Mission Movements leader, Steve Addison blogged the following http://www.movements.net/blog
"I was reading the story of Jesus’ visit to his hometown.Strange that the people who knew him best were so antagonistic.
Luke 4:28-30
{28} All the people in the synagogue were furious when they heard this. {29} They got up, drove him out of the town, and took him to the brow of the hill on which the town was built, in order to throw him off the cliff. {30} But he walked right through the crowd and went on his way.
Nazareth was a town of around 200 people. Every one of them would have known Jesus personally, seen him grow up. You can’t get more “incarnational” than that. So why do they want to throw him off the nearest cliff?
Jesus had thirty years of displaying the perfection of One who was truly God and truly man. I’m assuming his life spoke volumes. I’m assuming he had “earned the right to speak.”
It’s a mystery. Maybe a perfect life is no guarantee that people will welcome the gospel.
Funny how so many of the people who did welcome Jesus were strangers he’d never met before and never saw again."
I am an advocate and hopefully a practitioner of "incarnational" witness...living my faith and witness among the people God has placed in my life. It is what Jesus did, what Paul did and what the early church did. But - it certainly isn't safe! It's easier to wait inside the doors of our churches and wait for seekers to come to us. When we take our faith out among those who are ambivalent or even hostile to the Good News of Jesus, we are challenging Satan's strongholds. Jesus warned us about this when He said in John 17
{14} I have given them your word and the world has hated them, for they are not of the world any more than I am of the world. {15} My prayer is not that you take them out of the world but that you protect them from the evil one. {16} They are not of the world, even as I am not of it. {17} Sanctify them by the truth; your word is truth. {18} As you sent me into the world, I have sent them into the world.But, Jesus gave us assurance that we are protected from the evil one and the promise that our witness would be effective as he also prayed
{20} “My prayer is not for them alone. I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message, {21} that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you.May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me.We can expect persecution, rejection and sometimes even death, but we can also hold fast that there will be "those who will believe in my through their message." Our faithful witness is not in vain. People will come to know and love the Savior as we do if we faithfully witness. I like this equation for witness:
God's Ability
+
My Availability
=
The Possibility of Miracle in the life
of someone who does not know Jesus
Posts
