This past week in my Monday with Jesus, I discussed the passage where Jesus tells Simon to cast his net into deep water. After the great catch of fish, Jesus tells Peter that from now on, “you will fish for people.”

When I was growing up in California, I loved to fish with my father. We used to take the half day boats out of Balboa, and go deep sea fishing off the coast of Southern California, where we would catch, barracuda, halibut, bonita and other sports fish. I also loved going fresh water fishing with my father and one of my best memories of childhood was when I caught a lake trout and won a fishing contest for the largest fish. Still later in life, here on the East Coast, I tried to take up fishing again, only to discover that it’s much more difficult than I remembered. I took my rod and reel and my tackle box full of lures out to the lake, only to come back home having caught no fish, and having lost nearly all of my lures.When I got home my wife taunted, “Here fishy, Here fishy.” It was a humbling experience to say the least.

When Christians talk about being “fishers of men,” they often do so with the enthusiasm of a sport fisherman, who has just caught a really large marlin and had it stuffed and mounted on their wall. Evangelism as it is practiced today, brings to mind a sports fisherman who catches a large fish, and with the fish writhing and arching its back and its scaly spine on the deck of their boat, the fisherman beats the fish’s head against the side of the boat in order to stun it. What I am trying to say by all of this, is that Christians have misapplied Jesus’ words to Peter and have made evangelism into sport, or game, where we don’t really care about the person who we are trying to reach for Jesus, instead treating them instead like a fish that we want mounted on our wall, or a fish that we are simply trying to submit by beating its head in with our theological arguments. It’s a process that often lacks love or compassion for the person we are trying to reach with the message of Jesus.

All of this came to mind, when I was reading Carl Medearis’s Speaking of Jesus. Medearis served as a missionary in Lebanon for several years and has worked extensively on creating a dialogue of faith with members of the Arab Middle East. In his current book, Medearis talks about how we have made the gospel into a kind of “us versus them” contest, where we have been too focused on winning arguments, which have in turn taken us away from Jesus.

Medearis writes, “Too often I try to win allies to my point of view rather than pointing to Jesus. . .I proved that it was more important to me to win an argument than to be like Jesus—compassionate and loving. Kind and patient.”

The thesis of Speaking of Jesus is simple and straightforward:

If you don’t feel like you have to evangelize someone away from their team and onto yours, you can speak of Jesus much more freely, and thus, more effectively.

Medearis’ book is largely about evangelism and about how the gospel or good news should be a story of Jesus’ love for us, rather than about getting people to “convert” to Christianity. What Medearis shares in Speaking of Jesus is simple and has been shared by others, but Medearis’ book is beautiful insofar as it brings us back to Jesus. So often I have found my own faith in Jesus encumbered by trying to jump through the right hoops and trying too hard to get “things right” or to somehow “get myself right.” More than just thinking about evangelism, Medearis book had me longing for faith and a relationship with Jesus for myself.

As someone who has shared the gospel more than a few times, I confess to having a strange kind of fear. What if I shared about Jesus with someone and they actually wanted to become a Christian? This is not to say, that I really didn’t want them to know Jesus, but I worried about somehow botching their salvation. What if someone wanted to follow Jesus, and I somehow led them through the wrong prayer? What if I didn’t share with them the right perspective of sin or repentance and their decision to follow Jesus somehow “didn’t take?” It seems silly, but the ramifications of messing up someone’s salvation seemed to carry eternal consequences.  Speaking of Jesus reminded me that all of those fears and insecurities were misplaced. As Medearis writes:  

If we were to look at Jesus, in the totality of His love and determination, we would realize we are not required to make ourselves His followers by force of reason. We would realize He came to us in our poverty of mind and heart. It is our job to follow Jesus, like Paul. . .refusing to know anything else but the crucified and resurrected Jesus.

It’s not about reason, and its not about leading people through an intellectual theological maze that somehow leads them to God, instead it’s about Jesus. For so much of my life, I have been desperately afraid of failure and overly concerned about making mistakes, as if to say that Jesus could not overcome my failures. Medearis goes on to say. . .

I know the one place I cannot go wrong is the place where Jesus is. I can be weak, sinful, foolish and even rebellious. I can fail others, ruin ministries, fumble my work, and still I cannot go wrong when I stand with fear and trembling knowing only Jesus.

For a few years, I assisted in an international ministry, where we tried to share the gospel with mostly Chinese international students who were here in the states for graduate studies. Almost all of my memories of personal evangelism come from this period of my life. There was one particular graduate student who was particularly memorable for me. He seemed to have an insatiable hunger for all kinds of knowledge.

At the time, I was a graduate student of history and was taking a class on British History from 1700-1900. My Chinese friend, being an inquisitive person, wanted to audit the course with me. As it turned out this particular professor in British History seemed to take delight in recounting every Christian misdeed, scandal and hypocrisy for this period, or at least it seemed this way to me.  I felt hopelessly conflicted, since I was trying to get a good grade in his class, trying to be follow Jesus in the context of my own studies and trying to “defend the faith” in my conversations with my Chinese friend. In the end, it was a dispiriting and discouraging experience, that left me spiritually depressed and defeated, because as much as I tried to share my own personal faith in Jesus, I felt as if I had to defend or explain away two hundred years of Christian history and misdeeds.

In Speaking of Jesus, Medearis writes that “gospel and the religion of Christianity can be two different messages. Even opposed on some points. When we preach Christianity, we have to own it. When we preach Jesus we don’t have to own anything, Jesus owns us.” This totally blew me away, when I read it because it was so simple and yet so obvious. Where I had it wrong, is that I thought that the gospel was about defending this religion we call Christianity, when instead, it should have been about Jesus. I should have simply pointed my friend to Jesus, instead of feeling compelled to “own” Christianity.

What does a faith that focuses simply on following Jesus look like? This is a question I find myself asking more these days. Overall, I found Medearis’ book refreshing, because it brought me back to the core of the gospel. Finishing his book, I could only lament a life that has often been focused on layers of religious practice. The gospel that Jesus proclaimed was one that reached out the marginalized and to the sinners of his day. These are the very people who are turned away or turned off from the gospel today, because they feel that they cannot follow the right rules. The vision of the gospel that Medearis offers us in Speaking of Jesus is one that takes us back to the savior and away from the legalism that has often encumbered Christianity. This is a beautiful gospel that is not based on our ability, competency or our moral fidelity, but a gospel or a good news that is based on the love of Jesus.

Speaking of Jesus was reawakening for me, that left me wanting to re-read the gospel narratives, stripping away all of the excess and added weight of my religion, all in the hope of knowing and having relationship with Jesus.

More Jesus, Less of Everything Else.