sharing

i learned something the past couple days that will end up being extremely beneficial to me.

so after the message i gave sunday i became pumped up about god haha.  getting into scripture the week leading up to and so far this week has excited me about god and my faith in him.  so i thought it only necessary to begin share the good news of grace with my co-workers at disney.  i quickly learned that a large majority of them believe that if you’re a good person you go to heaven.  some were believers in reincarnation and jokingly stated that i was more spiritualy advanced then they were in this life.  others who claimed to believe in jesus’ sacrifice on the cross demanded that you also had to do good deeds in order to reach heaven.  one other person told me how they read a book of a man who had seen heaven and came back and was telling me about what heaven is like.

i approached the conversation with the goal of getting them to understand that god wants to be in right or reconciled relationship with them, and that god’s desire for that allows us to bypass any “work” we must do to reach him.  words like salvation, grace, redemption, etc. began to spew from my mouth.  looks of confusion and bewilderment came over their faces.  they didn’t not understand these “church-y” words.  i began to almost fumble words to better get across their meaning.  it took quite a bit of effort in order to get them to understand what i was saying.

i was raised in the church.  my entire life has been spent in church, christian schools, and a christian home.  even non-believers in those settings understand “church-y” words.  i better understood what paul meant when he said “to the jews i became like a jew…to those not having the law i became like one not having the law…to the weak i became weak…i have become all things to all men so that by all possible means i might save some,” (I corinthians 9:19-22).  i must enter into the vocabularly and world of my co-workers in order to share the gospel message with them.  otherwise they could be left confused and miss it entirely.