A young adult recently approached me a question: “Does it matter if someone knows Jesus or not?”
To be clear, the man asking the question is a faithful, committed Christian. He believes that Jesus is the incarnate Son of God. His question originated not in doubt of Jesus but in growing doubt that a just and loving God would condemn billions who never had a chance to meet him.
This man isn’t the first one to find that aligning his picture of God more fully with Jesus has raised a new set of questions for his faith. For many Christians the entire project of sharing faith—of evangelism—is closely tied to the looming threat of an angry God. Remove, or even diminish, the sense of divine threat and urgency evaporates like a dog bowl under Phoenix sun. Maybe as modern people in a pluralistic world who believe in a loving God, the best thing we can do for our neighbors is feed and clothe them, keep our religion out of their faces, and let Jesus sort it out in the end.
I have had such thoughts myself from time to time. It would be far less trouble if I believed it. But I can’t shake the feeling that there is something fundamentally strange about the notion that the more deeply I grasp the goodness of God, the less I should care that anyone else know it.
A few weeks ago during a time of prayer for a group of people who do not (yet) know Jesus, a thought came suddenly with a burst of clarity and conviction that I have come to associate with the Spirit’s voice:
God wants God’s self for us
because God wants everything for us
and God’s self is the doorway to everything.
I don’t know quite how to explain what these words have done to me, and for me. It’s as if in a single lightning bolt they reignited the fire of my early faith, burning somehow both hotter and deeper.
Christian mission, centered on Jesus, is not rooted first and foremost in threat but in dazzling invitation. Its urgency comes from beginning to grasp a few basic truths about humanity and the world itself: We were made for relationship with God. The connection is like water or air, only even more essential. This communion is our telos, our deepest human end. When the core relationship is strong, every other good flows from it.
In deep relationship with God, human beings become fully alive. We are delivered from what distorts and oppresses. We are healed, untangled, unbent, re-purposed. We start growing up. We become our true selves. We find the freedom of true calling. The fears and ego-projects that eat us for breakfast and rip nations apart limb-from-limb begin to be undone. We taste more of heaven’s abundance. We give it away more freely, confident in its infinite source.
What we are saved from is only the beginning. Jesus spends most of his preaching time describing what he’s come to save us for. We are saved for an abundance of wine. For a new family. For a ministry of healing and deliverance. Following me, Jesus says, is like losing your life and somehow finding it for the very first time. It’s like being born again into a brand-new world of grace and interconnection that you never dreamed existed.
So does it matter that people know Jesus? Heck yes. It matters more than anything. Because the God of Jesus is not only the doorway to heaven but the to humanity itself, to wholeness and freedom, to a true self and a world made right. All this is what God wants for you. All this is what God wants for every person you’ve met and also those you haven’t. What kind of Love, knowing what is possible, would settle for anything less?
