Welcome to Resurrection Parish. This is the third week of our message series “Staying Power.” This is a series about how to grow in your faith as a follower of Jesus Christ, and to keep growing in your faith. While some may dismiss the importance of spiritual growth, we are proposing that our most important objective in life could be to grow spiritually because it can so positively impact every other area of your life including your marriage, your kids, and your career.
This series is also about the steps you need to take to meet those commitments. We’ve identified five commitments that we believe are essential to grow as a follower of Christ. They form the acronym STEPS: Serving in Ministry or Missions, Tithing and Giving, Engaging in a Small Group, Practicing Prayer and Sacraments, and Sharing your Faith. Last week we looked at a step we said was the easiest of all, at least the easiest to understand and appreciate. We talked about prayer. Everybody agrees prayer is a good idea, even if we’re not good at actually praying.
Today, we’re looking at another step, and this step is actually the most difficult one of all. It’s difficult for all Christians. Today we are looking at the step of Sharing Your Faith. It’s not about sharing your faith with people of faith. That’s easy. It’s about sharing your faith with people we collectively call the “unchurched.”
I already know that many of you are going to push back at this. You might say something like, “I’m not equipped to share my faith. I don’t know all the books in the Bible, or why bad things happen to good people.” Answering questions and criticisms of the Faith is actually a branch of theology called Apologetics. While the Church does need people who are trained in apologetics, you do not have to be a theologian to share YOUR faith.
Another common pushback is, “My faith is personal and private.” Well, half right, your faith is personal. But if it’s the Christian faith, it is not at all private, its lived in a community and given expression in the world.
Perhaps the most common push back is: “I don’t want to impose my religion on someone else.” Well, I don’t want you to do that either. But “sharing your faith” is a far different thing from imposing your religion. Sharing your faith, is more about living your faith so as to reflect Christ.
Today, we’re going to look at how sharing your faith helps you grow spiritually. We’re going to look at three ways you can measure that growth.
First, sharing your faith helps you grow in love of God. In the Gospel today, Jesus said, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind” (Matthew 22:35). We express love for God when we join the mission he gave his Son and his Son, in turn gave to his followers.
When Jesus called Peter and the other apostles he said, “Follow me and I’ll make you …” (Matthew 4:19) …something. But think about it, he didn’t say, “I’ll make you smarter” or “I’ll make you richer.” He didn’t even say, “I’ll make you holier.” He said: “Follow me and I’ll make you fishers of men” (Matthew 4:19). Following Jesus fully means that we’re on a fishing expedition for the unchurched. That’s his mission.
When you have the same mission in life as someone else, when your purpose and goals align, your relationship with them changes, inevitably your affection and love for them grows.
Secondly, sharing your faith helps you grow in love of your neighbor. In the Gospel, Jesus says the second commandment is like the first, “Love your neighbor as yourself” (Matthew 22:36). Spiritually mature people have an ability to think about others first.
The more churchy word for what we’re talking about is evangelization – it’s Greek and it literally means sharing good news. The Gospel is good news. It is good news that we have a heavenly Father who planned for us from before the foundation of the world, and guides our steps everyday when we’ll let him, and one day will bring us home. It is good news that Jesus Christ died for us and rose from the dead to show us another way, a new way to live. It’s good news that God’s Spirit, the Holy Spirit, can help us live this new way of life that is love, no matter our current missteps or mistakes, no matter what we’ve done wrong or gotten wrong.
Sharing your faith means working to bring the good news of God’s love and mercy to people who do not know it. There are people all around you, who do not know the good news of the Gospel. They either have never heard it or, more likely, they grew up only superficially exposed to it, and since then have formed plenty of misconceptions about the Gospel, and the Church.
Lastly, sharing your faith grows your gratitude and enthusiasm for what God has done for you. When we commit to share our faith, it is an opportunity for us to be mindful of God for what he has done for us, grateful for the blessings we have received and, in fact, to grow in enthusiasm and gratitude.
We see all of the personal benefits in sharing our faith played out in the life of St. Paul. St. Paul shared his faith and was successful in sharing his faith because he was convinced of the difference knowing Christ had made in his life and would make in the lives of others. In today’s second reading, addressed to the Thessalonians, he writes, “You know what sort of people we were among you for your sake. And you became imitators of us and of the Lord, receiving the word in great affliction with joy from the Holy Spirit, so that you became a model for all the believers” (1 Thessalonians 1:6-7).
We should all ask ourselves, “What sort of person am I for your sake? What sort of person am I for the sake of the unchurched people in this community?”
St. Paul concludes, “For they themselves openly declare about us what sort of reception we had among you, and how you turned to God from idols to serve the living and true God and to await his Son Jesus from heaven, whom he raised from the dead” (1 Thessalonians 1:9-10). This is what sharing our faith is about. It is about helping people turn from idols, false Gods.
So let me give you a few ways to commit to sharing your faith. First, identify friends, family members and co-workers who are not connected to Christ and his Church. Second, invest in them in whatever way is available and appropriate. Invest first of all and most of all through prayer. Be someone who is open and available to them, easy to talk to, generous and kind. Finally, when appropriate, invite them to church. Sooner or later circumstances or conditions, events or issues, will make an invitation to church appropriate and welcome. If coming in person is too much at first, invite them to watch our live-stream from the comfort of their home.
The Church first and always needs witnesses, and all the baptized are called to be living witnesses of hope, of love, of Christ Jesus. We do so primarily by the way we live our lives – loving God and loving our neighbor. And when the time comes, we use words, of how the good God has done great things in our lives.