The Gospel for the Well-Mannered

I didn’t know him very well. We met a couple of times, and he always seemed to me, a quiet sort of man. There are a very few people that I know who can embody what it means to be dignified, and he was certainly one of them. He was a person of very little means who had worked very hard all his life, to care for his family. I suspect he travelled on foot for the most part, going about from house to house, selling cloth. He even attended my wedding and was very pleasant to be around. I could never communicate with him as I did not speak his language, but he wished me well when I married his niece.

A year ago, I received news that he had died. When I heard it, I was grieved. Not because I had lost someone I knew very well, but because he had died outside of Christ. Contrary to contemporary funeral etiquette, my wife and I both knew that he was not ‘in a better place’.  This was obviously painful to think about, but there was something even more troubling as I thought of his demise. He wasn’t exactly the kind of person your average church member would try to evangelize. And yet this is exactly the kind of ‘natural selection’ we must avoid. The gospel must be preached to all sinners – the well behaved ones and the not so well behaved.

We forget that rebellion against God is not always loud and boisterous. This man, as nice as he was, was an enemy of God, who did not believe in the Son of God for his salvation. The apostle John tells us, “Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life; whoever does not obey the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God remains on him.” (John 3:36 ESV)

People like this man don’t always get our attention. The loud ones do! The colleague with the potty mouth, the porn obsessed husband, the idol worshipping housewife, the thief, the rich playboy, the prostitute, and the crooked salesman. These are the ones who badly need to hear the gospel, we think. And they do! We must tell them about the Saviour who loved sinners that He died to redeem them for Himself.

But there are others who are equally lost. They are not OK, no matter how culturally attuned we may be to see them as otherwise. They are the quiet ones, the polite, the religious moralists, the philanthropists, the social crusaders. These are the nice, unregenerate people. This might be the old grandmother with squeaky clean morals. The atheist nurse who has given her life to working at the rehab center and the school teacher who is a prolife activist. Who would dare go and tell them about the offensive message of Christ and Him crucified? Who would dare tell them that they must be born again or will never see the kingdom of God? Who would dare tell them that the substitutionary sacrifice of Jesus for sinners, grants believers eternal life now and not just after they die? And yet, Christ calls us to proclaim not ourselves, but him as Lord, with ourselves as servants for his sake (2 Cor 4:5)

Cultures that prize moralism can very often forget that ‘the well mannered’ also need the gospel. They are not OK. So preach good news to the self-righteous and the immoral. Tell them about Jesus and the forgiveness he offers. Tell them about repentance and the transformation of grace. You might not get another chance.