A Pepper Grinder Post

Evangelism Jesus-Style

Think about evangelism in the modern world. Often a church or other organization will have some activity designed to appeal to people who aren't Christians, like an appearance by a sports or entertainment star, or a concert. Once the people are there and enjoying themselves, the gospel message will be presented in hopes that as many people as possible will make decisions to follow Christ. At the other side of the spectrum is relationship evangelism, where the goal is to form meaningful relationships with non-believers in hopes that the person will see the effect of Christ on the believer's life, and desire to have the same thing for him or herself.

My goal is not to criticize either of these techniques. After all, didn't Jesus command his followers to become fishers of men? It is easy to see the big event approach as fishing with a net and the relationship approach as fishing with a rod and line. I myself became a Christian years ago listening to Pat Robertson (not to be confused with Phil Robertson of Duck Dynasty fame) preaching on a radio station run by the Christian Broadcasting Network. While it is easy to criticize some things Robertson has said, I cannot deny that God used the man to draw me to himself.

What I do want to look at today is how Jesus presented a decision to become his follower, and how this should affect our attitudes as we engage in evangelism or just generally relate to people who are not Christians. On the one hand, Jesus had an incredibly powerful way of getting the interest of large groups of people. He healed the sick, he freed the demon-possessed, he fed the hungry, and he often encouraged the poor and attacked the rich and powerful. As a result of this, there are many times recorded in the gospels when Jesus was followed by such huge crowds that he had to resort to special techniques, like preaching from a boat, just to be able to minister to them. This, in spite of the fact that Jesus did no advertising or publicity and that he and his disciples would often leave one place and go to another without saying anything about where they were going next.

The question I have is, how did Jesus speak to those crowds about becoming his follower? Here is my translation of what he said in Luke 14:25-33.

Large crowds were traveling with Jesus. Turning to them, he said, "If anyone comes to me and doesn't hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, and even his life, he is unable to be my follower. Anyone who does not carry his cross and follow me is unable to be my follower.

"If one of you wanted to build a tower, wouldn't you first sit down and figure out how much it would cost, so you knew if you could afford to finish? If you started it and couldn't finish it, everyone who saw it would make fun of you. They'd say, 'This man couldn't finish what he started.'

"Or if a king is going to make war with another king, won't the one king sit down and decide if he and his ten thousand men can defeat the king attacking him with twenty thousand? And if he can't, while the other king is still far away, he'll send an ambassador, asking for peace.

In the same way, any of you who doesn't give up all his possessions is unable to be my follower."

Wow. This doesn't sound much like any evangelistic appeal I ever heard. It's hard to imagine a way that Jesus could have made the decision to follow him sound more stark and unappealing. What's more, it doesn't even sound biblical. Jesus said that anyone who doesn't hate his father and mother can't be his follower. And yet, the command to honor your father and mother is not only one of the Ten Commandments (Exodus 20:12), it is also reiterated in the New Testament (several times by Jesus himself, and also by Paul in Ephesians 6:2). And how can Jesus be saying that a man must hate his wife to follow him, when Paul so clearly commands husbands to love their wives the way Christ loved the church in Ephesians 5:25?

Could "hate" be a mistranslation? No, the Greek word leaves no wiggle room for an alternate meaning.

What is going on here?

This is an example of a rhetorical technique called hyperbole. Have you ever said something like, "This bag weighs a ton?" If so, you were engaging in hyperbole. When we hear it in contexts we are used to, our brains easily translate it to the true meaning of, "This bag is very heavy," never for a second supposing that the bag weighs 2,000 pounds. Hyperbole was a common technique in the teaching and preaching of Jesus's day. An example is Paul's quote of a Cretan, "Cretans are always liars, evil brutes, lazy gluttons." The trouble is that we aren't used to the kind of hyperbole Jesus uses here, so it's hard for our brains to translate it. What Jesus is saying is that, to follow him, we must put him FIRST. We must love him more than anyone else, including the people we are closest to and love the most.

In spite of my belief that the people hearing Jesus would have understood that he was using hyperbole, I still think that Jesus was intentionally presenting this teaching in a very strong way. He was clearly not trying to soften the message to make it appealing.

At the other end of the spectrum was Jesus's next statement, that anyone wanting to be his disciple must pick up his cross and follow him. While I think the statement that a follower must hate the people closest to him would have seemed very strong but not appalling to the people of Jesus's day, this statement would have packed much more of a punch to these people than it does for us.

Those of us in Christian circles have heard about the cross so often that we have become desensitized to it. We decorate our walls with crosses; we wear them on necklaces as jewelry. One of the things I've heard about this which I liked most was someone who pictured replacing "the cross" in some hymns with modern methods of execution. For example, "Oh, the electric chair, the electric chair, oh come to the electric chair with me." This starts to get it, but falls far short. Whereas modern forms of execution in the U.S. are designed to kill someone quickly and fairly painlessly, crucifixion was designed to produce a slow, excruciating, and humiliating death.

A person being crucified could only breathe by pushing himself up on the nail through his feet. Pushing himself up would allow him to breathe and give momentary relief from the pain from the nails in his wrists, but would cause intense pain in his feet. The impulse to breathe is so strong that the victim would keep doing this for hours or even days, until pain and exhaustion finally overcame him and he suffocated because of his own inability to push himself up and draw another breath. The prisoner was crucified in a public place, stark naked, and lifted well off the ground so that everyone could see him clearly and taunt him. To top things off, crucifixion was the ultimate sign of the Roman domination that was hated by the Jews. To suggest that someone had to pick up his cross and follow Jesus would have been a horrifying and revolting statement to the people of Christ's day.

Okay. If Jesus is trying to set the bar really high for following him, he has done an excellent job. But he isn't done yet. Last of all (after the two parables, which we'll get to in a minute), he says that no one is able to follow him unless he gives up all his possessions*! Here again, this doesn't seem to fit with other things in the Bible. Why does Paul address specific commands to the rich in 1 Timothy 6:17-19 if no one can follow Jesus without giving up everything he owns? When Zacchaeus pledged to give half his money to the poor (as well as paying back back generously anyone whom he had cheated), Jesus said, "Today salvation has come to this house." Why wouldn't Jesus have said that Zacchaeus had to give it ALL in order to be his follower? What is Jesus doing in Luke 14?

If you are thinking that he's using hyperbole again, I believe you are right. I think the message of Jesus is that following him must be far more important to us than our possessions. We must be ready and willing to give ALL of them up if he wants us to. However, Jesus is not establishing a monastic order that necessitates giving away all your possessions to join. To follow Jesus, we must put him first, above ALL else. There must be nothing we insist on keeping for ourselves. We must be willing to allow him to take anything.

I want to warn you about something. Jesus will often ask for the very thing we least want to give up. My wife and I knew a woman who told Jesus she would do anything, but asked him to please not send her to Chicago. Guess where God sent her?

Why would Jesus be so demanding? Who is this person who could stand before people and tell them that unless they submitted to his impossible demands, he wouldn't let them be his disciples?

There is something that struck me when I studied this passage. At first, like the NIV and all the other translations I looked at, I translated the refrain that appears three times in this passage, as "he cannot be my disciple." To me, this has connotations of Jesus saying, "unless you do what I say, you can't play the game." But when I looked at the parables Jesus tells, I saw things differently.

The man building the tower isn't stopped by the zoning board because his plans aren't up to code. He stops because he is unable to build it—he doesn't have what it takes. In the same way, the king going to war isn't stopped by threats from the U.N.—he stops because he realizes that he does not have the force necessary to win.

Jesus is saying that unless we have truly put him first and are willing to surrender everything to him, we will not be able to follow him. Here is the thing which I think we have lost sight of in the U.S.: following Jesus is HARD. We don't need to make it hard. It just is. If we don't start with a full tank of gas, we will end up at the side of a desert road with the needle on Empty. If we choose to follow Jesus with the idea in our minds that we will be able to call the shots and he will just help us out by making our lives better, one of three things will happen:

1. When the going gets tough, we'll get going and leave those childish Christian beliefs behind us.
2. We will end up as people who call ourselves Christians, but who are almost indistinguishable from non-believers.
3. We will come to a point of despair, and in that moment, will truly surrender everything to Christ.

In one way, it is easier if you live in a country where Christians are persecuted, because it is clear what the cost of following Christ is. There are many places in the world where people know that if they choose to follow Jesus, they will never have a high-paying job and will always be in danger of being attacked, having their possessions taken, or even being killed. I can almost guarantee that someone who follows Christ in that kind of situation will not have done so lightly.

By contrast, some evangelism in the U.S. seems to have the goal of obtaining the maximum number of "decisions" for Christ. The idea seems to be that just as higher profits mean that a business is successful, higher numbers of conversions denote a more successful evangelism program.

But is this Christ's way? It sure doesn't seem like it. It seems as though Christ was doing his best to keep people from deciding to follow him. Why would he do such a thing? I think there are two reasons.

1. He was going for quality, not quantity. When Jesus died, he had 11 main disciples plus some others, but almost certainly not over 200 in total. And yet with those few people, look at what he did! The ministry of these people was intensely powerful because of the Holy Spirit, but also because these were people who were willing to surrender everything for Jesus.
2. He only wanted people that the Father had truly sent. In John 6:44, Jesus said, "No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him." (NIV). While we try to use our best persuasive techniques to get the maximum number of Christians, Jesus wanted to make it hard enough that the only way it could happen was by God's supernatural work.

I know there are some who will read this blog and be overcome by a sense of despair that they are not committed enough to follow Jesus (I am thinking of one of my daughters). I would say to you, what I have often said to her, if you are in despair because you fear you may not be truly following Christ, that is a sign that you have put him first. If you didn't care about Christ above all else, why would you care about how well you were following him? Why wouldn't you just choose some path, either nominally Christian or not, that would make you feel good and let you do what you want to do?

On the other hand, some may read this article and think, "Well, that's a little over the top. I made a decision for Christ and I'm a pretty good person. What's the big deal?" If you fall into this camp, I would beg you to think really seriously about what Jesus said in this passage. You can forget about my words, but don't just ignore the words of Jesus because they make you uncomfortable. If you are trying to follow Christ but want to serve him on your conditions, watch out. Even if you live in a place where there is no real persecution of Christians at present, it may not stay that way. Even if your society does not change, my experience is that God will not be content with letting you do things the way you want. Hard times will come. Fill up the tank now. You don't want to run out of gas.

- Pepper
Posted 2021-01-18

*The Greek word (huparxousin) I've translated as "possessions" comes from a root meaning to exist or to be. This is why the NIV translates this as "everything he has" (literally something like "everything that is to him"). However, when this form of the verb is found in the plural, as it is here, it generally means property or possessions, which is why I and some other translators chose the translation we did.

**Image Credits: Fishing net by K Rayker, lightning by Manu Mohan.