From the Grass to God

Nick Horton

“Your lawn is looking great!”

“Thanks. I put fertilizer with weed killer on it once a week. Bagging the brass from the mower also helps it look clean. Plus watering. It’s a lot of work.”

“Man, yeah. Definitely. So… you know… Jesus mows the grass.. in Heaven?”

Whoa. Whoa. Whoa.

I’m sure you cringed reading that. I did. It’s an example of both an awkward attempt to have a gospel conversation with someone, a neighbor in this case, or the scenario we play out in our head as we considering talking about the gospel with someone. I think many of us struggle with moving the conversation from wherever it is to God. We think it’s going to be difficult which produces fear, uncertainty, and doubt. The rest of the conversation has this mental battle raging in our heads and we’re barely present in the moment and in the end don’t talk about God and leave feeling defeated or as if we have failed.

It doesn’t have to be that way. As in most things we need to have a plan to ensure success. Please understand, success is not narrowly defined as someone coming to Christ. That is what we hope for, but that is not success. Success implies we did it, and friends we don’t do it. Conversion is wholly of God. Success is sharing the gospel no matter the outcome.

Given that, here are a few things to remember and put in action as you seek to share Christ in your everyday conversations.

  1. You’re a Christian, so talk like one.
    Think about how you talk to folks at church. Think about the topics of conversation and the words you use. Does God permeate those conversations? Things like, “Praise God!,” “I prayed about it,” and “How can I pray for you?” If that’s who you are, why does no mention of God escape your mouth outside of conversations with other Christians? Your heart is not thus divided. Friends, neighbors, etc. should not initially find out you believe in God when you share the gospel with them (unless you’re a new convert!) They ought to know you love God because mentions of him constantly come from your lips. Do not be ashamed to talk of your Savior.
  2. You don’t have to share the gospel in every conversation.
    This will get some push back so let’s clarify. If you want to share the gospel with everyone you talk to, go for it. God bless you! What I mean is if this person is someone you have known or will know for a while, let your faith come out naturally. However, have a plan. Think about how each time you talk to someone you want to tell them something new of God. This will lead to a conversation in which the gospel is quite natural to share. IE, the differences between who you are now and who you were. Why you have hope. Why your outlook is different. Why you don’t gossip. Why you have joy. etc.
  3. The gospel is good news, not an argument.
    I spent the first 27 years of my life as a bitter opponent to the gospel; an outspoken and argumentative atheist. Arguments never won anyone over. As Dr. George Robinson said recently “You might win the argument but lose the person.” Apologetics are great and they have their place. We ought to give a reason why we have hope, but that reason had better be Jesus Christ and his gospel and not the Kalam Cosmological Argument. Arguments need opponents. They need winners and losers. Let’s not be adversaries to people, but be their friend in Christ encouraging them to believe the gospel.
  4. You don’t need all the answers.
    You’re not God. This dovetails with #3. It’s OK to say “I don’t know.” People cannot argue with how God has changed you. If they do, that’s not a discussion worth having as they’re essentially calling you a liar. Let that go. Encourage them to read the Bible for themselves. Invite them to a Bible study. We’re just workers in God’s vineyard. We encourage growth but we don’t cause it.
  5. Let conversations flow naturally.
    If someone is having a really tough time perhaps sharing scripture is helpful for that situation. Christ also calls us to rejoice with those who rejoice (Praise God friend! I’m glad to hear this!) and weep with those weep. (I’m so deeply sorry. I will pray for you. I am here for you and will listen.) This is a restatement of #1. If you don’t want conversations to be awkward, stay on topic. You know how to talk!

A short encouragement to this short list. Be a friend of sinners. People are not just your evangelism targets so you can notch your belt. That’s centered on you. They are people who need to be reconciled to God, for the glory of God. That’s God centered. When we come to faith we often slowly cut off all non-Christian friends we have as we reorient our lives around Church. This is natural, but we also ought to fight to keep those non-Christian friends. They’re still people, they still need God, and you might be the only Christian they know who will share the gospel with them.

I first heard the gospel at age 27 from Chuck. God used that to convert me. Chuck was the first person who shared a biblical gospel with me. Don’t ever assume someone has heard the good news. We’re here to herald our King. He is good! He is worthy of all fame. Do not be ashamed, think about how your conversations will start to be different and put it in practice!

Today in Blogworld 06.02.16

Mike Leake

Should Seminaries Require So Many Academic Papers?

Amen. I believe the ability to articulate your thoughts is helpful for training pastors but I appreciate what John Frame says here.

The Day I Dug My Daughter’s Grave

The title alone makes me want to weep. Wow.

The Backside Blessings of Blogging

This is true.

How to Evangelize Professing Believers

Which this wasn’t a thing but it is—and I believe this advice is sound and helpful.

This guy is a pretty good Disney impressionist. Here he is singing Adele’s “Hello”:

That Time I Was a Middle-Aged Woman

Mike Leake

For the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and of spirit, of joints and of marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart. And no creature is hidden from his sight, but all are naked and exposed to the eyes of him to whom we must give account. (Hebrews 4:12-13 ESV)

On occasion these fun little links for bloggers will float through social media. One particular site promised to identify the age and gender and a few other characteristics of the person writing the blog. I thought it’d be fun to put in my web address and see how close it could get to guessing details of my life.

Now, my birth certificate tells me that I’m a man in my thirties. According to this website, however, I’m actually a middle-aged woman—at least based upon the few articles that I had submitted to their handy little algorithm. I thought it’d be fun to try a few more and I found that my writing must be all over the place. At one point it had me as a teenage boy. More times than not it did correctly identify me as a man in his thirties.

Given my propensity to have delusions of grandeur I imagined what it would be like for someone one hundred years later going through my writings. When they went through the rigors of source criticism and textual criticism I’m confident that some dolt somewhere would postulate that this blog was actually written by a host of people—one being that jaded middle-aged woman and another the highly emotional teenage boy. The main author—perhaps the compiler of it all—would be that thirty year old man.

Of course this whole thing is folly. I’m not—nor ever will be a middle-aged woman. My writings as a teen are happily housed in tattered notebooks hidden from the world. I take full credit—and all the shame that accompanies it—for my writing on this blog.

—

There is a branch of biblical scholarship (scholarship being a fancy word for denying-orthodoxy-ship) which liked to go back through the Bible and discover the various different authors and sources of the gospel of Matthew. Rather than believe that a guy named Matthew—through actually living with Jesus—wrote a gospel account, they believe multiple authors contributed and that someone named Matthew (Lord only knows at what date), sat down and put this whole thing together. Once the church got their slimy hands on it and it got redacted and redacted we eventually have what we now know as the gospel of Matthew.

And they’ll do this with every book of the Bible. Making claims like Paul didn’t actually write Ephesians, and things of that sort.

Why do they believe this?

One reason is because sometimes a letter like Ephesians just doesn’t sound like Paul. Perhaps it sounds a bit more like a middle-aged woman. And so Paul cannot be the author. It has to be someone else, we are told.

But I’ve been on the receiving end of this silliness. It was an innocent little program but it used much of the same methods of source critics looking at the Bible. How did it get the whole thing wrong? Why did I at times write like a middle aged woman and at other times a teenage boy? Because I’m a complex human being—just like every other person. I’m complex emotionally. I’m living. I’m active. I say different things different ways at different times.

So is it not possible that the living God might communicate similarly? Is it possible that rather than seeing multiple authors in the gospel of Matthew that we are just seeing a complex and multi-faceted God? Maybe the God’s Word isn’t something static and lifeless. Maybe it can’t be put under a microscope and analyzed the same way we can determine which printing of Shakespeare’s first folio we’ve got in our hands. Maybe it’s a bit more living and active than that.

I know this isn’t all that can be said about source criticism. And it really is a bit simplistic—but maybe I’m writing as a college-aged simpleton this day. All I’m really trying to say is that we don’t necessarily have to jump to the conclusions that source critics would force us to jump to. Just because it “doesn’t sound like Paul” doesn’t mean it necessarily isn’t. A living Bible demands a bit more of us.

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Photo source: here (I imagine this is how that site viewed me as a middle-aged woman)

Today in Blogworld 06.01.16

Mike Leake

7 Ways Parents Unfairly Provoke Our Children

Scripture calls us not to provoke our children to anger. Here are seven ways that can happen.

Martin Luther On Depression

It’s always intriguing to me to read what those a few hundred years ago thought about depression. I really think we suffer from chronological snubbery on this point—I don’t think they are as backwards as we often view them. I’m convinced some of our medical treatments today are about as helpful as giving some “a good bleeding”.

10 Ways to Grow Your Marriage While Having Young Kids

These are helpful.

Awkward Gospel Conversations

This was both encouraging and convicting.

This is a pretty good prank…(Note: he doesn’t even work at the store):