On June 12, 1987, I was a young PhD student in Texas. On that date I watched as President Ronald Reagan stood at the Brandenberg Gate near Berlin on the 750th anniversary of the city. In that speech Reagan challenged Communist leader of the Soviet Union Gorbachev to tear down the wall dividing the city. Powerful rhetoric, I thought, but I doubted whether it would ever happen.
From then until now our world has changed dramatically. There is no Soviet Union. We have a united Germany. Communism and the Cold War are a shadow of their former influence. But as surely as there is a dramatic difference between Europe then and now, there is a similarly radical difference between understanding what happened in Berlin as an academic reality, and what it means to those who lived there and experienced the earth-shattering change.
Jared Wilson captures this in these words, which I recount in part:
“In the well-appointed study of a professor of history in a prestigious university in the American South sits a brick-sized piece of the Berlin Wall. It sits on the floor, because he uses it as a doorstop. He is not ignorant of the piece’s historical significance; as a historian he is deeply informed of the struggle and the repression attached to the wall, to the shame it symbolized and the division both literal and cultural it created….
“In a small, dingy apartment in Midwest America lives and elderly immigrant woman who sells newspapers and fresh cut flowers during the day and cleans an office building in the evenings. On an iron shelf in her bedroom sits a small lidless glass jar, and in that wall is a piece of the Berlin Wall the size of a marble. She has often held that piece of rock in her withered hand and wept. Her husband did not live to see the wall come down. Her cousin was one of the estimated five thousand people who tried to escape from the communist Eastern Bloc into West Berlin….one of the estimated one hundred to two hundred people killed by border guards in the attempt….”
Wilson then notes the meaning of the Brandenberg speech to each of the subjects noted above: “When the professor hears the epic Brandenburg Gate speech. …he admires it as a watershed moment in history, as iconic a sound bite from the annals of historical rhetoric as any. When the woman hears, ‘Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!’ she is stirred, always. When the professor speaks of the fall of the Berlin Wall as an earth-shattering event, he really does mean to communicate the radical nature of the event; he really does understand this. But the woman knows that the fall of the Berlin Wall was an earth-shattering event deep down in her bones.”
“This,” Wilson then observes, “Is gospel wakefulness.”
And this, I would argue, is one thing the church today desperately needs.
I have spent too much time in too many discussions with too many people in ministry about the things of God in purely academic terms, or in settings in which the wonder of the gospel has been lost in the interest in getting things done. I too have been guilty far too many times.
In his book Gospel Wakefulness from which the above story is taken (pages 19-20), Wilson argues that what is needed more than anything is a recovery of the wonder of the work of Christ. I read a lot of books every year. Most years I also (or, of first importance in fact) read the whole Bible. But I also read books for spiritual growth, others to help me understand our world to better apply the gospel to it, and still others by those who effectively lead in our time. I never have quite understood pastors who do not read voraciously, first, the Scripture, then significant books. But it has also struck me that men of God mightily used by God in history seemed to be very well read.
But occasionally I read a book that does more than inform or inspire. Sometimes I read a book that stirs me. A book that hits me in the solar plexus of my soul, and Gospel Wakefulness is such a book.
I for one am tired of the Christian subculture. Tired of the silliness so rampant in student ministry. Tired of the institutionalism of the church. And tired of the constant focus on producing like a factory with little focus on sitting at Jesus’ feet. Don’t get me wrong, I believe we should be growing, reaching, taking the gospel to the nations. But it seems to me we have such a focus on the doing that we live and move and act as if what God has done in Christ is not enough.
What Christ has done—it is enough. But it seems, does it not, that many in our churches—I am talking about professing followers of Christ—have become numb to the riches of Christ. Just look at the love for Black Friday and Football Saturday compared to the care for the broken in our rhetoric….or our tweets.
Read Wilson’s words: “How do we present the gospel in a nonroutine way in order to prevent people from becoming numb? My answer is counterintuitive. I think we do this by routinely presenting the unchanging gospel in a way that does justice to its earth-shaking announcement. This doesn’t mean we have to set it up with a power ballad or even dress it up at all. But it does mean we communicate it like its life or death stuff. People who know the gospel’s power will share it powerfully.” He then argues that, ironically, our efforts to make the gospel seem more special is what numbs people: “The weekly efforts of many churches to top themselves in razzle-dazzle for the cause of Christ is what numbs. It is like the cycle of drug addiction, always chasing the first high, never quite reaching it.” (page 16).
Sometimes I need to be reminded that Jesus is enough. I remember how He saved some rough young people when I was younger, how seeing His work in them showed me more than any cool youth event the truth of His gospel in changed lives. I need to read the Gospels and see how it was Jesus Himself that made lasting change, not His miracles. I need to see how in the Acts the gospel message advanced through remarkably ordinary (and mostly unnamed) people who simply met Him and never recovered.
Yesterday marked the 25th anniversary of Johnny Hunt as pastor of the First Baptist Church of Woodstock. Why do I segue from what I wrote so far to this fact? Because in 1989 I was stirred to my soul another time, not by a book like this one by Jared Wilson, but by a sermon by Johnny Hunt. Woodstock was just beginning its explosion, and Johnny was still relatively unknown. He preached at an evangelism conference I attended in Oklahoma. I had never heard of him. He had a fire, however, more than emotion. I could tell this preacher had been called, but more, he had been awakened.
Johnny said something that stirred and convicted me: “Too many Christians have met Jesus,” he observed, “But they have gotten over Jesus.” In other words, they needed gospel wakefulness.
Jared Wilson is a pastor in Vermont and a remarkable writer. Johnny Hunt is pastor to one of the most recognized churches in American and was recently president of the Southern Baptist Convention. Jared is a Calvinist. Johnny is not. All these things are not unimportant, but that are certainly not most important.
They both understand gospel wakefulness. And I am a debtor to both.
I close with a final, stirring quote by Wilson (from page 17):
“If we are regularly and excitedly engaging people in the good news of the finished saving work of the sacrificing, dying, rising, exalted, sovereign Jesus Christ who is the death-proof, fail-proof King of Kings before all things and in all things and holding all things together as he sustains the world by the mere word of his power, the ones whose hearts are opened by the Spirit to be won to Christ will be irrevocably changed.”
