Why We Sometimes Find it Easier to Talk About Amazon Prime than Jesus.
A couple of years ago, I posed a question to my women’s small group: What is something that has recently changed your life? Tell the person next to you about it.”
With ease and excitement, they buzzed about how Amazon Prime had transformed their shopping experience, click and collect had taken the stress out of buying groceries and packing cubes had brought much needed order to the chaos that formerly ruled in their suitcases while travelling.
Transformation is easy to talk about because we’re simply testifying to our experiences. A clear problem was overcome by a clear solution. What is clear to us is easy to communicate to others.
My next sentence was, “Now turn and share the gospel with that same person.”
Only crickets could be heard.
What are we missing when it comes to Jesus? Our minds are informed. We know what the Bible says and that it’s good news. We know the eternal trajectories of our lives have been changed, but perhaps we’re not always certain of how Jesus transforms our everyday lives.
We can’t talk about the Gospel with ease, excitement and clarity when we’re still wrestling with questions and realities such as “Why don’t I feel different?” or “Why do I feel stuck?” or “Why can’t I seem to change?” or “Why does my mind know so much more than my heart has experienced?”
When sharing the good news, I used to secretly think, “I don’t sound very convincing.“ I sounded like I was sharing theoretical information about Jesus rather than transformational experience.
Information doesn’t compel people the same way transformation does.
The noticeable gap between what the Bible says about the life Jesus came to give me and what I had experienced led me to conclude, “There has got to be more than this.”
God took that cry of my heart as an invitation to take me on a surprising journey, not of adding more to my life but of giving Him more of me. He gently broke me open and started digging to reveal the hardened, shallow and crowded places in my heart. As I studied the parable of the Sower, He began to reveal that what I had believed were obstacles to intimacy with Him were actually opportunities to trust Him. And this is where transformation began to take place.
The flourishing life is characterized by spiritual fruitfulness and kingdom productivity, but not as a result of our performance. It rests in the depth of our connection to God. More depth obviously requires going deeper, and going deeper begins with breaking ground.
Our job isn’t to create the crop or manufacture the fruit. Fruit happens in good soil. Our goal is to take responsibility to relentlessly prepare our hearts for His use and relinquish the results to Him. We focus on the field, not the yield. Soil serves a specific purpose—it is simply the environment where seed sown can flourish into fruit grown.