When the church ceases to be Christian: Reading Acts with David Gooding

        The account of Philip being led by God to share the gospel with the Ethiopian eunuch in Acts 8:26-40 led David Gooding to share two observations concerning the gospel and mission — the first in relation to Judaism, and then, much closer to home to many of us, in relation to Christendom:

Judaism today could scarcely be said to be a missionary movement. For that there are doubtless many reasons; but one of them is this: it has no gospel to offer mankind. Its witness to the one true God and its protest against our modern forms of idolatry are still as valid and still as necessary as they were in Isaiah’s day. Its stand for the value of human life, and its ethical concern in general, based as they are on God’s revealed law, are beyond praise. But when it comes to mankind’s fundamental problem, the real guilt of having broken God’s law, it has today no satisfactory answer. In centuries past it did have an answer: the system of sacrifices that God appointed along with his law. Granted they were only symbols; yet they were something. But with the destruction of the temple they lost even those symbols and they have no convincing reality to put in their place. The message that satisfied the Ethiopian and led him to faith, Judaism has rejected; and without it, it has no message of redemption, no atoning sacrifice, and therefore no gospel.

Christendom too is always in danger of losing its faith in the gospel, and with it its missionary zeal. People come to feel that somehow our modern world is different; that the gospel that ‘Christ died for our sins ... [and] that he was raised on the third day’, the gospel that saved the Ethiopian and the Corinthians and that planted churches all round the first-century world, would not save our modern sinners. So, when given the chance to address the world, they preach Christian ethics. They exhort the unregenerate to champion the poor, believe in the family, work for justice, and they forget to tell them that Christ died for our sins so that we can be — as we need to be — saved, justified, and reconciled to God. And so the world remains unaware that there is a salvation to be had; converts become few, and the church ceases to be missionary. Then, to the extent that it ceases to be missionary, the church ceases to be Christian.

         

Indeed, Gooding reminds us that this is a clear lesson to be learned from Acts as well from church history. May God grant us the grace to remain mindful of these things, so we do not lose our "saltiness", but may continue to be "salt of the earth" and "light of the world" - to the glory of our Father in heaven (Matthew 5:13-16).