The Art of Witness

A guy embarks on a journey in the first-class cabin of a train in Spain. To his delight, he finds that he’s sitting next to the famous artist Pablo Picasso. Gathering up his courage, he turns to the master and says, “Senor Picasso, you are a great artist, but why is all your art, all modern art, so screwed up? Why don’t you paint reality instead of these distortions?”

Picasso hesitates for a moment and asks, “So what do you think reality looks like?”

The man grabs his wallet and pulls out a picture of his wife. “Here, like this. It’s my wife.”

Picasso takes the photograph, looks at it, and grins. “Really? She’s very small. And flat, too.”(1)

Leadership is defining reality, and reality is more than a simple two-dimensional snapshot of the world, even though the snapshot may be true. We have too often reduced the wonder and majesty of the gospel of Jesus Christ to a simple snapshot. While a true representation as far as it goes, it so reduces the gospel that it easily misses its greatness.

Christianity cannot be reduced to one aspect of its reality:

The gospel changes one’s behavior, but reducing its effect to behavior modification hides its truth in legalism. The gospel should not create one more Pharisee.

The gospel sets one free, but noting freedom alone apart from surrender to Christ and His commands traps those freed by it to antinomianism. “If the grace u have received does not help u keep the law, u have not received grace,” as Martyn Lloyd-Jones said well.

The gospel is truth, and propositional truth for that matter, but reducing it to a series of propositions hides the amazing wonder of the new birth and a relationship with the Most High God.

The gospel shows us how to do the very thing we are created to do, to worship.  But teaching worship provided by the work of Christ as something done mostly in a service guided by particular forms loses the wonder of worship in our preferences, and creates division, not unity.

I may never understand all Picasso’s art seeks to say any more than I can trace the theology of the lyrics of Dave Matthews’ songs (I tried once, it was maddening). But I will agree that how we see art can be a reflection of how we see the gospel: an understanding of art that simply recognizes the ability of it to capture the world as we see it misses the power of art to help us see more, to dream more, to be filled with wonder at things we may not quite understand.

It is true that one can understand the gospel as a few propositions from Romans a la the Roman Road. But to take an unbeliever who does not know the Scripture, understand who God is, or comprehend the depths of depravity, then offer him a quick overview of the Roman Road as the whole of the gospel is no different than offering a two-dimensional picture of my wife as a fair representation of who she is. Visually, it is to some extent. But you know nothing of her personality, her wisdom, or her story, if you only see a snapshot.

I have led people to Christ using the Roman Road. Without exception they have been people with a background in the Scriptures, with some awareness of the greatness of the gospel beyond its propositions. But too many unchurched fail to understand the gospel by those propositions alone. And believe me, there is a massive number of those dear people than we often realize.

This is why my colleague George Robinson and I have been integrally involved in an approach to help believers understand the greatness and wonder of the gospel not only for unbelievers, but for themselves, called The Story (check it out at viewthestory.com). I believe we must give people more than a snapshot of the good news; we must help them see the wonder, the artistry, the majesty of its reality.

This week I trained a group of students from my church and Summit in RDU in using The Story to share the good news.  This approach sees the gospel in its context as central to the grand narrative of the Bible, or the mission of God for humanity.  Such an approach can help remind the believer how the gospel matters to us post-conversion as much as it did when we met Christ; we have become followers of Christ, part of His great story, and now we can invite others to be a part as well. This story should consume all of our lives until Jesus comes, so we must preach the gospel not only to the lost but to ourselves as well. So, instead of seeing evangelism as talking someone into something, we see it as what it is, amazingly good news that helps to make sense of all of life from creation to consummation.

This approach also helps unbelievers to see how the gospel makes sense of all of life, for it answers the big questions we all ask sooner or later:

How did it all begin? Creation

What went wrong? Fall

What can be done? Rescue

What does the future hold? Restoration

I have discovered unchurched people with whom I share agree completely that we live in an amazing world. They also concur that something awful has happened in our world. I can get into a serious gospel conversation simply by talking about obvious things all around us.  Then, the cross of Christ becomes more than a religious symbol for one world religion (the way many unchurched perceive it); it fits into a larger understanding of how everything works. That does not mean everyone will suddenly repent and believe, because our will is a stubborn thing. But it has proven remarkably helpful in communicating the good news in a larger context to unbelievers.

It also helps me to share with the growing numbers of dechurched, those (especially young adults) who have grown up in church, moved into the adult world, and have no use for it.  This helps me to show them how sometimes, though not intentionally, churches have taught the Bible as a collection of moral truisms instead of the revelation of God to men, not as fundamentally a rule book, but a guidebook to understand life and our place in it.  Several times I have spoken to dechurched young adults in the past few months, each of whom told me something like, “I never quite got this from my days in church.”

We must see that our world today inside and outside the church has been too driven by consumerism, entitlement, and preference, and not been shown clearly enough the wonder, the greatness, the splendor of our God.  Beginning with the majesty of creation and moving to the wonder of the cross has proven helpful to me.

This has become for me the most compelling way to teach how to share and to teach what to share (and how to live) the gospel I have seen in all my years of ministry.  It fits where we are in our culture I believe.

My colleague George Robinson and I will be teaching this in our evangelism classes this fall. We believe this to be a helpful, even more artistic, way to share Christ.

After all, I do not have to understand the art of Picasso.  But I must give my life to help people understand the handiwork of God.

(1) Taken from Seth Godin, Linchpin.