JR. Forasteros - July 15, 2018

Friends in Low Places

The Way, Way Back

We all know what it feels like to hit rock bottom. But we struggle to imagine that God knows what it feels like too. We can’t believe that God is with us in those low times of our lives. Jacob’s encounter with God at Bethel is a powerful proclamation that we are never outside of God’s love. God is the best friend we could ask for – especially when we’re in low places.

From Series: "The Way, Way Back"

What's Summer without a road trip? We're travelling back to the stories of the Patriarchs - Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Joseph. They lived on the road, and in their travels, they encountered God in strange and unexpected ways. What do we learn about God on the road that we can't learn when we stay in our comfort zones? How might God be calling us to go somewhere new, following after our creator?

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I was my high school biology teacher’s worst nightmare.

Not because I was good at biology – I really wasn’t. But because I walked in on the first day of class and warned him, “If you’re going to teach evolution, we’re going to have problems.”

And sure enough, on the day it came time to teach Evolution, I was locked and loaded.

My church had prepared me to go into my public school ready to defend my faith! It’s what Christians call ‘apologetics’, which for me growing up meant being able to out-argue all the atheists and scientists I encountered. I had to defend God’s honor.

The only minor complication was that my science teacher was also a Christian. I can still remember the pained look on his face as he taught biological evolution to our class as I sat loading my rhetorical clip with all the ammo my church had sent me with.

I saw myself as a righteous warrior.

I was preaching God’s Honest Truth to my class, holding back the tide of godless lies flooding out of our textbooks and off the chalkboard.

It never occurred to me to wonder why my classmates didn’t seem grateful, why none of them seemed even the least bit curious to meet this God I was so stridently defending.

It never occurred to me to wonder whether God found my defense particularly helpful.

I want to talk a little bit about apologetics, about how Christians go about defending our faith. Because if you look around, or listen to some of the loudest Church leaders, you’d think our sole mission is to stand against a sweeping tide of secularism and pluralism and fight back.

That approach is all wrong. God doesn’t now nor has God ever needed us to defend anything. And if there’s any account we are to offer the world, it’s a self-sacrificial, vulnerability that invites those outside the faith to come closer to God. Today, we’re going to find a vision for how we interact with our friends, neighbors, coworkers and family who don’t share our faith.

Our ‘defense’ should be grounded not in combat and suspicion, but in grace and humility.

Join us Sunday as we learn how to invite rather than defend.

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