How to Change the World in Three Easy Steps-Or Something Like That
Christians face perhaps the most frustrating task known to humankind. Change the world. (…go and make disciples of all nations…Matthew 28:18) But many have “changed” the world. Alexander, Galileo, Guttenberg, Columbus, Franklin, Newton, Marx, Lincoln, Einstein, Gates, to name just a few, all fundamentally altered how we live. So what makes the Christian task so compelling? It is compelling because of how we are to accomplish it. We are to change the world with no military might to bend people to our way of thinking, no great scientific breakthroughs to wow impress the masses with, no fancy new political ideas or super leaps in technology to wow with. In fact, our only tool if you want to call it that is our mouths. (Go into the world and preach the good news to all creation… Mark 16:15)
Not only that, but on the surface, our strategy does not look too promising either. We must boldly declare to the world an idea that we know it mostly rejects, which is: Christ is the only way to God. (No one comes to the father accept through me. John 14:6) And we are to do so without compromise as we call this mostly hostile environment home. In other words, in a rigid, insistent world, we are not to give an inch on the person and purpose of Christ. Yet we are still to live life so affirmatively, so alluringly, that people will chose to listen to what we have to say about Christ. It seems an almost impossible task.
Is it any wonder then that, in our oh-so politically charged and correct world, many perhaps most, Christians hesitate to share their faith? Courageous, indeed, are those who step proudly forth for Christ. Yet, it takes more than audacity to speak unflinchingly of Christ and persuade of Him at the same time. Using one sentence to both convict of sin and heal that sin in the same moment requires more than just daring. It requires two common C words, but in supernatural abundance, both of which Paul had-confidence and contentment. We will need them in like supply as well to accomplish our task.
So let’s talk first about confidence for awhile. What is it? Well, it’s easy enough to define. Just open the American Heritage Desk Dictionary and one learns that it is, “A feeling of assurance, especially of self-assurance…a firm belief in one’s own power…being sure of oneself.” But we know this. It is nothing new. We have all experienced the oomph and exhilaration of confidence… lost it… found it again, and have even helped other people experience it as well. So we know what it is and how it feels because it is tied to our emotions. And generally our feelings of confidence rise and fall according to what is happening around us at the moment. Therefore, such things as our jobs, if we have one, how much money we make and can we pay the bills, how good the kids are doing in school, did the car start this morning, the state of our marriage and other relationships, our health, whether the Dallas Cowboys win or lose and so forth, all impact our self-confidence. And I think if asked most of us would say that we are, through it all, confident people. We handle the up’s and downs of life okay, and when struggles confront us we, for the most part, deal with them successfully and come out the other side in good shape.
But in all honesty I think if we measured our self-confidence by the effect we are having on our world for Christ (that is by the number of souls who will follow each of us into Paradise) most of us would be embarrassed. Why is that? Again, it goes back to our task of confronting a hostile world with the person of Jesus Christ and convincing that world to relinquish its hostility. Let’s be honest, we are intimidated. So we need to ask, where did Paul’s supernatural confidence come from? The easy answer is that it comes from God, so this may seem an obvious and perhaps trite question to some. But I suggest if it were so obvious and easy to answer then there would be significantly less strife, anger and bloodshed in our world today. We would all be leading lost souls to the Lord on a regular basis and churches worldwide would be bursting at the seams. But those things do not seem apparent, at least not to me. Yes, it comes from God, but we need to know how He plants it inside us and then where does the water come from that causes it to grow?
It’s like knowing there is a jack in the trunk of your car, but never learning how to use it. Its nice to know it’s there, but if you can’t put it to work it will be useless to you when that rusty nail pierces the left rear tire. But, if you take the time to pull that jack out of the trunk and practice with it, before that nail does its damage, then you will be prepared to take advantage of all the jack has to offer when you need it. So it is with confidence, if all we know is that it comes from God, but we have not studied how it works and why, then when we need it most, we will be ill prepared to make use of it in our lives.
Getting long here, so more later.
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