June 7 - Acts 25: Catching Their Eye

I was talking with friends tonight about how to engage and minister to unbelievers in our neighborhood. We want to love and care for the people who live around us and, as we do, trust God to give us opportunities to tell them about Jesus.

It would be so much easier if we could just authentically live out our faith in front of them and then people would be so blown away by what they experience of us that they'll pursue a relationship with Christ.

Yeah, right.

"The trials in Acts 24-26 force us, if we're to stay true to the story we're reading, to give up the notion that the Christian community can catch the admiring eye of the world if we just live rightly and obediently. We have ample documentation by now to disabuse us of such thinking. God's revelation is rejected far more often than it is accepted, is dismissed by far more people than embrace it, and has been either attacked or ignored by every major culture or civilization in which it has given its witness: magnificent Egypt, fierce Assyria, beautiful Babylon, artistic Greece, political Rome, Enlightenment France, Nazi Germany, Renaissance Italy, Marxist Russia, Maoist China, and pursuit-of-happiness America. The community of God's people has survived all of these cultures and civilizations but always as a minority, always marginal to the mainstream, never statistically significant." Eugene Peterson, Conversations, pg. 1728

It's tempting to think that if I will only act a certain way, say the "right" things, or love my neighbors enough that they'll come to know Jesus.

Paul's example in these chapters proves that to be radically untrue. He did nothing wrong. Countless examples throughout the history of the Church prove that to be radically untrue. And there are enough examples in my own walk with Christ to know it isn't true. It's not about being a perfect community of believers; it's about what God's doing in people's hearts.

Rather than caring so much how others perceive me, or what they might think of my belief in Jesus, my task is like Paul's: to follow Jesus wherever He may lead, to say whatever the Spirit leads me to say, and to love my neighbors regardless of whether they're interested in Jesus or not. That is how I give glory and honor to my Lord.

"This gives us pause. If we, as the continuing company of Jesus, have achieved an easy accommodation with our society and culture, how did we manage to pull off what Jesus and his community of followers failed to accomplish? How has it come to pass that after twenty centuries of rejection, we assume that human acclaim is tantamount to divine approval?" Peterson

Father, I pray that, like Paul, my primary focus would be on You and Your ways, that I would seek to please You alone. I pray that You'll release me from my sinful desire for the approval of man. May I value Your plan and Your purposes in my life more than human acclaim.