Encounter with Seekers

Have you ever cried in church? Has there ever been anything that has so moved you that it brought tears to your eyes?

I cried last Sunday. Seeing and hearing the young people up here reporting on how God spoke to them during Niagara 2001 brought tears to my eyes as I thought of their love for God, the strength of their testimony, and the exciting potential of their lives.

But the thing that moved me most was when Alisa Currie talked about how she was able to lead her friend to Christ. There’s something so right and good and exciting about that. It’s no wonder that Jesus said that even the angels in heaven rejoice when a sinner comes home. There’s a party in heaven every time a lost person comes to the Lord.

That’s because lost people matter to God. They matter so much to God that he came here to earth himself – in person – to find them. Jesus said “I came to seek and to save what was lost” (Luke 19:10)

And when you look at the story of Jesus’ life and ministry in the Gospels, what do you see? You see a man who cared infinitely about people – especially about lost people – people who were living their lives without God.

We see Him going out of his way to be with them. We see him breaking through the social barriers of the time to talk with them, to spend time with them, to build relationships with them. And the overwhelming impression that comes through is that he really cared about these people.

You see, Jesus didn’t go to the religious people. He didn’t set up his ministry in the mainstream of the religious establishment of his time. He didn’t try to win the acceptance of the scribes and teachers of the law, the Pharisees and the theologians of the time. He didn’t set up a seminary, or a Bible school, or a center for religious studies.

No, he just went out where the people were – the common people – the lost people. He said “It isn’t the healthy people who need a doctor, but the sick. I didn’t come to call the righteous – or the people who think they’re righteous – I came to call the sinners.” Because lost people mattered to Him.

And you know the amazing thing? Here is Jesus, the Son of God, the only sinless man who ever lived, the holiest person ever to walk this earth. Yet when he was with lost people – when he was with sinners – he didn’t make them feel uncomfortable, he didn’t belittle them, he didn’t shame them, he didn’t preach hellfire and brimstone at them. He treated them with respect and dignity. You get the unmistakeable impression that he actually enjoyed being with them, and that he would rather be with them than with the religious people. In fact, the sinners sought him out – they followed him around; they invited him to their parties and they had him home for dinner. Because they sensed that he was real and that he, unlike the religious people, truly cared about them.

And because of that, the religious people resented Jesus. They criticized him. And they hung a label on him – the worst label they could think of. They accused him of being “a friend of sinners”.

Q. What about us today? We claim to be followers of Christ. We are trying to walk in his footsteps. Do you think that anyone could hang this label on us – that we are “friends of sinners”?

I’m afraid that when you look at the church today – you don’t see much of that. You don’t see Christians hanging out with and reaching out to non-Christians. We tend to do the opposite – to keep non-Christians at arm’s length. We insulate ourselves from non-Christians by spending most of our time with other believers.

Joe Aldrich says that when a person becomes a Christian, it takes about two years before he has lost most of his significant relationships with non-Christians. He just stops hanging out with lost people anymore. The church kind of “swallows him up” with programs and fellowships and events where he’s just with other Christians. And the Christian life becomes all about how to relate to other believers.

And the church becomes like a fortress – a holy huddle – where we gather inside the walls and enjoy each other’s company, while the lost people outside barely even know that we exist or what we believe, and could care less.

Somehow, I don’t think that this is what Jesus had in mind when he founded the church. He wants his church to have his heart for lost people. Since lost people matter so much to God, they ought to matter to us as well.

So, in an attempt to “re-connect” ourselves to this vital truth that we seem to have forgotten, we’re going to look at how Jesus related to lost people, and how we can reconnect to the lost people who surround us today.

Jesus was always “conecting” with people. And every one of those encounters he had left an indelible impression on the person he was with. That’s why I call them “eternal encounters”.

Have you ever been with a person who just “bowled you over” with the force of his or her personality? They are so high-powered and high-energy that when you are with them, you kind of feel swept up in a whirlwind.

That’s NOT what Jesus was like. Although he had the most magnificent personality of anyone who ever lived, he didn’t use his personality to sweep people off their feet. He could have used the sheer force of his charisma to get people to follow him, but he never did that.

He always respected people; never “overwhelmed” them. He loved them, he affirmed them, he treated them with dignity. But most of all, he let them make up their own minds about him and what their relationship to him would be. He invited people to follow him, but it was always that – an invitation, not a demand. He didn’t control people; he didn’t manipulate.

There were a lot of different kinds of people he encountered in the course of his ministry – there were spiritual seekers and there were skeptics. There were notorious sinners, and there were so-called saints. There were many people who were suffering – emotionally, economically, physically. And there were others who were pretty satisfied with the way their life was going.

And we are surrounded by those same kinds of people today – the seekers, the skeptics, the sinners, the saints, the suffering, and the satisfied. So let’s see how Jesus related to them, and what we can learn about building relationships with them.

The first category of people I want to look at with you are the spiritual seekers. These were people who had some spiritual interest – they were looking for answers to the spiritual questions of life. They were on a quest. They hadn’t gotten everything figured out and boiled down to a neat little religious formula. They were searching; they were actively seeking for the truth.

Jesus met several of them early on in his ministry. Let’s read about them in John 1.

Read John 1:35-51

The first thing that you notice about these guys is that they were not spiritually ignorant. They were just ordinary guys – three of them were fishermen – so they probably didn’t have a lot of education, but they certainly weren’t illiterates. They believed in God, they knew something about spiritual truth, and they knew at least some of the Bible’s content.

The interesting thing is that at least two of them – Andrew and his unnamed companion, whom we assume was John, the man who wrote this account – were disciples of John the Baptist. That tells us that they were not content with where they were spiritually. They were looking for something more.

They had heard about the ministry of this radical man named John, who looked for all the world like an OT prophet, and they had become his followers. That tells me that they were really interested in spiritual things – there was a spiritual hunger deep inside of them that made them want to hook their wagon to the ministry of John the Baptist.

Now John the Baptist was saying two things:

1. God is about to do something great – so prepare the way for the Lord. There was an anticipatory feeling to John’s ministry. He said “Remember, I’m not the main attraction – there’s someone coming after me who is.”

2. “All is not right with us spiritually. We have a problem called sin and we need to repent of it and we need to ask God’s forgiveness for it.” And John would baptize people who wanted to repent of their sin. And all kinds of people came to him for baptism – even hard-bitten Roman soldiers, and devious tax collectors.

So these disciples of John would have “bought into” these two truths:

1. God has something good in store for us

2. There’s something bad inside of us that keeps us from being all that God wants us to be.

You know, there are a lot of people around us who are in the same boat. They believe in God. If given the opportunity, they would want to know God better. They’re hoping to go to heaven when they die – but they also have a sense on some level that there’s something not entirely right inside themselves. In the words of the U2 song – they still haven’t found what they’re looking for.

That’s where these guys in John 1 were at. They were spiritual seekers. And then along comes Jesus. He is the answer to all their questions, he’s the fulfilment of all their needs – but they don’t fully know that yet.

How does Jesus deal with them? He asks them a question (v.38). He doesn’t sit them down and give them a big theological lecture about how he is the Son of God, and how he is the goal of their spiritual quest, and all that. No, he simply asks them a simple four word question: What do you want?

In our relationships with people who are spiritual seekers, I wonder if it would be a good idea to begin with that question: What do you want? What do you really want? What is it that you are really looking for?

You know, people live their lives in such a way that it often reveals what it is that they’re really looking for.

Jesus begins with that question. In the Gospel of John, those are the very first words that Jesus is quoted as saying. “What do you want?”

Not knowing how to reply, and perhaps being taken somewhat aback by the question, the disciples stammer out “Rabbi, where are you staying?”

What Jesus does next is amazingly good. Instead of answering their simple question with a statement of fact, he says “Come and see.” He invites them into relationship. Jesus is saying “I’d like to spend time with you, and I’d like you to spend time with me. Let’s get to know each other better.” There’s even an element of hospitality hinted at here, for when they got to Jesus’ lodging place, it’s certain that he would have invited them in for, what in our day, would have been a cup of coffee.

In the simple statement: Come and see, Jesus opens the door to relationship. I wonder if this is something we need to learn in our dealings with people who are not Christians?

Instead of keeping our conversations brief and to the point and then moving on, I wonder if we could begin to think of ways to open the door to further relationship?

I’m not always real good at this, and I’ve missed an awful lot of opportunities to open the door to relationships, but sometimes I do the right thing…

Back on Sep. 30, we did the Life Chain where we stood on Dundas St. holding signs proclaiming that Abortion Kills Children but that Jesus Heals and Forgives. During the time we were standing there, I happened to be at the end of the line by the bus stop. A man crossed the road and came to wait for the bus. He came up to me and asked “What does the word “abortion” mean?” He was an immigrant and probably had never encountered that English word before.

I explained to him, and that led to further conversation. I asked him his name, and where he was from. He told me he had just immigrated to Canada from Iran about a month before. I said “So you speak Farsi?” He said “Yes.” I said “Do you have a Bible?” He said “No.” I said “I just happen to have a Farsi Bible – I’d like to give it to you as a gift to welcome you to Canada.” So we arranged for him to come to the Chapel the following Sunday morning so that he could get the Bible.

As it happens, I wasn’t there that week, so I gave all the information to George Tabet, and George took him under his wing and introduced him to several other people. Turns out that this man and his family live across the street from the Landgraffs. To make a long story short, a few weeks later, George and Georgette have this man and his family in for dinner, along with the Landgraffs, and a friendship takes root. The whole family were out to our Christmas eve service.

That’s what I mean by opening doors instead of keeping them closed. And I’ll bet that a lot of you became Christians because someone opened a door of relationship.

Jesus invited these spiritual seekers into further relationship. And because he did, that led to other relationships. Andrew went and got his brother Peter. John had a brother named James, whom he presumably introduced to Jesus also. They happened to run into Philip, who was from the same hometown of Bethsaida, and he came along also. Then Philip went and found his friend Nathanael.

And in just one short statement: Come and see, Jesus opened a door through which entered half of the men who were ultimately to become his Apostles. Six men – Peter, James, John, Andrew, Philip, and Nathanael.

Evangelism happens best in the context of relationship. We often want to rely on technology to do evangelism for us. We hope that if a lost person just turns on the TV, or hears a radio broadcast, or reads a tract, or a book, or goes to a big Christian rally or crusade, that they’ll come to know the Lord.

But people will probably never come into relationship with Jesus unless they first come into relationship with you and me. Howard Hendricks has said “You can impress people at a distance; you can only impact them up close; the closer the personal relationship, the greater the potential for impact”

We tend to assume that non-Christians have seriously considered the claims of Christ and rejected them. But that assumption simply isn’t true. Recent surveys in the U.S. have shown that 51% of people have no philosophy of life that they can articulate. 46% of people have no idea why Christians celebrate Easter. And if those are the figures for the U.S. where the Christian message is so much more visible, they’ve got to be even higher for Canada.

The truth is that most people have not rejected Christ, because they haven’t even had an opportunity to seriously consider Christ. All they know about Christ is what they’ve seen of the church and religion, and unfortunately, that may have given them some wrong ideas.

There was a young man named John. He lived in California, in an affluent suburb of San Fransisco. He was a normal, all-American boy who while growing up, loved to play football and GI Joes with his friends. As a teenager, John was quiet, sensitive, and intelligent. He loved to read and explore new ideas. His parents enrolled him in a special high school for students who are gifted in the arts. There, he did well academically, and was well-liked by his teachers and his peers.

At the age of 16, John picked up a book “The Autobiography of Malcolm X”. He was deeply impressed by the story of how that man went from being a convict to a political leader, and ultimately a cultural icon.

John, who had grown up in the Catholic church, decided to convert to Islam – the religion of Malcolm X. He began to attend the local Islamic Center near his home in California. As he matured, he grew a beard, and began to wear traditional Islamic garb. He became more and more dedicated to his religion.

John graduated early from high school, and at the age of 17 traveled to Yemen to learn Arabic and pursue religious studies. From there, John moved on to a religious school in Bannu, Pakistan. The school was run by the Tablighi Jamaat movement – the same group joined several years ago by a man named Yusuf Islam – better known to millions as the British musician Cat Stevens.

John’s parents lost touch with their son about May of last year. They had no idea that he had moved into Afghanistan, where he was being trained by the Taliban to be a jihadi – a holy warrior – against the infidels.

After the events of Sept. 11, U.S. special forces moved into Afghanistan. Near the city of Mazar-i-Sharif, several hundred Taliban fighters made a bloody last stand in an ancient fortress that was being used as a prison. Among the last fighters captured was 20-year old John Walker.

I wonder if, in John’s teenage years, there were any Christian students around him at high school? I wonder if there were any Christian neighbors who lived on his street and knew his family? I wonder if, when he was looking for reading material, there were any Christian friends who could recommend a book that would help him in his spiritual quest?

John Walker is just one of millions of seekers out there who are looking for answers. Will we be there for them to say “Come and see”?

Prayer – challenge to find ways to open doorways to relationship with one non-christian this week. Let God take care of the results.