(Note: This sermon was introduced with a drama called "Nail The Pagan).
The reason we laugh at satire is because there’s an element of truth in it. Sometimes in our enthusiasm to share the good news of Jesus Christ with others we can tend to come across like outreach commandos. We can come off like pushy salespeople, eager to sign people up for our agenda, never really taking the time to listen, to care, to try to understand people. When we do that, we come off like jerks.
Today I want to talk about how to share our faith in Jesus Christ with others without being a jerk about it. We’ve been in a series through the New Testament book of Romans called "Good News for Our Times."
But today is going to be a bit different than my normal sermons, because this is going to be more like a workshop in sharing our faith. Instead of looking in depth at this section of Romans to hear with the apostle Paul is writing, we’re going to look at how Paul shared the message of Jesus with others. One of the reasons why I want to do this today, is because on Monday I found out one of the guys I’ve been sharing my faith with died unexpectedly in a fire. He was only 34 years old. Is I look at his obituary, it makes me wonder if I’d done everything God wanted me to do in his life. So today we’re going to talk about how to share our faith without coming off like a jerk.
Today I want to essentially do two things. First I want to share with you some observations about how our cultural context has changed in the last few decades, and then I want to share five principles about how to share our faith in Jesus.
1. How Has Our Context Changed?
I want to talk first about how our context has changed. I believe many of us who love Jesus come off as jerks become we don’t understand how our culture is changing. Most contemporary thinkers believe that you and I are living through a transition from something called modernism to something called postmodernism. We I could spend months talking about what postmodernism is all about. I’ll simply recommend a book by Chuck Smith, Jr. called "The End of the World As We Know It."
Pre-modernism is that time from when the New Testament was written until the 1500s. Up to that point, people were mostly illiterate and truth was based on relationships of authority. In pre-modernism, you didn’t question authority because people in authority knew better than you and were more educated than you were. Pre-modernism was a time of kings, bishops, and emperors, and it was all about power.
Modernism grew out of the 1500s and it basically believed that reason would be the answer to everything. The events that led to the birth of modernism in the 16th century were the invention of the printing press, the rise of science, and the Protestant Reformation. Modernism believed that all human evils would be solved through reason and technology. Modernism was book focused, and from that point on literacy rates began rising and the primary way to communicate was the written page.
The rise of postmodernism is harder to date, but some people think it started in the 1980s. Postmodernism is no longer confident that reason and technology will solve all our problems, because technology has created as many problems as its solved. Postmodernism is suspicious that everyone has a hidden agenda, that there are no people who are entirely neutral. In postmodernism digital technology and the internet are the primary modes of communication. Characteristics of postmodernism are cultural pluralism, an emphasis on tolerance, a belief that there’s no such thing as absolute truth, and a focus on individual freedom and liberty.
We live in the transition from modernism to postmodernism, which means there are lots of people who embrace modernist assumptions, but increasing numbers of people who embrace postmodern assumptions. I believe this transition has enormous implications for how we share our faith in Jesus Christ with others. Not understanding these changes is often what makes us look like jerks when we try to talk about Jesus.
In modernism outreach was about CONQUEST, but in postmodernism it’s about SERVICE. In modernism, outreach was having a Bible in one hand and a sword in another hand. It was believed that ultimately Christians would "Christianize" the world. Christopher Columbus was a typical modern Christian, as he came believing he was on a mission from God to spread the Christian faith, yet he also freely used violence and power to spread his message. In modernism it was often hard to separate the message of Jesus Christ from western European culture, because the two had become so mixed together. In modernism, Christians talk about "taking their cities for God," and "winning souls to Christ." The language modernist Christians used to speak of outreach was the language of conquest and victory. That’s what we saw satirized in the drama, and in some cases the satire isn’t too far from the truth.
Now a conquest approach to outreach terrifies most non-Christians. This is because the Christian faith has such a terrible track record in this area, whether it’s the crusades of the middle ages or the Salem witch trials in Puritan New England. I thought about this when I read a letter to the editor in Tuesday’s newspaper, where a reader wrote, "I am one scared senior. These [Christians] scare…me. I believe firmly…they represent the most dangerous threat to my liberty that exists today…I very much fear that, given the power, these people would take away my right to disagree" (Inland Valley Daily Bulletin 2/27/01 A10). More and more people view Christians the way that person does, and when we use conquest terminology, we contribute to this.
I believe outreach today must be much more service oriented. I thought about this service mentality when Mother Teresa spoke at the Presidential Prayer Breakfast a few years ago. Mother Teresa spoke about abortion, and she said, "If you don’t want your baby, don’t abort it. Give it to me. I’ll raise it." No one questioned whether she was serious or not, because she’d devoted her life to service, to ministry. Her life of service to Jesus Christ gave her credibility to say that.
Yesterday outreach was PROGRAM BASED, but today it’s RELATIONSHIP BASED. Most of what the Christian Church in America does in regard to outreach goes back to a guy named Charles Finney, who lived in the mid-1800s. Finney was an attorney who became a Christian, and basically he viewed effective outreach as finding the right methodology. Finney is the guy who popularized the altar call, the idea of calling people forward in church to receive Christ. Finney believed if you had an outreach event and no one came to know Christ, it was because you didn’t use the right methodology. This legacy of Finney is where we get a lot of our ideas about evangelism programs, about special meetings, advertising, and so forth.
A programmatic approach worked fairly well when most people in our nation were essential nominal Christians, people who knew about Jesus, who knew the Bible, who believed in God, and so forth, but who simply didn’t trust themselves to Jesus. But when we view outreach as essentially using a program or a method, we come off as pushy salespeople. I thought about this when I went to Amazon.com this week to see if a book on evangelism was still in print. On Amazon.com readers can post on-line reviews of certain books. One of the books on evangelism I was making sure was still in print had an online review of it. The reader said this: "This book is not only great for telling people about Jesus, but it’s done wonders for my Amway business. By using the methods and techniques in this book, my Amway sales have gone through the roof." I can only hope this was a joke.
But today effective outreach must be far more relationship based rather than program based. This is because a lot of people are suspicious of big programs, and rightfully so if we’re using the same techniques in evangelism that work for selling Amway. Postmodern people have a "hidden agenda" detector because they’ve been marketed to for so long in commercials. Our evangelism programs simply sound like another commercial to them.
In modernism outreach was an EVENT, but today its much more of a PROCESS. When American churches used to think of outreach, they thought of doing outreach events. This is because outreach in America used to be about reaching nominal Christians, people who were born into a Christian home, had a Christian heritage, understood the Bible, believed in God, accepted the ten commandments, and so forth. Essentially churches were reaching people who were already religious but who hadn’t yet trusted in Jesus Christ.
Now I’m in no way against outreach events, but more and more unchurched people are streaming into churches, wanting to see what the Christian faith is all about. They don’t want to see a show, but they want to see what a genuine Christian community looks like. Because today’s unchurched person is so thoroughly secularized, reaching them is entirely different than reaching nominal Christians who already accept the truthfulness of the Christian message. Before today’s secularized person decides to become a follower of Jesus, there’s a lot of ground to cover, lots of issues and questions to address. Most of the people who come to know Jesus here at LBF church don’t make a commitment to Jesus until 4 months to 12 months after they start attending. They begin attending as a seeker, and that process from seeker to surrender to Jesus is different for everyone. Viewing outreach as a process is very different than how most of us have been taught to view it, but it’s increasingly process oriented. Outreach events are still important, but they have to be part of an overall process or else they’ll only reach nominal Christians and not today’s secularized, person.
Finally, in modernism outreach tried to PROVE THAT THE MESSAGE WAS TRUE, but in postmodernism we have to DEMONSTRATE THAT THE MESSAGE IS RELEVANT. You see, modernism so exalted reason that Christians had to demonstrate that believing in Jesus was not irrational. To do this, Christians become focused on things like evidence, facts, arguments, and apologetics. The Church was very slow in doing this, but now we have lots of great resources to show that believing in Jesus is intellectually credible. The Christian faith is a reasonable faith, not an irrational leap in the dark. And that approach works great with people with modernist assumptions.
But I’m finding that more and more people with postmodern aren’t asking whether the Christian faith is true. Postmodern people are suspicious of people who think they have all the facts, because they know theories change and often people with facts have a hidden agenda that skews the way they present the facts. Postmodern people are asking whether the Christian faith works, not whether it’s true. Postmodern people in general don’t want to know truth about God, but they want to know and experience God himself. So when I share my sixteen impressive reasons why the resurrection of Jesus really happened, a lot of my friends say, "So what. What does that mean to me and my life today?" We’ve got to show first that the message of Jesus is relevant, and then we show the reason why it’s relevant is because its true.
So our context has changed drastically. Often we come across as jerks because we’re approaching outreach as conquest, program based, event oriented, and focused on proving the truthfulness of the Christian faith. Yet increasingly today’s secularized people are terrified by conquest terminology, yearning for authentic relationships, hoping for someone to let them be in process, and wanting to know if the Christian faith is relevant to their lives. So often it’s not the Christian message that’s offensive to people, but it’s our own approach.
Chuck Smith, Jr. says, "Christians need to find new ways to present the gospel" (91). I think he’s right.
2. How Can We Share Our Faith? (Romans 9:1-3, 10:1-2, 14-15, 17)
Now with that all said, how can we learn from Paul how to share our faith without being obnoxious? Let’s allow the apostle Paul mentor us for our remaining view minutes together, so we can learn from him. Certainly Paul was no stranger to changing cultures, yet he was able to effectively share the message of Jesus with people.
The first principle is this: BY CARING ABOUT SEEKERS. We find this principle in Romans 9:1-3. Notice how much Paul cares about his lost countrymen here. There’s no doubt that Paul loves them. He’s torn up
about their condition, and he’d be willing to somehow sacrifice his own salvation to bring them to faith in Jesus Christ.
I’m convinced most Christians simply don’t care all that much about non-Christians. A pastor I know in Baltimore once told me that we’ve worked hard to make seeker sensitive churches, but we’ve failed to make seeker sensitive Christians. I think he’s right. I do not believe it’s possible to effectively share Jesus Christ with a person we don’t really like or care about.
Think of the message of Jesus as being like a song. Our caring is the music, and the lyrics are the good news about Jesus. They’ve got to hear the music before they can understand the words.
Now I’m not talking about caring about a person conditionally, as if it were a manipulation technique to get someone to believe in Jesus. Some cult groups practice something called "love bombing," where potential members are drowned in a sea of love and caring, but it’s all conditional upon their conversion and involvement in the group. I know many Christians who come across like this.
Love must be genuine, without hypocrisy or a hidden agenda. My unchurched friends know that I’d love nothing more than for them to come into a life changing relationship with Jesus Christ, but they also know that my friendship is not conditional on that. In fact, some of my friends have actually tested this by acting hostile about my faith, just to see how I’d respond. Once they found out that my friendship is without strings, suddenly many have opened their hearts with questions.
Last Sunday I attended a free community classical concert at the Claremont Colleges. I know that shocks some of you, but my wife plays violin in the orchestra, so I went to enjoy the music and to support my wife. I brought my 9 year old and 6 year old sons with me, so they could enjoy the music and see their mom perform. I brought coloring books for them to stay busy during the concert, and my 6 year old whispered to me several times and dropped his coloring book a few times. After the concert a guy came up to me and asked me, "Do you respect music?" I thought he was just being friendly, so I smiled and said, "Yeah…I like this kind of music. And my wife is in the orchestra too." He said, "Well I reverence music, and your children ruined this concert for me because they were so loud and distracting. I can’t believe you’d bring them to a concert like this." Well I didn’t say what immediately came to my mind, but instead I just apologized that they were distracting, but afterwards I wondered how many times Christians are like that with unchurched people. We love the Christian message so much, unchurched people distract us from enjoying God’s grace and forgiveness. We don’t want to be bothered with introducing new people to the faith, because we’re so focused on enjoying the faith ourselves.We must begin with caring about seekers.
Next we can share our faith BY PRAYING FOR SEEKERS. That’s what we find modeled for us in Romans 10:1 Paul actually spent time praying for his countrymen who didn’t have a relationship with Jesus Christ. He wasn’t just praying for them as a faceless, nameless mass, but he prayed for actual people, family members and friends, former colleagues and friends who didn’t know Jesus.
If you’re having trouble caring for a person, try praying for that person every day until you start caring. Ask God to bless that person, to fill his or her life with God’s presence and greatness. Pray for God’s will to be done, for that person to be enriched with friends and family.
Some Christians find it helpful to do prayer walks in their neighborhoods. Just a casual walk around the block, but as you walk silently praying for the people you see, for that nosy neighbor across the street, for the family with the out of control teenager two houses down and so forth.
We have no right to share with people we haven’t prayed for.
Let me give you a third principle: we share our faith BY AFFIRMING WHAT IS POSITIVE IN THEIR LIVES. That’s what we see in 10:2. Paul could’ve said, "My Jewish countrymen are totally wrong. They’re so focused on do’s and don’ts that they are blind to God’s grace." But instead, he affirms something in their lives that they have right, namely their zeal for God. It’s a zeal not based on knowledge, but it’s a real zeal nonetheless.
Now some of you are thinking, "But Tim, you don’t know my unchurched friends!" Paul was talking about religious people here, people who already believed in God, accepted the ten commandments, and so forth. Of course he could find something to affirm in their lives, but I can’t find anything positive to affirm in my unchurched friends.
But I find it fascinating that Paul did the exact same thing when he spoke to the irreligious Athenians on Mars Hill in Acts 17. Paul says he can see they are very religious, and he observes that they’ve even built an altar to an unknown god. But he doesn’t say, "You stupid idiots, how can you worship these idols made of wood and clay. How dumb can you get?" He says, "What you worship as something unknown, that is what I’m proclaiming to you when I tell you about Jesus Christ."
You see, Christians are reluctant to affirm positive things in other people’s lives because they’re afraid that this will be misunderstood as their endorsement of their whole lifestyle. So if I affirm my non-Christian friend’s honesty at work, it will make him think I approve of the fact that he’s living with his girlfriend and has a child out of wedlock. Yet Paul didn’t have that hang-up. He freely affirmed what he saw that was positive in their lives. And if Paul could find things to affirm in the Athenians, you can I can find things in the lives of our unchurched friends.
Let me give you another principle; We share our faith BY SPEAKING THE MESSAGE. We see this principle in vv. 14-15. Now let me explain two important words from these verses.
The first word is the word "preaching" in v. 14. We tend to think of preaching as something negative, as a kind of scolding or nagging. Think of the lyrics to Madonna’s song from several years ago: "Papa Don’t Preach." But the Greek word is not a negative, nagging, scolding word. To preach is simply to announce something publicly. So what Paul is talking about here is different than what most people think of as preaching in our culture. Preaching is simply publicly speaking a message.
The other word is the word "sent" in v. 15. The Greek word here is apostello, and it’s the same word where the word "apostle" comes from. It means to send a person as an official representative of someone else, like an ambassador of a president goes to represent that president to a foreign nation. So not just anyone can preach this message, but it must be someone who’s sent by Jesus. That some one is the Christian community, the Church. Jesus said to his Church, "As the Father sent me, so now I send you" (John 20:21). We are the ones who are sent, authorized with the message.
The message is what the Bible calls the gospel or the good news about Jesus Christ. It centers in on God sending Jesus to the world at Christmas, Jesus’ perfect life, his sacrificial death on the cross and his resurrection from the dead. The message centers in on the fact that Christ died for us, so we can be made right with God and come into God’s kingdom. This good news is the theme of the book of Romans, so if you understand Romans, you understand the message.
Now I find from this section two important things to keep in mind when we speak the message about Jesus. First, WE MUST TELL IT ACCURATELY. This word "sent" tells us that it’s not our message that we share, but it’s Jesus’ message. We don’t have the liberty to water down the message or to leave out parts of it people mind find difficult to accept or understand. We’ve got to make sure we’re accurately sharing the good news.
Second, WE MUST TELL IT POSITIVELY. The last part of v. 15 is a quotation from Isaiah 52:7 about a messenger’s feet being beautiful. Back then they didn’t have TV, the internet, or Fax machines, so news was communicated by messengers. These messengers would come to a community with news about what was going on in other places, and you could tell just by looking at the messenger whether it was good news or bad news. A messenger with a spring in his step and a smile on his face was bringing good news. The "beautiful feet" is simply a way of saying a messenger with good news is a sight for sore eyes.
How many unchurched people look at their Christian friends as a sight for sore eyes? Early in my Christian walk I had friends who actually pretended that they weren’t home when I came to their door because I was so obnoxious. They weren’t offended by Jesus, but they were offended by me. I was sharing the message accurately, but not positively.
One more principle: We share our faith BY TRUSTING IN THE POWER OF THE MESSAGE. That’s what we find in v. 17. Faith is not generated by using the right technique or the right speaker or some special program. Faith is generated by the message itself, the good news of Jesus Christ. This is saying the same thing as Romans 1:17, where we learned that the good news of Jesus Christ is the power of God in action to bring about salvation for everyone who believes.
So many Christians don’t really believe that the message itself is powerful. We think we have to prop the message up with special programs or sales techniques. We focus so much on methodology that we neglect the very thing that transforms people. If we believe in the power of the message, we don’t have to rely on special techniques or methods, because if we can just accurately communicate the good news, that itself will generate faith.
Conclusion
So there you have it: How to share your faith in Jesus without being jerk. The Christian Church in America is awakening to a very different context than what existed fifty years ago. Outreach is no longer about conquest, program based, event oriented, and focused on proving the truth of the Christian faith. More and more effective outreach is focused on service, relationship based, a process and focused on demonstrating the relevance of the Christian faith. We can follow Paul’s example by caring, praying, affirming, speaking, and trusting. With Easter six weeks away, I think we face a wonderful opportunity to grow in these areas.
Amy Tracy was raised in a dysfunctional home that focused on performance (Christian Reader July/August 2000). Amy bloomed in high school as a cross country runner, and her dad was a typical sports obsessed father, who constantly prodded her to perform. When she stopped winning races, her family grew disappointed with her, and she began to grow depressed. In college Amy got into drugs and alcohol, and her junior year she developed a kinship with several professors who she knew were gay. She was drawn to their sense of community, and ultimately Amy concluded that she was gay. Soon afterward, Amy committed her life to women’s rights, and she became actively involved in the pro-abortion movement. Yet there were times Amy was filled with a profound sense of emptiness and sadness, a longing for peace and joy that she didn’t find in the way she was living her lives. As she looked at the Christians who marched against her in abortion demonstrations, all she saw was anger and hatred. In Amy’s words, "Christians lived down to my low expectations." Yet Amy started feeling like she was falling apart, and she concluded that her emptiness was a hunger for God himself. By now Amy had become the press secretary for the National Organization for Women. One night in Washington, D.C. Amy ran into a pro-life activist she had seen at several abortion demonstrations. She made a sarcastic remark, expecting him to respond the same way. But instead, he said, "Amy, all I pray for is the chance to see you standing in church, praising and loving Jesus. Forget the abortion debate. That’s all I really want." Her hunger for God grew desperate, and finally she looked in the yellow pages for a Christian church. One Sunday she showed up, her pick up truck covered with rainbow flags and pro-abortion stickers. Amy wondered if she’d be thrown out, yet as the pastor spoke and the church worshiped, she sensed God calling to her. It took a while, but eventually Amy committed her life to Jesus Christ. Today Amy is a writer for Focus on the Family in the area of public policy.
Amy says, "My prayer is that Christians will be able to see others with compassion, not as enemies; as broken and in need of restoration by the only healing of our souls, Jesus Christ." Let’s make that our prayer as well.
