The Gospel in Action

As told by Ronald J. Sider in his lecture "The Whole Gospel for the Whole Person" at The Vertias Forum at Harvard University, 1995.

Reprinted in A Place for Truth: Leading Thinkers Explore Life's Hardest Questions, edited by Dallas Willard copyright 2010, IVP Books.

James Dennis is a very dear friend of mine.  For eleven years my wife and I attended an inner-city church in an all-black section of Philadelphia.  James Dennis and I were elders together in that church.  Many years ago, Brother James was a very angry black militant.  He told me a little while ago that if he had met me years ago, he might have killed me.  (I'm glad he met Jesus first.)  But before that happened, his marriage was in trouble, he was abusing alcohol, and he finally went to prison for a major crime.  In prison, thank God, he came to know Jesus Christ, and he came out, struggled a bit, got involved in our church discipleship, and God put his life back together.

His family's back together, he's got a decent job, he owns his own home.  He wants to be a prison chaplain someday.  Fantastic transformation.  Anybody who thinks that all he needed was the best government programs of whatever sort, Democratic, Republican, or Green, simply doesn't understand.  He needed more than that.  He needed a living relationship with Jesus Christ that would transform his whole character from the inside out.

At the same time, anybody who thinks that all he needed was to be born again, when the school system wouldn't work and he couldn't get any job or housing, doesn't understand.  Surely he needed a decent societal order, and he needed a living relationship with Jesus Christ.  How on earth anybody who claims to follow Jesus Christ, the eternal Word become flesh, the perfect combination of word and deed, and then proceeds to separate them in life really puzzles me.

Two words: I agree.