Friday, March 3, 2017

How Do We Bring God’s Anointed one to People?

How often do Christians feel that reaching out to unbelievers is something just for the typecast “evangelists” to do? Maybe we feel like we lack the words, the knowledge, or the platform to witness for God’s anointed one Jesus. Or maybe it’s just easier, sometimes, to stay in the safe place of a believer’s only circle. It’s easy to point to verses in Scripture that seem to justify this exclusive position: “What fellowship does light have with darkness?” “Don’t be unevenly yoked with unbelievers!” However, God didn’t design believer’s to be a part of a gated community filled with those lucky enough to already be “in the fold.”
For is all the believer’s are is inside a gated community, how do they shine their light to the world?
Have we missed the part where Jesus sat with tax-collectors and prostitutes sharing with all of them the message of the coming Kingdom of his God and his Father.
Some of us suffer from social anxiety. We say: “I didn’t know how present my faith to others.” “Let someone else bring up Jesus to them,” “I’m bad at it.” “How would I even do it?”
The thing is, Jesus didn’t take people to a scroll to convince them of the Father’s love and the righteous path. He couldn’t, because the Scriptures weren’t readily available to the common people at that time. Jesus’ life and ministry were a reflection of God’s heart, so much so that when one of Jesus’ disciples asked him to “show him the Father,” Jesus was able to say “Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father.” Imagine if we imitated Jesus so closely that we could say the same. Imagine if our words weren’t our sole witness, but our very lives were! This can be true of us as we allow the spirit of the lord Jesus to do his work though us in reaching out to others.

Risk and Reward

Show people Jesus through your actions, not your words, hold yourself to the creed of Jesus [Mark 12:28034] and be a living example that reaches beyond where the words of others fail. In short, let the image of God’s anointed one speak for itself, in you and through you.
Of course we will fail many, many times at this, which is why David in prayer to God asks Him to remember that he is just dust. We don’t always show God’s anointed one through our actions. But when you do represent the Man you believe in, the one whose message is worth fighting for, you course-correct and get back in the arena. Jesus becomes the lens through which you view everything; grievous circumstances, daily annoyances, a request for advice.
The goal is to portray the same image of love that Jesus painted as he hung in there with people, even when things were tough or awkward, when people were stubborn. We are not going to reach people’s hearts by tapping out in the first round.
Our ultimate goal is always to lead people to God’s anointed one through the message of the coming Kingdom of God, and that doesn’t necessarily happen through sitting them down and taking them verse-by-verse through Scripture. However, showing God’s anointed one to people through our actions is not a simple thing that exists on a timetable where if we hang in there for just a little while. It requires patience, perseverance, and a willingness to step out of our corner in order to love and embrace those who don’t understand who God is or who His son really is.

With this endeavor, there always comes the risk of rejection, misunderstanding, and awkwardness… all things that we humans naturally avoid. But the payoff is literally life or death in the end we spare no one by keeping God’s anointed one Jesus to ourselves. Jesus paid much too high a price for us to pick and choose who we should talk to about him.

As the body of Jesus God anointed one, we can’t keep our hands and feet to ourselves; we need to be reaching out, stepping into the messy, complicated situations of life, willing to fight for the salvation of those around us.
Even after we’ve decided to make the effort to bring people to God’s anointed one, the question that stalls most believers is, “How do I actually do this?” There are plenty of resources that will tell you how to witness; from door-to-door evangelism, to people we sit next to on a plane; and none of these are bad, but no one approach works all the time. Winning people for the lord Jesus God’s anointed one isn’t a cookie-cutter endeavor.
Let us remember that Jesus is the hero in a story written for the ages upon ages to come. He’s the one who was commissioned by His God and Father to bring a message of salvation to people suffocating from the death dealing burden of sin. He was a crusader for the underprivileged, a voice of reason in a maelstrom of chaos that continues to this day. How could I not want to emulate him? How could I not want to speak of him as victorious savior that he was and still is, a champion of the most profound epic of all time?

So often, we burden our Jesus with the constraints of paradigms, frame him in the outline of our personal understanding, try to fit him in the box of our own design; and it doesn’t matter if our position is “right” or not, we can still complicate the Good News of Jesus God’s anointed one with it. We need to put for the message that Jesus brought in all its plain and straight forward simplicity!

In order to be ambassadors for God’s anointed one, we have to represent him in a way that truly represents who he was; when he walked the earth giving us an example to follow.

The truth is, sometimes the voice of Jesus speaks, not in a citation of a chapter and verse, but in the sound of a whisper. In the godly advice that reaps a good outcome, in the leap of trust that profits greatly. In the compassion of God’s anointed one Jesus working in us and through us; the compassion that loved a leper that the world pulled away from; who said “Your sins are forgiven”; who insisted he came to bring healing to the sick.
One of the best ways we show forth Jesus God’s anointed one is to allow the love of God to work in us and through us! Both the ability to love and the desire to receive it are in us by the spirit of the living God, built into our hearts and souls, our very bones. Sometimes our own perspectives can shackle our ability to portray Jesus in the barrier-breaking, earth-shattering, revolutionary way that Jesus God’s anointed one himself did it: loving with no-holds-barred. Loving; the sick, the broken, and degenerate. Acting in love to all he came in contact with without any reservation and always in a selfless way!
We need to be willing to love to the point of pain; loving beyond what the human body can endure as Jesus did. We need push ourselves. We need love radically. We can show others Jesus God’s anointed one through the enabling power of God’s Spirit that will give us the ability to love selflessly in a world that tells everyone to put self first, look out for number one, take care of your own needs above all others.
Even in a storm that would tempt us to avoid heartache and awkwardness by sticking to the safe route of those already saved; the voice of Jesus calls each of us out of the boat, to walk above the waves of life, and to love like he did; at the tables of the sinners and the unsaved.
Live the message without shame

I’ve heard accounts of people who shined the light of their trust in the lord Jesus so brightly, unbelievers were drawn to “whatever they had,” divulging their life stories, asking for prayer, just wanting to bask in the presence of someone who showed them the Lord in the way they lived; just as he showed himself to his followers. Eric Chang was such a person as we see reading his biography.
Will we do this perfectly all the time, the answer is no. Should we strive to do so, the answer is yes.
The message Jesus God’s anointed one has given to us should be lived out in everything we do. Not like a Tom and Jerry cartoon where we’re whispering over a secret, hoping people will crowd around us asking what we’re so interested in; but living it openly, weaving our love of Jesus into every choice we make, every step we take, so that the joy of the lord Jesus stands as our undeniable witness. We can affect change when we’re willing to step outside our comfort zones.

Whether or not people come to God’s anointed one is not up to us. It’s between God and the individual. However, God can and does draw people to the lord Jesus through us. So that is what we do can to bring His anointed one to people. Through our actions as well as our words, through every move we make, our lives can be a testimony of the lord Jesus who we serve, reflecting the man that Jesus was, is, and will always be. More often than we know, it’s not our words that will show people who Jesus God’s anointed one … it’s our actions!

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