Back 17 years ago, I preached in
With last Sunday’s observance of Ascension Sunday, I have been nosing around in
At one point he writes:
“…many of our people [American church folks] feel a sense of separation between their church life and their business, school or private life. Church is soothing after a rough week. People say it helps put things back into perspective. They get reoriented at church, and then go back into the world where a different set of values reign. By the end of the week, they have lost their spiritual footing and feel soul-weary…
…My premise [in this book] is that the church—our local church and churches of the west—needs to recover the meta-narrative of the gospel as a counter-story, indeed a better story to the one the world tells. As we noted in the introduction, the second article of the Apostles’ Creed is a narrative of a dozen dramatic movements. One of those episodes, the ascension, has been sorely neglected in the church’s telling of the story. The silence about this episode cuts us off from the present work of Christ in heaven and from the conclusion of the story—his coming again to judge the living and the dead.”
Do we have this sense of separation—a loss of perspective, as Dawson says, which leads to purposelessness in our day-to-day work and service, because we assume that our Lord’s separation from this world means the same for Him? Is it because we fail to teach and act on Christ’s on-going work regarding the earth, that we lose our way in it too?
The heavenly Man, our Sovereign God and Lord, is very earth-oriented. “He must reign till He has put all enemies under His feet…who is even at the right hand of God, who also makes intercession for us….I will not leave you orphans; I will come to you….A disciple is not above his teacher, but everyone who is perfectly trained will be like his teacher…”
Isn’t it this greatness of the gospel’s story that compels us onward? The gospel reverses things—at one time we had no hope, without God in the world; but now Hope lives! Jesus reigns, rules and recovers!
If we trim back the gospel, we’re back to the matter of preaching and teaching a little, narrow story with little, narrow application. What’s the little, narrow thing? We teach that Jesus won our salvation—that He brought us back to God by His mercies, but that’s it. In a little Gospel, we’ve been brought back to God, but not back to the world with God in it.
But with the Ascended Life, the earth is the Lord’s!
Dawson goes on to quote a father in the faith, H. B. Swete, who wrote back around 1900, saying that men who know the Ascended Life know how to live in this world.
G. Mark Sumpter
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