The last aspect of living like a disciple is sharing the faith. The components of the life of a disciple are interrelated and none so more than the calling to share our faith. To be effective at sharing our faith we must be self learners, people of prayer, living holy lives and sensitive to the leading of the Holy Spirit. But strength in these four areas will not immediately make us effective in sharing our faith. There is the matter of motivation. Getting off our static position and actually doing it.
One of the mistakes I have made and I think is the dominant framework for most of Christianity is the idea that if Christians know how to share their faith they will not be afraid and that confidence will result in actually sharing their faith. As a result, over the years Christian organizations have produced scores if not hundreds of training programs on “How to share your faith”. Programs from the highly systematic to the foot loose and fancy free variety have attempted to empower Christians to share their faith and be ‘evangelistic’. Most of these trainings are valid and useful to one degree or another, but that is clearly not the answer. In my years of ministry, I have trained my church people to use E.E., Love your Neighbor to Life, Thought you would like to know, and the Peace Treaty. But, interestingly, of all the people I have trained on how to share their faith none of them have actually led someone to faith in Jesus and become a disciple. All of these have components of learning, prayer, holy living, and being led by the Spirit. Beyond that I am not active in sharing my faith, outside of my preaching. I spend a lot of time getting a sermon ready to present to my church. I don’t spend nearly as much time sharing my faith with non-Christians.
There are two possibilities for the general lack of my sharing my faith, my students sharing their faith and the lack of faith sharing in American Christianity as a whole. One possibility is that I am a bad trainer, all trainers are bad trainers, and no church has an effective trainer. But you might expect that I would have been able to do at least one of these well. Beyond my own failures you would imagine that with the massive production of so many training programs and so many American churches that somewhere one would work.
There is a second possibility and this is, I think, the correct answer. We have plenty of training and tools, but we don’t have the motivation. We are neither sad enough nor happy enough. We are sad about bad stuff in the world, but not too sad. We may be sad that our church is not growing, but only a little sad. We are sad to the point of not being able to sleep at night because of a political course that means we might lose money, freedom or our AR-15. But are we really sad at the thought of people going off into a godless eternity? Everyone we know will one day be assigned a place in Heaven or Hell based on their relationship with Christ, from that assignment there is no remedy. Sadly, for any one of a number of reasons we are not terribly distressed about people going to hell. We may know it is true, and we are a little sad about it, but not sad enough to be motivated to share the good news of the Gospel.
We are also not happy enough. Because American Christianity of late has not been very good at talking about sin and the marvel of grace we don’t really appreciate our salvation. We think we were not that bad and only need a little help along the way. Because we have not been explicit about the bad news we are not overly thrilled with the good news. We are not that happy about it. What if I could actually provide for you an elixir that would restore you to the peak of health and prevent you from ever having to face cancer, or covid, or heart disease? What if this elixir had no negative side effects, got better over time, never lost its power and was free? If you had cancer or AIDS, took the formula and found all the claims were true, would you be happy enough to tell someone else? If you are a Christian your condition was worse and your cure is better. We are not happy enough perhaps because we don’t realize how bad off we actually were or how good we have it now, nor how great it will be.
If we are going to be faithful in being disciples we must make disciples. And if we are going to share our faith we need to regain holy sadness and grand happiness.
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