Tell them how much the Lord has done for you…
We regularly talk about the challenges that we have in sharing our faith. Here are some of the reasons that evangelism is hard.
1) The fear of rejection.
2) The uncertainty around what to say.
3) The fear of responding to objections.
We could certainly list more reasons than these. But what if the biggest challenge to sharing our faith was in how much we are caught up with deep love for our God and deeply appreciate his graces to us? What if our greatest challenge in outreach was a result of a lost first love?
Paul Tripp describes this sort of thing by talking about visual lethargy. In short, visual lethargy happens when you get so used to seeing something that it fails to capture your awe, your attention, and your heart. You see it so often that you don’t enjoy it anymore.
Could that be it?
This demon-possessed man had no formal training. He didn’t go to Evangelism 101 training. He experienced a deep mercy of God, and then he was sent out to talk about it. That’s it.
Could it be that we have “visual lethargy” when it comes to what God has done for us and how he has had mercy on us?
The truth is we talk about what we are most excited about, and we do it without training. We talk about our favorite sports teams. We talk about finances, the stock market, and community problems - though most of us are not experts in those areas. But we have trouble talking about our God?
Perhaps, what we need to do then first, before anything, is to recover our first love by spending time with our God and enjoying the gifts he gives us. We need to enjoy the work of God as he forgives us our sins and sets us free from their condemnation. We get to enjoy the work of God as he speaks to us through his pastors and as he serves us at the Table. We can even recover it by prioritizing time with him in his Word (before catching up on the stock market or the latest sports gossip). We can recover our first love by experiencing in worship the eternal, forgiving, and mercy-lavishing love of our God.
This Sunday, we’ll remember how God has had mercy on us, and then we’ll go to tell the story. We’ll consider Mark 5:18-20.
Pastor Nate