Connecting Others to Christ

When I was growing up, the offering cards at church had a little point system. 10 points if you brought your offering. 10 points if you read your Bible that week. 20 points if you told someone about Jesus. Thankfully, I have learned that Jesus already fulfilled the point system.

I have also learned that no one wants to be the tally mark on our offering cards, real or imagined.

I heard a lot of descriptions about Jesus when I was growing up. For some reason, the descriptions didn't work for me. It didn't necessarily matter how people could articulate the Gospel. In fact, some people got so desperate to use their words to lead me to Jesus that they resorted to guilt. Choosing to share the Gospel through words can lead to manipulation. They felt like it was their job to seal the deal.

I am a stubborn man. You can't change my mind very easily. But when I met Jesus for the first time, my heart literally melted in his nail-scarred hands.

So what was it that enabled me to be in a place where my heart was open even when my mind was hardened? First, a relationship. Someone took the time to get to know me. He asked questions and listened. I wasn’t a tally mark, and he wasn’t in a hurry to get on to the next person. He was different from me, and I saw that from being around him. This caused me to inquire deeper. I read Matthew’s account of Jesus’ life, and decided that I wanted to follow Jesus.

And of course, after being zapped by the love of Jesus, I began living a perfect life and only did good deeds from that point forward… Yeah right.

I stumbled a lot. There were many days early on when I just wanted to turn around. I didn’t want to call myself a Christian anymore, because I didn’t feel like a Christian and it would just have been easier. So what kept me going? What keeps me going to this very day? Relationships.

I think there’s a reason why Jesus had dinner with the sinners while the religious elite scoffed at him. He was building relationships. We Christians can be so prideful, we think we can just walk up to someone and tell them our version of Jesus and that will be enough. Well it’s not enough. In the real world, we don’t trust strangers to introduce us to other prospective friends. We trust our friends to make the introductions.

I do believe every person needs to meet the real Jesus. But we need a safe place to find Jesus. We need an authentic place to find Jesus. We need help destroying the barriers that others have helped erect between ourselves and Jesus. We need to hear that Jesus does not belong to someone else, but we all belong to him. This is the stuff of relationships – safe, authentic and life-changing.

This is not a ten-step process. It is love. It is prayer. It is patience. It is personal. And it is a celebration when one heart is changed by Jesus Christ. That is real conversion, and that is how we connect others to Christ.