Shortly after Jesus' transfiguration on the mount, Mark's Gospel recounts the dramatic scene of a father and his suffering son who has been plagued by a spirit of epilepsy. The child had been suffering from seizures since birth and out of desperation and hopelessness his father pleads with Galilee's miracle working Rabbi, Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus responds by addressing the father's belief, and in six short words, the father responds, "Lord, I believe; help my unbelief."
How can this be? How can two contradictory ideas hold one another up to summarize the spiritual dichotomy of every person who has put their faith and trust in Jesus as the Messiah? Did he believe, or did he not believe? The paradox of believing in Jesus as Lord and Messiah while simultaneously not believing that He is in control, is the essence of Jeff Vanderstelt's book, Gospel Fluency: Speaking the Truths of Jesus Into the Everyday Stuff of Life
Everyone Is An Unbeliever
From the very opening page, to the closing paragraph of the book, Gospel Fluency addresses the elephant in the room that most people choose to ignore: everyone has places in their lives where they do not believe or trust in God. Certainly we may believe in God's existence, and even more profoundly we may believe that there was a Jesus of Nazareth, the promised Messiah in whom all the fullness of the deity dwelt in bodily form. However, do we always believe that this Jesus is still in control, and even more so, do we believe that He truly cares about the every day struggles of our lives?
According to Vanderstelt, more often than not, "There are spaces where we don’t trust His word and don’t believe that what He accomplished in Jesus Christ is enough to deal with our past or what we are facing in the current moment or the next." This is the spiritual battle that, if we are honest, every believer has struggled with at one point or another. We believe that Jesus' life, death, and resurrection are sufficient for our tomorrows (future salvation), but we all slip in and out of confidence that what Jesus accomplished is sufficient for our todays (daily dependence). Vanderstelt's remedy for this paradox of belief is simple; understanding the true Gospel, recognizing your current beliefs, practicing real repentance, and preaching the Gospel daily to yourself.
Fluency Through Immersion
One of Vanderstelt's main themes throughout Gospel Fluency is that we have come to understand a watered down version of the true Gospel. Jeff boldly proclaims:
"Most Christians don’t know why we need the Gospel, what it is, why it is good news, and what it actually does. Most people have become Gospel-snippet people, not Gospel-fluent, who speak Gospel catchphrases. We speak Gospelish, but not the actual Gospel in a way people can hear and believe."
Some of us may know from experience of what it truly takes to be fluent in another language, while some of us, after forgetting almost everything they learned in High School Spanish, can certainly imagine. To truly be fluent in another language takes a considerable amount of training, and more importantly, a life dedicated to cultural immersion. To gain fluency in another language you have to move from merely translating an unfamiliar language back to your own, to interpreting all of life through that new language. In fact, sociologists and psychologists have discovered that people who are multi-lingual, and in turn, multi-cultural, more often than not have different personalities within each culture that they can identify with. This is not to say that truly multi-cultural people have a Multiple Personality Disorder, but instead, they act, react, and interact differently across cultures. Culture and language are so irreducibly complex that it is impossible to fully understand a culture without understanding its language and vice-versa. This becomes one of Vanderstelt's main threads, stating:
'If you want to change a culture, change the language [...] If you want a new or redefined language, tell a new story. We need Gospel language that is correctly shaped by the gospel story."
The Gospel Story
Throughout the four Gospel accounts, we see that Jesus ministered to people in a plethora of ways. Some people he healed by rubbing dirt in their eyes, while others he restored sight by simply commanding it to be done. Some people he called to follow him, while others he let walk away (the rich young ruler). The only constant in all of Jesus' interactions was love and compassion.
One of the many reasons for the four Gospel accounts is to show, through a myriad of life's struggles and pains, how multi-faceted God's Kingdom truly is, and how it can call and redeem all people from all walks of life, if they allow it. There is not a single formula or way to speak the good news of Jesus into someone's life, however, according to Vanderstelt, it should always include four key movements: Creation, Fall, Redemption, New Creation.
The Creation aspect of the Gospel is recognizing that the invisible God created humans to be a visible display - a picture - of what he is like. We were always called to submit to God, to rule over the earth on behalf of God, and fill it with more image bearers of God who would do the same. It was a mandate to love, work and rule in such a way as to show all of creation what God is like.
The Fall portion of the Gospel is realizing that the problem was and now is unbelief. The action was and now is sin. The result was and now is death. In the Garden, they surrendered their God given authority over the world to Satan. We were meant to rule over the world, but we gave it to Satan, who became known as the “god of this world”.
The Redemption was what we recognize as the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. Jesus came as the true and better Adam, the true and better Abraham, and the true and better Israel. He lived the life we were created to live, by ruling and representing God perfectly.
The New Creation All those who believe in Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection go from having Adam as their authority and life source to having Jesus as the new Adam. When we are born again of the spirit, we are brought under Jesus as our new Adam - our new life source and our new authority. Through his lifeless body in the tomb, God brought forth another woman - the second woman to be brought forth from a man’s body. God brought forth the church. Like Eve was to Adam, the Church is Jesus' bride; we are God's New Creation people.
So What Do We Do?
After chapters dedicated to what the true Gospel entails and encompasses, Vanderstelt begs the question, "So what do we do with this information?" Once we recognize the true Gospel, how do we effectively and accurately speak it into our lives first, and then to the lives of those around us?
What often gets overlooked in the witnessing and ministering to both believers and non-believers alike, is the importance of listening. Speaking the Gospel into someone's life should include 90% listening and 10% speaking. We need to develop the skill of actively listening to be able to hear through someone's struggle and story to understand what part of the Gospel they are currently not believing in. Vanderstelt understands that:
"We will never help people stop sinning by using the consequences as motivation. We will just make them better at sinning in other ways [...] If we don’t lead people to repentance and belief in God and the work of Jesus, we are only leading them to look elsewhere for their salvation - trusting in someone or something more than God’s word and work."
Lord, We Believe; Help Our Unbelief
Often times in our walk with Jesus, it is tangibly evident that our attitudes, thoughts, beliefs, and testimonies are not lining up with Jesus' character and the Fruits of the Spirit. According to Vanderstelt, this is directly correlated to what we are currently, in the moment, believing to be true about God. Reasons we do not believe may be because we lack the knowledge of the truth about God, we believe a lie about God, or usually, because we fail to put our faith in what we know to be true about God.
"Pay attention to the overflow of your hearts. What comes out in form of thoughts, emotions, and behaviors finds its origin inside of us. Jesus was very clear that what defiles us proceeds from inside of our hearts. The fruit of our lives comes from the roots of our faith"
So how do we know what we are currently believing to be true about God, and more importantly, once we find out, how do we address it? Jesus clearly taught that we need to look at the fruit of our lives, and then address it at the root. When life is going great and we are in lock step with Jesus, we can trace the fruit of our lives back to the root of our beliefs about Jesus with four simple questions: who is God, what has God done, who am I in light of God's work, and how should I live in light of who I am? Usually, when we are consistent in prayer, fellowship, and study, these questions are easy to answer and roll effortlessly off the tongue.
But what about in seasons of anxiety, depression, fear, and trials? Well, according to Vanderstelt, you simply reverse the process! Now, you ask: What am I doing or experiencing right now? In light of what I am doing or experiencing, what do I believe about myself? What do I believe God is doing or has done? What do I believe God is like? Jeff would go as far as to say, "beneath every sin is a failure to believe a truth about God." When we ask these questions, truly seeking for answers and committing to honesty and transparency with God, we bring the darkness to light and expose the areas of unbelief within us.
Repentance Leads to Freedom
Once we discover what we are wrongly believing about God, we now have the access and privilege to lay it at His feet in true repentance, accept His grace, and ask Him just like the father did, "Lord, I believe; help my unbelief!" Repenting of our sins before God is not only essential but commanded; however, most of the time we never realize that our sin is coming from an area of unbelief toward Jesus. Tracing our fruit to our root not only exposes our sin, but traces it all the way back to our unbelief that we can ask for forgiveness for, realign, and then recognize next time we fall under the same trap. The next time we are preaching to ourselves, or listening to our peers, actively and with intent, Vanderstelt leaves us with these four questions: how does the gospel bring good news to this situation, what about the gospel needs to be heard right now, what about the gospel has been forgotten or not believed, and how is Jesus better than what we have or want?
Remember, "You will never be fluent in the Gospel if it really isn't good news to you. [...] You will talk about Him if you love him. If you don't, then talk about Him, and you will grow to love Him." The Gospel is something that we need to immerse ourselves in by cultivating a culture that requires you to speak it to yourself, to your friends, and to the enemy. The ideas that Jeff Vanderstelt unravels in Gospel Fluency are anything but new. They are simply ideas around the Gospel that have been forgotten over time. In chapter 3 of Lamentations, a depressed man battles his own mind with a very Gospel fluent approach:
"This I recall to my mind, therefore I have hope. Through the Lord’s mercies we are not consumed, because His compassions fail not."
If you would like to purchase this book or the handbook that accompanies it, click the links below. You can also click the link below to check out our podcast episode where we hash out the details of this book and discuss what has helped and change our walk with Christ!
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