the gospel of information

I was speaking with someone earlier today who was talking about the gospel. Then they mentioned something about the four spiritual laws. I thought, “Is the gospel only within the confines of telling someone the four spiritual laws?”

If this is the case, then what exactly did Jesus preach while he was on earth? It says he preached the gospel. Did he walk around saying, “I have a great plan for you, but you are separated from God, so I am going to die, and I become your personal Savior, then you can no the plan I have for you.” This would not have made sense because he hadn’t died yet, his own disciples did not know who he was for a long time, and he never spoke about the “personal savior idea.” He constantly spoke about the Kingdom of Heaven. “The Kingdom of Heaven is like …”

My wife and I were in Athens several years ago. I thought I was cool because I could read Greek. Then I got to Greece and remembered that I had gotten C’s in Greek Class … enough said. As we were walking in the downtown area, one word on a sign stuck out to me, because I had seen it before … it said Evangelismos. Below this word in English it said, “information”. The information that was there was the “you are here” dot, bus routes, roads, cafés, shops, and attractions. I stood there thinking … “that’s it.”

Evangelismos. The idea captured behind this word is to tell people about the reality they find themselves in relative to where they are. This sign told me that I was in the northeast part of Athens, and showed me how far away things were and how to navigate my way to and from them.

Maybe this is what Jesus was talking about.

Maybe his idea was to tell people about the ultimate reality (the Kingdom of Heaven) relative to who they are and where they were … the old “you are here” dot on the map. The sign that I saw did not try to give me directions … it simply showed me where I was in relation to everything else. So often we are trying to get people to somewhere and we have no clue where they are, where they are going or even where they have come from. Maybe this is the picture of the gospel.