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November 16, 2003
Why Share Your Faith?
Why Share Your Faith?
Psalm 138 / Isaiah 55: 1-13
Matthew 28: 16-20
November 16th, 2003
This morning I invite you to think with me about something at the heart of the Christian faith that nearly every Christian finds awkward—sharing your faith. In a pluralistic society where there are so many competitors saying, “I’m the real—real religion,” many thoughtful people respond by drawing back modestly from the confusion of marketing religion. But is there a larger view of this that calls for larger thoughts and your participation?
There are two things I want to say today. First, we need to share our faith because this is how God awakens faith in others. Second, we need to share our faith because Jesus said, “Do it.”
Jesus asked a question: “What will it profit to gain the whole world and lose your soul? What can a person give in exchange for his soul?”
What is your soul? Someone said it is a little white-pea in the head, like the pituitary gland, that makes people think about religion. Not so. The soul is your everything, your body, your mind, your feelings. Our society is big into screening people from thinking about their souls. Some people retreat from even thinking about the soul by concentrating on developing their bodies, or by work, or by a sensuous way of life. Sharing your faith penetrates someone’s smokescreen and touches her soul. How wonderful it feels when you recognize someone really cares about you. Sharing your faith is really caring.
Well before there was any competition between religions for converts the Prophet Isaiah went out on a limb and proposed that what God offered to Israel He offered to the whole world. The souls of Israel’s enemies were as important as the soul of any Israeli. Jurgen read this morning of God’s open arms: “Ho, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters; and you that have no money, come, buy and eat.” Isaiah spoke odd words to Israel, “Nations that do not know you shall run to you.”
These were odd words because in the ancient world nations did not think of their deities as available to other nations. My god is hopefully stronger than your god, each nation hoped. And Israel was no different. Israel’s God defeated Egypt and the Philistines in battle. But Isaiah said that this God, the Creator of heaven and earth, extended His welcome to all nations. “My house will be called a house of prayer for all peoples.”
How surprising it must have been to be an Assyrian to think that Israel’s God loved him. Isaiah said these words winsomely. God cares about you. His eyes must have said he believed what he said. In soul to soul talk, body language counts.
Then Jesus came along a few hundred years later. Here was the most personal expression of the love of God. We might say the soul of God appeared before human souls, body, mind, and feelings. Isaiah may have said that God welcomes all people. Jesus made this message more personal than Isaiah ever could. Jesus said it face to face to people God loves you. That is, I love you. He said this to people from whom others turned away their faces.
Mark’s Gospel tells us His message was summarized briefly: “The time is fulfilled. The Kingdom of God has come. Repent, and believe the good news.”
What time? People must have wondered. Was it the time when the Romans would be ousted from Israel? Well, no, because Jesus was speaking to Romans too.
What Kingdom of God? Later Jesus would explain, “You’ll find the Kingdom of God inside you when you are in it.”
Repent. That’s what John the Baptist was saying. You’ve got to change your ways. “I know it,” All kinds of people acknowledged when they realized that Jesus did not condemn them when He welcomed them to change.
Trust the Good News. It’s true. What good news? Everyone likes good news, especially unexpected good news. Jesus had unexpected good news. The God who created everything loves you like you can’t believe, but believe it; it’s true.
There was nothing sectarian about Jesus’ message. Jesus spoke it freely to all kinds of people.
Jesus said these things after standing in line with all kinds of people waiting for John to baptize them. Roman soldiers, renowned for their capacity of cruelty, stood in line with Pharisees—the most pious of Jews. It didn’t matter who stood front to back in line. Jesus stood in line with them all. In this non-sectarian setting John the Baptist changed the focus from himself to Jesus and said, “Look at Him. I’m not even worthy to take off his sandals.”
All eyes turned to Jesus who stood in line with them. Jesus became one with them and with you and me. Jesus was God sharing His faith, what was deepest in His heart.
Three years passed in which Jesus showed Himself a friend of sinners, of devout Jews and Romans too, a friend of outsiders, of the poor and the rich, of men, women, boys and girls.
Those who were closest to Jesus all watched in amazement when He was killed brutally by the Romans. It was so inappropriate! It stung them to the quick when they realized that this Man, who fulfilled the ideals of the prophet Isaiah, offering living water to an outcast Samaritan woman, and free bread to hungry thousands, was executed cruelly as a common felon. The shock of Jesus’ execution compels our scrutiny.
Many of you have read reviews of Mel Gibson’s movie on “The Passion.” Let me read to you a few words from one review sent to me by two of you:
“’The Passion’ evoked more deep reflection, sorrow and emotional reaction within me than anything since my wedding, my ordination, or the birth of my children. Frankly, I will never be the same. When the film concluded, this ‘invitation only’ gathering of ‘movers and shakers’ in Washington, DC were shaking indeed, but this time from sobbing. I am not sure there was a dry eye in the place. The crowd that had been glad-handing before the film was now eerily silent. No one could speak because words were woefully inadequate. We had experienced a kind of art that is a rarity in life, the kind that makes heaven touch earth.”
Sectarian divisions break down as people watch this movie. More than Christians found wrenched out of them what the Roman centurion said who stood at the foot of the cross: “Surely this man was the Son of God.” I wonder how the texture of your life and mine might change if we had the view of the foot of the cross. But how is it possible to maintain this view through the ups and downs of life? We forget the greatest impressions so soon.
What I have in mind as “sharing your faith” has to do with communicating the sense that I think this movie is communicating. We need to see how massive was God’s love that made Him submit Jesus to such a death for our sake. Time does not dilute the fact of God’s love. Its pertinence is not less at 3 p.m. than at 9 a.m., nor less in 2003 than in AD 30.
Then I step back and realize it was I who put Jesus on the cross. My sin put Him there. We come to think the purpose of Jesus and Church and God is simply to makes us happier and raise our kids to be good citizens. How such a watered down view cheapens it all.
We all know it’s true that the greatest exhibit of love is to lay down your life to save someone else’s life. But when laying down your life means willingly accepting even such barbaric cruelty, it is stunning. When someone accepts this in behalf of people He’s never seen, it can only be an act of a loving God. I believe that if you and I really caught a glimpse of how massive is God’s love for us it would change the texture of our expectations of life. How could we not keep from sharing our faith, our trust if this were its texture?
We sing in the great Communion hymn, “Love so amazing, so Divine, demands my soul, my life, my all.” Who does the demanding? I demand it of myself when I realize what God did for me in Jesus. It’s true, Jesus said, “Follow me, and you’ve got to lose your life to find it.” But God does not ask for your life because He wants to strip you of life, but because He’ll keep you from wasting it. He’ll save your life. This is information worth sharing.
Sharing your faith enlists your love with the love of God in helping other people to find life. You pass on the love you know you’ve received.
The term “share your faith” suggests what the Apostle Paul was getting at in Romans 1: 17, “I am not ashamed of the Gospel . . . for in it the righteousness of God is revealed through faith for faith.” Through faith, for faith. God needs the conduit of your faith to trigger faith in someone else. You and I carry out a function like Jesus’ soul to soul contact with people.
Faith somehow is awakened in a person’s soul through the touch of another person’s faith. It’s not just the Gospel words, wonderful though they are. The Gospel needs a human conduit to touch the human heart. That conduit is your faith and mine, that is your life and mine.
How many of you would report that you learned to believe in God from the faith of your mother, or some other person who touched your soul? You watched your mother’s kindness, her selfless work in the home. She stayed awake with you during the night when you had a fever long after you were a child. You were a difficult high schooler maybe. She still cared for you tenderly. She loved transparently. And somehow, you realized that the faith that moved your mother was waking up inside you too. The Gospel made its way into your heart through the faith of your mother.
When we talk about “sharing your faith,” we’re talking about this essential touch of your soul on someone else’s depths. The faith of Jesus began the process. You pass it on.
Why should you share your faith? Because this is how God planned to awaken response to His love in people.
Something deadening happens inside you and me if we don’t share this trust in Jesus. How reduced your religion becomes. Sharing your faith is like exhaling when you breathe. Something deadening happens to you and to the Church when you do not exhale. You turn blue. You get cold.
There’s a second reason for sharing your faith. Jesus said to do it. We think of Jesus’ way as a way of receiving grace. But Jesus graciously gave some commands that we obey if we trust Him. Grace is at the heart of the Gospel. But what credit is there in remembering this if we then reject our place in the transmission of God’s grace? Jesus told His disciples at the end, “You are my witnesses now. Preach repentance. In my name preach the forgiveness of sins. Open the scriptures to people. Show that the Christ had to suffer and die on the third day and be raised from the dead.” Jesus said, “Do it.”
They understood a little of what He meant because some faithful Jews were letting non-Jews know about God’s love. Judaism was unique among the ancient religions in that it had a missionary element to it. You remember Jesus said to the Pharisees at one point, “You traverse sea and land to make a single proselyte.” Why? Because they read in the Prophet Isaiah what we read this morning. Jesus was critical of the legalism they introduced, but they did right in telling non-Jews about God.
It was into a world filled with horrid superstitions that Jesus sent His disciples with a simple message. “Repent. Hear and believe the Good News. Receive the sign of baptism. Learn how I told you to live.” How refreshing. How different from anything other people came up with in their religions. Nobody made up the Christian faith. The Christian faith is the way of Jesus in and out of me and you.
I have sometimes facetiously reported that my ancestors in the Scottish highlands were savages who ran around clothed in nothing but blue paint, plundering and hacking other peoples to death with their swords. But they heard this message from St. Colomba in the 6th century after Jesus died. This message taught them hope and gave them a way of life better than the frightening way they lived. Consequently there are St. Colomba churches all over Scotland.
There are questions many of us reasonably have about why Jesus said to share this trust in Him, this message of repentance. We wonder about the scope of God’s salvation and the role of saying “I believe,” that can seem to be said so effortlessly. We wonder what God will do with people who have never heard about Jesus, or who, if they have, heard about Him in such a mean-spirited way that it turned them away from Jesus. We read the doctrines John Calvin taught having to do with God’s choosing some and not others for salvation. Happily, Jesus didn’t say, “First, get everything figured out.” He simply said, “You are my witnesses.”
If you have trusted in Jesus, be open to sharing your faith. Why? Because other people need to be exposed to your simple trust in Jesus for them to learn how to trust in Jesus. Because Jesus said to do it. Despite how futile you may feel when you try to speak of your faith, this is the means God has chosen to spread the Good News that He loves us all.
This past week our furnace stopped working. A young repairman came out to fix it. After he made out the bill and I paid him, he asked if I was a pastor. He’d been told a pastor lived at this address. I confessed that I was a pastor. Apologetically he asked if he could ask me a question. He didn’t want to impose. I welcomed his question. He asked if God punishes people by making hard times come to them. He’d become irregular at church and was doing some things that were probably wrong. Was God punishing him?
I told him in my own words what the Apostle Paul wrote (Romans 2:4) that God uses various means to catch our attention. I went on to share something of how Jesus came to be important to me and how I had given my life back to God and how this really helped me through the ups and downs of life. At that moments my wife was in the hospital recovering from a painful surgery, so my heart was tender. I prayed with him and for him. He thanked me and went on his way.
This was sharing my faith –– my life, my trust in Jesus, with someone who was open and needy. I think this is what Paul had in mind in telling us the gospel moves “from faith to faith.”
Next Sunday I hope I can clarify what is essential to say about Jesus to those who ask. But today I simply want to make clear that if you are a Christian, you are the means God uses to help others find life. And if you are a Christian, when Jesus says you should do something, you should be doing it. Jesus said, “You are my witnesses.” Are you a witness who would say in embarrassment, like Peter on the night of Jesus’ trial, “I don’t know the man?” Or can you say, “I know the Man, and He loves me, and loves you too.” People need to hear you say this. I hope that you believe it is true for you.
Let us pray: O God, we don’t understand the deep mysteries of life. We don’t understand so much. But we understand that you love us, and that you love others too. Help us not only to be glad you love us, but to share your love. In Jesus’ name. Amen.
Stuart D. Robertson
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, Indiana
Posted by faithpres at November 16, 2003 09:30 AM