Year: 2014

When I first read the quote that I have included below, the words definitely resonated with me. It is because I feel the same way. I know people who love Jesus. I know people who want to share the joy they have found in Jesus with others. But there is a tension in how to do so. You might be one who also struggles with this. We have a hard time doing that thing that preachers call “sharing your faith.” When we are instructed to do this, we feel like we are being asked to go sell a product to people who haven’t asked for the sales pitch. We feel like telemarketers on a cold call or like carnival hawkers trying to entice a stranger to come win a stuffed penguin. And so we get awkward trying to market and sell Jesus.

But Jesus doesn’t need us to be His marketing agent nor a salesman for Him. Instead, we just need to let our honesty about our joy and belief in Him to flow out of us naturally. We just need to change our conversations slightly to point people in the direction of Jesus. Jesus can take care of the rest. Instead of becoming the pushy salesman or the marketing agent trying to come up with a cute jingle that’ll “hook” someone into wanting the “Product,” we just need to be honest with people about our feelings for and about Jesus. Jesus doesn’t need your marketing and sales skills. He is way more capable than you of drawing people to Himself. Here is an illustration of the point from Miller:

…when I share my faith, I feel like a network marketing guy…. Some of my friends who aren’t Christians think that Christians are insistent and demanding and intruding, but that isn’t the case. Those folks are the squeaky wheel. Most Christians have enormous respect for the space and freedom of others; it is only that they have found a joy in Jesus they want to share. There is the tension.

In a recent radio interview I was sternly asked by the host, who did not consider himself a Christian, to defend Christianity. I told him that I couldn’t do it, and moreover, that I didn’t want to defend the term. He asked me if I was a Christian, and I told him yes. “Then why don’t you want to defend Christianity?” he asked, confused. I told him I no longer knew what the term meant. Of the hundreds of thousands of people listening to his show that day, some of them had terrible experiences with Christianity; they may have been yelled at by a teacher in a Christian school, abused by a minister, or browbeaten by a Christian parent. To them, the term Christianity meant something that no Christian I know would defend. By fortifying the term, I am only making them more and more angry. I won’t do it. Stop ten people on the street and ask them what they think of when they hear the word Christianity, and they will give you ten different answers. How can I defend a term that means ten different things to ten different people?

I told the radio show host that I would rather talk about Jesus and how I came to believe that Jesus exists and that he likes me. The host looked back at me with tears in his eyes. When we were done, he asked me if we could go get lunch together. He told me how much he didn’t like Christianity but how he had always wanted to believe Jesus was the Son of God.

So how do we market and sell Jesus to others? We don’t. Instead we strive to live out an imitation of Christ in our lives and we honestly share the joy we have discovered in the fact that Jesus likes us. We can trust Jesus to be big enough to handle the rest.

How have you had similar experiences with feeling like Miller, like his friends that thought Christians were pushy, or like the radio host?