With the race riots and protests and demonstrations sweeping the land, it seems the Lord quieted the USA through the Coronavirus crisis to get our attention to Seek God (Amos 5) and then with great clarity focused His people on the issue He wants us to deal with. With the Alliance having made significant strides in addressing racial issues over the last 3 decades, perhaps in the larger cultural context, there may be a place for Alliance churches to lead both evangelistically in reaching the lost and in refining the found by leading other believers, regardless of denomination, into repentance.
Likewise throughout this season, and off and on while God has had me serve in racially mixed congregations in racially mixed communities, His Spirit repeatedly has sifted my own ethnocentric pride through Matthew’s Jewish Gospel. At different times and in different ways, the Lord has convicted me through almost every chapter of my own monocultural, ethnocentric pride. This Gospel starts with exalting Gentile women in chapter 1, works through an ongoing reorienting of Jewish thought by exalting Gentiles over Jews throughout the whole Gospel, and ends in triumphant climax with the Jewish believer being confronted with the great commission to make disciples of all Gentiles (ethane/nations). The question Matthew’s Jewish Gospel confronts Jewish believers with is: What does it mean for me to prioritize taking the Gospel to the people I culturally have been trained to hate the most?
In light of Paul’s public rebuke of Peter (Galatians 2) and the ruling of the Jerusalem Council (Acts 15), the Lord repeatedly has impressed on me how important Matthew’s Gospel must have been: important to the Jewish believers who thought Jesus came to save the Jews and to take the Gospel just to the Jews, and important to the Gentiles who needed to hear that they were in fact valued by the apostolic leadership of Matthew (a Jewish tax collector who understood what it meant to be hated by other Jews). In this polarized first century context of a church divided between Peter and Paul, I think Matthew’s Gospel is an attempt to heal the divide and disciple both camps into a forward motion around the great commission.
Beware a revival in the Land if we do what this ethnocentric gospel calls us to believe and to think.