I was studying Philippians this morning and came across Paul speaking of preaching the gospel. He says that some people preach the gospel out of envy and rivalry, and some preach it out of good will. He then says that as long as the gospel is being preached, he rejoices. I hate this passage, it seems wrong. I've been wrestling with it all morning.
Here's my problem with it: if we preach the gospel out of a sense of rivalry with others, is that realy the gospel at all? Richard Foster says, "We cannot preach the good news and be bad news...what we are offering the world is life as it was intended to be." I agree wholeheartedly with that statement. The gospel is about God saying to us, "I have a better way for you to live, my shalom is available to everyone, including you." If we're offering life as it was intended to be, how can we preach that selfishly? If we preach selfishly, we're not offering people anything different than the rest of the world. We're saying that the world is about us. We're saying that we'll look out for number one and everyone else can take a hike. How is that different than the corporate world? This all seems inconsistent. Any thoughts?
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3 comments:
i'm with you on that. could it be that Paul was speaking on his own there? could it be a resignation to the way things are? don't know. really disturbing passage though. i don't know what to do with that. i know that I CAN'T use it, or stand for people to use it, to JUSTIFY pitiful excuses for spreading the gospel, or their version of it.
It seems to me that you're either preaching the gospel or you aren't. I'm just not sure you can preach selfishly and really be preaching the gospel.
but even if someone who was preaching it and didnt get it then mabey someone who was listening to them could wrap thier brain around the message even through the preacher hypocracy an the they would preach it wholeheartedly and so on.
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