One Plus One Part 1

One Plus One Series

A short two series on the need to make friends and engage with our culture relevantly with the Gospel.

Romans 1:16: For I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ, for it is the power of God to salvation for everyone who believes…

One of the greatest challenges we have a Christians is to make, cultivate and maintain friendships with  those who don’t believe.

When we have our outreach events, Christmas, Panto, Easter, Alpha and to other things we struggle to think who we can bring.  This is because we can become increasingly insular within the culture and activities of Life Church.

It can seem as though our circle of Christian friends (our brothers and sisters in Christ) exists at the expense of our non-Christian friends.  

We have to break through a few in-built opinions that we have as believers that prevent us from sharing our faith.  What I am going to share with you today is not criticism but rather a reflection for the reasons I have used in the past to put off sharing my faith.  Let me address these first and then we’ll look at an exciting initiative that might help us next week called OneplusOne..

Problem number one: I’m not an evangelist!  

This is where many of us struggle.  We think that to share our faith we have to be an evangelist, aka Billy Graham.  We think we have to have a silver-edged tongue, a way with words, an unusual spirituality to be able to speak a Holy Spirit empowered word in a specific way to bring about instant repentance of our friends.

If you are not an evangelist, congratulations!  They can be quite weird [sometimes].  Here’s the good news - there are not many evangelists in churches!  They are only mentioned three times in the New Testament.

Acts 21:8: Leaving the next day, we reached Caesarea and stayed at the house of Philip the evangelist, one of the Seven.

In this case the ministry of evangelism is attributed to a person. In other words, everyone know that seas what Philip was.

2 Timothy 4:5: But you, keep your head in all situations, endure hardship, do the work of an evangelist, discharge all the duties of your ministry.

In this instance Timothy is told, as a church leader, to preach the gospel.  

Evangelists are mentioned in Ephesians 4:11-13 as part of the five-fold ministry:

Ephesians 4:11-13: So Christ himself gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the pastors and teachers, 12 to equip his people for works of service, so that the body of Christ may be built up 13 until we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God and become mature, attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ.

Here evangelists are partnered with pastors, teachers, apostles and prophets in a role to help those in the church to spread the gospel.  This goes against our picture of evangelist who comes into church, preaches at some meetings, and leaves a bunch of converts.  

It seems that the NT expectation was for evangelists to equip those in the church to share their faith, to help believers reach maturity, to equip people.

So we may not be evangelists!  But the more general word used for every Christian would be witnesses.

Acts 1:8: But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.’

Acts 2:32: God has raised this Jesus to life, and we are all witnesses of it.

A witness is someone who has seen something and is called to give evidence of this.  This is why we use words like ‘witnessing’ and ‘testimony’ to describe the sharing of our faith.

Here is the point: if we have given our lives to Jesus then we have a testimony of what we have witnessed Jesus do in our lives.  We have a story.  We have an account of God’s love in our lives!  

Problem number two: my story is not exciting!

We live in a Christian bubble sometimes where we think the only good testimony is the exciting one!

We have been nurtured on the Damascus Road experience of Paul, and believe that this is the norm.  

We have been reared and encouraged by the incredible biographies of believers who were once drug users, prostitutes, alcoholics, gang leaders et al, who meet Jesus, give up their lifestyles, move across the world and start amazing ministries.

Those are great testimonies.  ALL testimonies are exciting!

Timothy’s testimony in the Bible is quite ‘normal’ in comparison.  He is just someone in the church (Acts 16:1-4).  He is a third generation believer (2 Timothy 1:5).  His testimony would be: I grew up around Christians and my mum and granny led me to Jesus!

Doesn't sound very ‘sexy.’  There is tremendous power in everyone’s testimony.  All testimonies would have these things in common:

There was a time when I didn’t know God.

I was once separated from God by my sin, my wrongdoing.

I accepted the offer of forgiveness.

My life has changed from the inside out.

My friends, do not disparage or belittle the testimony you have in Jesus.  It is good news!

Problem number three: I will lose my friends if I witness to them.

This is basically a lie from the enemy.  People will know that there is something different about you - as much as you try to hide it.

Our friends will hold our friendship dear if we value them for who they are, created in the image of God (Gen 1:27).  That means that everyone has a value before God because they carry something of God’s indelible likeness about them.  They are not-yet-children-of-God (John 1:12).

Some friends desert us when we become Christians; sometimes they will deliberately act in a way that we know is not healthy to be around.  That does’t mean that we are never to have non-Christian friends.

Very few people have lifelong friendships with lots of people.  Most people will have some friends who are ‘lifers’ who you can pick with at any time, no matter how long you have been apart.

In the course of life it is normal for some people to move in and out of our lives, and for us to move in and out of theirs.  People move, change employer, change social circles.  That’s normal.

True friends won’t be upset if you invite them to something important to you. 

Problem number four: my friends won’t come anyway.

The wonderful thing about the Christian faith is that it is a free choice.  We do not have anything quite like Sharia Law - where religion is forced upon the populous.  Sadly, many things have been done in the name of Christendom but actually these were connected more with politics.

When people say that organised religion is the cause of most wars I chuckle for two reasons:

To call Christianity as a worldwide movement ‘organised’ is hilarious.  God tends to move in spite of us!  Henry Ford once remarked: “There must be some truth within the church, for no group organised so badly could survive for so long if it were not so.”

Relatively speaking very few wars have been genuinely connected with religion:

“An interesting source of truth on the matter is Philip and Axelrod’s three-volume Encyclopedia of Wars, which chronicles some 1,763 wars that have been waged over the course of human history.  Of those wars, the authors categorise 123 as being religious in nature, which is an astonishingly low 6.98% of all wars. However, when one subtracts out those waged in the name of Islam (66), the percentage is cut by more than half to 3.23%.

That means that all faiths combined – minus Islam – have caused less than 4% of all of humanity’s wars and violent conflicts.  Further, they played no motivating role in the major wars that have resulted in the most loss of life…

The truth is, non-religious motivations and naturalistic philosophies bear the blame for nearly all of humankind’s wars.  Lives lost during religious conflict pales in comparison to those experienced during the regimes who wanted nothing to do with the idea of God…” (source: http://carm.org/religion-cause-war)

Most people who ‘reject’ Christ have never had the opportunity to do so; they are rejecting church for they see this as irrelevant.

They will only see the relevance of church and the live that God offers if they see and hear the difference in us!  Many will not have even considered that Christianity is relevant until they had met you!  

By not inviting them to outreach events we are making the decision for them.  We shouldn’t do that!  They may not come along to something.  They might though!

Problem number five: I don’t need words, my actions speak for me.

The idea that we don’t need to speak the gospel is a twisted misunderstanding of St. Francis of Assisi’s famous and oft quoted phrase: “Preach the Gospel at all times and if necessary, use words.”

How I wish this were universally true!  How I wish it were that easy!  How I pray that we were all so ‘salty’ and so ‘bright’ that people would repent just by us being present (Matthew 5: 13).

St. Francis of Assisi had a reason for saying this.  He was wealthy and inherited a fortune from his family.  When he was converted he turned is back on this wealth, set up a monastery on a hillside above a community (who all knew the poor lifestyle he was following was in contrast to the luxury he could live in), and becomes part of an poor community that operated in the town.  He was so DIFFERENT to everyone else that people couldn’t deny the truth of the gospel displayed through his acts of kindness.

Friends, please go and sell everything, join a commune and work tirelessly for the betterment of people.  You’ll win some for Jesus to be sure!

The problem with this attitude of “I’ll show people through my actions” is that often (sadly) the church looks no different from the community in which it lives!

We have all heard that punchy slogan: “we’re in the world but of the world.”

Based on the words of Jesus:

John 17:15-19: My prayer is not that you take them out of the world but that you protect them from the evil one. 16 They are not of the world, even as I am not of it. 17 Sanctify them by the truth; your word is truth. 18 As you sent me into the world, I have sent them into the world. 19 For them I sanctify myself, that they too may be truly sanctified.

There are plenty of supporting Scriptures for this too.  

What we are being told is that we are to live differently to the rest of the world.  We are being sanctified in the midst of it.  Why?  So that the world see the difference.

Friends why would our friends want to give their lives to Jesus when WE treat our faith as just another thing that slots into our busy lives!  Trust me our friends are busy enough without adding more activity to it.

This is where our testimony comes to the forefront.  Notice that Jesus, who did miracles, healed the sick, and generally oozed the Holy Spirit everywhere He went, still used words!

We don’t use words because we are scared that people might actually takes at our words and then examine our lives by what we say!

Romans 10:14: How, then, can they call on the one they have not believed in? And how can they believe in the one of whom they have not heard? And how can they hear without someone preaching to them?

People still need to hear the Good News as well as see it.

1 Peter 3:15: But in your hearts revere Christ as Lord. Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have. But do this with gentleness and respect.

Wrapping this up:

OK, so I’ve highlighted the problem. To be honest that doesn’t take much anointing of forethought.  I ma stating the obvious.

Our biggest problem is this: we don’t know many non-Christians, and those we do, we don’t like much so we don't really want to spend time with them.

Next week I am going to be unpacking a simple initiative to help us all make friends.  

Friendships for friendships sake, not to treat people as gospel-fodder.