Sharing Your Faith Step 2: Preparing Yourself

I’ll confess, I haven’t been watching the Olympics. I believe I am a sports agnostic. Few sports grab my attention. Bowling, umm, ok so bowling seems to be the only example of something I watch with any regularity. But regardless of what events you like to watch, one thing is for sure: Gabby didn’t just wake up doing summersaults. She had to train and work for the medals she earned. In fact, every athlete has had to work hard to become the best of the best of their homelands, regardless if they win or lose. To that, I understand that one runner ran the race on a broken leg. Talk about commitment.

This brings me to our race, as Paul calls it. “I have fought the good fight. I have finished the race. I have kept the faith.” Reading his writings, Paul often talks of the constant need of training in order to live the Christian faith, as we need to share the faith with others. Are we prepared?

Peter encouraged his readers to “…revere Christ as Lord. Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have. But do this with gentleness and respect…” (1 Peter 3.15 NIV) This is our second step in sharing the faith. The first step was to pray. Pray to be open to God’s leaning, to seeing opportunities, and for people in general and one person in particular. Now we need to be prepared ourselves.

Yes, prayer does help prepare us. Remember, I told you that we will not be done with prayer. But prayer is not all that we need to be prepared. So what do we need to do to be prepared to share our faith?

Our verse from Peter provides the key to being prepared. Revere Christ in your hearts. But not just revere Him. There is a submission painted here. (Yeah, it’s that 4-letter word.)  We are to set Jesus as Lord of our lives. How often do we seek his guidance and direction? For example, we take our GPS devices and look to it for finding places that we’ve not been to a whole bunch, if we’ve even been to that destination. For every turn, we listen and obey. But do we listen to hear Christ? Not just at the beginning of the day, or its ending. I mean at every turn, there is opportunity to do horrid, to do good, to do better. Do we bring Christ’s lordship into the minutia of daily life?

When we do not, might I put forth that we are robbing God his due glory. Working graveyard shift, an older gentleman came in, driving a beat-up looking smaller Ram 350 RV. He came in and gave me a quiz. When you were working along the highway at the church this afternoon, you were almost hit by a truck. Were you lucky, or did God step in? I said God stepped in. I figured he had driven by and recalled seeing me there earlier. Both my store and the church were a mile apart on the highway heading out of town. This evening, when you barely beat your friend at the net in Volleyball, you were? I said lucky. He asked me what was about God that I didn’t include Him in my minutia. I had no answer. He went to demonstrate that even in, or especially in the minutia, God does care about the very details. He even cares when a bird falls to the ground. (Mat 10.29)

From the end of that conversation, I ceased using the word “lucky”. There were times that I wanted to use that word in the beginning, but after making a concerted effort, it became easy to purge the word from my vocabulary. Like any word that we ought not use, making an effort, looking to the Father’s help. It comes down to changing our vocabulary. Paul tells the church of Ephesus twice that there should be no coarse talk, but words that encourage and full of thanksgiving.

Now why is this important? For a couple of reasons: Paul encourages the reader in 1 Cor. 3 that we should not be of this world. According to 1 Pet. 2.9, we are a royal priesthood, God’s special possession so that we may declare his praise. James would add that therefore we cannot praise and curse from the same mouth. (James 3.9-10). 2 Corinthians 5.17, if we are in Christ, we are a new creation. The old is gone, the new is come.  How we talk, the words we choose to use are first indicators of whether or not we are new, they are what will grab our friends’ attention. But it isn’t just talking the talk. I made the assumption that we are already living the walk. Now as we talk, we will also find our walk matching. There is an old school rhyme: “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but your words will hurt me more than you know.” The reverse is true. “A person finds joy in giving an apt reply—and how good is a timely word.” (Proverbs 15.23)

But having the right words, coming from revering Christ as Lord in our hearts, even in our minutia, will help in the final process of preparation that we are looking at this morning. Write your story out. As we are striving to live our Christian faith, sometimes someone may just force you to jump your steps in learning to share your faith. Writing the story will allow you to be familiar with the details of how Christ has worked in your life. The story is more than just when you became a Christian. Your story should contain why you were looking for Christ, or what you were doing when you discovered Christ. You might include how he has walked you through the storms in your life. “When I came to Christ, I was an awkward teen, my skin full of blemishes that no medication worked. It was my senior year, and I was miserable. Even my family had alienated me. Maybe we alienated each other. Was there anyone to accept me? In the chemistry class I TA’ed, I was tired of hearing of this one clique’s over the top parties, so I was crashing the next one. I learned once I arrived, it was a church party. The youth minister invited me to come to church in a couple of days. When I went, I was showered with love and hugs. I drank it in like the desert floor drinks in the rain.  I later that week, every night actually, I shared my childhood years and asked questions of the youth minister, who was the high school choir teacher. He took his time, even when he saw my ugly past. They accepted me, and I was soon clothed in Christ. They accepted me because God had accepted them. When I was looking for God, God made His love known. January 17^th, 1988.” That is a small bit of my story. What is yours?

This week, I encourage you consider your story as you continue to pray step one, as part of preparing to share your faith. Now I know the prep work is hard. I struggle all the time. Even Paul struggled with it. This is why we need to realize that we are not in this by ourselves. We have one another. If life hasn’t been what it should have been, then let’s lift one another in prayer so that together, we can reach people with the Gospel. Take the next step with me.