Invitation

If we think about how the Spirit enables us to speak in the languages that people need to hear, it raises the question of how to characterize the need to be saved when speaking to unbelievers. How should we think about this compared to what we read in Scripture?

In Scripture, discussions with Jews typically highlighted the fact that Jesus was the Christ, the Messiah that they had been waiting for. Jews already understood (at least at some level) that God would be establishing His kingdom here, and that the Messiah would be His instrument. Thus, proclaiming Jesus as the Messiah essentially announced the arrival of God’s kingdom and the Messiah’s availability to bring people into it.

When Paul was in Athens, however, he took a different approach with the Areopagus. That group had roots as a judicial body, and so it’s interesting he focused on judgment when describing Jesus’ role. The picture was of becoming right with the one true God, who Paul had presented as their “unknown god”. This isn’t explicitly a description of kingdom, but still seems to carry the idea of being accepted into God’s domain.

In both cases, accepting the resurrection, presumably among other basic tenants of the faith, was necessary for entrance into the kingdom.

How does this work today? We could try surveys, and so on, to generate ideas. But listening to the Spirit, it seems the idea of “invitation” could be useful.

Like baptism, which is a physical act that we do that mirrors a spiritual event, invitation could be a physical act that we participate in that mirrors a spiritual calling that God is performing in someone’s life.

Today’s highly polarized world seems to focus on excluding others, so the idea of inclusion would stand out as positive because being included is a basic human need. It just seems that inviting people into something good, without them needing to change themselves, is much different than what we commonly hear.

The thing is, if this is true and we have not been listening to the Spirit, then the ways we’ve been describing the gospel, setting expectations, and so on, may not be what’s needed today, and why it isn’t working.

Not sure exactly what this would look like – there might be more than one way to do an invitation. But thinking about it as an invitation into something wonderful, rather than more of the same of what the world offers, does seem promising.