The Christian Vacuum
The Christian life does not happen in a vacuum. It is a shared experience. It is life lived with and among people as we follow Christ. The challenge is that we often forget the communal, life-lived-together aspect of the faith. When that happens, sermons take on an extreme amount of importance. The words the preacher speaks begin to take on an importance of epic proportions. A preacher needs to say all of the right things all of the time. Why? Because we are excluding the key component of living lives for others to observe and emulate.
We forget that our lives are to be examples. We are supposed to help people learn about Jesus by the way we live our lives. We help them when we apologize when we are wrong. We help them when we give sacrificially. We help them when we love our enemies. We help them when we live in such a way that Jesus Christ shines through. The faith is easier to understand when it is observed than described.
My wife, Ruth, was taking part in a management class. The communication exercise was not easy. The instructor gave each person a shape. There were straight lines, triangles, circles, and squares. These shapes and lines were put together into a shape. Each person had to give detailed instructions on how to draw the shape. There was a catch, however. They could not use the words of the shapes to describe them. A triangle now becomes a geometric shape in which the sum of the angles equals 180 degrees. There are only three sides to this shape. That is a lot of words to describe a triangle.
Well, Ruth is brilliant and thought the best way to describe this shape would be to show it to them. She cut the design out, pasted it to a piece of paper and wrote, “Draw this shape.” The instructor said that was not the intent of the exercise. I thought it a great way to get it done.
Imagine the life of Christ; there have been countless volumes written about the life Jesus lived and the example he gave. Without an example to follow there is a void and we will fill the void with something. That something is words.
I am not against words. I am a preacher. But if no one is living the Christ life in my congregation, I need to use more words than I know. Let me put it this way: People will learn more quickly how to forgive when they have seen it, experienced it in their lives. People will learn to pray when they have seen it.
I was fixing my motorcycle when I learned this lesson. The bike was idling roughly and there were some problems with it at highway speeds. My friend and I started to look through the manual for some trouble shooting ideas and there it was right before my eyes. They had instructions on how to not only eliminate the problem, but how to keep the bike in top working form. There were a lot of words used to describe something I realized my friends had quickly demonstrated for me. Their examples filled the vacuum words would had to fill if they did not show me.
Don’t get me wrong, we need words. But the words are a part of the package, not the total package. Jesus didn’t say the Bible was useless. He showed us how to live the Bible. Jesus said, “Follow me.”
Where are you today? Do you expect your preacher or your professor or books or movies to say everything that needs to be said about the Christ life? If so, does that expose a vacuum in your life? Maybe evangelism is a simple as saying, “follow me as I follow Christ.”