Photo by Ben Hershey on Unsplash
On display in our home is an antique baseball glove. Our family loves baseball, but this particular glove is on display not simply because it represents a sport we love, but because it belonged to my husband’s grandfather. It’s a piece of family history. My three-year-old, Edie, loves to talk about it. The most recent conversation started with her expressing her own love for baseball, but ended up being more about who Grandpa Rikard was and how he has already passed away. Edie thought very hard about the concept of death and after a few moments she piped up with “and then he was buried in the tomb, and on the third day he rose from the dead!” After stifling laughter, I was able to redirect her to Jesus being the one who did that, but praise his name that because Jesus defeated death, we can follow suit!
What really hit me at this moment was that she is so familiar with the gospel story that anytime death is mentioned in our home, she associates it with Jesus’ victory on the cross. That’s because of discipleship at home, discipleship at Mosaic (with many of you teaching her that truth on Sunday mornings in Mosaic Kids) and the community around us that points her to the gospel any chance we can get.
Most of the time, sharing the gospel with my kids comes naturally. I would guess that it’s probably the same for you. We believe it. We want our children to believe it, as well, and so we find ways to bring it up. Church, I must confess. I do not feel the same level of confidence about sharing the gospel with our neighbors as I do my children. When I think about bringing up the hope I have in Jesus with a friend or another mom at my kids’ schools, I recoil. It doesn’t feel as natural. It doesn’t feel as acceptable. It feels way more risky to whatever social standing I think I have in any given context, and I sometimes believe that I don’t know how.
But the truth of the matter is that I know the gospel itself, therefore I do know how to talk about it with someone else. It may be awkward and I will probably make mistakes, but I can do it. When I do get a chance to share with someone, I am not eloquent and it is usually a little bit uncomfortable. I wish it were more natural to me, but much like throwing the baseball, if I don’t practice, I will not get better. If I don’t push my muscles, they’ll never grow. If I don’t try, it won’t get less awkward. This is what our elders are calling us into. Just try. Flex the muscle of evangelism and see what the Holy Spirit does. Let’s choose to be uncomfortable so that others might be comforted by Christ. Let’s make little of our own names so that Christ’s name would be magnified in our city. Would you join us?
