1 Peter 3:15
When we think about evangelism it all starts with great reverence towards Christ in our hearts. But what is there in Him that we should revere?
Another apostle, Paul, talks elsewhere about the "Spirit of Christ" and that He was in the image of God but decided to take on Himself marred by the consequences of sin human nature in order to rejuvenate the humanity by laying the seed of faith inside the hearts. God endured contradiction against His nature of almighty and holy by allowing to become temporary subjected to what God does not usually experience. In His presence is "fullness of joy and always gladness". He suffered as a man, but He also conquered the evil as a God. On Jesus' eternal work on our behalf depends if we would be accepted in the presence of the holy and perfect morally and in any way God. If one has Jesus as an advocate he can trust securely that Jesus would make it work out well for him. If one doesn't have Jesus as defender and Saviour then there is no chance whatsoever to fare well before the high standard of righteousness and holiness required by God.
Therefore we "revere" or from Greek "sanctify" which means "to set apart" or "give special place" to Jesus in our hearts because we don't have and cannot reasonably have any other as real and meaningful hope for this life and eternity.
Our hope is not without a reason. We must have good reasons to believe what we do else it's completely arbitrary. If those reasons work for us then chances are they may work for other people too. How do we know whom they would work for? One obvious possibility is if somebody shows interest in our faith and "asks " us about why we hold it. They could be being nudged by the Spirit of God to seek the truth and we should be able to offer it to them. This perhaps happened to many of us once: we were seeking, we asked and were given to know the truth by somebody whom God used to bless us. Therefore we shouldn't hesitate to allow God to use us to, in turn, bless others too.
Our sharing of eternal hope should be with meekness, respect and reverence.
Yet we need to ask a legitimate question: "If we have faith and want to share it but we are not asked about it should we go ahead and do it anyway?". Here, often, many Christians stumble in two diametrically opposing each other blocks of prejudice.
One group are the so called "Bible thumping" believers who want to talk about their faith to anyone regardless whether this is wanted by the other side or not. The problem with this approach is that if the person opposite does not want to listen and clearly says so we go beyond the realm of respect for the person, meekness in the heart and reverence towards Jesus if we keep on pushing our case. That's also mostly counterproductive.
On another hand we should realise that there are many people who would want to hear our reasons but may never ask us first. Then we have the responsibility to broach the topic, to draw their attention to the larger than life question of their standing before God and then if they show lack of interest we should stop but if they ASK for more we should be able to give it to them.
We cannot assume that the initiative is always on the other side. They should display interest, but we might be used by God to awake it in them in the first place. Scripture shows that it goes both ways. Paul was asked but also was setting up the stage himself in order to get asked about the Gospel.
Setting the stage and being able to answer afterwards are sometime the two sides of the same evangelistic coin and we should be prepared to polish those sides well and be able to use them at any time.
One last thing is the obvious for some but controversial for others question of "Why sharing the Gospel and why conversion is God's goal?"
The second group of people think that others don't need to believe the Gospel but would nonetheless get saved so talking to someone with the purpose to help them come to God is superfluous. The first half of this sentence is true but it is about people, who never had the opportunity to hear a Spirit-filled, evangelistic, loving message of hope and salvation, and the Holy Spirit never put them before the clear choice for or against Jesus. Then and only then in their ignorance they will be judged by the conscience they have and how much they obeyed the measure of light already revealed to them.
Yet this does not mean that we shouldn't share the Gospel at all and not aim to show the "advantages" of the One who called us from " the darkness into His marvellous light". Throughout the New Testament we see the witness of Jesus and His apostles that all people everywhere need to hear the Good news that they can have fulfilled life with and through God in it and all have to repent and turn to Jesus if they are to be saved from the eternal separation from their Creator - the Author of all good things. That is the principle and the cases of ignorance and conscience-based judgement do not rule out the need of Jesus (they still get saved by Him in a misterious way) and more relevantly to our topic: these cases do not rule out the need to preach the Gospel to all who have interest to hear the Word of Life.
God wants to have ever more people who do know Him now and live lives of glorious worship towards Him and full victory over evil now.
Those who get saved through Jesus in a mysterious way without ever hearing the Good News about Him are people who, should they had the choice, they would have wanted to know and follow the truth. The prophets in OT were looking eagerly to see the glory of God in Jesus and couldn't see it in its fullness in their time but they desired to.
The Macedonian who asked Paul in the dream to come and help them could have been in theory saved by following his conscience but he was so exacerbated (representing all who do or would love God but never heard of Him) that he fervently asked for help. If we love those people we would tell everyone who asks or would want to ask.
Also, there is a clear warning that some people would be judged because they were told to say the truth to the perishing sinner but they didn't. Ezekiel was warned about this. When a man is violating his conscience as a constant practice then there is nothing left that could be done for him to save his soul but the Word of life preached and proclaimed in the hope that he would be turned and would want to hear it. The salvation through conscience without knowledge is a mystery and not the wide, straight path. Being a mystery it should be treated with caution. It could be regarded as last resort, a safety net for those deemed sincere by God but in no way this risk (it is a risk) should be taken to its extremity. The mysterious is best dealt with if acted upon as per the revealed Word. As we said, often people do not heed to their conscience and If we do not tell them and let the Word wrestle them out from the paws of the evil they may end up an eternal failure. And this could be our fault. Even if this is only theoretically possible, even if this is, say, only about being a spiritual failure in this life, we should be careful to obey God and see this world saved from its own inequity.
Dear God,
Thank you for saving the world and willing to use us, former sinners and unworthy before your high standard of holiness and purity, to help others know you better and thus be blessed.
Please, give us ability to share our faith effectively with love and reverence, and cleverness to be able to set the stage upon which the flame and fire of desire to know more about God would be stoked up.
Thank You for being with us.
In Jesus' Name!
Amen
No comments:
Post a Comment