5 Reasons You Should Share Your Faith in Christ This Year

It's a new year and the events of the past year demonstrate how desperately people need the peace of mind and heart that come from the God Who has revealed Himself in Jesus Christ.

That means that the Church, the people who daily engage in battle against their own sin and entrust their lives to Jesus Christ, their God, need to get busy sharing their faith in Christ.

Not convinced? Here are five reasons you should share your faith in Christ in 2013.

1. Jesus commands us to love our neighbors. Jesus once summarized God's moral law, as revealed in the Old Testament's Ten Commandments, in what has come to be called the great commandment. It's made up of two parts, each of which cite passages from the Old Testament. Jesus said, "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. The second commandment is like it: 'You shall love your neighbor as yourself.' On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets" (Matthew 22:37-40).

A relationship with Jesus Christ is the best thing that can come to a person. So, if we love our neighbors, we must share Christ.

We should take the first believers in Christ as our models. They simply told their skeptical friends, "Come and see." If we love our friends, neighbors, and family members, we must share Christ with them!

2. Jesus commissions Christians to make disciples, that is, followers of Christ. Faith is not reproduced genetically. Just because your parents were committed Christians who took you to church as a kid doesn't mean that you're a disciple. Faith is passed on from person to person.

That's why Jesus tells Christians, "Go into all the world and proclaim the good news to the whole creation. The one who believes and is baptized will be saved; but the one who does not believe will be condemned" (Matthew 16:15-16).

3. Your neighbor needs Christ. There's an inborn hole in every soul that can only be filled by Jesus Christ. That hole is the vacuum where a right and loving relationship with God and neighbor is meant to be. Jesus is the only way that hole can be filled!

Jesus says, "I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me" (John 14:6).

At risk to their lives, early followers of the crucified and risen Jesus told people, "There is salvation in no one else, for their is no other name under heaven given among mortals by which we must be saved" (Acts 4:12).

4. Without a saving faith in Jesus Christ, your neighbor will be separated from God today and for eternity. Jesus says: "For God so loved the world [everybody] that He gave His only Son [Jesus], so that everyone who believes in Him may not perish but may have eternal life. Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through Him. Those who believe in Him are not condemned; but those who do not believe are condemned already, because they have not believed in the Name of the only Son of God" (John 3:16-18).

5. Our own faith grows as we share Christ with others and our own faith ebbs as we fail to share Christ with others. We have a need to share our faith.

Jesus tells believers in Him, "You are the light of the world. A city built on a hill cannot be hid. No one after lighting a lamp puts it under a bushel basket, but on the lampstand, and it gives light to all in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father in heaven" (Matthew 5:14-16).

Jesus, the light of the world, ignites the flame of faith in all who are baptized and believe in Him. When we let others see our faith, it lights their way to peace with God, others, and themselves. When we tamp down the flame of faith, we harm others and threaten the very existence of faith within us.

That's why, after being beaten and threatened with grave consequences if they shared their faith in Christ with others, Peter and John, two early followers of Jesus told the authorities, "Whether it is right in God's sight to listen to you rather than to God, you must judge, for we cannot keep from speaking about what we have seen and heard" (Acts 4:19-20).

Peter and John, of course, were witnesses of both Jesus' death and His resurrection. We have the witness of hundreds of such eyewitnesses like them who risked their lives to share the fantastic story of the God of all creation taking on human flesh in the person of Jesus, then dying and rising, to give new lives to all who repent and believe in Christ.

We also have the witness of millions of people in the centuries since Jesus' birth, death, and resurrection that their lives were transformed by faith in Christ. Believers in Christ today have similar stories.

How can we possibly keep from speaking about Jesus? News this good has to be shared.

Happy new year!

What's So "New" About Jesus' "New Commandment"?

[This was prepared to be shared with the people of Saint Matthew Lutheran Church in Logan, Ohio, along with their guests and friends, as we celebrated Maundy Thursday earlier this evening.]

John 13:1-17, 31b-35

The late Watchman Nee, a Christian author and leader, told the true story of a Chinese Christian who owned a rice paddy next to one owned by a communist neighbor. 

The Christian irrigated his paddy by pumping water out of a canal, using a leg-operated pump that makes users look like they’re riding bicycles. Every day, after the Christian had pumped enough water to fill his field, the neighbor would come out, remove some of the boards that kept the water in the Christian man’s field and let all the water flow down into his own field. That way, he didn’t have to pump. 

Of course, it also left the Christian man's field without the water needed to make his rice crop grow.

This went on for a number of days. Finally, the Christian prayed, “Lord, if this keeps up, I’m going to lose all my rice, maybe even my field. I’ve got a family to take care of. What can I do?”

After the man prayed in this way, the Lord put a thought in his mind. So, the next morning, he woke up well before dawn, while it was still dark, and started pumping water into the field of his neighbor. Then, he replaced the boards and pumped water into his own rice paddy. In a few weeks, both fields of rice were doing well.*

In our lesson for this evening, Jesus tells the eleven disciples who remain with Him to celebrate the Passover just before His arrest: “I give you a new commandment, that you love one another.”**

I used to wonder what was so new about this commandment. 

After all, as every Lutheran Catechism student knows, the ten commandments, given by God to the world through Moses about 1500 years before Jesus’ birth, can be divided into two tables. The first table, composed of the first three commandments, says that we are to love God. The second table, made up of the fourth through tenth commandments, tell us to love others. 

And, as we’ve remembered in our confession of sin at the beginnings of our Sunday services during Lent, Jesus once summarized the two tables in what we know as the Great Commandment. It’s in Matthew 22:37-40, where Jesus says: “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.”

And before Jesus gave the “new commandment” He gives in our lesson for this evening, He already had expanded the boundaries of who among our neighbors He expected all human beings to love. In the parable of the Good Samaritan, the hero of Jesus’ story is the member of an ethnic group His people hated.

And early in His ministry, during what we call the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus had said, “You have heard it said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you...”

It’s always been God’s will and command that we love. So, what’s so new about the commandment He gave on the night when He was arrested? 

The answer to that question comes in what Jesus says in its entirety. “I give you a new commandment, that you love one another,” Jesus says and then adds, “Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.”

We are to love others as Jesus loved the disciples gathered with Him on that first Maundy Thursday. He did the work of a slave, washing the grimy feet of His disciples, even the feet of Judas, the man He knew was going to betray Him in a short while, sending Jesus to an undeserved and violent death.

We’re to love others as Jesus loved those who prayed that God the Father would forgive those who shouted for His death, who spat on and punched Him, who plaited a crown of thorns for His head and mocked Him, who cheered and jeered as cold, hard nails were pounded into His flesh.

We’re to love others as Jesus loved and had compassion for Peter, forgiving Peter after Peter had denied even knowing Jesus three different times at the very moment when Jesus could have used a friend.

To love as Jesus loves is to sacrifice oneself to the nth degree. It doesn’t mean being a doormat: Jesus, you’ll remember, wasn’t shy about confronting people about their sins, sins that threatened to put up a wall between God’s grace and the people who wallowed in their sin. He threw the moneychangers from the temple. He called Peter a “Satan” who was trying to keep God’s will from being done. He expressed frustration with the disciples when they argued who of them was the greatest, when they failed to feed crowds who were hungry, and when they claimed to be powerless to pray for anxious parents with demon-possessed children. But even these signs of anger and frustration on Jesus' part were the expressions of the Savior Who had come to call us all out of slavery to sin into the freedom of new life with God!
 

Jesus didn’t spare any sacrifice, including the giving of His very life, to do the loving thing, the thing that was best for us. 

That’s the kind of love Jesus commands of us. I truly blush in shame and repentance when I remember that Jesus doesn’t suggest that we love others as He has loved us. He commands us to love, not as a condition for being saved from sin and death, but as an expression of faith, joy, and gratitude over the fact that Jesus has already saved those who are baptized and believe in Him from sin and death. 

If you and I will love as Jesus has loved us, Jesus says, “everyone will know that you are my disciples.”

This is why I so love the story of the Chinese Christian rice farmer. He could have had an angry confrontation with his neighbor and maybe there would be times when the loving thing would demand such confrontation. But before he acted out of his justifiable anger, the man prayed. Then, as he prayed, God seemed to tell him not to exercise his righteous indignation, but to try something different: to serve and love and sacrifice at an outrageous level. 

“You’ve been loved and, because of Jesus, you are with Me always,” God seemed to tell the man. “You have eternity as your certain possession. Not everyone has the freedom from sin and death you possess as My child. Only those who know Jesus as you know Jesus have that. So, have compassion on those enslaved by sin and death. Dare to love as My Son loved you on the cross and see what, if anything, happens.”

When you and I, under the guidance of the living Lord we intimately know and have come to believe in through prayer, the reading and study of Scripture, public worship, and receiving the Sacraments, dare to love others as Jesus has loved us, strange things happen. 

Watchman Nee says that after the Chinese Christian farmer spent weeks waking up before the crack of dawn, giving the free gift of his labor and love to an atheist neighbor who hated and stole from him, the neighbor came to faith in Christ.

In a way, that shouldn’t surprise us. After Jesus’ outrageous act of love on the cross, He rose again from the grave and now offers to all who turn from sin and believe in Him new and everlasting life. And since the risen Jesus is still alive and living within all who trust in Him, we can expect surprising things when we seek God’s help in loving others as Jesus loves us.

May we all dare to obey Jesus’ new commandment. May we all learn to love others as Jesus has loved us!

*The true story told by Watchman Nee is recounted in this book.

**It's from these words that the designation of this day as Maundy Thursday comes. The word maundy comes the English language from Latin by way of Old French. The word mandatum in Latin and mandé in Old French, both mean commandment. In Latin, the words of Jesus at the beginning of John 13:34, are: "Mandātum novum dō vōbīs" (literally, "A commandment new to you I give"). Why Latin? That was the language used for Mass in the Roman Catholic tradition in which Maundy Thursday arose on the church calendar. It was also the language of the Latin Vulgate translation of the Bible used during Mass.

Goal-Setting, A Christian Approach, Part 3

In the first two installments of this series, I’ve said that...

(1) Conventional approaches to success and goal-setting, even when resulting in success as usually defined by the world, can leave us empty and unhappy. That’s because the finite, dying trophies of this world cannot scratch the itch for significance we all have.

(2) The place to start in establishing goals for our lives isn’t inside of ourselves because we are as finite and death-bound as those trophies. Rather, we must begin with the eternal God of the universe. The God Who designed us and Who, when we had gone wrong, entered our lives in the Person of Jesus of Nazareth to die and rise for us, has every right to call the shots in our lives. In the model for prayer that Jesus gave us, the Lord’s Prayer or the Our Father, the centrally important petition is one that echoes Jesus’ earnest prayer in the garden of Gethsemane on the night of His arrest: “Your will be done.”

The third point to be made about establishing goals for ourselves, be they the overarching direction we establish for our lives or the baby-goals that we jot down in our day planners each day, may be considered a bit objectionable by some. I would have found what I’m going to say objectionable myself just a few short years ago. But prayer, study, and life experience have convinced me of what I will assert here.

Regular readers of this blog know that one of my favorite books of recent years is The Will of God as a Way of Life by pastor and historian Gerald L. Sittser. It’s had a great impact on my thinking and my life.

As a student in college, Sittser was certain that God had called him to be a doctor. But while in college, he got turned on by theology and ministry. A new certainty supplanted the old one. Now, he was sure God was calling him to be a pastor.

To the extent that such things can be measured, he became a successful pastor.

After several years though, he felt that God was calling him to yet another profession. He was sure that he needed to go to graduate school, earning advanced degrees in History so that he could teach at the college level. This he did. Again, he was successful.

As he looked back over his life, Sittser was sure that God had called him to everything he had done. Included in this certainty was his marriage to Linda and their beautiful family. Friends told them they had the perfect life. They were convinced that in it all, they could see the sovereign hand of God.

But then, tragedy struck. One day when his mother was visiting Gerald and his family, a drunk driver struck the vehicle in which they all were riding. His wife, his mother, and one of his children were killed. Was this the will of a sovereign God for a family that had always sought to do God’s will?

Some Christians, particularly those whose lives have never been touched by tragedy or those who have never helped a friend through a tragedy, might answer thoughtlessly, “Of course.”

But such responses hardly do credit to God, to those whose lives have been snuffed out, or to the ones left behind.

After these multiple tragedies, Sittser still believed in the goodness of God. The willingness of God to share in our sufferings on a cross showed that.

Sittser still believed in the power of God. Jesus’ resurrection and His continuing ability to change people’s lives for the better are evidence of that.

But Sittser also believed that he needed to look exactly at what the will of God means.

All of his life, Sittser had assumed that the will of God was about the future. If things he thought were God’s will turned out okay, he assumed this to be God’s affirmation of his having made the right guess about God’s will for his life. I suspect that most Christians take a similar view. It’s the view I held until a few years ago.

But as Sittser looked at the Bible’s understanding of the will of God, particularly as evidenced in the writings of Paul in the New Testament, he made a discovery. In the Bible, the phrase is never used of the future, only of the present.

In other words, the will of God is not some mystery shrouding our futures which we must, through agonizing prayer and discernment, seek out.

Instead, the will of God is about how we live in the present moment. And how we are to live in the present moment is crystal clear. As Sittser writes:

...the New Testament offers no hint that Paul agonized about the will of God as it pertained to the future. He gave himself to the present because he was eager to use what little time he had to do what he already knew God wanted him to do.

If we sense any agony in the heroes of Scripture, it is not in discovering the will of God but in doing it....

The only time we have to know and do God’s will is this present moment.

So, what exactly is the will of God for our lives in the present moments in which each of us live our lives? Even a perfunctory reading of the Bible will give us the answer to that question. It would include these imperatives from Jesus:

“I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in Me, even though they die, will live and everyone who lives and believes in Me will never die...” [John 11:25-26]

...”’You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind’...’You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.” [Matthew 22:37-40]

“This is My commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you...” [John 15:12]

“Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you. And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.” [Matthew 28:19-20]

“Go into all the world and proclaim the good news to the whole creation.” [Mark 16:15]

“...strive first for the kingdom of God and His righteousness...” [Matthew 6:33]

All these passages make clear what God’s will is and for any given moment of our lives, give us more than ample inspiration for our goal-setting.

They indicate that God isn’t terribly concerned about what profession we enter. Chefs, plumbers, teachers, carpenters, computer programmers, housewives, preachers, and others all have the same mission. So long as the profession is honorable, God’s will is the same for all of us and each of us is equally capable of pursuing it. God calls all to follow Jesus.

The imperatives also indicate that God may not be terribly concerned about who we marry, so long as we submit our marriages to His lordship.

God may not care what we volunteer to do in the Church or in the community, so long as we express His love in whatever we do.

God may not care how many children we have or how we spend our quiet evenings at home either., so long as He is at the center of our lives

God may not care where we live, so long as we seek to live for His purposes.

To all followers of Jesus, God addresses the words found in the New Testament:

...you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people, in order that you may proclaim the mighty acts of Him Who called you out of darkness into His marvelous light. [First Peter 2:9-10]

As Sittser points out, Jesus doesn’t say that we need to go through a process of discernment to uncover what God wants us to do with our vocations, avocations, relationships, or futures. He writes:

In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus exhorts us not to be anxious about tomorrow but to concentrate on what we must do today...[He says] nothing about how to discern God’s will for our lives...Jesus demands instead that we establish right priorities and put first things first...Jesus only requires that we make sure our heart is good, our motives are pure, and our basic direction is right, pointing toward the “true north” of the kingdom of God. We can, in good conscience, choose from among any number of reasonable alternatives and continue to do the will of God.

I agree with Sittser.

This insight complicates, simplifies, and grants freedom to us as we set goals for ourselves.

(1) It complicates because doing the will of God can sometimes bring trouble, challenge, and difficulty to our lives. It necessarily means “dying to ourselves” and our old selfish ambitions so that our new God-selves can rise. [Romans 6:1-8] The martyred Dietrich Bonhoeffer said that “when Christ calls a man, He bids him come and die.”

We can no longer dodge the will of God as a “someday I’ll” proposition. We know the will of God and we know that it’s something that we can and should do right now.

Doing the will of God isn't always easy. It got Jesus into trouble. Why should those who claim to follow Him be any different?

(2) It simplifies things because the will of God is clear to us. It helps us to know what to say Yes to and to what we should say No.

(3) It grants us freedom because we can plan and live each day in the certainty that if our intention is to follow Christ and do God’s will, our life is being lived God’s way!

In The Purpose Driven Life, Rick Warren identifies five purposes for every one of us:

• to worship God with our whole lives
• to fellowship with other Jesus-Followers
• to grow spiritually, learning to love God and neighbor more each day
• to serve others in Jesus' Name
• to be messengers for God, telling others about the free new life that comes from Jesus Christ

Those five purposes, based on Jesus’ Great Commission and His Great Commandment, are right on the money, I think. They can form a sound bases for our goal-setting. [More to come]

[Read the first two installments of this series:

Part 1
Part 2]