The proclamation of the gospel for the salvation of humankind

Okay, friends, we’re going to go ahead and get started.
Thank you for being here this evening.
Michael and I are probably a little late in the game.
We’re scrambling a little bit,
trying to figure out what we should do for this study.
We came around to a thing in the Presbyterian church called the sixth grade ends.
So we’re going to take one of those a week.
The sixth grade ends,
I think, are one of the kind of hidden gems.
If you’ve ever tried to work your way through our Presbyterian Book of Order,
it’s not exciting.
I mean,
lots of it is a policy manual,
and so you wouldn’t expect it to be exciting.
There’s some good stuff in it,
but it’s also nobody’s–well,
I shouldn’t say it’s nobody’s favorite book.
It shouldn’t be your favorite book.
But there are some gems in it.
And one of those gems is this section called the sixth grade ends of the church.
And the sixth grade ends of the church are essentially an action plan or a mission statement that was written for the church.
Six things that the church is to be about.
So six priorities for the church to be the church.
And it is uniquely Presbyterian.
And by that, I don’t mean that we’re the only ones who think this is the way to be the church,
but this statement of priorities only exists in our context.
They were created in the early 1900s, about 1910.
These six items were adopted as a mission statement by the United Presbyterian Church in North America,
which is the predecessor of a group that joined together and became the United Presbyterian Church,
or the Northern Presbyterian Church,
which joined with the Southern Church in 1983.
So way before that group even existed,
this group,
the UPCNA,
adopted these mission statements
to summarize what the church should concern itself with.
What should be our highest priorities are our main businesses.
And these six items have stayed with us through 10 decades,
two mergers,
and a boatload of church problems.
And they are very good.
They’re helpful.
I find them one of the best things in our book of order.
They’re clear.
They’re directional.
They’re theologically sound.
And to whatever extent church mission statement can be, they’re almost,
they border on poetic.
They’re probably not poetic,
but they’re well said.
So here they are in no particular,
well, no, in a very particular order.
The proclamation of the gospel for the salvation of humankind,
this will be our theme tonight,
the shelter, the nurture, and the spiritual fellowship of the children of God,
the maintenance of divine worship,
the preservation of the truth,
the promotion of social righteousness,
and the exhibition of the kingdom of heaven to the world.
So those six things have been the backbone of the Presbyterian Church’s attempt to articulate
what are the things we are to be about as we follow Christ in congregations and as his body.
And there’s a wonderful balance to these.
We’re going to take these one at a time in this Lenten series.
But there is a great balance here.
This next slide is a little busy color-wise.
But I group these together because the two individual ones that are the same color provide,
I think, a great balance.
So we talk about,
is it more important to do evangelism or to do mission?
Is it more important to go out and preach the word,
or is it more important to go out and do the things that help people and be a witness in the world?
Well,
there’s one of each,
proclamation and exhibition.
So the six ends tell us we can’t pick either one.
We have to do both if we were to be the church.
The shelter, nurture, and fellowship of the children of God and the promotion of social righteousness.
We hear this sometimes.
People say, well, it’s most important to take care of our people.
We should take care of ourselves first.
Is it more important to pay attention to who’s in the church or who’s not in the church?
And the six ends say you have to do both.
You have to pay attention to the congregation.
We have to nurture the children of God.
But you can’t forget about the outside world.
Social justice, social righteousness matters.
The maintenance of divine worship,
the preservation of the truth,
they have to work together.
You can’t lock in truth and say this is how we’re always going to do it.
There’s new truth for each generation,
how we worship, how we communicate,
how we experience Christ together.
And so the six ends,
one of the great things,
and I don’t know that they did this on purpose,
if they did, they’re genius.
But there’s a wonderful both/and here as we think through some of the issues of what it means.
The great ends,
I think, are some of our best work as Presbyterians.
Once you get through the table of contents in the Book of Order,
which is long because it lists things by section,
the great ends of the church are on page five.
It probably should be,
I don’t know,
I would say page two or even page one.
But page five is pretty good.
And they give us the message right away that the church is not simply about us.
They’re outward focused.
They’re looking beyond a particular congregation.
It’s not about our way of doing things or our preferences or our politics or our policies.
The church has this
inherited mandate that our ancestors discern that include these six tasks.
And the church is to be connected with these six tasks really in everything that it does.
Whenever we do something,
we can in large measure evaluate it by whether it fits into one of these categories.
Why do we have Sunday school?
Why do we have a mission committee?
Why do we have worship service?
Why do we have this study?
What we do, what we’re about, should find its root somewhere in one of these ends.
I think that’s really about that helpful.
So tonight we’re going to look at the first great end,
the proclamation of the gospel for the salvation of humankind.
In fairness, in 1910, when this was written, it said mankind.
We’ve modern did up a little bit.
And the proclamation of the gospel for the salvation of humankind is a mouthful.
But there’s four main concepts here to walk through.
The first proclamation to proclaim is to tell,
to share or announce.
It is the church’s job to announce.
Announcement sharing is our Christian vocation.
When we become Christians,
part of our job description is to share being Christian with the rest of the world.
To share is the fundamental drive of the church.
This is why the scripture exists.
Because people who followed Christ,
people pre-Christ,
wanted to communicate these stories.
They wanted to tell their experience of God.
They wanted to share the truth.
They wanted to chart and share and announce this thing that had changed their life.
So at our best,
almost everything we do is done out of a desire to proclaim.
And proclamation is not just the job of pastors and staff and worship leaders,
but of the church, of every Christian.
And coming upon every person who comes to Christ is this idea that this is worth sharing.
Christians and congregations know things
that are worth proclaiming.
And we must pronounce those things if we’re going to be the church.
And proclamation doesn’t mean explanation.
Often we’re afraid to engage people in the faith because they’re going to ask us to explain things that we can’t explain.
Proclamation is the sharing of our experience.
What has Christ done in my life?
What has God meant to me?
Why do I call myself Christian?
The Bible word here is to testify,
to say what you know as an eyewitness.
Witness is an important word in the scripture.
So we proclaim.
And this is the,
this is the,
there’s a lot that is uncomfortable maybe about this first grade end for Presbyterians.
One of them is proclamation.
If I asked you when was the last time you shared your faith with someone,
I guarantee you’d all look at your shoes.
No doubt about it.
So I said, raise your hand.
Last time you evangelize somebody.
Last time you witness to somebody.
I’ve told you this story before,
but from the church I served in Texas when I went home,
I had to go around the city square.
And it was so hot there in the summer.
And there was a guy in a long sleeve shirt that would stand out on the corner.
And he had this giant floppy Bible.
And he would floppy Bible every car that drove by just screaming at them about Jesus.
And we too often think of that as our picture of evangelism.
That seems like proclamation.
Well, that’s
that’s not what our ancestors meant.
I promise you.
They just mean share.
We share the faith.
Proclaim does mean words,
but it doesn’t just mean words.
We share the faith with others.
When you take an interest in somebody,
when you encourage somebody,
when you help somebody connect your positive behaviors with following Christ, with your faith,
that’s proclamation.
When the church takes a stand for people who are hurting,
when the church does the things the church is trying to do,
that’s proclamation.
When we get it right,
which for us as individuals and for congregations isn’t all the time.
But when we do, we are proclaiming.
We’re announcing.
So proclamation.
Well, what do we proclaim?
The gospel.
Gospel is, as you probably know,
good news.
By the way, the Greek word good news is euangelion.
It’s the exact word from which we get evangelism, sharing good news.
We know God so loved the world.
This is the good news.
We know that in spite of being willful and rebellious and sinful,
God has loved us relentlessly.
We know that in spite of intentionally turning ourself away from God when we’d rather do our own thing,
Christ has been gracious to us.
God is not dead and distant and absence.
God is alive and active and loose in the world,
working for good.
This is the good news that Christians know,
that there’s more to the story than just this sort of work your way through the world existence.
That there’s something deeper,
there’s something richer, there’s something better.
There is good news for people,
and this is what we’re called to share.
It is not doctrinal necessarily.
It’s not theological in the sense that you have to be trained to do it.
It is simply the good news that I was in a place and Jesus took me to a better place.
It’s really that simple.
Sometimes we think we don’t know enough to do this proclamation,
but we do.
So proclaiming the gospel,
sharing the good news.
To what end?
Salvation.
This is probably the trickiest word in the equation here.
Of all the words used,
this is probably most often misunderstood.
If we were to ask people if we’re just to take some random poll about salvation,
it would be for many people,
go to heaven and avoid hell.
That’s what they would mean when they talk about being saved.
The Greek helps us here in that the word that we translate saved is a huge word.
Actually, I mean, it’s a short word,
but it’s a huge word for the Greeks.
It means saved.
It means delivered.
It means rescued.
It means preserved.
It means healed.
It means wholeness.
It means fullness.
This was not simply an after death word for early Christians.
This was a way to live word.
In fact, the word that Christians use,
the word in Greek and Hebrew that we translate saved,
is not a religious word.
They borrowed it from the language.
And in both cases,
it simply means to be made well.
So to be saved,
despite the idea of going to heaven and avoiding hell,
is simply to be made well.
To be repaired,
to be fixed.
There’s something fundamentally broken in us.
And to come to salvation is to allow God’s grace to make an effort at fixing it for us.
The good news of salvation is far more than do you know where you go when you die.
It’s also,
what does it mean to live?
To be fully alive, to be whole,
to be well.
Do you know that in a life of sin and sickness and struggle and darkness,
Jesus is light, that God has freely offered you a fullness of real life beyond whatever tries to promise real life in the world?
This is the good news.
This is salvation.
It’s no lesser thing like sex or money or success.
Those things cannot offer what God has offered us in Christ the opportunity by grace to be filled,
to be whole.
Now, who is this promise for?
This is the easiest word,
humankind.
Simply put, even our ancestors, when they said mankind,
they meant everybody,
anyone.
All of us.
No one is beyond the invitation.
The first great task of the church is to announce that what God wants to do,
God wants to do for everybody.
No exceptions.
The color, the language, the nation, the political party, the fill in the blank, it doesn’t matter.
God is open to all people.
Anyone can come to God through Jesus Christ.
And God desires everyone to do so.
So if we simplify the words,
share good news of wholeness with everyone.
That’s a modern translation of the business of the church.
The first great task of the church,
by word and deed and worship and work and everything we do to share the good news of wholeness for anyone.
And the reason that this end comes first,
I think,
is that it undergirds everything else the church does.
All of our ministry is proclamation.
When we worship,
when we minister to kids,
when we go fix houses,
when we feed a hungry,
whatever we do,
we are announcing the good news of this saved experience that we’re having.
This idea of living out our faith.
So let me pause there and ask if there are comments, questions.
I can go back to the sentence for you.
Is this something you all have heard before?
First of all, who said no that was here in 2007 when I preached the sixth grade ends of the church?
You have heard this before.
I know some of you were here.
No, it’s a wonderful,
it is a wonderful statement.
It’s a loaded one because we’ll finish with this in a little bit,
but evangelism makes Presbyterians nervous and really kind of always has.
But this idea of invitational living,
invitational ministry is there’s something here for us.
What else?
Comments, questions?
Why did they use the term “hand”?
I’m sorry?
The overall title is sixth grade ends,
so why did they change it?
So that’s old language tasks,
sending them for tasks or jobs.
Yeah, I don’t know why we’ve stuck with it.
It sounds a little overconfident,
but as much as I like these,
they could use a little freshening up.
But they will never ask me to do that.
So historically speaking, did we lose our way since 1910?
I mean, if we’re put together,
it’s kind of cool.
Did we lose our way as far as the church’s leadership was concerned?
Or somewhere,
seminary,
and what happened?
This is really pretty cool.
Yeah,
you mean in terms of why we have not voiced these more?
Some churches have,
and in some churches,
I think this language is probably familiar.
I know they’re on display in some places.
Some of that may be because they’re stuck in the book of order.
Maybe we should put them over in the book of confession so more people would see them, I’m not sure.
Lots of people, Mike, would say that we’ve lost our way.
It’d be hard to connect it to whether or not,
you know, the Southern church didn’t even have these.
So until we came together in 1983,
these were really a northern document or a northern expression.
Yeah, I probably didn’t say that really well.
Some churches, obviously,
have lost their way.
To me, I think that’d be hard to argue,
but at times we lost our focus.
These would seem to be a logical focus.
I think so.
And one of the great things about these,
though, we would argue a lot about what they meant secondarily.
These six statements, I think, are common ground for “conservative” and “we’d all agree on these six things.”
We wouldn’t agree what they meant and how to act them out, necessarily.
There’d be some place for argument,
but we could at least get together and say,
“Yeah, those six things,
that’s important.
Those six things matter.”
And the other thing I’d say is that I do think most churches that are,
I think most churches are trying to do things that you could pinpoint on that list.
How much they connect it with sort of this historical charge.
I don’t know.
Yeah,
it’s a good question.
Anything else?
So,
pretty good evidence that we may or may not remember a 2007 sermon series.
I assume that might be the case,
and I stole a couple of sermon illustrations from back then.
So, let me tell you a couple of proclamation stories.
This first one I find absolutely fascinating.
Some of you, when I was a kid,
how many of you know the name Evil Knievel?
Okay.
So, when I was a kid,
I had an Evil Knievel motorcycle.
You’d put him on the thing,
and I don’t remember if you,
I think you cranked it maybe,
and at some point he’d shoot out of there.
You’d make him jump over your bed or your bookcase or your cement wall, whatever.
And so,
having kind of grown up with the Evil Knievel thing,
I didn’t know this,
and I find it fascinating.
In the Crystal Cathedral on Palm Sunday of 2007,
Evil Knievel was the featured speaker.
And he talked in his testimony about spending his life running from God.
And you’d have to be a pretty big Evil Knievel fan,
so this is spring of ’07.
He dies in the fall of ’07.
He talked about running away from God almost all of his life, preferring other things.
He talked about some of the mistakes he made.
Evil Knievel,
I don’t know if this is surprising for a guy that jumps over buses and sharks and flaming things,
but he was a little rough around the edges.
He played minor league hockey until he was kicked out for probably fixing the game.
He was a hunting guide until it was found out he was taking clients into Yosemite National Park to hunt.
And then he was an insurance salesman and did really well,
but was denied a promotion and got in a fight with his boss and was fired.
And I think like actual fight.
I don’t think like argument.
I think fight-fight.
And so then he said,
well, I like motorcycles.
I like jumping over things.
And the rest is history.
But he was kind of that guy.
And at some point he became aware that his daughter’s church was praying for him.
His ex-wife’s church was praying for him.
And he would get letters from fans saying they were praying for him.
And he said to all of them, I’m not interested.
And these are his words from that morning in the Crystal Cathedral.
I don’t know what in the world happened.
I don’t know if it was the power of prayer or God himself,
but it just reached out.
Either I was driving or walking,
sleeping.
It was just the power of God in Jesus that grabbed me.
All of a sudden,
I simply believed in Jesus Christ.
I did.
I believed in him.
I rose up in bed and I was by myself and I said,
devil, you bastard, get away from me.
I cast you from my life.
By the way,
bastard in the Crystal Cathedral,
only evil can evil pulls that off, right?
He says, I cast you out of my life.
And I got on my knees and prayed that God would put his arms around me and never,
ever let me go.
So Robert Shuler is standing there next to Evil Knievel.
Evil Knievel is doing this.
And Shuler says he noticed that every person in the Crystal Cathedral is just spellbound.
And he says several people are crying and he’s supposed to go up there,
thank him and move to the offering.
And he says, I felt like we couldn’t do it.
So I stepped up and I said,
I have the feeling that some of you may need to respond to this.
And perhaps you’d like to come forward.
And so he did it.
He was unaware that four other pastors on staff began filling in the blanks with him.
And by the time it was said and done,
at least 500 and possibly 800 people came forward,
most of whom were baptized either again or for the first time and committed or recommitted themselves to Christ.
Because one man shared the story of where he found hope and wholeness in Jesus Christ.
That’s partly the power of proclamation.
Now, bookend that story on the other end of the spectrum,
story about a woman who stopped by a church on her way home from the hospital.
Her mother and father were both in the hospital.
In fact, they ended up dying within the same week.
But that wasn’t that hadn’t happened yet.
She had attended this church a few times.
She stopped by just sort of feeling beat up,
needing some hope.
She was going to sit in the sanctuary and pray or cry or whatever happened.
And there in the church was an older lady.
The church had an event coming up and the lady was working in the kitchen and she didn’t know the woman and the lady who was working in the church didn’t know this young younger woman.
Now, that kitchen lady could have said many things.
She could have said,
hey, the pastor’s not here.
She could have said,
the church is closed.
Can you come back later?
She could have said,
what are you doing here?
But as the story was told,
actually, the woman in the kitchen didn’t say anything.
The woman said she looked at me.
She took off her apron.
She walked over next to me,
grabbed my hand and sat down with me.
Now, that’s also proclamation.
Not a word gets said.
And yet Christ is proclaimed.
And finally.
This one I love.
I don’t know what I feel about this story.
A homeless man went to church one day and the reason that was known is because the guy sitting next to him,
they signed the friendship pad like we do.
And under address, the man wrote homeless.
Pretty, pretty good clue.
He noticed it.
So he’s just kind of curious about the man.
He’s watching him during service and during the offering,
the plate comes by and he sees this man grab an offering envelope.
And he thinks to himself,
that’s not what I expected.
A little surprising.
Then the man flips it over and instead of putting anything in it,
he just writes something on it and he drops it in the plate and it comes by the guy and he’s just dying of curiosity.
So I’m not sure if this part is true,
but as I imagine it,
he took his own offering and kind of made sure to flip that or cover the card.
He wanted to see what he wrote.
And when he saw it, it simply said,
I love you very much.
So here’s a homeless man proclaiming Jesus to a church guy.
And again, he didn’t say anything out loud.
The proclamation of the gospel for the salvation of humankind,
that sounds high and mighty,
right?
Those are lofty words.
But as one theologian said it,
it’s one beggar that tells another beggar where he found bread.
When we accept the life that God offers in Christ,
we look to him to be saved,
not just from hell,
but from ourselves,
from our sin, from anything that keeps us from being well, from being whole.
And then almost anything we do in Christ’s name becomes proclamation because it announces him.
Presbyterians are not great at evangelism.
They’re not at the revival and altar call kind at least.
But when we talk to just about anybody,
about our experience with Jesus, we’re doing evangelism.
I know that scares the heck out of some of us.
But at our best,
and at our best,
we understand that following Jesus is fundamentally about inviting people,
about encouraging people,
about exampling.
That’s not a word,
but I’m using it.
For others to do the same,
for everyone and anyone to know that they can find hope and wholeness in Jesus.
It sounds big,
but it just means sharing Christ because God desires every person on this earth to understand that they are loved and to know that they matter and to be made well.
And for reasons that I’m completely not sure that I get,
God has asked us to help spread the message.
God has put the proclamation of the gospel for the salvation of humankind in our hands,
which doesn’t seem like wisdom.
But that’s the way it is.
When we come to Christ,
we come to this task.
And it doesn’t mean,
in fact,
please don’t let me see you out on the corner with your fucking Bible.
We’ve got enough of those guys.
We don’t need a lot of them.
I’m not too worried with this crowd,
to be honest, but that’s not it.
But I’m going to challenge you that every single day,
every single one of us has an opportunity to do this.
Every day you cross paths with somebody,
and by what you say or do or how you act,
we have the opportunity to proclaim the gospel,
possibly by even using words,
but not necessarily.
And that is one of the chief ends,
the main jobs of the Church of Jesus Christ.
It’s a great place to start,
and I’m thankful to our ancestors for giving us those words to help understand it.
Let me stop there.
Comments, questions?
Anybody have any thoughts?
I should put them on my head.
So,
do we have to connect that to Jesus?
So, the things that I do,
the share that I do with other people,
which we all do each and every day,
is that enough for Jesus,
or is that something I have to connect myself?
I think,
I think that,
yeah, so there was a moderator of the Presbyterian Church who used to say,
“Presbyterians are great at doing things and terrible at telling people why we do them.”
And I’ve always found wisdom in her words.
I do think that ultimately the goal is not simply to do the things that need done,
though that’s important, but to honor Christ by doing them so that He’s glorified.
Now,
I don’t think that means you have to Jesus stamp everything,
but I do think it means, hopefully,
that people understand,
get something right, they understand why we did it.
If they see us face adversity in a way that they say,
“I don’t know how you can be hopeful,” we say, “Well,
it’s because of this.” That’s why.
Again,
it doesn’t have to be a sermon.
It certainly doesn’t have to be beating people over the head,
but I do think at its best proclamation and gospel are connected.
I do think,
at best,
it needs to point toward Christ,
and it’s hard to do that if we never make that effort,
because, I mean, let’s be honest,
a lot more of us are comfortable doing those things.
Now, when I drive by and the homeless guy needs some food,
give him five bucks,
I don’t,
I probably,
I might say, “God bless you,” and hope that has something to do with it.
That proclamation may be less for him and maybe more for my daughter who’s in the car watching it.
Well, that part’s hard,
and it’s why we don’t do it very often,
and probably we don’t do it very well,
because we don’t do it very often.
That, I’m talking about me.
It may be easier to do the front side of that,
but the back side of that,
how I connect that,
I’m not so good at that.
I think one of the unfortunate things that happens is that lots of church people are considered great men and women.
Oh, he’s a good guy.
Oh, she’s a beautiful person,
and the people who know them well don’t always understand why they’re great guys and beautiful women.
I mean,
that they’ve been shaped that way.
And maybe to some extent it is incumbent upon us to try and help make the connections for people who wouldn’t know it.
I would argue gently and graciously,
but yeah.
There’s a verse in which Jesus says,
“Anyone who gives a cup of cold water in my name,”
and this same woman who made the point that Presbyterians do things and don’t tell anybody why,
she makes a helpful observation.
To have Jesus’ name without giving the water doesn’t do a lot of good,
and to give the water without Jesus’ name does some good,
but not as much as it could.
And that keeping those things together seems to be Jesus’ advice.
Find that helpful.
I don’t know if that helps, Mike.
Anything else?
I actually feel like I think about this a lot,
like working in a public school.
I wish I could talk to my kids all the time about Jesus,
but I like to keep my jazz mostly,
so I still do it secretly.
Often, I really try a lot of times,
and they ask me,
“Why are you doing that?”
Because I love Jesus.
Last Friday there was grilled cheese as an option.
Why is that grilled cheese?
I was like, “Let’s have a sermon about Lent.”
I’m not supposed to do that,
but I tried to do that.
You have several great teachers who navigated those boundaries for a long time that could answer that stuff way better than I can,
but I think you’re on the right track to do what you can.
But sometimes I wonder if that’s enough.
Is that enough?
Because I can’t actually proclaim.
A lot of times,
the soundtrack in my head is like,
“They’ll know we are Christians by our love.”
So I just keep trying to do that,
because I can’t always say as much as I want to say.
You’re planting seeds.
I would agree.
Now, would there be a time you dig in and get fired?
Maybe.
I mean, that might present itself.
I don’t think so in my school.
I feel like a lot of other very strong Christian people.
I think it’s helpful when people just kind of know that about you,
like your co-workers.
I had my
Christian radio station playing faintly in my classroom during parent-teacher conferences,
just in case they wanted to know.
Yeah.
Well, and again,
my strong bias, Katie,
is I have seen beat people over the head evangelism.
I just don’t think it works.
I don’t think very many people have ever been scared or argued into the kingdom.
I think most people come because someone treated them in a way that mattered.
And that’s my bias by a hundred times.
So I think those little things add up,
and I think that you’re living this out when you do them.
Yeah, that’s very sure.
Yes, sir?
Well, I feel like there’s a piece that connects to both comments, really,
because when Rachelle and I were getting married,
one of the pieces of advice I got from my mentor in that stage of my life was he said,
“Your goal every day is to love your wife.”
And he said, “That sounds elementary,
but you will find that that simple thing is not so simple.”
And I found so often that I do the right thing without love.
I do the right thing,
but I don’t do it because I love her.
When you do the right thing and you do it for the right reason,
it’s known.
She knows it.
She knows that I didn’t do the laundry because I love her,
in that instance.
When you pair action with intention and you do it in a really thought—if it really matters to you,
I don’t know that you need to beat people.
I think people,
it hits a soul when someone knows that when they can see in your eyes the reason,
I’m not sure that you need to use lofty words to make it happen.
I like hanging in cabinet.
Hey.
My wife is here, unlike his.
I’ve got three people that heard it on the radio today and shot the trackball.
It was less funny at our house yesterday about three o’clock in the afternoon,
I can tell you that.
Michael, I heard it said,
“When the queen is happy,
there’s peace in the kingdom.”
I think
we can be honest,
if Presbyterians err on one side of this equation,
it’s on the not saying enough.
Again, to paraphrase the moderator,
we’re good at the doing.
It’s the telling
people why we’re doing it that I think we struggle with.
We’re better at the acting it out than we are at the proclamation part.
That’s good.
It’s a growing edge for us.
I think sometimes to share your love of Jesus and what he’s done for you is the fear of rejection with another person that they’ll look at you like,
you know.
I find that for myself,
I like to share a little of that,
but you can almost tell by their body actions to back off.
I think rejection for me on sharing that is a big thing.
I don’t know if we put too much pressure on the idea that it’s our job to convert.
Nothing in this talks about conversion.
Conversion is not our job.
That’s God’s deal.
Our thing is to witness.
Our thing is to testify.
Our thing is to live out the faith in a noticeable and public way.
I can’t convert anybody.
I don’t need to worry about that.
If I tell them,
“Why’d you do this?” “Well,
I’m trying to be a follower of Christ.” “Well, that’s stupid.” “Well,
nice talking to you.”
Again,
it’s not my job to argue,
convince,
rationalize, threaten,
whatever someone into the kingdom.
It’s my job to love my neighbor and proclaim the gospel in the way that I live and the way that I talk.
I wonder if sometimes we get bogged down in that idea that it has to “work.”
The other thing, and I’m not picking on you, Polly,
because this is true of all of us.
Well, two things.
Those of you who are a little older than I am,
you had the benefit of growing up in a time when there were lots of assumptions.
And among mainline church in context
like this, one of them was people were in church.
So the idea of evangelism was kind of like,
“Well, they already know that.”
Well, if you’re not aware,
they don’t know it.
That’s no longer true.
There are no shared assumptions about what is true from a faith perspective in the American culture anymore.
It’s all over the place.
And the other thing that’s interesting to me,
and I’m in this boat,
so please don’t hear it as judgmental.
If I go see a great movie,
I’m going to tell you.
If I go eat a great hamburger,
I’m going to tell you.
And yet there’s this thing that’s at the center of who I’m trying to be,
and
I don’t talk to people about it.
I mean, I do because I have to.
But, I mean,
here I have to.
I mean,
I don’t in other places, you know.
But the lesser things that we want to share with people,
and then we keep that most important thing to ourselves sometimes.
And it’s a challenge,
but it’s a good challenge.
Jim?
I wanted to say living out your faith is a fantastic statement because we do it so many places in this church.
And I’ve been influenced by people that live out their faith,
and I want to be like them, you know.
So I do learn from those things,
and there aren’t words that are exchanged,
but
I’ve modeled my life after many others.
Yeah,
absolutely. That live out their faith.
Yeah.
Well, just to brag along with hers,
I personally
know, and I think most of us do,
know people who are good.
And I have no idea whatsoever why they’re good.
Because it’s not their faith.
So I think we have to differentiate between that.
Why are we good?
And like you said,
we give Christ their credit,
and they don’t.
Yeah.
And that’s hard.
You know, the person at the grocery store gives you a 10 when they should have given you a five,
you’re going to give the five back.
Why?
Because that’s the Christlike thing to do.
That’s honesty, that’s integrity, that’s those things.
Are you going to say,
I follow Jesus, and you can too,
and here’s your five.
I mean,
no.
No, but somebody’s going to say,
that guy just gave me money back.
And they say, oh, yeah, it’s a jam.
He goes to the press materials.
I hope they say that.
I mean, that’d be awesome.
Yeah.
He just took $20 from you.
He’s a jam.
So, yeah, I’ll tell that story some more.
It’s the opposite of that.
Yeah, that’s very bold.
Effective, maybe.
I mean, I don’t know.
Yeah.
I’ll
end here.
So,
the world needs Jesus.
We’d all agree on that.
But how the world needs Jesus is, I think,
to see Jesus in real people.
The world probably doesn’t need saints as much as you think they do.
Those saints are wonderful.
They need to see real people with real faith trying to live that out through the ups and the downs
and the getting it right and the getting it wrong.
And they need to see that in churches and in individuals.
Because the idea that, you know,
well, sure,
yeah, I mean, that person,
they’re a saint.
No, they’re not.
They aren’t.
They’re just a person trying to be faithful.
And I think when we invite people
into that kind of real relationship,
there’s just something more compelling about it.
You know,
those who come to church thinking that they’re going to meet a bunch of Mother Teresa’s heart
and for a big surprise.
But even Mother Teresa wasn’t Mother Teresa.
And she had her stuff, too.
So I think the point of real connection is important.
Anything else?
Got 630.
So thank you for your time.
Thanks again, food providers.
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Appreciate the conversation.
And you all have a wonderful week.