EVANGELION - The Five Fold Ministry Of Ephesians Part 4

Image of a sunrise with the word 'evangelion' written on it

The Great Comission

The word evangelist comes from the Greek word evangelion – meaning ‘good news’

In my tradition, whenever we think of the good news, we view it as synonymous with the great commission found in Matthew 28:16-20 –basically, tell people about Jesus.

When we view the good news from this perspective then everything else becomes a means to an end, rather than an end in itself. I remember one of my lecturers saying that social action, like feeding the poor, should only ever be used as a reason to tell people about Jesus.

The Kingdom of God

When Jesus spoke of the good news, he used it in conjunction with the concept of ‘The Kingdom Of God’.

In the words of Tom Wright, 'what would it look like if God was running the show'; And the answer is, there would be no poor, no hungry, no-one in need.

When we consider our proclamation of the good news, then these things are part and parcel of it, not just precursors to it.

When I think of the Good News, I see a God who is love, who loves us.

I see a God who became human, who experienced the worst that humanity had to offer.

He met the barbarism of humanity with peace. He met the hatred of humanity with love. He took the death that was handed to him and turned it into new life and called us to follow him in this way of love.

I see hope. Hope for a world torn apart by war.

I see a new creation bursting forth right in the midst of this one, and we are invited to be a part of it.

This is good news.

 May we be those that announce this good news wherever we go, may we be those that live this good news, bringing hope to those around us, and may we be those that love.
Make Your Church An Eco-Church. Download Your Free Guide Today. Click Here.

Comments

Post a Comment

* indicates required

Popular posts from this blog

If God is All Good and All Powerful, Why Does Suffering Exist?

Image
Philosopher Alvin Plantinga called the problem of suffering “the only good objection to God”. The often quoted argument goes:  “if God is all good (all benevolent) then God has the desire to end suffering, and if God is all-powerful (omnipotent) then God has the ability to end suffering. Therefore if God does not end suffering, then God is either not all good, or is not all-powerful, and is therefore not God”. As Christians, we need to be able to answer this objection to God, to enable us to “give a reason for the faith that we have in Christ Jesus” (1 Peter 3:15). To this end, I want to try and answer this question to help anybody who finds the problem of suffering to be a sticking point or an obstacle in their faith (an argument to explain the problem of suffering is called a “theodicy”). To begin with, I want to go back to the beginning of it all and look at God. Who is God and what is God like? It is worth noting here that this argument takes as given the f...
Keep reading

The Surprising Truth About The Differences Between The Temptation Narratives of Matthew and Luke and What They Teach Us About Overcoming Temptation

Image
  5 MINUTE READ We are now well into Lent , one of the two great fasts in the Christian Calendar ( along with Advent ). Lent is the time when we contemplate Christ’s sacrifice, along with Christ’s 40 days of temptation in the wilderness. When we give up things for Lent we find ourselves tempted in similar, yet far less extreme, circumstances (Let’s be honest, who wants to hang out in the wilderness by themselves for 40 days and eat and drink nothing; I can barely handle giving up chocolate!). Much writing during this time consists of looking at the temptations of Jesus, and how Jesus overcame them as a template for our own overcoming of temptations. But in this post, I do not intend to look at the traditional views, but rather to look at the differences between how Matthew and Luke told the story of Christ’s temptation and what we can learn from these differences. Let’s look at them now. Why Differences are OK We do not like to discuss differences in ...
Keep reading

SANDWICHES - Enhance Your Reading of Mark's Gospel

Image
As followers of Christ, we look to the Bible as one of our main sources of inspiration and guides in our lives. So it follows that we all want our times reading the Bible to be as rich as possible. Learning more about the Bible is one way to help with this. It is particularly helpful when we know the types of things that the authors of the books used to aid us in this task. To this end I wanted to talk about something that has enriched my reading of the gospel of Mark: Markan Sandwiches (also called interpolations ). Essentially, what Mark does is get one story within his gospel, and inserts it inside another story ; this serves the purpose of giving both stories a greater sense of meaning. It’s purpose is to make the reader stop and think “Mark is trying to tell us something important here”. In practice it looks like this: Story 1 – Introduction Story 2 – Introduction & Conclusion Story 1 – Conclusion We can see where the idea of the sandwich com...
Keep reading