For the Sake of the Gospel, Part Two

1 Corinthians 9:19-27

^19 Though I am free and belong to no man, I make myself a slave to everyone, to win as many as possible. ^20 To the Jews I became like a Jew, to win the Jews. To those under the law I became like one under the law (though I myself am not under the law), so as to win those under the law. ^21 To those not having the law I became like one not having the law (though I am not free from God’s law but am under Christ’s law), so as to win those not having the law. ^22 To the weak I became weak, to win the weak. I have become all things to all men so that by all possible means I might save some. ^23 I do all this for the sake of the gospel, that I may share in its blessings.

^24 Do you not know that in a race all the runners run, but only one gets the prize? Run in such a way as to get the prize. ^25 Everyone who competes in the games goes into strict training. They do it to get a crown that will not last; but we do it to get a crown that will last forever. ^26 Therefore I do not run like a man running aimlessly; I do not fight like a man beating the air. ^27 No, I beat my body and make it my slave so that after I have preached to others, I myself will not be disqualified for the prize.

Can anyone identify this man? This picture was taken in 1853 when he was 21 years old. Not long after this, he sailed to China on a cargo ship called the Dumfries. This is none other than the famous missionary to China, Hudson Taylor. If you recognize him at all, you probably know him from this picture, taken when he was 61 years old. The time between these two pictures was an amazingly fruitful season.

First of all, imagine sailing to China all alone as a 21 year old. How many 21 year olds could do that today? I know I could not have done it. Taylor was not satisfied to work along the China coastland where every other missionary was working, rather, he was determined to reach the unreached Chinese living in inland China. To do this he had to start his own missionary society called China Inland Mission, which is still one of the premier missions organizations in the world and have since changed their name to Overseas Missionary Fellowship. Taylor recruited 800 missionaries to serve with CIM which led to over 18,000 converts. One biographer described Taylor and his methods this way: “No other missionary in the nineteen centuries since the Apostle Paul has had a wider vision and has carried out a more systematized plan of evangelizing a broad geographical area than Hudson Taylor.”[i]

Personally, God blessed Taylor with a total of fourteen children from two different wives, as his first wife died. Here is a list of his fourteen children. Unfortunately, painful loss was a regular part of the Taylor household as nine of his fourteen children died before the age of 15 and five of those were newborns. This man had been acquainted with grief.

Even though Taylor had enormous missionary success in the long run, at first he encountered enormous obstacles.

He went on 18 preaching tours starting in 1855, and was often poorly received by the people, even though he brought with him medical supplies and skills. He made a decision to adopt wearing the native Chinese dress and queue (pigtail) with shaven forehead, however, and was then able to gain an audience without creating a disturbance. Previous to this, Taylor realized that wherever he went he was being referred to as a "black devil" because of the overcoat that he wore.[ii]

By adopting Chinese dress and some Chinese culture, Taylor began to be well received by the Chinese people, however, he was severely criticized by his fellow missionaries for doing so. How did Taylor decide to make this important decision? The answer comes from his own words when he wrote, “Let us in everything unsinful become like the Chinese, that by all means we may save some.”[iii]

Does that quote sound familiar to you? He learned it from the apostle Paul, didn’t he? Paul wrote, I have become all things to all men so that by all possible means I might save some. Do you recall from last week what Paul laid aside so as not to hinder the gospel? He spent more than half of chapter nine defending his right as an apostle to receive material support from the believers in Corinth, but then he explained how he had laid aside all of these rights so that the gospel would not be hindered in any way. In the same way, Hudson Taylor discovered that the clothes he wore were a definite hindrance to his ability to share the gospel. Please remember that Paul’s love for the gospel was inseparable form his love for Christ. The same is true for us today: Our passion for lost souls will never exceed our passion for Christ and his gospel. Taylor loved the lost in China because he loved the gospel of Christ. That is why Taylor said, “Let us in everything unsinful become like the Chinese, that by all means we may save some.” Was it sinful to wear Chinese clothes? Of course not. Now it would have been sinful for Taylor to have begun practicing the Chinese cultural practice of binding the feet of girls. That would have been wrong, but adopting the clothes and food of the Chinese was helpful to advance the gospel message.

What Hudson Taylor did was called “contextualization”. Contextualization happens when you take the gospel message from one culture and communicate it to another culture. Whether or not we realize it, the gospel message in our culture looks very different from the way it is expressed in other cultures. I am not at all saying that the core message changes—that cannot and must never change, but we must be able to strip away all of the cultural additions that we have added to the gospel message. One mission’s expert describes it this way:

Biblically, the contextualization of Christianity is not simply to be the passing on of a product that has been developed once for all in Europe or America. It is, rather, the imitating of the process that the early apostles went through…Christianity is not supposed to be like a tree that was nourished and grew in one society and then was transplanted to a new cultural environment, with leaves, branches and fruit that mark it indelibly as a product of the sending society. The gospel is to be planted as a seed that will sprout within and be nourished by the rain and nutrients in the cultural soil of the receiving peoples.[iv]

Here is Taylor and his first wife dressed in typical 19^th century European dress. In the simplest of terms, how does one get from here to here? How do you take the gospel to another culture without either hindering the gospel or else harming the gospel? This was a burning question for Hudson Taylor because in his European clothes he was called the “black devil” and no one would listen to him. The gospel was hindered because of his clothes. What Taylor needed to do was to literally strip the gospel from its British culture and then re-clothe it in the Chinese culture. His western clothes were a cultural barrier to sharing the gospel. This is the exact same problem that Paul faced as a Jew trying to take the gospel message to the Gentiles. Today, contextualization is an assumed mission’s strategy, but Taylor was light years ahead of his day.

We had some missionary friends who were raising support to go to Poland. As they went from church to church they were often asked the question, “Do you love the Polish people, is that why you are going there?” I thought their answer was a good one. They would reply, “No, we don’t necessarily love the Polish people because we haven’t met then yet, but please pray that God will help us learn to love them.” That is a good answer, but I think a better answer would have been, “No, we don’t necessarily love the Polish people because we haven’t met then yet, but we do love Christ and his gospel, and that will allow us to love them and share the truth with them.”

This is what it looks like in graphic form. As Christians living in our culture, we believe that we have the pure gospel, but we don’t. What we actually have is the “pure gospel” message surrounded by several layers of culture. So when Hudson Taylor took the gospel to China, the gospel he was carrying was dressed in European clothes. What happened was that the cultural layers around the gospel bumped into the cultural layers of China. The gospel was not able to effectively penetrate the dual cultural layers.

But by doing a simple thing like adopting Chinese dress and food, Taylor essentially lifted the pure gospel out of its cultural layers, carried it to China and then reinserted it into their own culture. The result was that Taylor became all things to all men so that by all possible means he might win some.

Why have I spent all of this time talking about contextualization? First, it is important to see how this Scripture is applied to missions and evangelism. When we understand the story of Hudson Taylor we understand this whole chapter better, more than that, we have a greater understanding of the gospel itself. But the question always comes around to, “What difference does it make in my life?” It’s possible that a few in this room will enter the foreign mission field and for you, this would be vitally important to understand. But what difference does it make for the rest of us?

The application for us is that we have also added our own layers of culture to the gospel and we don’t even know it. Many of these things are rooted in our traditions. A simple example would be someone who believes that a church must have an organ. Someone like this was probably raised in a church singing hymns with organ accompaniment. The end result is that they have made the gospel and the organ to be inseparable from each other. They have added a completely unnecessary layer to the pure gospel.

Here are some more examples from one writer:

Some western Christian denominations, for example, forbid wine while ignoring gluttony, forbid polygamy, but allow no-fault divorce, forbid movies, guitars or work on Sundays, but accept greed and materialistic values. They hold loyalty to king or country to be as important as loyalty to Jesus. They affirm Jesus as sacrifice but ignore his ongoing role as Savior and Lord of all. They hope for heaven but live for this life. They honor the Bible but rarely read it.[v]

Part of what this writer is saying is that we have sold out the gospel and don’t even know it. We wave our Christian banner for the world to see but the banner doesn’t exactly look like Jesus because it is layered with stuff that has nothing to do with the gospel.

Most of you have been listening to me preach for at least several years. Let me ask you a question. Would you say that I have a Biblical worldview? I realize that no one has a perfect Biblical worldview. Only Jesus could say that, but would you say I have a fairly strong Biblical worldview? I hope you agree that I do, because it is the cry of my heart to have the truth of the Bible penetrate all areas of my life and thinking. Do you know that I took a worldview test and almost failed the thing? I scored a 75% on the test which was just barely a passing grade. I think this happened because many of the questions had a particular political bent toward them.

· The more a government resembles a pure democracy the more disorder and confusion occur.

· It is the responsibility of the federal government to create wealth.

· All forms of government-sponsored socialism stifle economic growth and prosperity to one degree or another.

· Our judicial system should allow judges, through their decisions and rulings, to guide and shape the foundational basis of law.

· The federal government should require students to pass a national test before graduating from high school.

· The most biblically based tax system would be one based on a flat tax system where everyone pays the same percentage of their income in taxes.

You see, if we are not careful, we could present the gospel in such a way as to communicate that being saved is equivalent to changing political parties. It’s not that the Bible should not have a strong impact on our political views, but these things are not the core of the gospel message.

How do we get past these cultural layers? A good way to do this is to use what I call the “Concentric Circle of Certainty.” This is similar to the other circle but it uses the word “absolute” to represent the gospel. I define an absolute truth this way: One that is true for all people at all times in all places and you are willing to die for it, though not kill for it. We need to strip the cultural layers off of the gospel until we get it down to the core message—a Biblical absolute truth that we are willing to die for.

How do we break free of these barriers and start to become all things to all men? Paul gave us the answer to this in verse 23,  I do all this for the sake of the gospel, that I may share in its blessings. His entire life was committed to Christ and his gospel. You can see the depth of his commitment in the rest of the chapter Paul likened his life to the Greek games, which were the forerunner of our Olympic games. He said, Therefore I do not run like a man running aimlessly; I do not fight like a man beating the air. ^27 No, I beat my body and make it my slave so that after I have preached to others, I myself will not be disqualified for the prize. Every Christian is in the exact same race, but some of us are running the race aimlessly. Some of us are running in a crooked line with no finish line in sight. The gospel is not our chief passion so therefore we don’t care so much about the race. But the race is the gospel, and the gospel is worth hard work and “strict training” as Paul describes it. Paul loved the gospel with such passion that he was willing to strip away everything that would potentially cover or hinder the gospel. This is how he could become all things to all men in order to save some. He literally gave up his rights as an apostle to share the gospel. This is the only race that matters. Don’t get run this race aimlessly or be distracted by anything along the way. Run for the prize that is eternal and everlasting—the pure gospel of Jesus Christ.

Rich Maurer

March 11, 2007