Rob Witham

The explorer, Ernest Shackleton, placed the following advertisement in a London newspaper in August, 1914.

Men wanted for hazardous journey. Small wages, bitter cold, long months of complete darkness, constant journey, safe return doubtful. Honour and recognition in case of success.

Reportedly more than 5,000 people responded to the ad. These people did not repsond over the promise of great pay. They were promised low pay and great hardship. Why the overwhelming interest? People (perhaps men in particular) are looking for adventure, excitement, risk and the opportunity to be a part of something big and meaningful. This is far more important than money.

Unfortunately, the church has yet to figure this out. The Gospel message is too often watered down. Eternal life is freely offered to all who will accept it; however, Jesus was clear that gaining the Kingdom would also cost you everything. I do not have space in this post to fully detail the message of salvation as recorded in the Scriptures. What too often happens in evangelism is that people are told to pray a prayer and then they can live however they want. Oh, it would be nice if they eventually started acting like a disciple of the Lord Jesus - but that is sort of an option. Consequently we have lots of folks walking around who are quite convinced they are heirs of eternal life while they live worse than the pagans around them.

I am sorry to have to burst someone’s bubble but that is not what the Scriptures teach. Jesus usually always told people to repent and stop sinning. John the Baptizer told people it would be nice if they acted like God’s people to repent and produce fruit in keeping with repentance. I am not talking about legalistically dictating what professing Christians should and should not do. My point is that any true follower of Jesus Christ will have a dramatically changed life.

Proclaiming that people can pray the “sinner’s prayer” (not found in Scripture, by the way) and then live like the devil is disingenuous at best. This is a teaching not found anywhere in Scripture. We need to begin reading what the Scriptures say about eternal life and following Jesus for a while. We would all do well to put down the theology books and the denominational literature and spend some time reading God’s book.

Any church historian can readily describe how phenomenal church growth always accompanies persecution. Church growth always declines when Christianity is legalized and socially accepted. This is closely related to my point.

The reason many people do not find the Christian message interesting is because it does not speak to their deepest heart-felt needs. This is not a fault of the Gospel for God made us, knows us and delivered His message to us. The fault is with our widespread misrepresentation of the Gospel message. When we cheapen the Gospel and reduce it to a meaningless religious ritual we also reduce interest. We are throwing our pearls before pigs and then wondering why people are not interested in the value of our pearls. By all accounts the typical churchgoer does not much value the pearls Gospel either.

Perhaps if we started explaining the hope of eternal life (and the reality of Kingdom life) the way Jesus did 5,000 people would respond to our next ad as well. If we stopped watering down the Gospel message to make it an easier sell we might find more people interested in the adventure God is calling us all into.