Humiliation
Dear Family,
This time of year brings so many thoughts to my mind about Christ and His coming — and all of them end in my own humiliation as I contemplate His. I have often thought about the passage that John wrote after seeing Jesus (John 3:30). I think about how radical Christianity is and only in that reality is it a much greater thing for us to decrease (and how damaging and dangerous it is for us to increase in any form). Only here, in the Christian faith is it better to be in the back, to be last. Humility in royalty really is radical. Being a brother with the King of Kings! In most every earthly understanding we would see people balk at having to always be in the "shadow" of their more "famous" brother. But not here. Humility is actually better as we adequately see in Philippians 2. Can you tell I have been thinking of the kenosis lately :) Humility in the Christian experience is a glorifying prospect — not just needed, but enjoyed. It is amazing to consider the "babe" wrapped in dusty rags when we consider how He was not forced to be humbled, but humbled Himself. Wow! There is so much to learn from Christ (and so much still to learn about how much we are still not like Him)! Thank God that He has promised us sanctification!
But being humiliated is one thing that many of us will be subjected to over the next couple of days in maybe an unexpected way. It won't be because of something we wear or because we reveal some secret that was supposed to stay in the family. We will experience this humiliation in a way that will perhaps leave us cowering in fear. We will be with family and friends and it is possible that they just won't want to hear anything about "your Jesus." But nonetheless it is important that we keep in mind that no matter how it comes across our friends and family desperately need Jesus. So during the plethora of gatherings that you will experience over the next week or so you will have many divine "opportunities" to share how Jesus came to reconcile man to God...the Gospel (good news) of peace. One of the reasons that we don't share the gospel is because we are just uncomfortable when we start talking about Jesus. We are fine talking to friends, co-workers, neighbours, and family about almost anything but when Jesus enters the conversation, we get all serious and weird (just click on the link). Maybe it's because we are not prepared, maybe it's because we just don't talk or think much about it. So for you who have a hard time sharing the gospel with friends and family (which is most of us) let me share with you something that I read that may give you some pointers about sharing the gospel with your loved ones over the next week.
Christmas with Family Who Don't Know Jesus
David Mathis recently extracted some practical ideas from the book in connection to all the family gatherings accustomed to the holidays. Here are those ten points again, or in his words, "a few thoughts from a fellow bungler to help us think ahead and pray about how we might grow in being proxies for the gospel, in word and deed, among our families."
1) Pray ahead
Begin praying for your part in gospel advance among extended family several days before gathering. And let’s not just pray for changes in them, but also pray for the needed heart changes in us — whether it’s for love or courage or patience or kindness or fresh hope, or all of the above.
2) Listen and ask questions
Listen, listen, listen. Perhaps more good evangelism than we realize starts not with speaking but with good listening. Getting to know someone well, and specifically applying the gospel to them, is huge in witness. Relationship matters.
Ask questions to draw them out. People like to talk about themselves — and we should capitalize on this. And most people only enjoy talking about themselves for so long. At some point, they’ll ask us questions. And that’s our golden chance to speak, upon request.
One of the best times to tell the gospel with clarity and particularity is when someone has just asked us a question. They want to hear from us. So let’s share ourselves, and Jesus in us. Not artificially, but in genuine answer to their asking about our lives. And remember it’s a conversation. Be careful not to rabbit on for too long, but try to keep a sense of equilibrium in the dialogue.
3) Raise the gospel flag early
Let’s not wait to get to know them “well enough” to start clearly identifying with Jesus. Depending on how extended our family is, or how long it’s been since we married in, they may already plainly know that we are Christians. But if they don’t know that, or don’t know how important Jesus is to our everyday lives, we should realize now that there isn’t any good strategy in being coy about such vital information. It will backfire. Even if we don’t put on the evangelistic full-court press right away (which is not typically advised), wisdom is to identify with Jesus early and often, and articulate the gospel with clarity (and kindness) as soon as possible.
No one’s impressed to discover years into a relationship that we’ve withheld from them the most important things in our lives.
4) Take the long view and cultivate patience
With family especially, we should consider the long arc. Randy Newman is not afraid to say to Christians in general, “You need a longer-term perspective when it comes to family.” Chances are we do. And so he challenges us to think in terms of an alphabet chart, seeing our family members positioned at some point from letters A to Z. These 26 steps/letters along the way from distant unbelief (A) to great nearness to Jesus (Z) and fledgling faith help us remember that evangelism is usually a process, and often a long one.
It is helpful to recognize that not everyone is near the end of the alphabet waiting for our pointed gospel pitch to tip them into the kingdom. Frequently there is much spadework to be done. Without losing the sense of urgency, let’s consider how we can move them a letter, or two or three, at a time and not jerk them toward Z in a way that may actually make them regress.
5) Beware the self-righteous older brother in you
For those who grew up in nonbelieving or in shallow or nominal Christian families, it can be too easy to slide into playing the role of the self-righteous older brother when we return to be around our families. Let’s ask God that he would enable us to speak with humility and patience and grace. Let’s remember that we’re sinners daily in need of his grace, and not gallop through the family gathering on our high horse as if we’ve arrived or just came back from the third heaven. Newman’s advice: “use the pronouns ‘we’ and ‘us’ far more than ‘you’” (65).
6) Tell it slant
Some extended family contexts may be so far from spiritual that we need to till the soil of conversation before making many direct spiritual claims. It’s not that the statements aren’t true or desperately needed, but that our audience may not yet be ready to hear it. The gospel may seem so foreign that wisdom would have us take another approach. One strategy is to “tell it slant,” to borrow from the poem of the same name — to get at the gospel from an angle.
“If your family has a long history of negativity and sarcasm,” writes Newman, “the intermediate step of speaking positively about a good meal or a great film may pave the way for ‘blinding’ talk of God’s grace and mercy” (67). Don’t “blind” them by rushing to say loads more than they’re ready for. As Emily Dickinson says, “The truth must dazzle gradually / Or every man be blind.”
7) Be real about the gospel
As we dialogue with family about the gospel, let’s not default to quoting Bible verses that don’t really answer the questions being asked. Let’s take up the gospel in its accompanying worldview and engage their questions as much as possible in the terms in which they asked them. Newman says, “We need to find ways to articulate the internally consistent logic of the gospel’s claims and not resort to anti-intellectual punch lines like, ‘The Bible says it, I believe it, and that settles it.’”
Yes, let’s do quote Bible when appropriate — we are Christians owing ultimately to revelation, not to reason. But let’s not make the Bible into an excuse for not really engaging with their queries in all their difficulty. (And let’s not be afraid to say we don’t know when we don’t!)
8) Consider the conversational context
Context matters. It doesn’t have to be face to face across the table to be significant. “Many people told me their best conversations occurred in a car — where both people faced forward, rather than toward each other,” says Newman. “Perhaps the indirect eye contact posed less of a threat” (91). Maybe even sofas and recliners during a Thanksgiving Day football game, if the volume’s not ridiculous. Be mindful of the context, and seek to make yourself available for conversation while at family gatherings, rather than retreating always into activities or situations that are not conducive to substantive talk.
9) Know your particular family situation
In some families, the gospel has been spoken time and again in the past to hard hearts, perhaps there has been a lack of grace in the speaking, and what is most needed is some unexpected relational rebuilding. Or maybe you’ve built and built and built the relationship and have never (or only rarely) clearly spoken the message of the gospel.
Let’s think and pray ahead of time as to what the need of hour is in our family, and as the gathering approaches pray toward what little steps we might take. And then let’s trust Jesus to give us the grace our hearts need, whether it’s grace for humbling ourselves enough to connect relationally or whether it’s courage enough to speak with grace and clarity.
10) Be hopeful
God loves to convert the people we think are the least likely. Jesus is able to melt the hardest of hearts. Some who finished their lives among the greatest saints started as the worst of sinners.
Realistically, there could have been some cousin of the apostle Paul sitting around some prayer meeting centuries ago telling his fellow believers, “Hey, would you guys pray for my cousin Saul? I can’t think of anyone more lost. He hunts down followers of The Way and arrests them. Just last week, he was the guy who stood guard over the clothes of the people who killed our brother Stephen.” (53)
With God, all things are possible. Jesus has a history of conquering those most hostile to him. We have great reason to have great hope about gospel advance in our families, despite how dire and dark it may seem.
When We Fail
And when we fail — not if, but when — the place to return is Calvary’s tree. Our solace in failing to adequately share the gospel is the very gospel we seek to share. It is good to ache over our failures to love our families in gospel word and deed. But let’s not miss that as we reflect on our failures, we have all the more reason to marvel at God’s love for us.
Be astonished that his love is so lavish that he does not fail to love us, like we fail to love him and our families, and that he does so despite our recurrent flops in representing him well to our kin.
I found this to be helpful for me and I hope it will encourage you too. Take some time to read it through and decide now how you will approach the gospel when it comes time to talk of Jesus at family gatherings. This is an excerpt from a book that talks about sharing the Gospel with your family that I found helpful and intriguing (download the PDF here). Crossway books has offered it as a free download so if you have an eReader device, click on this link and you can download the book as a PDF, Mobi or Epub. As with every book, you aren't going to agree with everything the author says but the book goes a long way to reigniting our passion for and emboldening us to witness to our family. But I know that most of you aren't going to have the time to work through a book in just 2 or 3 days, so start by reading the suggestions I've included above from the book and begin praying and preparing your heart and mind to witness to your family.
So on that note...Have a great day revelling in amazing grace and may God give you the opportunities to speak more of Him as He increases more and more in you and you decrease more and more; and that those "opportunities" will not just be with those that know Him but also with those that don't.
Gladly His slave, humbly His son,
PT