Ask Away
For a while now, I have had a section of scripture that I keep going back to and wonder how I can put it into practice in my life. The first part of the scripture is 1 Corinthians 2:1-5 which says,
“And so it was with me, brothers and sisters. When I came to you, I did not come with eloquence or human wisdom as I proclaimed to you the testimony about God. For I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and him crucified. I came to you in weakness with great fear and trembling. My message and my preaching were not with wise and persuasive words, but with a demonstration of the Spirit’s power, so that your faith might not rest on human wisdom, but on God’s power.”
As a person who stands up and preaches on a regular basis these verses really started to challenge me. Am I suppose to come up with some clever way of convincing people that Jesus is Christ or do I just preach Jesus and him crucified? Do I trust the Spirit to work in someone’s life or do I feel the need to persuade them with my own words to follow Christ? I was really struggling with some of these questions.
A couple of weeks ago I was able to attend the Exponential conference in Orlando. One of the classes that I went to was about table evangelism. It was about a program called Alpha that is all about allowing people to ask questions about God, Christ, and faith without telling them what to believe. One thing that struck me from the woman talking about the program was when she said that the program was set up so that if the Holy Spirit didn’t come through it was not going to work. I loved that idea of having to rely on the Spirit alone to bring people to Christ. Letting people ask questions and seek for themselves instead of telling them what to believe.
Often in churches we don’t allow people to ask questions and wrestle with their faith. We think we have to tell them what to believe and persuade them with great logic or wisdom. However, when we look at Christ we see that that wasn’t the way he operated. Jesus asked 307 questions in the Gospels. Jesus wasn’t about telling people what they had to think or do. Jesus was about making people think critically about what they should think or do. I believe we should start taking this approach, because when we allow people to ask questions and come to conclusions on their own with the help of the Spirit they are going to be much more likely to stick with their faith.
It is not easy to actually put this approach into practice. It means we have to stop relying on ourselves and let the Holy Spirit work. However, I think that when we start to do this we will see more people come to Christ and more people stay in a relationship with Christ. Let’s give it a shot and see what the Spirit will do!
Joel Harper
