least by enabling us to see what the picture is. We’ve taken the first step to see how we may begin to address it, but we’ll reserve that for tomorrow. Let’s pray.
We confess, Lord God, that however long we have been bearing witness to the gospel that has saved us, we don’t know anything in comparison with what we ought to know. We confess the many times that we have failed or lacked courage or lacked wisdom when we’ve just been too tired, too worn out to be bothered, or perhaps too selfish, or too afraid, too intimidated, too uncertain, too ignorant.
Lord God, forgive us our sins, for Jesus’ sake. Fill us afresh with your Spirit and give to us something of the compassion of the Savior who when he saw the crowds was moved to tears and insisted that we pray for harvesters for the harvest field that is already white unto harvest. Grant to us, Lord God, not merely philosophical analysis, understanding our times, but also the most profound compassion, understanding with the apostle Paul that if Christ in principle died for all kinds of people, it’s because all are dead. Without him, all are lost.
We ourselves are debtors to grace and, therefore, debtors to all. We ourselves are never more than poor beggars telling other poor beggars where there is bread. So equip us, Lord God, by your word and by an understanding of our own times to be ready to give an answer to everyone for the faith and hope that lie within us. These mercies we ask in Jesus’ name, amen.
