Sharing our faith with friends who don’t (yet) believe
Reverend Ray Galvin, 25 January 2009
Acts 17: 16-34, Mark 1:14-20
One of the great challenges for Christians in the western world today is to communicate the Gospel to millions of people who don’t understand it. Often we can see quite clearly how much they’d benefit from a strong faith in Christ. But to get this faith they’ve got to hear the message. And more crucially, they have to hear the message in language they can clearly understand.
I have a very close friend overseas who believes there’s a God ‘of some sort’, and lives an exemplary life, but isn’t sure about Christ. Recently he asked me, very seriously, why did Jesus have to die. Why was this necessary? What did it accomplish?
That’s a very stimulating question, and I could have opened my mouth and rattled off some of the well-known, central tenets of Christian belief. But I thought, no, he wants me to speak in language he understands, in terms that relate to life as he experiences it, and it has to touch him and make him sit up and say, ‘I can see what you’re getting at. That’s food for thought.’
So I thought very hard, and finally sent him a one-page email, in the clearest, most relevant language I could express myself in. And then we got together and talked about it.
Are we good at communicating our faith to our friends?
I want to challenge you today to think about this. If we can learn how to explain our beliefs in everyday language, and clearly express what these beliefs do for us in our daily lives, then I think we’re doing our friends a very big favour. I think they want to hear this.
I’m out of touch with what’s going on in New Zealand, but in Britain the ‘credit crunch’ is pressing down hard on people. Thousands are being laid off; many pension schemes have collapsed or been reduced; house values have plummeted; bankruptcies have increased. Economists still seem to have no idea how long it might last or how deep in might go.
A year ago Britain was so awash with money, many people had no interest in spiritual questions. Now I think they’re much more ready to listen. When the party’s over, it’s not just that people have real worries about their future. It’s also that, now that the glitzy distractions are gone, people no longer feel invincible, and they’re forced to think about more fundamental questions – like ‘What are we here for? Can we be happy without getting drunk twice a week? What gives dignity to human life when the prop of riches is taken away? What’s the bond that joins us all together in this precarious world?
I believe this is a crucial moment, when we mustn’t fail our friends. We must find ways to tell them of the love and hope Jesus can give them. And we must do it clearly, simply, without super-spiritual ‘in-words’ and ‘catch-phrases’.
So lately I’ve been challenging myself to get better at explaining what my faith in Christ does for me. How does trusting my life to Christ benefit me in everyday life? Can I put my finger on some of the key benefits of my faith, and learn to talk about them in words that anybody can understand?
And I want to share some of the results of this with you, as a kind of challenge – hoping you might feel moved to go home and sit down and think out how you would explain to your friends, what putting your faith in Christ does for you.
It’ll be different for each one of us. There’ll be different emphases, and you have to think out how to explain your particular story. That’s what your friends want to know. They know you, they like you, they know you’re a Christian, they’ll want to see what’s real to you about your faith.
So here are 3 of the main benefits I get from trusting God – from trusting my daily life to Christ.
1. It gives me the courage to live in a more daring way
By nature I’m a restless and inquisitive person. I need constantly to be learning new things, facing new challenges, extending myself mentally and physically, discovering more of the abilities I’ve been given.
So last year, for example, I gave up my job and became a full time student again. I did an MSc in climate change science and policy, and now I’m doing a PhD on environmental policy issues.
Mental challenges, but also physical challenges: Every summer my partner and I do a thousand-plus kilometre cycling trip on the Continent. We live in a very small tent and carrying all our luggage on the back of our bikes. This summer it was 1500 km, and because students get longer holidays than workers, I did most of it alone. It included pedalling along German river valleys, over the Austrian Alps, a romp through Slovenia, then over the Julian Alps, back into Austria, then the German Alpine route.
Not everybody’s like this. Many people don’t like doing new things, and I certainly don’t blame them, because life can be pretty scary. Many prefer what’s safe and comfortable, a nice routine, without anything too daring or different: same job, same house, same type of annual holiday, same tastes in music, same beliefs, same views on politics and ethics.
But even for such people, the little challenges of everyday life can be frightening. Wherever we start from, life is risky. It’s uncertain. We have to make big decisions without all the relevant information. Bereavements and diseases come along. We lose our investments; our budget doesn’t balance; life is never fully under our control.
But when I put my faith in Christ each day, I can trust that he’s there with me and up ahead of me, and will be my companion through every danger and calamity.
Faith in Christ turns difficulties into an adventure. A few months ago when I was cycling high up in the Isonzo Valley, the day before I went over the Julian Alps, I camped at a tiny Slovenian village called Trenta (pop. ~20). Its one shop was shut for the holidays and I only had dry bread left. A tent-pole on my brand new tent broke, and that night it rained bucket-loads. The thunder roared and the lightning flashed, as water dripped steadily through the tent onto my sleeping bag.
I prayed (rather desperately – I think even an atheist would have prayed that night) and eventually a kind of peace came over me as I realised that this was not a disaster, it was an adventure. I didn’t know what God was going to bring out of it, but I knew, I just knew, that God would turn this into a very strengthening and meaningful life-experience for me.
And I won’t go into all the details, but that’s exactly what happened. Being alone and wet and a bit cold, and surviving on dry bread and water, and not knowing whether I’d have the leg-power to get over the Alps was a very good experience. Looking back, I can see the hand of God everywhere in it.
And now when I’m facing trouble, of any kind, I can look back on those moments in Trenta I feel that strength and assurance again.
2. My faith helps me deal positively with difficult world issues
I mentioned my concern about climate change. You may know that for the last 10,000 years the earth’s climate has been remarkably stable. For hundreds of thousands of years before that it was up and down like a yo-yo. The global average temperature was almost always changing, as it tracked up and down on its cycles from very hot to very cold. The sea level followed the temperature up and down. Deserts and fertile areas waxed and waned and swapped around. But about 10,000 years ago the climate stabilised, and it’s been fairly reliable since then. (Scientists call it the ‘Holocene’ period)
This is important big reason why civilisation’s been able to develop. Think of all those coastal cities, close to both fishing grounds and fertile alluvial soils, with ports for trade and commerce. London’s been there for 2000 years; the Nile Delta for two or three times as long. Think of the great river valleys in China, fertilised and watered from melting snow on the Himalayas. A huge infrastructure of roads, farms, fisheries and cities has grown up on the basis if this Holocene climate.
Climate change is threatening to break the pattern of this steady, reliable climate and send us back in to the age of massive swings and changes.
In theory that’s not such a big problem. Human beings like you and me can live in a huge range of different climates.
But 6 or 7 billion people can’t. And you can’t suddenly shift 6 or 7 billion people from a stable, reliable Holocene climate to a hotter or colder one, let alone to an unstable one. The human disruption of suddenly shifting out of a Holocene climate would be horrendous.
So my research is concerned with how to improve the political processes of protecting the climate from the human influences that threaten to destabilise it. I also feel committed to being involved in influencing politicians and other key players in this direction.
You can imagine that that’s not an easy task. There are so many vested interests in things that pollute the earth. And many very well-informed people have grave doubts as to whether we’ve left ourselves enough time to make any difference.
My faith in Christ is a very important support and encouragement in this task. I feel that Christ has not only called us to try to make a difference, but he also gives us the courage, the persistence, the sense of hope, the sense of moral commitment, and the good humour to persevere and not give up. There are many people who are just as concerned about climate change as I am and who work just as hard or harder to prevent it, yet without any faith in Christ, or in any version of God. I greatly admire them. I often wonder how they keep going. For me the presence of Christ in my heart is a huge source of strength and encouragement. It stops me getting cynical, puts a song in my heart, helps me understand the people I disagree with, puts a warm glow in my heart and the sense that it’s worth doing even if we don’t succeed.
It’s been the same with every social or political issue I’ve been involved in. And I’m sure there are many things that you do, for the world or for your neighbours, in which Christ also gives you strength and encouragement, even when you seem to be up against a brick wall. My faith helps me deal positively with difficult world issues.
3. It answers my spiritual experience
My friend Rinny Westra recently wrote a very engaging little book, which I enjoyed reading immensely. In this book Rinny set out very clearly some of the big, challenging questions Christians have to face: questions that stop us thinking religion is problem-free and we’ve got it all wrapped up.
For me his two biggest questions (put simply) were:
(1) If there’s an all-loving, all-powerful God, then why do the innocent suffer so much?
(2) If science has explained more and more of the secrets of life and the universe, why do we need a God to fill the gaps?
These questions have always rattled me. But reading the book helped me realise that the main reason I believe in God is not an intellectual one, it’s based on my experience. The questions raised in the book are very important. But for me they come within the context of me having experienced God and trusted my life to Christ.
Why? Because even though I don’t look for it, I keep experiencing a reality that seems to be beyond the physical world. It’s something I can’t get away from, it just happens. God is just there.
It’s a bit like falling in love. First you fall in love with your partner and commit your life to her, then you realise there are things about her you’ll never understand.
And because I have this experience of the spiritual realm, I need to find a framework that explains it, that makes sense of it, that integrates it into my life.
And it’s not just that I find the Christian faith the best framework I know of for explaining this experience. It’s that the kind of Being I meet in this experience calls me to trust him.
It’s not that God peeks out from behind an existential cloud and shouts, ‘Hello, it’s me, I really am there. You’d better believe it.’ It’s more like a voice saying, ‘Yes I’m here, but I’m no use to you unless you trust me.’
This is a God who doesn’t really mean much if all we do is argue about him and try to prove he exists. [So what?]
Rather it’s a spiritual experience of a God who’s personal and wants to get to know us by us trusting our lives to him.
In our Gospel reading today, Jesus calls Simon, Andrew, James and John to leave their fishing nets and spend time with him, so they can become ‘fishers of people’. We’re not all called to be apostles but we do have a faith story to tell. People need to hear our faith story. Your friends may need to hear your story. Even people who are hostile to religion in general might be curious about your faith, if they know you and like you.
In our epistle reading, from Acts, Paul makes a big effort to explain the Gospel to his Greek audience in terms they clearly understand. It’s the only place in the Bible you hear God referred to as the one ‘in whom we live and move and have our being.’ It’s the only place in the Bible you see a direct link being made between ‘the unknown God’ and the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.
Paul was a very practical man who knew how to explain things to the particular people he was talking to.
This is a challenge for each one of us – to explain our faith to our friends in their language. We don’t need religious jargon, it just gets in the way. We don’t need to explain why our pastor or former pastor has faith in Christ, they don’t know him or her. It’s you they know, it’s you they like. Will your friends get to hear what your faith in Christ means to you on an everyday basis?
