I am in Toastmasters and one of my observations is that speakers and
presenters almost always begin their talk justifying to the audience why they
are speaking and explaining their job. ‘I’m
here because I’m the evaluator’ or ‘this
is my Ice Breaker speech’. They then tell us how they arrived at where they
are, ‘this thought came to me in the
middle of the night’, or ‘I spent a
week in trying to think what I wanted to say’. We who speak in the church
have the same habit. For instance speakers will say, ‘Today I am giving the Communion meditation’ – actually the audience
already knows that you are doing the meditation because you are listed in the
bulletin. Presenters will then
continue on and tell us when, where, how and why they arrived at their
particular text for this particular meditation. I wonder if we do something
similar when we present the Gospel to others. I think it’s possible that we
spend more time telling people how we arrived at the Gospel, than we do in
actually sharing the Good News of Jesus Christ.
1 comment:
Gail;
-----Anymore, we are taught less how to think and more what to think. If life’s natural perils where less held at bay by our social, economic, and political machinery, each of us would individually better learn how to think and would discover more basic truths to think as well. We would have to, or the next peril waiting to devour us would get its belly filled every time. So people are not very strong in logic when they live in the comfort and tranquility we have enjoyed since the middle of last century. Moreover, when you consider the frantic push towards individual submission pressing us to regard what we believe as merely being “your own truth only, so keep it to yourself,” (a completely illogical proposal) then it becomes more understandable why we are so apt to gravitate towards the personal experience side of evangelism. Personal experience is all we have if we do not think about the life we live, the Word we’ve been given, and the door we’ve entered.
-----I watched a bit of a documentary last night. I laughed. SETI has a giant array of radio telescopes in some southwestern desert. They tapped massive computers into them. Moreover, they are enlisting millions of people to download screensavers that are actually simple programs to help monitor the enormous volume of signals they're collecting. They are looking for any pattern of electromagnetic waves that breaks from the randomness produced by mere nature. In other words, they are looking for signals that only intelligent life could have broadcast.
-----We live in a natural randomness of intellectual and emotional signals. The world has become filled with books and communications of all kinds, novels, manuals, texts, statistical collections, histories, movies, music, you name it. Everyone produces at least a few ideas, and most would love to have their's expressed. Many have had enough persistence to fill the world with every sort of thinking imaginable, true or false. And it all together forms a spew not dissimilar to what your TV makes when between channels - almost a totally random and constant signal.
-----But amidst all of it there is an undeniably perceptible pattern which does not fit; a break from the randomness. Human thought can only deal with what has happened. But this signal alone has dealt with what will happen. Where evidence is available its reliability has been unequivocally proven. So, it is an uniquely non-human signal - just what SETI would be looking for if it were looking for the truth.
-----The gospel is what only those who seek the truth shall find. It proceeds from the telling of God. And He so plainly spoke Christ into our world that if someone can not see Him he is looking for himself, not the truth. I best not talk about myself to talk about something so obvious.
Love you all,
Steve Corey
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