Monday, December 24, 2012

If you only had one chance

I had a friend on Facebook ask me if I would put together a step-by-step instruction guide for witnessing to a lost person who I would only meet one time.  This is probably the most common form of intentional evangelism most Christians will participate in.  However, just because it is so common doesn't make it the best form.  So, I'd love to put together a step-by-step guide, but first I want to discuss the goal of evangelism and the best way to evangelize.  Most of us will meet many people throughout our lives, and a large number of those people will be brief encounters, so it is important for us to think about how we would share our faith in the short time we have.

I stated that I don't think that the best form of evangelism is witnessing to strangers.  I'll stand by that position and I'll explain why.  Most of the evangelism we see done in the New Testament (there just isn't quite as much in the Old) is done over time.  Yes, Paul went and argued with people, but usually he met with them multiple times in his discussions.  And yes, Jesus shared with people, but usually he stayed with them for an extended time in talking with them.  One time meetings with strangers robs evangelism of one of its most important aspects: the ability to test the truth by experience.

The goal of the Christian should be to witness to others.  The proclamation of the gospel is our goal, and that means we need to live lives that prove the gospel to be true.  While no one will know that we are following Christ if we never tell them, at the same time know one will know what it means to follow Christ if we don't show them.  Words are easy, a Lothario can woo a woman with empty words, but an Orpheus will travel the very halls of death to win back his bride.  If our goal is to win others to Christ, then our lives must reflect the love of our savior that our words proclaim.

Unfortunately in short, one-off meetings you will get a very limited amount of time to prove your character an thus demonstrate the love you have for Christ.  You may have opportunity to tell someone of Christ, which is of utmost importance, but they will have little time to form a judgment about the truth of what you say from that meeting.  This is the unfortunate limitation in all brief encounters.  You cannot develop a relationship with commonality, and you cannot establish commonality without time and shared experience.  Therefore, while brief and fleeting meetings are altogether common, and present opportunities to share the gospel, they are also limited in what can be accomplished.

Okay, so brief opportunities aren't the best, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't use every opportunity we have to share Christ.  So what should we do with the brief opportunities we have?  Our answer can be broken down into three major steps that each have smaller parts within those steps.

The first thing we must do is be prepared for the encounter.  Peter tells us to be prepared at all times to give a defense for the hope within us.  Specifically in 1 Peter 3:15-16 we read, "but in your hearts honor Christ the Lord as holy, always being prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you; yet do it with gentleness and respect, having a good conscience, so that when you are slandered, those who revile your good behavior in Christ may be put to shame."  Obviously this passage expects that there should be some relationship between those asking and those giving a defense, for it expects that those who accuse should also have the ability to judge our character, but there are still parts of the passage that can be applied to the opportunity of a onetime encounter.

The first step of witnessing to anyone, whether someone you have a relationship with or someone you don't know is to be prepared to actually witness.  Therefore our first part of witnessing must begin with preparation.  That preparation starts with what Peter tells us here: honoring Christ the Lord as holy.  The use of the term "heart" indicates not that Peter is talking to us about an emotional commitment, but rather a whole person commitment.  Our whole person must be devoted to the holiness of Christ our Lord.  This is the beginning of our preparation to witness.

You may know all the right words, you may know facts and figures, you may even have all the tracts and tools you want at hand, but despite all of that sin in your life can be a hindrance to your opportunity to share Christ.  The encounter you have with a bank teller right after you get done rudely cutting others off in line or cursing under your breath because you just realized you are going to get back to work late after lunch will likely not be an opportunity for you to share Christ, because your failure to live as though in the presence of a holy God have just put the lie to everything you might say.  But, even more insidiously, sin in your life that happened previously, that you are still struggling with, can be a hindrance in that you may allow the feelings of guilt and shame prevent you from speaking the truth of Christ.  I don't hear note that unresolved sin can make your words ineffective because Paul said that the only thing that mattered to him was that Christ was preached regardless of the reasons for why people were preaching Christ.  Thus I believe that the Word of God will be faithful to complete the task God has set for it, but that an unfaithful witness harms us in other ways that hinder the gospel's affects.

So, if we begin with living our lives as though we truly are living for a Holy Christ, then what should the next step of preparation be?  Here the answer must be knowledge of the Word of God.  We must be students of the Word so that we can proclaim that Word.  How can you tell others of the good news of Christ if you don't know it yourself?

You may say that you can simply tell others of what Christ has done for you, but the fact is that if you don't know the Word, you don't know what Christ has done.  If you are unfamiliar with the condemnation of the Law, then you cannot fathom the mercy of God's grace.  If you do not see yourself as a sinner who was due the righteous wrath of a holy God, then you will not be able to share what exactly you have been spared from for the sake of Christ.  One of the most familiar illustrations of Christ was the idea of removing the plank in your own eye before you could remove the saw dust from the eye of your brother.  If you have not seen the reality of your sin in the mirror of Scripture, so as to remove that plank from your eye, then how can you look to the speck in someone else's eye and tell them how to remove it?  Knowledge of Scripture is not ancillary to witnessing, rather it is crucial.

On top of this, we read that the gospel of Christ is what saves us.  But what is the gospel?  The gospel is the message of Christ, the good news, that was passed down in the bible.  The gospel is that God is holy and made all things for his glory, but that man rebelled against God and so brought sin and death into the world.  Because all men are sinners, all men deserve to die, because we have all rebelled against the one true, holy, and perfect God.  Yet God, in his love for us, sent his Son, the Lord Jesus, to live a perfect life of holiness to God and then to take sin upon himself by dying upon the cross.  Because the cross was the fulfillment of the curse of sin, and because that sin was born by Christ, all those who come to Christ can have their sins forgiven in him.  This forgiveness was proven by the fact that Christ raised from the dead and so conquered death that reigns through sin.  Now, all those who trust in Christ are saved by the power of his blood cleansing us from sin.

This is a more detailed explanation than is perhaps necessary, but I wanted to at least briefly touch on a lot of the issues that the gospel contains.  But, understanding the fullness of this gospel means understanding Scripture.  If you are not a student of Scripture, while you may be able to tell people that there is forgiveness to be found in Jesus, you will not really be able to understand what that means.  That means you will fall short of sharing the full gospel and will only be able to share part of it.  You don't have to share a detailed step-by-step explanation of the gospel that starts in Genesis, goes through the Mosaic Covenant, explains the outworking of God's plan through the prophets, and gives a detailed account of how wisdom is found in God.  But, you do need to know the basics of the faith and at least a general understanding of what Scripture has proclaimed about the forgiveness found in Christ; and that knowledge can only be found in Scripture.

So then, to be prepared to share we must live lives of holiness and know Scripture.  But, there is one more thing we must do as well.  We must be trusting God.  This goes with the first point and is sharpened by the reading we do in the second point, but it also stands apart from the other two.  Trusting God means being confident in what we say, being in prayer on a regular basis, and being prepared that whatever happens, God is the one in control of the situation.

If we are not in regular prayer then we will be weak when opportunities to share come to us.  Prayer is part of our faith.  It is something we are commanded to do and it is the conduit through which God chooses to put his power into effect.  Christ, in John 14 and 16, commands us to pray to the Father so that he will glorify himself in accomplishing those prayer.  The goal of these prayers, as shown in these sections (I didn't link verses because you really should read both chapters to get the context) is not for us, but that we might be seeking to bring glory to God.  Thus our prayer lives should be about opportunities to glorify God, and so should include the witnessing we do and seeking that God would work his power through our witnessing.  If we are witnessing, but are not in prayer, then we are missing part of the point: The Father delights to use our prayers as a way to bring glory to the Son, whose body we are on earth.

If we are living lives of holiness as Peter commands, studying Scripture as we ought to, and being in regular prayer to God, then we can expect that God will glorify himself through us when the opportunities for us to share our faith arise.  If we are doing all of this, not as some simple "3 steps to prepare to witness" but as a matter of our true lives and who we are, then we will be prepared for the opportunities as they arise.  This is the final step of trusting in God, of actually taking the opportunity when it comes, of putting aside doubts and hindrances, and of being bold in proclaiming Christ in every opportunity we get, and it won't be forced or awkward, but it will be the natural outflow of a love born of understanding the great kindness God has shown us.

This is the first part of witnessing, just being prepared to be a witness.  It is actually the hardest part because it requires a full life commitment to the holiness of Christ and a devotion to the Word of God as being able to accomplish his will.  The second part, which will be the next post, is easier, though it is often the part we make the hardest.  The second part is the actual witnessing, and the third is what we do afterwords.  But, if we glorify Christ in our lives, then telling others about him in those "chance" encounters becomes far easier than many of us think.

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