The Middle Matters

By Mike Glenn

The Middle Matters – Mike Glenn

I know everyone has their own version of heaven. Some want beaches and warm breezes. Others want mountain streams and cool, crisp air. Me? I’m a simple guy. All I want is plenty of Oreo cookies and a lot of ice-cold milk. I want to eat as many Oreos as I can and not gain weight or shoot my blood sugar off the charts. I want to while away eternity twisting the chocolate cookies off the creamy center, licking off the cream and then eating the two cookies. This, of course, is the righteous way to eat an Oreo cookie. The other day, as I was eating my favorite cookie, I noticed I was eating an improved Oreo cookie called Double Stuff. The bakers of the Oreo cookie, when they were looking for a way to improve the best cookie ever, made the choice to double the cream filling.  Why? Because the bakers of Oreo cookies know the middle matters. 

Photo by Kristine Wook on Unsplash

While discussing how evangelism had changed with some young pastor friends of mine, I thought about Oreo cookies. Here’s why. For most of my career, preaching focused on the beginning and end of the gospel message. We preached about our need to be saved – forgiven for our sins. We preached about what it will be like when we go to heaven. We preached about the cookies. We didn’t have a lot to say about the cream in the middle. 

As with Oreos, the middle of the gospel matters. When I was growing up in my small mill village church in Huntsville, Alabama, most of the sermons I heard when I was growing up were about justification and glorification, the beginning and end of our faith. I didn’t hear a lot of sermons on sanctification. As a matter of fact, I didn’t preach a lot of sermons about sanctification. For most of my life, the entire middle of the gospel was left out. 

As in Oreo cookies, however, the middle of the gospel matters.

The gospel is good all the way through. Yes, it’s good news we can be forgiven of our sins and restored into a transformational relationship with Jesus Christ. Yes, it’s good news that, in the fullness of time, God will complete all He has begun and bring His children home to live with Him forever. In between the beginning of the gospel and the finishing of God’s kingdom work there is a lot of good news as well. For some reason, a lot of Christians have forgotten that. 

Every now and then, we’ll still hear the old adage that Christians are so heavenly minded they’re no earthly good. Sadly, there have been times in church history where people were told to remain silent about their suffering because heaven would make up for all of the unjust pain. What makes this attitude so much sadder is Jesus and His gospel have a lot of good things to say about how we live our lives in between our initial baptism and when we arrive in heaven.

Who has a richer and deeper understanding of marriage than the Scriptures? Who can help us deal with forgiveness and anger better than Jesus? Who can free us from our prisons of materialism and commercialism better than Jesus? Who knows more about love – real love – than Jesus? 

What makes this interesting is in our world’s efforts to remove all external truth claims from our culture – since truth can only be validated by the individual’s experience - we have come to a place in our culture where people don’t know how to live their lives. Right now, on this day, most people are struggling to find a life that’s worth the effort. This is a great chance for the church to share with our neighbors the good news contained in the middle of the gospel. If we’re paying attention to the conversations going on in our communities, we’re going to hear a lot of sanctification questions being asked. Questions about individual identity and purpose, life’s meaning and hope – all of these are sanctification questions. No, our friends probably won’t use the word “sanctification,” but they’ll talk in terms that remind us why the middle of the gospel matters. 

Think about all the times a conversion experience is symbolized in a name change – Jacob becomes Israel, Abram becomes Abraham, Simon becomes Peter. How life changing is the moment when a person hears Jesus say, “You are.” How frustrating and confusing it is when we’ve never heard those words spoken to us by Jesus. This is one of the best gospel moments – when we hear Jesus tell us who we are - and He explains to us why He created us and what He wants to accomplish in our lives for the sake of His kingdom. When we know those things, we’ll find a life worth living. The good news of the gospel is we can have this life worth living before we get to heaven.  Good news. The gospel is still the best news we can ever hear or share. It doesn’t matter where you start – the beginning, middle or end. The gospel’s good all the way through. 

Let’s not get so carried away with how it will be “one day” that we overlook how it can be right now – today. In the gospel, like Oreo cookies, the middle still matters.