From Cartoons to Christology

Movement has a dynamic all its own. Movement fascinates. A rushing Colorado river beguiles more than a stagnant backyard pond. A Colorado river has its white foam rapids; a pond its algae and mosquitoes. A storefront window with a moving display draws more of a focused lingering crowd than a few stationary mannequins. Chess matches don't draw TV ratings; pro football does. (Few want to see Boris sit and think before he moves a pawn.)

Movement in the Christian life fascinates. When God saves a person, that person has come to know, understand, and believe that Christ died for his sins and rose the third day (I Corinthians 15:1-3). The gospel isn't intricate or vastly complicated. Jesus presented the same gospel to the intellectual Nicodemus and the prostitute bereft of education. His method of presentation varied, but never the substance (Galatians 1:6-9).

After salvation, the movement should start. Paul called this movement "growth." We start as babies and then start moving toward spiritual maturity. We start with the basic belief in the gospel, that Jesus' death makes available forgiveness and eternal life for all who believe. The whole gospel message can be summed up in a few words, as few as John 6:40. A person may be persuaded of the truth of the gospel even if it is presented in a series of cartoon drawings. Five years later, the Christian should have shed the cartoons and been involved in the book of Romans and understanding it.

Paul encouraged the Corinthians to grow and grow up. Instead, they were involved in childish things as per I Corinthians 1:10-17; 3:3-9; and 6:1-8, et. al. The Corinthians were teething all over the pews. They weren't growing up.

They should have moved from cartoons to in-depth Christian living, eating and loving a full-course meat of the Word existence. There's no need to go over and over and over the plan of salvation. Believers never grow up on salvational milk (I Corinthians 3:1-3). It should have been feast time for the Corinthians; instead Paul had to dish out the Gerber's.

The New Testament puts a premium on movement in the Christian life. The Christian who never changes is as tragic a sight as the adult with a man's body who's still playing hide and seek or cowboys and Indians.

The New Testament puts a premium on movement to the point of equipping. Paul said that God gives gifts to men and gifted men to the church and their purpose is to work themselves out of a job. The way he put it in Ephesians 4:11ff is that God gives evangelists and pastor-teachers to the church for the purpose of equipping believers to be useful servants of God to bring people to a unity of the faith. They reproduce reproducers. A disciple-maker trains others to make disciples. Immediately after that, Paul says, "We should all be growing up."

Is it possible that we have it all wrong in the church today? Is it possible that Paul is telling us that, instead of counting noses and nickels, we should be counting equippers? It was an end of life tragedy for the great English preacher, Martin-Lloyd Jones, to admit, "I've built a great church, but I've never built great people."

Movement. The church's task is a humanly impossible one: take a spiritually blinded sinner, one who's a slave to sin (Ephesians 2:1-3) and move him or her to being an equipper. That takes growth, robust growth, and it doesn't happen overnight. That's the "work of the ministry."