Making Jesus Known to People Who Don’t Want to Know
I’m in Paris this weekend, gathering people to an event which I’ve entitled “Making Jesus Known in a City Which Doesn’t Want to Know”. I used to live and work in Paris, so I’m under no illusions about the size of the task facing the church plant I’m serving in the city. Perhaps you feel a bit like they do - eager to share Jesus but discouraged that most of the people around you don’t seem interested. That’s why I’m blogging one of the insights I’ll be sharing in Paris, to encourage you as well.
Jesus was aged twelve. In about six months’ time he would be celebrating his bar mitzvah. Finally, after waiting for millennia to come to earth and preach the Gospel to the human race, he was finally able to speak and be taken seriously. His parents took him to Jerusalem for the Passover Feast, and he slipped away to the Temple to start sharing with the Old Testament teachers who were there. Jesus must have been incredibly excited. That’s why I find what he did so surprising.
Luke 2:46 tells us that his parents went looking for him. “After three days they found him in the temple courts, sitting among the teachers, listening to them and asking them questions.” Stop and read that verse again a bit more slowly. Jesus, the omniscient, all-knowing Son of God didn’t launch into preaching. He sat down, asked questions and listened for three days. We desperately need to learn that lesson from a twelve-year-old. It’s the only way to make Jesus known to people who don’t want to know.
Questions show people that we care about them. I don’t know who said, “People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care”, but I’m sure they were right. The teachers in the Temple didn’t want to be lectured by a twelve-year-old, any more than your non-Christian friends want to be lectured by you. But when we ask questions like Jesus did and let people know that we care, we very quickly find that they start caring about what we know.
Questions also stop us from coming across as spiritual know-it-alls. It didn’t matter who the twelve-year-old was, if he had tried to lecture the teachers at the Temple they would have switched off immediately and shut their ears to his message. It doesn’t matter what you or I know about the mysteries of the Gospel - if we come across as know-it-alls then unbelievers do the same. Bill Hybels puts it this way in his excellent book ‘Just Walk Across the Room’:
“This usually launches me into a tirade, I feel so strongly about it. I’ve been in situations when strangers are telling me their stories and don’t yet know I’m a Christ-follower. A few of their pious remarks or haughty assumptions later, I shut down. They don’t care about me. The only thing they care about is getting the roles nailed down: they are the ones with their act together, and I’m the pitiable lost person, substandard in countless ways. There may be no quicker way to send an unbeliever to the hills than to play the piety card. If you want to permanently repulse a person from the things of God, try a little superiority on for size. It works every time.”
Ultimately, questions make people want to ask us questions of their own. It’s like Solomon tells us in Proverbs 18:27 - “The first to present his case seems right, till another comes forward to question him.” The reason most unbelievers don’t want to hear what we have to say about Jesus is that they think they’ve got him sorted. They have heard one persistent, uniform message from their parents, their schoolteachers, their TV screens and their magazines. It’s only when we ask them questions that they begin to see that they have been peddled a lie about the carpenter from Galilee. When we question their worldview, we help them see the other side of the story. In Luke 2:47 we discover that “Everyone who heard him was amazed at his understanding and his answers.” His answers? I thought he was the one asking questions? That’s what always happens when we stop, sit, ask and listen. You’ll be amazed at the questions people ask you in return.
If you’re not a Christian and you’re reading this, you probably recognise this tendency in the Christians around you to lecture you as spiritual know-it-alls. We’re sorry. Jesus isn’t like that, and we shouldn’t be either.
If you’re a Christian and you’re reading this, then let’s learn this lesson from a twelve-year-old. How can we make Jesus known to people who don’t want to know? In the way I will be explaining to the church plant in Paris this weekend. We can do it by sitting, by asking questions, and by listening - then by being ready to give an answer for the hope that we have when people respond by asking questions of their own.
If you would like to learn some more lessons from a twelve-year-old, listen online to a message I preached recently at Kings Church, Eastbourne at http://www.kingschurch.eu/sunday-teaching-page/audio/lessons_i_learnt_from_a_12_year_old.mp3
