Monday, July 17, 2006

Evangelism and the Glory of God

I was at a meeting the other day where we heard a recording of a prominent local Christian speaker give five reasons why he sometimes "bottled it" when it came to talking to people about Jesus. His reasons were as follows:

  • afraid of what people think of us
  • ashamed of the gospel
  • failing to grasp the immensity of Jesus' love
  • forgetting how serious the gospel really is
  • not being that bothered about God's glory

I was thinking about this, and I think that all five of those stem from the same root cause, which is that we do not sufficiently see God's glory, which is largely because we do not sufficiently seek to see God's glory.

If we come to understand something of how amazing Jesus is, then we won't care what other people think of us compared to how faithful we are being to him; we won't be ashamed of the gospel and will see how serious is it because we see that it is all about coming to know the surpassing greatness of Jesus; we will be seeing the immensity of his love better; we will be passionate about God's glory and seeking to see him more and more glorified in us.

If we think Christianity is all about being part of a club, we might introduce others. If we think it is all about how to be forgiven and get to heaven, then logically we should tell others (but people aren't that logical). If we see rightly that it is about how to know the surpassingly amazing God, then we might actually be sufficiently passionate about that to tell people.

2 comments:

Simon said...

I have found the Truth. Are you ready to step through the door to Freedom?

John said...

The problem of course is that it's kind of hard to tell whether something you've found is truth or just caused by too many twiglets.