All of us who name the name of Jesus as Savior and Lord have a common assignment: Communicate God’s saving truth. Communicate it in one-to-one testimony. Communicate it in church services. Communicate it individually, locally, nationally, and globally. Communicate it by radio and television. Communicate it by tracts and magazines and books.
Yet in carrying out this all-inclusive imperative, our major concern is not with means and methods and media, the technology and techniques of our day. Our major concern is with ourselves—the motives we have as we communicate the Word, the principles we follow, the goals we keep in view, and especially the attitudes that control us. Of course we must preach the Word and tell the old, old story. But how? I suggest five controlling attitudes.
Communicating Confidently
We must share the good news with conviction and authority. We must bear in our hearts and minds 1 Thessalonians 2:13: “And we also thank God continually because, when you received the Word of God, which you heard from us, you accepted it not as the word of men, but as it actually is, the Word of God, which is at work in you who believe” (NIV).
Do we believe, personally and profoundly, that the message we are communicating is the Word of God? Perhaps our witness is stumbling, hesitant, tongue-tied, naive, and simple. Are we dead sure, nevertheless, that it is God’s truth we are sharing, backed by all of God’s authority and power? If we have this faith, then we can witness with confidence even though our witness may be weak and wobbly. For the power lies not in our words but in God’s Word.
David Hume, the eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher, was the father of modern skepticism. With irony and logic he attacked the existence of God and the possibility of miracles. But quite regularly on Sundays he went to hear a dogmatic Presbyterian minister in Edinburgh. When his cynical friends chided him for his inconsistency, Hume replied, “I don’t believe what he preaches, but he believes it; and once a week I like to hear a man say what he believes.”
Communicating Honestly
To communicate the Word effectively we must also communicate it honestly. Notice the focus on simple honesty in 2 Corinthians 2:17: “Unlike so many, we do not peddle the Word of God for profit. On the contrary, in Christ we speak before God with sincerity, like men sent from God” (NIV; see also 2 Cor. 4:2 and 2 Tim. 2:15).
Why does Scripture focus on honesty? The reason, alas, is rather plain. As sinners, we carry on a constant battle against an inborn tendency to take over God’s job—only, as regenerate sinners, we play God in subtle ways. Instead of indulging in the violent megalomania of an Adolf Hitler, we prefer to pose as experts on Scripture and claim that God is speaking through our pronouncements—when as a matter of fact, we are merely ventilating our own prejudices.
We claim God’s awesome authority for our own fallible opinions, insisting, “Thus said the Lord,” when we should be confessing, “This is my guess.” As proud sinners, we fail to heed John Calvin’s stern admonition, “Let us be silent when God has shut his holy mouth.”
Thus, some Christians have dogmatically claimed God’s authority for racial segregation, white supremacy, and anti-Semitism. Other Christians have dogmatically claimed God’s authority for witch burning and snake handling; the divine right of kings to govern wrongly; slavery and polygamy; and for every conceivable heresy and absurdity.
In honesty, we must refuse to treat the Bible as a ventriloquist’s dummy through which we mouth our own hunches. If we force Scripture to say what we prefer to have it say, we are no longer obedient believers. We are false witnesses in danger of palming off human lies as God’s truth.
Communicating Prayerfully
We must communicate the Word prayerfully. We could just as well say we communicate the Word pneumatically. That looks like a complicated term, but in Greek it simply means air, wind, or spirit. To communicate the Word pneumatically is to communicate it in the power of the Holy Spirit.
Prayer and the Holy Spirit are as inseparable as the inside and the outside of a cup. The Holy Spirit enables us to communicate God’s Word effectively. It enlightens, regenerates, and converts through Scripture. But we cannot share the truth pneumatically unless we do it prayerfully.
I grasp more firmly the interconnectedness of human prayer and the divine Spirit of the Word. Listen to 1 Corinthians 2:4–5: “My message and my preaching were not with wise and persuasive words, but with a demonstration of the Spirit’s power, so that your faith might not rest on men’s wisdom, but on God’s power” (NIV).
The people to whom we witness are lost and blind, deaf, bound, and dead. They are incapable of receiving the truth until, in response to believing prayer, the Holy Spirit works a miracle of enlightenment, regeneration, and conversion. Without supernatural action, all our witnessing is in vain. The Spirit works as we pray.
We must witness; but before we witness, we pray. While we witness, we pray. After we witness, we pray. We do our human utmost to communicate the gospel effectively, but we master one indispensable lesson if we have never mastered it before. To communicate the gospel pneumatically—that is, in demonstration of the Spirit and power—we must communicate it prayerfully.
Communicating Compassionately
1 Thessalonians 2:7–8, a moving piece of autobiography, discloses the tenderness of the apostle Paul, that great-souled witness, who stands without peer in the effective communication of God’s message.
“As apostles of Christ we could have been a burden to you,” Paul writes to the community at Thessalonica, “but we were gentle among you, like a mother caring for her little children. We loved you so much that we were delighted to share with you not only the gospel of God but our lives as well because you had become so dear to us” (NIV).
This passage lays bare the secret of Paul’s witness: he was a compassionate communicator. Undoubtedly he knew from oral tradition that his Master before him had wept outside the grave of Lazarus and had also wept as he sat overlooking the self-doomed city of Jerusalem. Compassion is a master principle of effective communication—tender compassion, burdened compassion, loving compassion, yes, even tearful compassion.
Communicating Incarnationally
A single text will be enough on this score, that great statement in John 1:14: “The Word became flesh.” Central to Christianity is the incredible act of divine condescension by which the everlasting Father became Mary’s baby,
Veiled in flesh the Godhead see;
Hail th’incarnate Deity,
Pleased as man with men to dwell,
Jesus, our Emmanuel.
Together with the Atonement and the Resurrection, the Incarnation is the heart of the gospel, the divine Creator identifying himself with his human creature, immortal love lived out in mortal protoplasm, subject to growth and pain and death. “The Word became flesh.”
Physicist Robert Oppenheimer once remarked, “If you want to send an idea, wrap it up in a person.” God did just that. He wrapped himself up in the person of Jesus Christ, and, because the Word became flesh, we now know what truth is; we know what forgiveness is; we know what grace is; we know what love is; we know who God is.
If people today are to know truth and forgiveness and grace and love and God, the Word must again become flesh, not in a repetition of the Virgin Birth, but in that miracle by which Jesus Christ through the Holy Spirit lives out his life in our lives day after day.
What a radiant person Marilyn Edwards Madsen was, filled with God’s love, exuding sunshine, cheerfulness, and joy. With her husband, Dick, she witnessed in Africa after they both graduated from Denver Seminary. Then, in her early thirties, during the birth of her fourth child, Marilyn died.
Her death was a heartbreaking tragedy for her parents, a stunning blow from which they have never fully recovered. Yet, in those days of agonizing sorrow they bore their loss with quiet dignity, strength, and submission, refusing to question God’s wisdom and goodness, never revealing any trace of resentment or bitterness. Morning after morning her father, Dr. Edwards, who taught Old Testament at Denver Seminary, met with his class on the Book of Job and continued to explain the need for faith in the face of life’s mysterious suffering.
Some time later when Dr. Edwards retired, the seminary held a testimonial banquet in his honor. One of his former students, now a pastor, spoke on behalf of all the alumni. He made a few of the usual remarks, then recalled the death of Marilyn Edwards Madsen. He described how in the weeks immediately afterward her bereaved father taught the Book of Job morning after morning, discussing the testing of faith in the crucible of suffering and emphasizing the need for trust in the face of loss and tragedy. That alumnus said, “In those mornings, we saw the Word become flesh.”
For the effective communication of redemptive truth, the Word must become flesh. Confidence, honesty, prayer, and compassion are not enough. The Word must be communicated incarnationally. May God help us, then, to be living words who flesh out his saving grace!
Vernon C. Grounds, a contributing editor of this magazine, is president emeritus of Denver Seminary. His books include Revolution and the Christian Faith and Evangelicalism and Social Responsibility.
