FAITH: Are People Open to What We Preach?
Jan 31st, 2008 by azdean
Christians love to preach. We have the gospel, we have our morals, we know what’s right and what’s wrong and we like to tell other people all about it.
Trouble is that many people have been turned off and don’t care to listen any more. Why is that?
Well, sometimes it can be helpful to look at a group outside our own to see what lessons we can learn.
So, take vegetarians for example.
Most likely, most people don’t think much about vegetarians. I mean if that’s the way they want to eat then good for them. But what if the vegetarian is pushy and keeps preaching at you that you shouldn’t eat meat. Wouldn’t that get annoying really fast?
Or what if the vegetarian went a little further and said he wanted to pass laws making it illegal to eat anything except what he approved of. That would not only be annoying, it would be downright threatening. No?
And what if while he was preaching his vegetarian lifestyle to us, we caught him sneaking a burger or two when he thought no one was looking. In that case, he would lose all respectability and we’d be sick and disgusted with him. We wouldn’t even want to be around him let alone listen to him anymore.
On the other hand, what if we saw him repenting for his failures to live up to the lifestyle he had been preaching and lamenting how much those failures had cost him — not only in respect but in other ways like becomming fat. Well, in that case we’d actually have compassion for him — even if we still didn’t see the need to be vegetarian ourselves.
But more, if we saw a love in him that demonstrated he cared more about us than just preaching at us or converting us, then we would actually be attracted to his message. We still may not change in the end, but we would much more likely listen careful to what he had to say.
Repentance, honesty, humility and genuine love open doors that years of hard preaching have long closed.
What do you think?
