Last week I posed the question: Why do people come to church for Easter and then not return?
I noted Easter represents a complicated story – not one you can fully appreciate from the scripture reading or sermon you’d hear in a single Easter worship service. But the story itself does give us clues about how to talk to others about the message of Easter.
In the first place, we see that Jesus started telling his followers what was going to happen to Him in Jerusalem for a long period before the event: “the Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected, … killed and after three days rise again” (Mark 8:31 NIV). No one understood what He meant, but they did remember that they had been told. This proves that getting people into church on Easter is way better than nothing!
When Jesus does rise from the dead, there’s no 24-hour broadcast service to cover the story. Instead, the news travels by word of eyewitnesses. Philip Yancey observes that everyone to whom the Christ appeared in scripture (with Paul making the notable exception) was already a Jesus follower. Visiting Pilate or Herod with an “I told you so” was not on the Lord’s agenda. Rather, these early Christians’ experience of the resurrected Christ became for each of them a purely “personal” form of proof – one that made each of them sure in their faith but did not give them a basis for “verifying” for someone else that their confession was true. The case of “doubting Thomas” in John 20:24-29 makes this point well.
Yet, this personal evidence ends up being a powerful recruitment tool. These eyewitnesses went forth with such conviction that even now the gospel continues to bless “those who have not seen and yet have believed” (John 20:29 NIV).
We believers all hold different “personal proofs” that Jesus is indeed Lord. While we should never expect that what made us have faith will convince someone else, we need to remember the value of anything that speaks to us “personally.” God actually plans to get acquainted with the unbelieving by having us make the introductions. It’s all about keeping it personal.
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