A little something different for you this Friday. I had the chance to see Disney’s new movie, The Haunted Mansion, last weekend, really enjoyed it, and will plan to review it next Friday, Lord willing. Today, though, I wanted to share with you a bit of inside baseball. Yesterday I was invited to deliver a message to our local Baptist association’s monthly pastor’s gathering. It gave me the chance to say to a bunch of pastors some things I think a bunch of pastors needed to hear. I shared with them some thoughts on how to go about keeping the main thing of the church (the Gospel) the main thing of the church. What I had to say may not be what you expect. Read on to find out what three suggestions I had with the help of Paul’s first letter to the Corinthian church.

Keeping the Main Thing the Main Thing

Karl Barth was one of the giants of Christian theology in the 20th century. That doesn’t mean he was always right—he very often was not—but in terms of the people who shaped Christian theology in a profound way and whose influence absolutely cannot be ignored when taking stock of how the world thinks about God today, Barth sits on a very short list. Now, in spite of that, I’ll be the first to admit that my knowledge and understanding of Barth’s theology is pretty limited because his influence tended to be much stronger outside the evangelical world, but neither was he simply a theological liberal. He carved out his own space on the theological map. 

That all being said, there has always been a story about Barth that has captured my attention. Barth was Swiss and spent most of his life and career there. He made a couple of high profile visits to the United States toward the end of his career, though. One was to the University of Chicago’s Divinity School. That is not exactly known to be a bastion of theological conservatism or historical orthodoxy. But it is highly touted for its academic prowess and so in spite of much of Barth’s work undermining its basic theological assumptions about God and the Christian worldview, he was considered an intellectual giant in his day, so they extended an invitation for him to come and speak. 

After his main presentation, he spent some time answering questions from the audience. I’m sure a great many of the questions focused on high level theological debates and obscure intellectual niches so that the questioners could demonstrate themselves academics to Barth, yes, but more importantly to their colleagues in the room. One questioner, though, asked a big picture question. The question went something like this: In all of your career and study, what is the most important theological concept you have learned? Barth thought for a minute and replied: “Jesus loves me, this I know; for the Bible tells me so.” 

So, why do I tell you that particular story today? Because it’s a good reminder. It’s a good reminder that for all the things we do as pastors and practical theologians, there are some things that matter most. It’s tough sometimes to know which things are which. It is so easy to let our decision on the question be influenced by our own particular ministry gifts and passions. A pastor with a gift of evangelism sees evangelism as indisputably the most important thing for all followers of Jesus to be doing. Another with a gift of discipling new believers sees that as clearly the number one concern for the church. A third whose heart beats with the pulse of missions will argue until he’s blue in the face that missions should come before everything else. A pastor who is primarily a teacher and theologian will spend all of his time and attention helping his congregation to think theologically. Barth had spent his life thinking about God. His magnum opus, Church Dogmatics, comes in at 31 volumes and can be purchased on Amazon for about $1200. And whatever else you might think of him, he had the humility to acknowledge that very little of that extraordinarily significant work counted as what matters most. It all came down to something very simple: Jesus loves me, this I know. 

Well then, what exactly is it that matters most? With gratitude to Karl, Jesus’ love for us as revealed in the Scriptures and its implications for our lives and the world in which we live is a pretty good candidate. For the sake of simplicity of communication, though, I think that idea can be boiled down to a single word. You have perhaps already guessed what that word is. What is the one word that properly captures this idea that Jesus loves us perfectly along with its implications? Gospel. The Gospel is the main thing. It is the thing that matters most. 

I don’t suspect I need to convince any of you of that in the abstract. But sometimes when you’ve been doing something for a sufficiently long amount of time, it’s good to have a reminder of what it really is and why it really matters just to keep things fresh. But you don’t need me to give this to you. I don’t speak with much in the way of authority generally, and less so with this group. Getting this reminder from the apostle Paul, though, does carry at least a little bit of weight with most of you, I suspect. And so, if you have your copy of the Scriptures handy this afternoon, find your way with me to Paul’s first letter to the believers in ancient Corinth. When you get that far, settle in 1 Corinthians 9. We’ll spend most of our time today camped out there. 

First Corinthians 9 falls right in the middle of a three-chapter-spanning argument from Paul about how to maintain unity in the church for a group that was characterized by divergent views on significant cultural arguments and in light of the incredible freedom we have in Christ. Through chapter 9 Paul is talking about the freedom ministers of the Gospel have to collect a wage for their labors. Halfway through his argument, Paul addresses head on the critique that he’s just saying all of this for his own benefit. His response is that he’s not saying any of this for himself. Pick this up with me in v. 15. 

“For my part I have used none of these rights, nor have I written these things that they may be applied in my case. For it would be better for me to die than for anyone to deprive me of my boast! For if I preach the gospel, I have no reason to boast, because I am compelled to preach—and woe to me if I do not preach the gospel! For if I do this willingly, I have a reward, but if unwillingly, I am entrusted with a commission. What then is my reward? To preach the gospel and offer it free of charge and not make full use of my rights in the gospel.” 

Paul’s point here is that because the Gospel is the main thing, and because he has been called to preach the Gospel, he doesn’t want to do anything that could possibly get in the way of its being proclaimed and received. And while perhaps we sometimes give a lot of our attention to the proclamation side of that equation, that’s not what Paul does here. Oh, the proclamation matters. Make no mistake on that fact. But in at least this context, Paul gives a great deal more attention to his efforts to make sure the message is received and received favorably. 

I’m certain you’ve heard these words before. You’ve probably preached them and perhaps on more than one occasion. But listen once again with fresh ears to what Paul says here about his passion for seeing the main thing—the Gospel—received as the main thing it is. Stay with me in the text at v. 19: “Although I am free from all and not anyone’s slave, I have made myself a slave to everyone, in order to win more people.” Now, just pause there for a second and ponder the weight of this statement. When we give our greatest attention to the proclamation of the Gospel and not to how our proclamation is received by our target audience, we run the risk of making the whole thing about us. We can protest to the contrary that we give so much attention to the proclamation so that we can successfully get ourselves out of the way so the message of the Gospel is the only thing anyone sees, but the ongoing temptation here is to do exactly the opposite. And we can slide into it with frightening ease. Paul’s passion here, though, is all in the direction of the reception of the Gospel. He is willing to bend over backwards, stand on his head, dance a jig, and generally accommodate his proclamation to his audience to make sure they are hearing it in a way they can receive it. 

He goes on to get more specific as to what he means starting in v. 20: “To the Jews I became like a Jew, to win Jews; to those under the law, like one under the law—though I myself am not under the law—to win those under the law.” Now, what might that look like? He emphasized the parts of the Gospel that were going to ring true and compelling in the ears of his Jewish audience. He adjusted his behavior to the confines of the Law in spite of the fact that it had no power or authority over him so that he didn’t needlessly alienate his audience. When his audience was a primarily Gentile one, though, which neither knew nor cared for the Jewish law, and what little they did know sounded weird and off-putting, he wouldn’t touch it with a ten-foot pole. “To those who are without the law, like one without the law—though I am not without God’s law but under the law of Christ—to win those without the law.” When folks struggled with participating in something their freedom in Christ otherwise allowed, Paul adjusted himself to their limits and presented the Gospel from within those boundaries. “To the weak I became weak, in order to win the weak.” To put a bit of a finer point on it, Paul was willing to do anything short of sin in order to make sure his proclamation was received. “I have become all things to all people, so that I may by every possible means save some.” 

And lest we think Paul is losing sight of the main thing in his efforts to gain a hearing for his proclamation, one last verse here blows that critique right out of the water. “Now I do this because of the gospel, so that I may share in the blessings.” All of what he’s been talking about here is pursued with the Gospel—the main thing—firmly locked into view. 

Are you with Paul in what he’s saying here? Because this is big stuff if we are going to take it seriously. It will necessarily have an impact on how we do church. It will impact the way we talk to people about the Gospel. It will impact how we do life in our own families. The potential implications of what Paul says here are manifold indeed. Can we talk through some of those implications together for just a few minutes? In fact, let’s just let the three examples I gave a second ago be our guide in that starting with how we do church. 

About a year and a half ago, I saw a post from a fairly prominent SBC pastor on Facebook in response to the SBC leadership’s congratulating Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson for her confirmation to the Supreme Court. He was shocked and appalled that they would do such a thing given the apparently sharp divergence between her expressed worldview and the particular understanding of the Christian worldview he happened to hold. He wrote that if a member of his staff had publicly expressed a similar sentiment, he would have fired him on the spot because of how offensive such a sentiment was to him. I don’t follow this particular pastor on social media at all. I saw the post because another pastor who I do count as a friend had reposted it approvingly. 

Now, as a personal matter, I was not particularly supportive of Justice Jackson’s nomination to the court. There are a number of reasons for that, some admittedly political, some genuinely theological, some cultural. Those don’t matter right now. As I wrote in a blog I posted on the whole episode at the time, “What this pastor has done is to reveal something. He has revealed that people who hold to a political mindset that differs from his own aren’t welcome in his church.” 

To recontextualize what Paul said to the Corinthian believers for this particular situation, “To the Democrats I became a Democrat, in order to win the Democrats.” That seems to be pretty reasonably covered by Paul’s final declaration that he was willing to become all things to all people in order that by all means he might win some of them. For this pastor to have expressed such vigorous opposition to merely the public statement of support for a political figure with whom he happens to disagree is to send a signal that people who happen to be supportive of her are probably not going to be welcome in his church. Given that a great many of the non-believers in his community likely do not share his particular political perspective, such a public statement struck me at the time and still does today as profoundly unwise to make. 

The fact is: most of our churches are set up to draw in and keep people who are like the people who are already there. Some of that is simply because people tend to want to worship with other people who look and sound and feel about like they feel about themselves. That’s how the church has always worked. Some of it, though, is because their pastors have molded their churches in their own images and aren’t really capable of diverging from that. And then sometimes we just flat out tell certain people they aren’t welcome. If we are going to be committed to truly making the Gospel the main thing in our churches, then we need to ask—and answer—a tough question: Are there any people we wouldn’t want to have in our churches? And then, after we’ve all given a sanctimonious, “Why, of course not! We would welcome anyone in our church,” we ask this follow up question: Are there any people we wouldn’t want to have in our churches, really? For one fairly prominent SBC pastor, the answer to that question is apparently Democrats. Listen: If we are not creating churches in which anyone can come in and be received just as they are (you know, like the old song goes), then we’re not really following Paul’s lead here in making the Gospel the main thing. 

If we are going to follow Paul’s lead in bending over backwards to make the Gospel the main thing, that is going to also have some implications for how we talk about the Gospel. More specifically, it is going to have some implications for how we talk about the Bible. I saw a blurb the other day about the results of another survey that revealed how little people are even thinking about spiritual things these days. While people are incurably religious and the deluded boasts of the new atheist movement of a few years ago have proven to be just that, the public square of our culture is secularizing at an incredible rate. The Christian worldview is being rapidly stripped from our public spaces and replaced with a worldview that is at best skeptical of the Christian worldview it is replacing. More often it is openly hostile to it. This has long been the state of the political left, but it is increasingly the state of the political right as well. 

What all of this means is that when you are thinking about talking about the Bible in the context of a sermon or even just generally, you need to ask yourself a pretty important question: are you going to be talking with a church person or not a church person? If you’re talking about it with a church person, then you can talk about it like a church person. No big deal. They speak the same language. But if you’re talking about it with someone who’s not a church person, you’ve got to change things up. The odds are increasingly overwhelming that they don’t think about the Bible like you do. In fact, they may think about it the opposite way you do. They do not consider it a source of authority. They probably consider it something more like a tool of oppression. This means that if you try to go into the conversation leading with, “the Bible says,” you’re wildly decreasing the likelihood of your proclamation being received positively right out of the gate. As soon as you say something like, “the Bible says,” they’re tuning you out. 

So, stop saying that. Eliminate the phrase, “the Bible says,” from your vocabulary altogether. This kind of a change in language falls right in line with Paul’s encouragement to become all things to all people in order to win some of them. It falls right in line with his counsel elsewhere (not to mention Jesus’ example) of leaning into the limitations of your audience in order to gain a better hearing for the Gospel message. Now, does this mean you need to back off on your assumption of the authority and inerrancy of the Scriptures? Of course not! Absolutely not! You’re simply changing the way you refer to it. Yes, the word originally referred to the collection of scrolls that make up the Scriptures, which is exactly what it is, but today people don’t understand it in those terms. People today hear the word “Bible” and think about a single book that has mostly been used as a tool of oppression. So, when you talk with folks like this, don’t talk about “the Bible.” Instead, refer to “the Scriptures.” Better yet, make reference to the specific author from whom you’re quoting. And, yes, I know God wrote all of it, but He did it through various individuals. Say, “Paul says,” or “Peter says,” or “Matthew says,” or “James, the brother of Jesus—and what would your brother have to do in order to convince you He’s the Messiah?—has this to say,” and so on and so forth. 

Now, do you need to do this with the Christian, church people audience that is mostly in attendance with you on Sunday mornings? No, you don’t. But they’re still going to know what you’re talking about, and if this little shift in language allows you to be more likely to gain a better hearing with the occasional unchurched, non-believer who is there, isn’t that worthwhile? Surely something this simple is covered by the “by every possible means” Paul committed himself to becoming all things to all people in order to save some of them. Preach your sermon for the followers of Jesus in the room who need to be called to greater discipleship and holiness in their lives, but in a language the non-Christian in the room can better understand. 

Paul’s efforts here don’t just apply to our work in the church, though. They apply to our efforts at home as well. It’s tough being a pastor’s kid. A lot of them don’t make it out with their faith intact. That’s not being unnecessarily gloomy; it’s just statistics. Yet is that not where our chief ministry lies? Surely, if there is anywhere Paul’s example of striving to be all things to all people in order that by every possible means he might save some of them needs to come powerfully to bear it is with our own families. After all, isn’t one of the criteria for being pastors—given by Paul himself—that “he must manage his own household competently and have his children under control with all dignity”? That doesn’t just mean they should be well-behaved. It means they should be followers of Jesus. 

So, how do we do that? Well, I’m still learning, but one thing I have learned is this: we have to make sure they know we’re their dad first. And the kind of knowledge I’m talking about here isn’t just informational knowledge. It is experiential knowledge. That is, we can’t just tell them they matter most. We have to make sure they experience it. 

Listen, you know as well as I do that there are going to be times you have to go and that your going will mean missing some of their stuff. Every working parent faces that same tension. But compared with most of the working world, we have about the most flexible schedules there are. Unless your church requires you to keep regular and strict office hours, you have the freedom to fairly well come and go as you need as long as the work is getting done. Now, we can over-schedule ourselves—and that’s something far too many pastors struggle with because of an inability (not to mention a prideful unwillingness) to say, “no”—but that’s a separate matter for now. 

What I’m getting at is this: if you are going to truly do everything you can to make sure your kids can not only hear the Gospel message you are proclaiming in word and deed before them, but are as likely as they can possibly be to accept that message, then you need to be a dad first. If your wife is going to experience the same thing, you need to show her you are going to be a husband first. When they have something going on, you be there. And if that means occasionally missing out on church stuff and making them go without you so you can be there, all the better. When they consistently see that you are their dad, their husband, before you are a pastor, then they are going to be a whole lot more likely to love the church like you do. If you show the opposite by the choices you make, then they are going to be a whole lot more likely to hate the church because it represents the thing that is keeping you from being for them what they need you to be. 

This means making sure you don’t ever miss one of their events so far as it depends on you. Be at every ball game and dance competition; pick them up after practices; go to all the school and sports meetings; volunteer in their schools; take them on vacations and don’t bring work with you; take your wife out on dates; make certain the two of you go away together for at least a weekend, at least once a year, and for something that doesn’t involve ministry in even the slightest amount; pick them up after school; be a part of getting them ready for school in the mornings (and if you’re not a morning person, get your butt out of bed and do it anyway because they are more important than your sleep schedule); eat dinner with them more nights during the week than you don’t; take an interest in their hobbies and learn to enjoy their music; put them to bed at night; chaperone their camps; watch every single Hallmark movie that comes on tv with her if she enjoys doing that; should I go on? Be to them fully who God gave you to them to be. And do all of that because by that means you just might have a role in saving them. You just might get the chance to have your little boy crawl into your lap, tell you he’s ready to follow Jesus, and pray to accept Him into his heart right then and there. 

Friends, the Gospel is the main thing. We all know that. Keeping it as the main thing can be trickier than we imagine. It means embracing a great deal of humility, being willing to change and even jettison everything we think about how to do and talk about church save the Gospel message itself, and being nimble enough to shift gears on the fly at times. But if we will take steps like these and others like them, we will keep the Gospel as the main thing. And when we keep the Gospel as the main thing, God’s kingdom grows. That’s the goal.