Jesus sent His disciples with nothing,
then told them to be shrewd & innocent.

“Behold, I am sending you out as sheep in the midst of wolves, so be wise as serpents and innocent as doves.”  – Matthew 10:16

When Jesus sent out his disciples to preach among the towns and villages,  there was no guarantee that the locals would listen.  However, the “kingdom of heaven was at hand,” was more than just words.  Jesus wanted His disciples to embody the message. That’s why he sent them with the instructions to be both “shrewd” and “innocent.” Jesus valued acting with wisdom and working within the culture to clearly communicate the Kingdom message.  Jesus also knew that if such wisdom and cunning resulted in harming others or was done for selfish gain, it could destroy the message through hypocrisy.

There is nothing new under the sun. I believe it is the particular challenge of American Christianity to be both shrewd and innocent. We can’t simply rely on people wandering off the streets into the open doors of our churches and hearing the Gospel. We need to reach people where they live, wherever they are on the journey and communicate the life-changing love of Jesus in their cultural context. Jesus knew such a task would require a certain amount of strategy, cunning and shrewdness.

This love of Jesus and the gift of forgiveness is not from ourselves. It is the gift of God. We didn’t write the Bible. God did. We don’t get to choose what passages we like and the ones that we ignore. There’s nothing innocent about doing surgery on the Bible to “fix” it. We also can’t excuse bad behavior for the sake of the Gospel of Jesus. When we misbehave in the name of Jesus, we communicate through our actions the exact opposite of what Jesus intends! There’s a certain humility to being a Christian that keeps us from thinking this is all about us or that we can be justified treating people badly because we’re “right.”

Combining shrewdness with innocence in the name of Jesus is simply answering His call and imitating the Master.

I’m not altogether convinced that the Christian church in America today is all that good at being shrewd or innocent. That’s a big reason why I’m blogging.  I’m not calling people out or embarrassing anyone.  There are plenty of other blogs doing that.

I would rather love people into truth than judge them into truth.

So, I’ll just tap my keyboard about the things that I see working and ideas about how today’s disciples of Jesus can be both shrewd and innocent in a world that expects the Christian to be a limp-fish hypocrite.  Who knows?  Maybe