JR. Forasteros - November 29, 2015
Learning to Fly
We don't like to wait. Especially when change is on the horizon, we'd rather just rush into the change. But growing is waiting, and waiting is an opportunity for faith. The journey of coming to know begins with naming our desires. To learn to name our desires, we listen as Jeremiah gave Israel the vocabulary to hope for the long-awaited Messiah.
From Series: "What to Expect When We're Expecting"
The future can be a scary thing – especially because it doesn’t come with a roadmap. But when God calls us, we rarely get all the details. How do we move forward faithfully when we don’t know where we’re going? Advent invites us to anticipate well, to look to our fathers and mothers as they longed for God’s rescue. Their stories teach us how to hope well and move forward faithfully.
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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.
