An Invitation To Inhabit The Gospel

The words, the narrative, the reality.

Mark Raja

Published in

Kerygma Teens Club

7 min readAug 29, 2024

Is it mere words?

From my childhood, I grew up in an evangelical church. In my teens I surrendered my life to serve Christ, soon I occupied myself with evangelical activities, like distributing gospel tracts, preaching on the streets and village squares, performing street plays, puppet shows, songs, rope tricks, and doing what we called ‘sharing the gospel’. Nevertheless, I am really grateful to God for this upbringing.

Why was I doing that? To me, and many believers then, preaching the gospel of Jesus Christ is the mission of the Church that we all need to participate in. Consequently, by hearing the gospel, people can believe in Jesus, be saved, and go to heaven after they die.

I heard one world-renowned evangelist stating his mission statement as “to go to heaven and take as many as I can with me.” I made that my mission statement too. I wanted to join a missions organisation to pursue this vocation. I was sincere and I know many who have committed their lives to do the same with an honest heart. Those missionaries are my inspiration even today.

God has surely blessed their work, and many came to know Christ. Some of them were not merely communicating the gospel but also healing the sick, setting people free from demon possession, educating the poor, etc.

However, by and large, we believe that the gospel is the good news for our salvation. By accepting this news that Jesus died in our place to forgive us our sins, we receive eternal life after we die. We pick many verses from the Bible like John 3:16, to support this understanding.

In response to hearing this gospel, we ask people to make a decision to accept Jesus as their personal saviour, get baptised and join a church. This is pretty much the gospel we believe even today. Fortunately, some Christians also teach us to live a godly life until we die. However, does this understanding fully represent the biblical view of the gospel?

By reading the bible carefully, I understood that this is a very skewed interpretation of the gospel Jesus and his disciples proclaimed. We have made it a way to personal salvation to escape hell. Which is quite opposite to the cross of Christ.

How did the church arrive at this conclusion? I do not fully know the factors that shaped this understanding in the global church for the past century. Let me digress a bit to better frame the problem.

The human need for narratives

Like me who was surrounded by evangelical activities, we humans live by narratives that make sense to us. We are fundamentally narrative creatures making sense of the world through them. That’s how our brains are organised. Therefore, we pursue to identify with the narratives of our tribes because they feed our need for identity, self-esteem and fulfilment.

If you watch a 10-year-old you will notice they live in a world of their favourite Anime or Disney characters. They imitate them and want to be identified with them. However, as they grow and face different life experiences, their narratives change.

By narratives or stories, I mean a set of values, aspirations or shared experiences a group is captivated by. They are so captivating that they shape their reality and provide life meaning. Therefore narratives are essential for human survival and development.

Are narratives true?

The narratives we live by are rooted in myths or meta-narratives. By myth, I mean a narrative that purports in some sense to be historical and which encapsulates and reinforces the strongly held beliefs of the community that tells it.

We live amidst numerous narratives and meta-narratives, but honestly, do we really seek the truth? Does truth matter? As I mentioned earlier, we are attracted to them to meet our need for belonging and significance. Sadly, it is often for convenience or personal advantage rather than truth. Eventually, we get disappointed or deceived by false narratives and change them. Therefore, it is wise to constantly pursue and inhabit that which is true.

One of the obstacles for C.S. Lewis coming to faith was the similarity between Christian and pagan mythology. Since pagan myths were assumed to be false, he wondered why Christianity should be treated differently. Later, Lewis came to understand that Jesus was the “myth became fact.”

So to the seeking man, God revealed his narrative that is eternally true and invites us to inhabit it.

The sufficiency of the Biblical narrative

In the beginning, God gave man the garden to inhabit, Later He gave the Jews the Torah and the temple (a reflection of the garden) to live by. Christ came proclaiming the narrative of the kingdom for us to inhabit and truly become human, growing to our fullest potential as God’s image bearers where he is the new temple.

In Christ, the narrative and the reality unite. What does that mean? The eternal Word became flesh. That is what John in his gospel begins by stating, “In the beginning was the Word”, “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us”. The biblical narrative is not mere words, it is the signpost to its eternal reality.

Now back to the gospel narrative that we lost. Why did the Church turn the gospel into a ‘personal salvation after you die’ story which is very much self-centred? It is probably because we have stripped some verses out of the biblical narrative to fit the dominant post-world-war end-times narrative which appeared to be true.

In our modern scientific minds, we think we just need facts, not narratives. We ignore cultural allusions, metaphors, plots, settings, characters, and actions. So what was the consequence? We reduced the gospel to a utilitarian concept to save ourselves from hell in the face of imminent doom. This narrative has no root in the grand biblical narrative that leads to the hope of new creation. Therefore we failed to comprehend and inhabit the kingdom of heaven we are called to enter.

In this imminent doom narrative, there is no place for love, beauty, marriage, vocation, education, healing, peace etc. Isn’t it surprising that we fell for it? On the contrary, the kingdom of God narrative is very much about love, joy, marriage, vocation, beauty, healing, peace etc.

The Kingdom narrative not only points to truth, goodness and beauty it also provides our deepest longings for identity, self-esteem and purpose.

Lewis says, “What flows into you from the myth is not truth but reality (truth is always about something, but reality is that about which truth is), and, therefore, every myth becomes the father of innumerable truths on the abstract level. Myth is the mountain whence all the different streams arise which become truths down here in the valley.”

The grand Biblical narrative

The biblical narrative is God’s revelation to us to guide us into the kingdom of Christ. This plot begins and completes in the garden.

This garden is the place where heaven and earth unite. Here God gives man his identity and purpose as children of God to reign as God’s kings and priests by cultivating God’s righteousness and justice.

But man rejected this identity and chose another myth that led to a reality devoid of heaven where he needed to toil for survival. God who loves man enters his reality to redeem him through His death and through his resurrection restores him back as a new creation, as kings and priests into his garden.

In Christ, we are in the garden to cultivate God’s righteousness and justice as children of God. This ultimate reality is what Christ invites us into. This is the myth that became fact. Christ is the way, the truth and the life that leads us to the Father.

The early Christians were called the ‘people of the way’ because Christ gave them a way of life, a different narrative to live out. Their origin, identity, purpose and hope are deeply rooted in it.

Therefore, the gospel is not a mere rescue plan to heaven, it is an invitation into God’s meta-narrative, an eternal reality to live by, to satisfy our deepest longings and restore us back to the full potential we are made to be as God’s image bearers. This is true salvation. It is of utmost importance to fully understand it and be rooted in it so that we are not carried away by worldly narratives.