JR. Forasteros - October 21, 2018
Personal Service
When we see a need, we often think, "Oh, someone should help!" One of the biggest barriers to us stepping up is our own anxiety. But what if those are opportunities to grow in our faith? What if God is inviting us to step out and serve?
From Series: "5 Things God Uses to Grow Your Faith"
How do we discover life-changing faith What would your life look like if you knew beyond a shadow of a doubt God was real? How would your relationships be different? How would your job be different? In this series, we'll explore the five things God uses to take our faith to the next level. We'll learn how we can partner with God to have the kind of faith we thought was only for spiritual giants. God wants you to have big faith. Saying YES starts here!
More Messages From JR. Forasteros...
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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.
