The good news is called the good news because it is
also a bad news. It is a bad news in the sense that it demands repentance—a
radical change of mind that leads to proper behavior. The good news is made of
the messages of salvation and judgment. We are saved when we repent and believe;
we are judged when we do not repent and believe (Jn. 3:16-18). Is it considered
a success to have ten or twenty people to believe without emphasizing the fact
that Jesus died for their sins? Is it
a failure to have one person or no one to repent and believe? Are we looking
for a churchly statistic? Or a heavenly statistic? Are we satisfied with
certain numbers instead of caring for the eternity of others? We often talk
about evangelizing people in the mission field, but we often neglect the church
as a mission field in which it is filled with many believing “Christians.” Didn’t
Paul refer to the church at Corinth as God’s field (1 Cor. 3:9)? In order for this
field to produce a harvest, Paul planted the seed. Apollos watered it. God made
it grow (1 Cor. 3:6). Planting and watering are human acts; growing is a divine
act. In 1 Cor. 3, Paul does not speak like an evangelist. Rather, he talks like
a pastor. As John Stott said, “We think of Paul as an evangelist, a missionary,
a church-planter. But here he thinks of himself as a pastor, resolved above all
else to lead his converts into Christian maturity.” [Basic Christian Leadership: Biblical Models of Church, Gospel and
Ministry (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2002), p. 82.] The art of
pastoring a local church is a great missional act.
Do not tell me that people tend to walk away from
the gospel because we mention repentance of sins. Do not tell me that people do
not want to be told that they need to change. Do not tell me that as long as
they believe Jesus, they are saved. A saving faith requires total allegiance
with Jesus in and through whom our sins are confronted and convicted, and a new
orientation of life is presented to us. Do not tell me to water down the good
news as a therapeutic message in which we only preach “peace, peace, peace.”
There is no peace without forgiveness of sins.
We often share the ½ news because our gospel message
is human-centered, not cross-centered. We give what people want and,
unfortunately, we think Jesus wants it too. If people do not want to hear the good
news, we give them good advice. But no one is truly saved by hearing and
accepting good advice. Good advice makes us feel good; the good news makes us
look bad.
In The
Crucified God (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1993), Jürgen
Moltmann
writes:
Thus dehumanized man,
who must exalt himself, because he cannot ensure himself as he is, in practice
uses these religious insights only in the interest of his own self-deification.
As a result, they do not help him to achieve humanity, but only give greater
force to his inhumanity. The knowledge of the cross is the knowledge of God in
the suffering cased to him by dehumanized man, that is, in the contrary of
everything which dehumanized man seeks and tries to attain as the deity in him.
Consequently, this knowledge does not confirm him as what he is, but destroys
him. It destroys the god, miserable in his pride, which we would like to be,
and restores to us our abandoned and despised humanity (p. 71).
Good advice keeps maximizing the dehumanized women
and men who know no God but their own pride. However, the good news destroys
the gods of people so that they can be restored. We preach the good news that
is also a bad news. Evangelization of the church ought to be constantly
confronted and refuted by the cross, for “the cross is the test of everything
which deserves to be called Christian” (The
Crucified God, p. 7). 
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