1. A Deadly Dichotomy
1
A DEADLY DICHOTOMY
The stones of the church parking lot crunched beneath my feet in the freezing December air. It was my first Christmas in America—and I was as excited and bewildered as any two-year-old child at the wonder of it all.
I had never seen a Christmas like this before! In many parts of my native India, December 25 passes without fanfare. For my people, it is just another day of bondage to sin, suffering and death—the life without Christ.
You see, for untold millions in Asia, there is no Christmas. As far as they are concerned, Christ still has not come. His name, His peace and His redemption through Calvary are not yet known or understood. Asia has yet to hear the Good News of Christmas—that Christ came into the world to seek and to save lost sinners.
On the way to church that night, it seemed to me as if the whole nation were Christian. Streets, stores and malls were decorated brightly. Thousands of tired-looking people were filling their cars with bags and boxes of gifts, food and wine for the holidays. Nearly every home had colored lights, decorated trees and even life-size manger scenes telling the Christmas story.
“How these people must love Christ!” I thought. “What a wonder to live in a country that is saturated with Christians, churches and the Gospel!”
Inside the church, I touched the beautifully padded pews in awe and walked carefully on the rich carpeting. Even the altar was decorated in red bows for the candlelight carols we had come to hear. A huge tree stood on one side with a large American flag on the other. The symbolism of a Christian nation celebrating the birth of the Savior was new and exciting to me.
In the front of the church was an orchestra backed by a hundred-voice choir standing in the pyramid shape of “a living Christmas tree.” At first, I thought it was a tree. But then I realized it was colorfully robed men and women forming the tree. One man told me that the steel scaffolding for the display had cost the church more than $25,000. I couldn’t imagine that much money—at that time it could have built four or five village churches in Nepal or India.
I looked down at the lavish program in my hands and wondered to myself how much it had cost to be printed. Back in India, I had been involved in printing tracts for our Gospel teams, and I recalled that five cents’ worth of tracts would give the Gospel to 100 people.
“But these people love the Lord,” I rebuked myself. “I mustn’t judge.” But still, the thought wouldn’t go away. If this printed program cost only 50 cents to produce, that would have been the equivalent of 1,000 tracts. (And I suspected it cost more than 50 cents!) I thought of the national missionaries I knew of in Nepal and Myanmar working without enough Gospel tracts among millions of lost Hindus and Buddhists.
The rest of that first Christmas was still awesome and exciting to me, but the thought of those unprinted tracts haunted me. Why did these people who already had everything still need to buy more? Why did they send so many Christmas cards to people they hardly knew? Why did they eat and drink so much that they often got sick? And how, I wondered, could all this be done to celebrate and proclaim the coming of the Savior?
If even the very name of the Savior is still unknown to millions of lost souls, I reasoned, isn’t this self-indulgence a strange way to herald the coming of the Lord Jesus? Wouldn’t it be more fitting to proclaim the Good News of His coming to those who’ve not heard rather than to those who’ve already heard thousands of times?
Enormous Self-Deception
Since that Christmas I have traveled millions of miles, speaking to Christians. I have counseled privately with hundreds of them about their beliefs and lifestyles. What I have found has to be one of the most tragic ironies of all time: A tiny group of believers who have the Gospel keep mumbling it over and over to themselves. Meanwhile, millions who have never heard it once fall into the flames of eternal hell without ever hearing the salvation story.
Most Christians are living out that Christmas irony every day in one way or another. As individuals, their lifestyles often amount to an enormous self-deception.
Who we claim to be is disconnected from what we know, and what we know is even more removed from what we do. It is so unreal. It is a mysterious but deadly spiritual dichotomy.
A dichotomy is a whole divided into two parts. And we as modern Christians are living dangerously in this double contradiction of our beliefs.
To choose deliberately to live in a world of unreality such as this is a disease or sickness. For a Christian, it is also sinful disobedience to the Lord we love. It invites judgment from a loving God who cannot and will not allow us to go on living forever in such hypocrisy.
The message of this book is a direct result of my first 10 years of confrontation with believers in the West. Many nights, after preaching my heart out, I returned to my hotel room bitterly discouraged, asking myself how this paradox can even exist. It has to be one of the great mysteries of all time.
For instance, as I was writing this book, another great missionary conference was being held where thousands were gathered from all parts of the country. Most were raised lovingly in Christian homes where the Word of God was honored.
They gathered to consider the claims of Jesus Christ on their lives. Some of the greatest Christian orators of our time addressed them. Some of the finest musicians in the world played and sang to them. Beautiful films and videos portrayed the needs of a lost and dying world in vivid graphic detail. Hundreds of Christian organizations spent tens of thousands of dollars to present the desperate needs of a world without Christ. Mission leaders flew in from every continent to plead the cause of the lost. In addition, the participants themselves spent huge sums of money to come and be challenged, educated and informed.
What will the results of this enormous investment be?
Thousands stood at the invitation and offered themselves for missionary service. But if this conference is like past ones, the statistical chances of even a handful of them going to the hidden peoples is almost nil. Fewer than one percent of those who respond to the altar call will ever obey the Great Commission of Christ and go to the foreign mission field. Of those who do go, many will not return for a second term of service. The percentage that will actually go to the hidden peoples of Asia, where almost 90 percent of the world’s unreached people are dying without Christ, is so small that it doesn’t show statistically![1]
As another example, a few years back I was privileged to speak to the youth group of one of the great evangelical churches of our day. It was a model of ministry that would be the dream come true of any pastor.
These young people were exposed to the most balanced youth ministry possible. They had a full-time youth director, Bible studies many nights of the week, monthly socials, weekly fellowships, a gym and sports teams, camps, conferences, concerts, a big library, full-time counseling staff—everything!
I looked forward to presenting to them the burden of Christ’s heart for the lost world. When I addressed 350 of these healthy, well-fed, bright-eyed young people with the message of New Testament Christianity, the results were incredible.
With tears in my eyes, I told them of the lost and needy millions still without Christ. Many appeared deeply moved. But when I asked for a show of hands of those willing to give their lives to Christ’s service, not one was able to say, “Yes, Lord!”
Since When Is Obedience Optional?
Not one was willing to break out of that velvet cage of comfort and convenience to begin a radical lifestyle lived from an inner reality that affects the world. Since when has obedience to Christ and His Gospel become optional to Christianity?
What kind of church, culture or ethnic group can produce a faith where obedience to God has become dispensable? This is the question I ask myself over and over.
These examples are not unusual—just the extremes. I address thousands of people weekly. Even in the best meetings, it is rare that more than one or two percent of the listeners will pledge to support national missionaries, let alone volunteer for service on the mission field.
This amazes me constantly because most believers could contribute $1 a day—almost without sacrifice. Yet that small offering can mean the difference between spiritual life or death for some tribe or village in Asia.
This should ring alarm bells in our minds and hearts. Something is wrong when Christians don’t respond to what is so dear to the heart of Jesus.
What’s really wrong? How can we diagnose the causes or come to grips with this deadly problem in our Christian lives? I think it is best described as the dichotomy of the modern Christian.
First, we modern Christians have divorced what we do from who we are.
We have lost touch with our spiritual being or self-identity in Christ. Seldom does our spirit-man lead and dominate. We are content to act out a religion of externals, a lifestyle disconnected from the life born of the Holy Spirit in our human spirits.
Today, millions of people claim to be “born again.” By this, they mean that they have walked the aisle to be saved from hell; find peace and joy; escape from guilt; please family and friends; find wealth, health and happiness; and get that preacher off their backs! But a religion measured in such superficial, external terms bears no resemblance to the faith of Scripture.
For them, Jesus is “cool,” and being a Christian is a respectable, acceptable and normal choice.
What’s more, it’s free, instant, a convenience-store item. All that is necessary is to pray a 30-word prayer, sign a little card or put your hand on the television screen—and you’re in!
This modern Christianity is weak on the Gospels. You rarely hear an evangelist preach from Matthew, Mark or Luke. To do so would mean that the ego demands of Christ on His followers would have to become a central concern.
Thus, the false religion of popular Christianity does not ask us to internalize the passion and mind of Christ, to surrender our egos, lay aside our flesh, take up the cross and begin a lifestyle marked by submission to the will of the Father as He did.
We are also seldom asked to internalize the commands of Christ—to begin a lifestyle of sacrifice, service and suffering for the sake of our Lord.
We are not asked to love as He loved, walk where He walked, interact with the kind of sinful people He did and live the life of self-sacrificing service that was His trademark.
But what about that vast network of Christian activities that so often preoccupies our hearts, hands and minds? Don’t our frenzied lives prove our piety? I cannot look at them without asking the critical question: From where does this current wave of activism spring?
Will it pass through the fires of judgment? Is it the work of our own hands and egos, or does it spring from the heart of Jesus? If your Christian service were to end today, would it make any difference in eternity?
Second, we modern Christians are divorced from what we know.
Until you travel to some of the poorest nations in Asia, you cannot appreciate the religious information glut we have. Christians here are blessed with thousands of Christian books and DVDs, 24-hour Christian radio and television, conferences and seminars, and all the Christian resources of the Internet.
Someone has said that there are more than 1,000 commentaries on the book of Acts in the English language—but not 100 Christians living with the power of New Testament Christianity.
All too often, it seems, we’re willing to be students of Christianity rather than disciples of Christ. The fact is that most of us are substituting learning and information for practical obedience.
Nowhere is this more evident than in the world of Christian missions. The focus has shifted to learning about the hidden and unreached peoples rather than going to them.
Probably no culture has been better able to fulfill that frightening prophecy in 2 Timothy 3:1–8. We are a people “ever learning, and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth.” We are indeed “having a form of godliness, but denying the power thereof.”
Never in history has there been a society with so much information about God, but so little real knowledge of the Holy One.
Whatever the reason for this lack of spiritual reality, it cannot be a lack of teaching resources. We have shamefully hoarded Christian knowledge, preventing the rest of the world from finding out the truth—while not taking advantage of the knowledge it possesses.
Why Are We Still Spiritual Babies?
The question that faces us is this: How can a Christian culture that knows so much truth fail to perform?
Why do we have all this Bible study? Our Sunday school and Christian education programs? Our Holy Land tours and Christian sea cruises? Our camps, retreats, seminars, conferences, books, magazines, newspapers, videos and broadcasting? Why do we now even have Christian theme parks, family theaters and coffee houses?
Isn’t the reason to be like Christ? Isn’t that what we say?
Then why are we still spiritual babies? Kindergarten Christians?
Why is there so little power and holiness in our lives? Why aren’t we manifesting Christ to our friends, neighbors, classmates and peers? Why aren’t we incarnating Him to those across town in our own inner cities—and to the lost billions still in darkness around the world?