The Weight of the Gospel

“For when I preach the gospel, I cannot boast, since I am compelled to preach.” 1 Corinthians 9:16

Last March I sat at the bedside of a man who had been attacked by a crocodile. As I listened to his story, through a translator who spoke his national dialect, tears welled in my eyes. 

“It was a war,” he said as he described the event.

This man was going about his normal day, cutting reeds on the river’s edge, which he would then weave together to make a carpet and sell in his community, when the crocodile attacked. He so vividly shared about the “battle” between he and the crocodile, as the crocodile attempted to pull him into the riverand the man fought back with the spike he had been using to cut the reeds. As he told each part of the story, he’d point to the associated bite marks on his legs. 

At last, the man escaped, crawled up the hill, and summoned someone passing by for help. He was then taken to a referral clinic and transferred to the mission hospital that our team was working at. 

This man’s face has lingered in my mind since that day. 

Yes, there was victory. The man survived, and with some wound debridement and the right antibiotics, he likely recovered quite well. But that’s not why his image has stuck with me. This encounter was the beginning of a sentence that the Lord has continued to speak to my heart over the past year; “The weight of the gospel is real. It IS life and death.”

You see, when the attack occurred, that man was not following Jesus as Lord of his life. Though he didn’t know it at the time “the war” he was fighting wasn’t just to escape a physical death, but quite possibly an eternal death as well. 

As this man finished telling his story, I couldn’t help but ask, “Do you recognize that your life was spared yesterday?” 

He responded, “Yes, I believe that God spared my life. I think I need to start going back to church.” 

“Go back to church,” I said, “but run to Jesus.” 

He and I continued on in conversation about this for a while, before closing our time together in prayer. I thanked God for sparing this man’s life the day before, and prayed that the experience would lead the man into a relationship with Jesus. 

I continued to visit this man’s bedside throughout our time there. We exchanged smiles when a translator wasn’t present and when given the opportunity to check in with words, I did so. On my last day there, I encouraged him one more time to run to Jesus and suggested that he look at the wounds he would now carry as reminders of the day the Lord spared his life – an event God used to draw him to Himself.

A week after I returned home from this trip, our church service was wrapping up when the Pastor came back on stage. 

“This is a sermon that requires a call to action,” he said. “If there are any parents in the room who have been praying over a wandering child – a child who has walked away from the faith, I invite you to come to the front for prayer.” 

Within moments, the front of our church was full, as were the aisles. Tears rolled down my cheeks not necessarily just because of the immensity of this response to the pastor’s invitation, but the immediacy of this response. 

“These parents know the weight of the gospel,” I thought as I imagined how frequently and faithfully these parents were likely hitting their knees for their children that had wandered from the faith. 

I went home from church that day and sobbed at my kitchen table – both the crocodile man and these parents fresh in my mind, and this newly revealed weight of the gospel pressing all the harder on my heart.

Sin separated man from God (Genesis 3:24). Apart from Him we are broken, unrighteousness, unworthy, guilty, sinful, and on our way to spend eternity in hell. Apart from us God is righteous, worthy, holy, pure, blameless, just, and glorified among much else. We don’t deserve Him and He surely doesn’t need us. YET He chose to send His only Son, Jesus Christ, to the walk in this world and to die on the cross for our sins (John 3:16), so that through Him WE MAY BE righteous, worthy, holy, purified, blameless, justified, glorified, and on our way to spend eternity in His presence. And all we need to do is to believe in our hearts that God did what He said He’s done through His Son, confess it with our mouths (Romans 10:9), and walk forth as a new creation (2 Corinthians 5:17) through the transforming power of the Holy Spirit. How can it be so? 

For us who know and believe, the gospel is freeing. But for the lost, there is a weightiness of the reality of eternal life versus eternal death. 

The processing of these two events on that Sunday took me back to something that the Lord had imprinted on my heart a few years earlier in a season when I was content to let my actions speak the gospel. I was afraid of stepping on toes or of being offensive, so I planted my seeds by doing good things and being a good person and I left the direct conversations about Jesus for someone else to do. 

I vividly remember listening to a podcast one day in which the speaker said this: “If we truly believe what we say that we believe, the most loving thing that we can do is to share the gospel. Likewise, if we truly believe what we say we believe, the most hateful thing that we can do is withhold the gospel.” 

I have since heard it likened to watching someone walk right towards a cliff without giving a warning. 

In 1 Corinthians 9:16 Paul says, “For when I preach the gospel, I cannot boast, since I am compelled to preach.” 

Compelled. 

A friend of mine recently explained that this word “compelled” is an obligation. It is the same tone as saying that I was thirsty so I had to drink or that I was hungry so I had to eat. 

Christian brothers and sisters – for us who believe, the sharing of the gospel isn’t optional and it isn’t to be done just “as or if we feel like it”. It is a command given directly from our Lord Jesus Christ. 

So why do we, myself included, treat it so lackadaisically? 

How can we allow person after person to walk straight past us on their way off of the cliff to eternity in hell? 

Is that love? Are we not called to be marked by a greater lovethan this? 

Again – if we believe that the gospel is true, the greatest act of love that we can extend is to share what we know in love and in truth. 

Just a few months down the road from the Sunday when the church aisles were filled with parents, I was with another team serving to offer obstetric care in Kenya. Before she was discharged, I sat with one of the women who came to receive surgery and listened to her story. 

Her mother passed away when she was young and her father left she and her siblings behind. In her early teens she was married off as a second wife, where she acquired the role of taking care of her husband’s children as well as her own siblings. She later contracted HIV/AIDS. And then she suffered from a severe perineal tear following the birth of her first child – an injury that left her incontinent of stool and flatulence. This is also the injury that led her to the hospital during our outreach. 

So much suffering. So much isolation. So much pain. 

Yet this was the patient who ended our time together by encouraging me with the scripture that she had clung to throughout these seasons of struggle (Revelation 21:4). And it is also her smile that is etched in my mind still today, as she danced and sung praises to the Lord before she left the hospital. 

Again, the Lord revealed the power of the gospel. 

I could go on and on with story after story, as the Lord is still speaking this same sentence today. Internationally and domestically. Regarding those I know well and those who are just passing by. Stories of hope and stories of suffering. God has used so many angles to reinforce this message deep into my heart. 

Just a few points of clarification as I draw to a close. 

I will be the first to admit that I have missed and misused many opportunities along the way and I am sure that I will walk right by orchestrated encounters in the future. I’ve probably done that a time or two today! 

With that in mind, I have been striving to coat my days in a prayer that I would remain interruptible as I go about what I have planned for the hours before me and to remain sensitive to the Holy Spirit’s nudging and guiding with each step that I take. 

That brings me to the second point of clarification. 

We often suggest that the Holy Spirit didn’t lead us into a conversation, and while I do agree and acknowledge that sometimes that is the case or that there are times when we need to invest in building a relationship first, I also believe that we often use this as an excuse to stay comfortable. I sure know that I have. 

But my challenge is this – May we step out from complacency and step into the opportunities that the Lord places before us to share about His Son, Jesus Christ, in love… and taking it a step further, may we make ourselves available for those opportunities and may we always be ready to share this reason for the hope that we have in a broken and withering world (1 Peter 3:15).

Am I walking through the grocery store with my head down or am I engaging with the cashier? 

Am I trying to walk well with the people who I encounter daily and weekly or have I taken those opportunities for granted?

Am I creating conversation with the person who sat down by meon the bus or airplane, at the sporting event, or in the coffee shop or am I putting my headphones in and minding my own business? 

Am I being intentional in knowing my waitress or barista’s name and even going beyond in offering to pray for him/her? Or am I failing to see the person behind the orders that I am giving?

In the United States alone, 4 out of 5 people who claim to be Christians are not actually walking in a relationship with Jesus Christ. 

Am I building relationships with the people who I sit next to in church every single Sunday? Or am I justifying that a smile and half-hearted wave is sufficient?

Am I actively encouraging my brothers and sisters in Christ closer to the feet of Jesus? 

Am I sharing testimonies of the Lord’s doings with my fellow believers? Or am I keeping them for myself?

These are some of the many questions that have been rolling through my mind as I have contemplated this need to share the truth in love. 

The gospel of Jesus Christ is real. It comes with a weight. And it is indeed life and death. 

And we, brothers and sisters, are obligated to share His good news to bring others into this freedom that we walk in today. 

If we truly believe what we say we believe, it is the most loving thing that we can do. 

May we rise up as ambassadors of Jesus Christ and put some sweat equity into the growth of the Kingdom of God. 

Here are a few scriptures to keep close as we walk in obedience to this calling on our lives. 

John 3:16 – For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life. 

Romans 10:9 – 10 – If you confess with your mouth the Lord Jesus and believe in your heart that God has raised Him from the dead, you will be saved. For with the heart one believes unto righteousness, and with the mouth confession is made until salvation. 

Romans 10:14 – How then shall they call on Him in whom they have not believed? And how shall they believe in Him of whom they have not heard? And how shall they hear without a preacher? And how shall they preach unless they are sent?

5 Corinthians 5:18 – Now all things are of God, who has reconciled us to Himself through Jesus Christ, and has given us the ministry of reconciliation. 

2 Corinthians 5:21 For He made Him who knew no sin to be sin for us, that we might become the righteousness of God in Him. 

Acts 1:8 – But you shall receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you shall be witnesses to Me in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth. 

Matthew 28:19-20 – Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all things that I have commanded you; and lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age.

With so much love,

Your Sister in Christ