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The Motivating Disaster
by Lieutenant James Thompson

 

A young boy is playing with a ball. The ball rolls onto a busy road, the boy follows it, grabs it and sits down on the road and starts playing with it. You walk by and see that a disaster is about to take place. A car is speeding towards him. Do you run on to the road, grab the boy, and take him to safety? Or do you worry about the politically correct thing to do? You don’t know the boy, so you have a quick look. You notice that there are no parents around. Not wanting to go to prison or be sued for a misunderstanding, you ignore the problem. You go home and whinge about it to your friends and family about how parents suck these days...

 

What if you, a good swimmer, is swimming in the pool and you see an old lady drowning. Do you grab her and pull her to safety or do you say to yourself, “She’s not my age, I won’t be able to connect with her.” You then wait for someone else her age to save her so that she doesn’t freak out when she’s being saved.

 

A family is asleep in a burning house unaware of the disaster that awaits them. You walk by, do you scream to tell them to wake up? Do you rush in, do what you can, call the firemen? Or do you respect the peaceful and quiet neighborhood, not wake people up from their beauty sleep and say to yourself, “I’ll just come back in the morning when they’re awake.”

 

How about this. There is a virus that is affecting your nation. No one knows how to cure it, but you find a cure. Do you try to distribute it to everyone you know as quickly as you can. Or do you keep it for yourself and for your family not wanting to give it to others because they may not like the taste of it, and they’re all strangers to you?

 

As we read the above scenarios we can easily see what the right thing to do is. If disaster is coming you need to warn people. We cross certain barriers that would normally prevent us from interacting with certain people. But at the end of the day the disaster is more dangerous than the alternatives. As we use these analogies for gospel sharing we will see that we need to Die to ourselves, Disregard Differences, Disturb the Peace and Distribute to all.

 

Disaster

In the above we read of disasters that cause us to do more than what we would normally do. We sum up in our minds, whether their fate is more important than the consequences of our involvement. We would have no problem protecting a child, rescuing a lady, yelling at a house, calling the fire brigade, or shamelessly promoting a product if it meant lives were saved.

 

In the same way we need to realise that our evangelistic efforts are of extreme importance. The disaster that awaits those who do not know Christ are horrific. Hell is not a place we should want anyone to go to. But hell is real and we would do well to realise that the disaster of hell is a lot worse than any excuse...

 

Die to self

The dilemma in the first analogy is the potential hazard of doing, being seen or being charged with doing something politically incorrect. In gospel sharing we can do this too. Instead of proclaiming the grace and truth of Jesus we can water it down not wanting to say anything to anyone that would make them blush. Instead we choose to cover our backsides. The disaster we are more afraid of is the disaster that could harm ourselves. To put it simply, we choose our own safety over others. Hardly a Christlike character.

 

What is needed is for men and women, boys and girls to die to themselves. To give their lives up for other peoples safety. Are you willing to make other peoples eternal safety more important than your temporal safety? Jesus did, and I think we should too.

 

Disregard Differences

The swimmer who would not save the elderly person was worried about the age difference. This too is common in evangelism. We decide not to preach the gospel of love and salvation to certain people because they are different to us. We don’t mix with those sorts of people, or even the more “holy” cop out, “They’re not like us, they wouldn’t want to talk about Jesus!”

 

The problem here is that we fail to realise that all people are bound for hell unless they call upon the Savior. We are all the same. We need to disregard our differences, we need to focus on the similarities, we need to major on the major points. That is, that Jesus Christ loves them and wants to save them.

 

Disturb the Peace

No one wants to disturb a peaceful and quiet neighborhood. People have their own lives, they are going about their everyday business. “We shouldn’t disturb them.” We don’t want to get up in their face and change the subject. We don’t want to be rude. We will wait for them... Thats a very common modern evangelism approach. We wait for them. We are more worried about keeping the peace, the status quo so to speak than other peoples salvation.

 

However, this does not take into account the impending danger. The disaster that awaits us is more than a good enough reason to disturb people, for if we don’t they will be a lot more disturbed in an eternal hell than what they are in the present. For the unsaved this is as close to heaven as they will ever experience and the furthest from hell they will ever be. We must disturb the peace, peoples eternity is at stake!

 

Distribute to All

Have you ever thought bout Christ’s words to go into all the world and preach the gospel and make disciples? It sounds like a big job doesn’t it? Maybe what He meant was go into your little cocoon of a world and tell only your friends and family the good news of Jesus. Jesus said what He meant. We have the cure for the worlds problems, His name is Jesus! And all people need Him!

 

This means that every single person in the world needs Jesus, and so we must not only go to those we now and love, we must go to all peoples, all nations, all places! The need is greater than our tiny sphere of influence. We need to go bigger! We need strategies to get the most amount of people saved and sent out to do the same in the shortest amount of time! We cannot pick and choose who should hear the gospel, all people should hear the gospel!

 

Wrapping Up

It would be too easy to say that we simply share the gospel exactly the same in every context though. In each of the above analogies the method of saving was different.  The same can be said for evangelism, different people will respond to different things in different ways. However, we must never fall into the self serving traps of political correctness, allowing differences to hinder, wanting peace and quiet instead of heaven, or preferring relationship over the mandate for all the world. The impending disaster must take precedent over our petty excuses! We must be ready to die to ourselves, disregard differences, disturb the peace and distribute the gospel to all people!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

   

 

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