Relevance Pottage

Even Jesus was known to have a Scottish revival or two. A Scottish revival, if you’ve not heard the term, is pretty much the opposite of a revival. It’s where the crowds get smaller and smaller instead of bigger and bigger. And it happened to Jesus in John 6. First, the crowds came. He fed the five thousand and they, understandably, thought it a rather nifty trick. Jesus, like Gideon obeying the Lord, decides to thin the crowd, first by speaking about eating His flesh and drinking His blood. Not exactly a delicate topic of conversation. The crowds began to fidget and grumble, so Jesus reached in His bag of sweet and winsome things to say to win them back. “And He said, “Therefore I have said to you that no one can come to Me unless it has been granted to him by My Father” (verse 65). Nothing like a good shot of total depravity to draw them in. The next thing you know the crowd suddenly found better things to do.

Not very strategic of Jesus. Had He been surrounded with evangelical counselors they would have explained to Him that such was no way to reach the lost. You couldn’t go around telling them about their inability to repent. You should never talk about something as strange and foreign to them as sacraments. You need to connect with them, and give them some news they can use. They would have told Jesus how the Sadducees had grown from a 1 percent to an 18 percent market share in just over three years by emphasizing the quality coffee they served at their meetings.

We have come to believe that an audience is more important than a message, whereas Jesus grasped that no one in any audience can be served by the wrong message. The offense of the gospel is the gospel. Take away the offense and you have taken away the gospel. Jesus was right- the only ones who can embrace the message are those who are given that ability by their Father in heaven. Our methods, our strategies, our attempts to woo people into the kingdom are worse than useless. They are uselessness gift-wrapped in pride.

Jesus, seeing that many of His disciples had abandoned Him, asked the twelve if they were leaving too. Peter, God bless Peter, didn’t say, “Jesus, You’re the best. We’re all in with You. Those poor people just don’t understand. I’m sure if they weren’t so confused they’d still be here with us. Let’s work on the message, and we’ll win them back.” There is almost a resignation, a sense in which Peter fully understood what had turned off the crowd. He hit the nail on the head, however, when giving the reason they wouldn’t leave, “You have the word of eternal life.”

Which He has given to us to steward. How could we possibly think it wise to bury or worse trade them in for some of our own wisdom? Our words are the words of eternal death. We have been called to give up relevance, esteem, respect, friendship from and with the world. All so we might speak the words of the Word, the One who redeems us.