Core Value: Proclaim
November 25, 2007
We prayerfully seek to proclaim the gospel of the kingdom with creativity, urgency, personal appeal, love, and reliance on God to draw sinners to himself.
This is one of our core values that correspond with the “reaching out” part of our mission statement, along with portraying the gospel of the kingdom and spreading this work locally and internationally. While these other values clarify that ministering the gospel of the kingdom involves more than verbal witness, we want to be clear that the spoken message about Jesus is central and necessary to gospel work.
Jesus commissioned his disciples to “make disciples of all nations” (Matt 28:19) and told them, “you will be my witnesses” (Acts 1:8), which they fulfilled by preaching to crowds and individuals about the crucified and risen Christ. This mandate for verbal proclamation was carried out by all the apostles, including Paul, who said, “Woe to me if I do not preach the gospel!” (1 Corinthians 9:16).
Our core value describes the nature of this verbal proclamation based on the way the New Testament church spoke to others about Jesus Christ. Paul brought creativity to his proclamation as he engaged Jews in the synagogue and Greeks in the marketplace, in each situation pointing to God’s redemption story that climaxes in Jesus’ death and resurrection. Peter preached with urgency at Pentecost, in Solomon’s porch, and before religious leaders, calling people to repent without delay.
We see Paul exhibiting personal appeal and love as he went about Ephesus “proclaiming the kingdom” and unceasingly admonished everyone “with tears” (Acts 20:25, 31). While in chains Paul even pleaded with his judge, King Agrippa, to become a follower of Jesus (Acts 26:27-29). The apostle expressed his own “great sorrow and unceasing anguish in my heart” that his fellow Jews would believe in Jesus as Messiah and Lord (Romans 9:1-5).
Finally, we see the early church in complete reliance on God to draw sinners to himself through their preaching. Paul expressed this to the Corinthians with a farming metaphor: “What then is Apollos? What is Paul? Servants through whom you believed, as the Lord assigned to each. I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth” (1 Corinthians 3:6). For Paul this meant that when a sinner hears the gospel and trusts in Jesus for salvation, the credit for that conversion is not due to the creativity or urgency of the preacher but in the powerful working of God. As he continues, “So neither he who plants nor he who waters is anything, but only God who gives the growth” (v. 7).
None of these attributes of gospel proclamation will be true of us unless we remain in tune with the fierceness of God’s wrath against our sin, the unique sufficiency of Christ’s death and resurrection to purchase our forgiveness and eternal life, the deep mercy God displayed in providing such a Savior, and the power of God to breathe life into those who are spiritually dead.
May God grant us deeper joy as we meditate on the gospel and greater fruit as we proclaim it.
Pastor Chris