Tenchi
Member
Psalm 36:7-9
7 How precious is your steadfast love, O God! The children
of mankind take refuge in the shadow of your wings.
8 They feast on the abundance of your house, and
you give them drink from the river of your delights.
9 For with you is the fountain of life; in your light do we see light.
7 How precious is your steadfast love, O God! The children
of mankind take refuge in the shadow of your wings.
8 They feast on the abundance of your house, and
you give them drink from the river of your delights.
9 For with you is the fountain of life; in your light do we see light.
Evangelism is, for many believers, a scary prospect. They worry that they'll encounter someone who'll have hard questions, difficult challenges to their faith they can't answer. They don't like the prospect of someone perhaps angrily deriding their faith, mocking them, even, for believing in God. They stress out over the possibility of being called a "bigot," or "self-righteous," or "narrow-minded" - maybe even racist when they share the Good News of Christ, the Savior. All sorts of potential fearful situations crowd the minds of Christians as they ponder telling others about their desperate need of the Good Shepherd who's given his life for the sheep. And so, these fearful believers adopt strategies for evangelism, systems of approach, methods of engagement with the lost, they marshal arguments and evidences for their faith, learning syllogisms, and studying natural theology, they train to be winsome and to subtly order evangelistic conversations to their advantage. Or, they don't. In fact, most don't. It's a lot of work to get all this stuff down. And the sense of guilt of the "silent majority" about hiding their light from the lost doesn't exceed their anxieties about sharing the Gospel. There are, as a result, few laborers in the field of evangelism that is "white unto harvest" - maybe fewer now, at least in North America, than has ever been.
Compare this state-of-affairs regarding Christian evangelism to my friend who loved golf. During the golf season, he was daily on the golf course, often doing two eighteen-hole rounds in a single day. He spent ten thousand dollars on a golfing membership each year, in addition to the expenses he incurred buying golfing equipment, clothing, golf training and incidentals (beer, food, buckets of golf balls, etc.). Hours were spent by my friend honing his putting skills and improving his golf swing. Man, did my friend love golf!
You'll not be surprised, then, to hear that my friend was quite the evangelist for golf. Not in any contrived way; he just couldn't help but talk about the joy he took in golfing, about how fascinating it was to polish his golf game, about the pleasure of playing through the beautifully manicured course with his buddies, and so on. Bubbling over with enthusiasm for, and talk of, golf was entirely natural for my friend and I could always expect at some point in our times together to hear about what was going on with him and his golfing. My friend had no carefully-ordered plan for speaking to me about golf; no conversational strategy that would manipulate me into agreeing to play golf, too; no carefully studied collection of arguments and evidences for the reasonableness of my taking up the game. It was enough that my friend enjoyed golf immensely and invested his life greatly in pursuit of the game; and out of these things a natural and irrepressible "golf-evangelism" flowed.
In light of my friend's easy and joyful promotion of golf, I've wondered often about the anxiety-ridden, hesitant - or non-existent - evangelism of Christians and the industry that has arisen around it. Is the constant multiplication of books written on how to evangelize, each layering onto believers more and more "essentials" of evangelism, more vital considerations of generational distinctives, and more "necessary features" of preparing fertile ground for the Gospel in the minds and hearts of the lost really at all required?
These myriad steps, and strategies, and plans of evangelism actually, I believe, hinder evangelism, subtly forbidding the one unschooled in "modern evangelism" from sharing Christ with others. By the chorus of "experts" in evangelism writing books, and making video series, and providing weekend conferences, Christians have been made to believe they must first study, and prepare, and practice talking about Jesus to the lost, buying all that the evangelism industry has to offer them in order to be properly equipped to evangelize. Only the foolish, these Christians come to believe, would ever do otherwise. This is what the "experts" whose books they buy say to them, after all. Convinced, many believers end up perennially preparing to share the Gospel, eating up all the new material on the latest evangelism "essentials" ever-flowing from the evangelism industry, but never actually taking the Good News of salvation to the lost all around them because there's always some vital, new "insight" into evangelism to be learned (for a modest fee of $19.99 - in paperback).
How the devil must snicker at Christians caught in this consumerist current of thinking about sharing the Gospel! He knows that none of the merchandise offered to Christians by the industry of evangelism is at all necessary. What they actually need is to have with God what my friend had with golf. When they love and enjoy God, investing daily their "treasure"(time, energy and money) in knowing and walking with Him (Matthew 6:21), delighted, and fulfilled, and transformed by their Maker (Psalm 16:11; Psalm 36:7-9; Philippians 3:7-14), the result is a natural and irrepressible high enthusiasm for God and for sharing with others how they might enjoy the same experience of Him.
How often, though, Christians make the Gospel an academic endeavor, offering to the lost cosmological, or teleological, or moral arguments for God, delineating the historical evidence for the Resurrection and giving ten reasons why the Bible is the word of God because they have no deep, concrete, life-changing and personal experience of God, of the Holy Spirit more specifically, that is spiritually abundant and joyful, full of peace, love, contentment, truth and holiness. What the lost truly need to hear, though, is the Christian's own personal, real and transformative experience of God that fulfills them richly and delights them deeply. For it is far more than mere "fire insurance" that God offers to the lost; in being saved, it is Himself in eternal, joyful, holy fellowship that the lost receive.
Revelation 3:20
20 'Behold, I stand at the door and knock; if anyone hears My voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and will dine with him, and he with Me.
1 John 1:2-3
2 and the life was manifested, and we have seen and testify and proclaim to you the eternal life, which was with the Father and was manifested to us—
3 what we have seen and heard we proclaim to you also, so that you too may have fellowship with us; and indeed our fellowship is with the Father, and with His Son Jesus Christ.
Continued below.
