Introduction
During September we have been looking at a general theme of sharing our faith. We looked, at the start of the month, at what our faith actually is and said we could summarise the start of the Christian journey as an understanding of four spiritual laws:
1.
God loves us and wants the best for us.
2. Human sin keeps us apart from God's love and purpose.
3. God sought us out in the person of Jesus and died so our sins could be
forgiven.
4. We have to ask God to forgive us and Jesus to come in as Lord of our lives.
This is the Christian faith in a nutshell and everything else we do stems from these four spiritual truths.
Last week we looked at blocks to sharing our faith and said most of these blocks were to do with fear, fear of rejection, fear of wasting time, fear of not knowing the right answers and fear of getting involved in the cosmic battle between good and evil. We said that God's perfect love drives out all fear and we need to take some responsibility for claiming that love.
This week we are going to end our series and look at different approaches to sharing our faith. Will you pray with me?
Loving
God,
Help us understand the many different ways we can share our faith in you,
Help us to leave behind our fears so that your love consumes us
And reaches out from us to our people,
So that they may be saved.
Amen.
There are many different styles we can use when sharing our faith depending on our own temperament and the situations we find ourselves in. We find all these styles in the Scriptures.
Confrontational
The first style we are going to look at is a confrontational style. This was the style used by St Peter on the day of Pentecost.
"People of Israel, listen to this. Jesus of Nazareth was a man accredited by God to you by miracles, wonders and signs, which God did among you through him, as you yourselves know. This man was handed over to you by God's set purpose and foreknowledge, and you, with the help of wicked people, put him to death by healing him to the cross. But God raised him from the dead, freeing him from the agony of death, because it was impossible for death to keep its hold on him."
The day before Peter made this speech he, with the other disciples, had been hiding away from the authorities scared he would be arrested and put on trial. He knew of the resurrection but was still timed. On the day of Pentecost he was filled with the fire and passion of the God as he was bathed in the Holy Spirit and was filled with power.
However, his words are not ones of comfort! He tells the crowds that God had sent Jesus to them, that God had proved Jesus was from God by the signs and wonders he performed and he tells them that they know this! He goes on to tell them that they were partly responsible for having Jesus handed over to death. This man has not been on a course about how to win friends and influence people!
We see this type of confrontational preaching in the ministries of many of the TV evangelists. In the people who go round preaching on the streets and often it the smug, self righteous platitudes of people who wish to convert us. I get a couple of emails a month from people who feel themselves burdened by the Lord to tell me I am hell bound and this is, it must be said a confrontational style!
Yet on the day of Pentecost, Luke tells us, that over 3,000 people were converted which must have made St Peter's sermon one of the most effective in the history of the Church. So why did his style work then but it turns people off now?
The answer, is, I think, something to do with being sensitive to the leading of the Holy Spirit. Peter was not always confrontational - though his personality was well suited to this type of approach. But on that day he knew that he just had to tell it like it is.
Sometimes we have to tell it like it is too. Sometimes the message of the gospel is such that we have to speak up and be confrontational. If we write to a bishop to protest about how our people are treated or spoken about, we may have to tell it like it is. If I argue with an anti-gay evangelist on television I will be confrontational - not necessarily in my tone, but in what I say. I remember once asking an evangelical vicar if he ate turkey for Christmas. He rather cautiously said "yes" so I asked him why he didn't follow the Bible when Acts 15 says that we should abstain from meat which has been strangled. Then of course he had to explain why he saw that passage in a different way. This made a nice change from me doing that with the gay passages! Afterwards he complained bitterly that I had been unfair - but I don't think I was. If he presumes to say that we don't follow the Bible it is only fair to point out that he doesn't either!!
Sometimes a confrontational approach is needed, but it is not the only way of sharing our faith and we must only use this way if we really feel the leading of the Holy Spirit. Otherwise, we will put off more people than we attract.
Intellectual
Sometimes we might want to use a more intellectual approach to sharing our faith. Paul was often like this, he used argument, persuasion and logic to convince people of the truth of his approach. The most famous example of this was when he preached to the Athenians on Mars Hill.
"Paul stood up in the meeting and said: 'People of Athens! I see that in every way you are very religious. For as I walked around and looked carefully at your objects of worship, I even found an altar with this inscription: To An Unknown God. Now what you worship as something unknown I am going to proclaim to you. The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of Heaven and Earth and does not live in temples built by hands. And he is not served by human hands, as if he needed anything, because he himself gives all of us life and breath and everything else. "
Paul used the culture he found to make links with the living God who was already at work within that culture. He used his intelligence, his logic, his reasoning.
Sometimes this works very well as we try to convince another person that what we believe has some logic within it. Sometimes this is most effective when talking to someone from a cult or a sub-Christian group which bases its theology partly on the Bible. If the other person accepts the same terms of reference, then intellect and logic can be useful.
However, more often than not faith is not logical! It is not logical to assert that I am better off giving 10% of my money to God - yet I am! I have more money for myself if I give 10% of it to God - though its all God's really. Often the things of faith are not logical. Also faith is more than an intellectual assent to a set of ideas.
Again, this way of sharing our faith is useful in some circumstances and not in others. Sensitivity to the leading of the Holy Spirit is what makes us effective.
Testimonial
One of the most powerful forms of sharing our faith is to tell our stories. When we share our own stories, or journeys of faith, we invite people to see directly what Jesus has done for us. This is most powerful if we are already in a friendship with the person we are sharing with. An example of this is found in St John's Gospel:
As Jesus went along, he saw a man blind from birth. His disciples asked him, "Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?" "Neither this man nor his parents sinned," said Jesus, "but this happened so that the work of God might be displayed in his life. As long as it is day, we must do the work of him who sent me. Night is coming, when no one can work. While I am in the world, I am the light of the world." Having said this, he spit on the ground, made some mud with the saliva, and put it on the man's eyes. "Go," he told him, "wash in the Pool of Siloam". So the man went and washed, and came home seeing. His neighbours and those who had formerly seen him begging asked, "Isn't this the same man who used to sit and beg?" Some claimed that he was. Others said, "No, he only looks like him." But he himself insisted, "I am the man." "How then were your eyes opened?" they demanded. He replied, "The man they call Jesus made some mud and put it on my eyes. He told me to go to Siloam and wash. So I went and washed, and then I could see." "Where is this man?" they asked him. "I don't know," he said. They brought to the Pharisees the man who had been blind. Now the day on which Jesus had made the mud and opened the man's eyes was a Sabbath. Therefore the Pharisees also asked him how he had received his sight. "He put mud on my eyes," the man replied, "and I washed, and now I see." Some of the Pharisees said, "This man is not from God, for he does not keep the Sabbath." But others asked, "How can a sinner do such miraculous signs?" So they were divided. Finally they turned again to the blind man, "What have you to say about him? It was your eyes he opened." The man replied, "He is a prophet." The Jews still did not believe that he had been blind and had received his sight until they sent for the man's parents. "Is this your son?" they asked. "Is this the one you say was born blind? How is it that now he can see?" "We know he is our son," the parents answered, "and we know he was born blind. But how he can see now, or who opened his eyes, we don't know. Ask him. He is of age; he will speak for himself." His parents said this because they were afraid of the Jews, for already the Jews had decided that anyone who acknowledged that Jesus was the Christ would be put out of the synagogue. That was why his parents said, "He is of age; ask him." A second time they summoned the man who had been blind. "Give glory to God," they said. "We know this man is a sinner." He replied, "Whether he is a sinner or not, I don't know. One thing I do know. I was blind but now I see!"
The man didn't want to get into the power struggles, he didn't understand the theology all he did was share what Jesus had done for him. Provided we can do this in a sensitive way, which listens and respects the journey of the one we share with this is perhaps the most powerful way of sharing our faith. You can see some other examples of journeys of faith on our website as some of our community have told the world what Jesus has done for them.
Conclusion
There are as many ways of sharing your faith as there are people of faith. These three, confrontational, intellectual or testimonial are three. Jesus own method was relationship much of the time as he taught the disciples and the women who travelled with him. Sometimes the way we do it is invitational as we invite people along to church and let the church do the work. All these are ways of sharing our faith. The method in itself does not matter - so long as we are sensitive to the leading of the Holy Spirit. What matters is that, no matter in which way we do it, that we actually get serious about sharing our faith with those around us, those we live with, those we work with, those we study with and those we play with. So that our people might be saved.
This
sermon was first preached in the Metropolitan Community Church of Manchester.
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