The Horizontal Gospel

Last week’s Insider featured Chad Veach sharing with us the current reality of God having time for us. In the midst of your busy schedule and heavy burdens, God has His eyes set on you, ready to receive all the cares you have to cast on Him.

God’s availability and pursuit of you is good news, but it doesn’t end there. Watch this week’s Insider to hear Bryan Loritts share how the gospel is not purely a vertical exchange between us and God, but also a horizontal relationship between us and our neighbor. 

From an overflow of our relationship with God, we should be a people who cultivate a community made of people different than ourselves, giving the world a glimpse of the diverse Heaven we’re living for. 

Watch the video to see the social implications the gospel has on your life today.
Prefer to read rather than watch? Here’s the transcript to Bryan’s talk:

But now we come to our text. And one of the things that we see is Paul, a Jewish man, is not marinating in evangelical passivity. In fact, Paul shows us the absolute antithesis to evangelical passivity. It is something that every single believer who has accepted the grace of God must, for their own selves, incarnate and contextualize in their own situations. It is what I am terming redemptive impatience.

Paul, he is not passive. He is impatient and aggressive when it comes to issues of multi-ethnicity. Here is Paul, this Jewish man, boasting in his eclectic relationships. He says on Monday you might catch me having a kosher meal with my Jewish brothers. But on Tuesdays, when he talks about those outside the law, he is talking about his gentile brothers and sisters. He says on Tuesday you might catch me at the Montgomery Inn wiping port juice from the sides of the corners of my mouth, having a wonderful non-kosher meal with them. Why Paul do you do this? He says in verse 23, "I do it all for the sake of the Gospel."

Paul understood that the gospel of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ is not a homogenous proposition. That red and yellow, black and white, they are precious in his sight. And if you have a problem with diversity, you go have a problem with heaven. There will be no gentrification in heaven. There will be no red lining in heaven. Heaven will be multiethnic. There will be incredible diversity there. On one day there will be a white boy with flip-flops playing an acoustic guitar, and the next day leading the worship will be a brother on a Hammond B3 organ. And it's going to be wonderful and great. And in the middle of it all will be the lamb. So I've got to ask you, is your church giving our world a preview of coming attractions?

See, to Paul ... Paul understood that the Gospel is not just vertical. It is not just me and my relationship with God. It is not just me having my quiet time with my Bible open, my favorite cup of coffee with my Beth Moore bobble head doll, that I love that Beth Moore. But the gospel is profoundly social. It is. It is both vertical and it is horizontal. This is the gospel.

Jesus would say it this way. Jesus was once asked, what was the great commandment? He says, "Here it is. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, soul, and being." That's vertical. But the second, he says, is like it. "And you shall love your neighbor as yourself." Horizontal. John would say it this way, "How can you claim to love God whom you don't see, yet hate your brother, whom you do see?"

And you must understand that in the Jewish mind, hate is not a vitriolic feeling as much as it is detachment. So for anybody to say I love God, but live a detached life from people who don't look like, act like, think like, or vote like them is a fundamental misunderstanding of the Gospel. So is the gospel social? You're darn right it is.

So to Paul, the Gospel has comprehensive implications. And one of those implications is ethnic. And so as we talk about what it means to be to build multiethnic communities, or what Dr. King loved to call the community of the beloved, it begins with creating communities that have a robust orthodoxy and orthopraxy. That constantly show people, this is how the Gospel comes to bear. This is what the Gospel is. So I draw people and I show them. Stop just preaching Ephesians 2:1-10. "For by grace, you have been saved through faith. It is the gift of God." Read the rest of the chapters. What does he do? Right on the heels of that, he says, "Because of that, because Jesus Christ in his flesh has dismantled the dividing wall of hostility, now Jews and gentiles can come together." A homogenous church in a multiethnic community is in affront to the Gospel.