I’m going to start sharing some thoughts from a book I’m going through by Doug Pollock called God Space. This blog is almost a pre-cursor to some deeper context I hope to dive into. There seems to be a bit of a theme to my posts now. Not going to apologize for it, because I’ve figured 1 thing out in my 35 years of life… that’s it… 1. If you miss everything else, catch this. Jesus died on a cross for our sins, rose from the dead so that we can have eternal life with Him and now here we are, stumbling our way through life thousands of years later trying to figure out what that really means to us in modern-day America.
Ultimately, I think it’s pretty simple… know the truth about who He is, grow in a relationship with Him and go tell others about Him (thank you Redemption Chapel for that one). Does simple mean there won’t be any excitement or challenges? Of course not. Does it mean that I don’t value other things in my life like my family, friends, job, etc? Of course I do. But all of that takes a back seat to the fact that there is 1 true King and we are living in his Kingdom, so we better figure out what that means in our lives.
I’ve said enough about that in previous posts, so I wanted to spend a little time on this one talking about what we do with that information. It’s so easy to get caught up in the craziness of life that we forget every interaction we have could be an opportunity to make an impact in God’s Kingdom. That could be a positive impact or a negative one. When it comes to those conversations, it’s easy to get locked in on the “how” and the “who” and the “when.” Instead of focusing on the most important thing… “the why,” which is because God has called us to share His Word. But I don’t think enough Christians think about that for a few different reasons…
- Life gets busy and you put it on the back burner
- You think it may hurt some of your relationships
- You’re not confident in what the Bible has to say
- You think you may screw up and say something you shouldn’t
- You’re embarrassed
These are just a few from the top of my head. If you fall in line with any of these, I will ask you one question in the form of an analogy. If there was a flesh-eating disease killing millions of people and you had the antidote to cure them; would you keep it to yourself? Would you be too embarrassed to tell people about it? Would life get too busy where you wouldn’t step in and save those people? Heck no! You’d do everything possible to get them that antidote. The good news is that we have the antidote and it’s written down, and yet, we still won’t take any opportunity possible to share it.
Don’t get me wrong, I know it’s not that simple. If someone had a flesh-eating disease and you had the antidote; they would be all over you trying to get it. But that’s the attitude we want people to have when they are around us. Our lives should be different and show that we are living for a life bigger than the broken world we’re living in. That will take prayer on our end and many, many conversations and listening before it will happen in most cases. We are not called to convert people. We are called to listen and care for others and show God’s love as much as possible. And then maybe, God creates an opening to share that good news. But it’s on us to pray for those opportunities and be confident in the fact that we don’t have to have all the answers. We can trust God to take control from there.
I’m looking forward to diving a bit deeper into this in future blog posts. If you have any specific questions prior to then (because it might be a while), hit me up on social media and we can get connected. For now, start praying for those opportunities, and pray God gives you the confidence to just listen.