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Bringing the Gospel Home

E-BookEPUB0 - No protectionE-Book
224 Seiten
Englisch
Crosswayerschienen am07.04.2011
Sharing the gospel with a family member can be an exciting experience-and often a long, painful, and confrontational one. Randy Newman recognizes it can be more difficult and frustrating to witness to a family member than to nearly anyone else. In Bringing the Gospel Home, he delivers practical, holistic strategies to help average Christians engage family members and others on topics of faith. A messianic Jew who has led several family members to Christ, Newman urges Christians to look to the Bible before they evangelize. He writes, 'a richer understanding of biblical truth, I have found, can provide a firmer foundation for bold witness and clear communication.' After a brief introduction on the nature of family, he delves into discussions of grace, truth, love, humility, and time. He also addresses issues related to eternity and end-of-life conversations. Bringing the Gospel Home will help any Christian as he seeks to guide loved ones into God's family.

Randy Newman (1956-2024) served as senior fellow for apologetics and evangelism at the C. S. Lewis Institute, and was formerly on staff with Cru. He authored several books, including Questioning Faith; Questioning Evangelism; and Bringing the Gospel Home.mehr
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Produkt

KlappentextSharing the gospel with a family member can be an exciting experience-and often a long, painful, and confrontational one. Randy Newman recognizes it can be more difficult and frustrating to witness to a family member than to nearly anyone else. In Bringing the Gospel Home, he delivers practical, holistic strategies to help average Christians engage family members and others on topics of faith. A messianic Jew who has led several family members to Christ, Newman urges Christians to look to the Bible before they evangelize. He writes, 'a richer understanding of biblical truth, I have found, can provide a firmer foundation for bold witness and clear communication.' After a brief introduction on the nature of family, he delves into discussions of grace, truth, love, humility, and time. He also addresses issues related to eternity and end-of-life conversations. Bringing the Gospel Home will help any Christian as he seeks to guide loved ones into God's family.

Randy Newman (1956-2024) served as senior fellow for apologetics and evangelism at the C. S. Lewis Institute, and was formerly on staff with Cru. He authored several books, including Questioning Faith; Questioning Evangelism; and Bringing the Gospel Home.
Details
Weitere ISBN/GTIN9781433524332
ProduktartE-Book
EinbandartE-Book
FormatEPUB
Format Hinweis0 - No protection
FormatE101
Verlag
Erscheinungsjahr2011
Erscheinungsdatum07.04.2011
Seiten224 Seiten
SpracheEnglisch
Dateigrösse374 Kbytes
Artikel-Nr.14345622
Rubriken
Genre9201

Inhalt/Kritik

Leseprobe


 
INTRODUCTION

 

 

When I informed a friend I was writing a book on witnessing to family, he told me he had the perfect chapter titles:

Chapter 1: Don´t Do It!
Chapter 2: Don´t Do It!
Chapter 3: Did You Think I Was Kidding?
Chapter 4: Pray for Somebody Else to Do It
Chapter 5: Review Chapters 1, 2, and 3

He then offered several firsthand stories of how not to witness to family. And he had more from where those came from. Since then, many others have volunteered the same kinds of illustrations. Apparently, horror stories outnumber success stories.

This hasn´t deterred me. In fact, it has propelled me to write this book with a sense of urgency. Since my first book, Questioning Evangelism, was published in 2004, God has opened up many opportunities for me to speak about witnessing. During the question-and-answer periods that follow my presentations, inquiries about reaching out to family with the gospel have always been the most frequent and painful questions posed. People want to know how they can engage their loved ones with the good news. After my presentations, people come up to tell me, through tears, of their atheistic father or bitter mother or gay brother or drug-addicted sister or cult-ensnared daughter or backslidden cousin, and on and on it goes.

Some tell of family members who once held closely to the faith. Their testimonial goes something like this: We were raised in a great Christian home but now my brother wants nothing to do with God. Sometimes the drama moves in the opposite direction: I was raised Jewish (or Muslim or Hindu or Buddhist), and I came to faith in college. My parents have almost disowned me. Sometimes the disowning actually happens. One woman told me that her father, a Hindu priest, warned her, If you ever step foot in a church again, I will kill myself. (More about her situation later).

In some instances the prodigals ran away from a Christian home and now wallow in the mud (or the drugs or the sex or whatever other messes the Devil finds for them). In other settings the ones who became Christians are considered the rebels! The difference in the levels of pain seems minimal.

My purpose in this book is to offer hope. Consider that Scripture often describes God´s work in salvation as a miracle. He makes alive what was once dead (Eph. 2:1-5); he delivered us from the domain of darkness (Col. 1:13); and he explained that with man this is impossible, but with God all things are possible (Matt. 19:26). Once we realize that evangelism occurs in the realm of the miraculous, we start praying more faithfully, trusting more wholeheartedly, and proclaiming more gently. When we relinquish trust in our ability to pursuade and latch onto God´s power to save, we find hope beyond explanation.

In the process of researching this topic, I interviewed dozens of Christians with stories to tell-some with happy endings, some with other kinds of finales, and some still waiting to see how it all turns out. In this book I share some of their stories. All of them, regardless of how unsaved relatives have responded, hold encouraging lessons tucked inside.

Let me begin by telling you one of my favorite stories.

I grew up in a Jewish family and came to believe in Jesus as the Messiah when I was a sophomore in college. That means I have a Jewish mother. All those Jewish mother jokes you´ve heard are true . . . but they´re not funny. Telling my Jewish parents that I now embraced Christianity (what they thought of as the faith of the Nazis ) was no picnic. They responded politely, but I have no idea what they said to each other after we got off the phone. (By the way, telling family members about your newfound faith in person-face to face-is much better than telling them over the phone. I was a chicken.)

Priding themselves as true liberals, my parents (my Dad was silent on the phone while my mother did all the talking) simply told me they were happy for me. In a way that only a Jewish mother could intone, I´m happy sounded more like You´ve made me miserable. What followed were two requests and three wishes I will never forget:

Request 1: Don´t tell Grandma and Grandpa.
Request 2: Stay away from your younger brother.
Wish 1: We hope you won´t join some commune in Colorado.
Wish 2: We hope you won´t try to change the world.
Wish 3: We hope you won´t shave your head.

I´ve often amused myself with the thought that I now work for Campus Crusade for Christ, an organization that meets every other summer in Colorado and was founded under the motto, Come help change the world. However, I have never shaved my head.

My first attempts to witness to my parents were met with stonewalled resistance. We´re happy for you was always inseparably followed by the word but. . . . but don´t talk to us about this, . . . but we don´t want to hear about this, . . . but please talk about something else . . . anything else. I got the message. Jesus was off limits.

That didn´t stop me from sending books, pamphlets, and long letters imploring my parents to be true to their Jewish roots and embrace the Jewish Messiah who was promised by Jewish prophets.

Once I even sent them the Jesus film, a presentation of the Gospel of Luke, in Hebrew. (I had already sent them a copy of the film in English, which they didn´t watch). My parents don´t speak a word of Hebrew, but somehow I thought they´d be impressed that Jesus spoke the same language as Moses. Of course, the fact that the Hebrew was dubbed into the film didn´t seem to deter me from sending it. They never watched the Hebrew version either. Like its English counterpart, it collected dust on the shelf near their television.

Once I invited my parents to a Messianic Jewish congregation´s Friday night worship service. They walked out.

I also sent them a copy of my favorite book for telling Jewish people about the gospel, Stan Telchin´s Betrayed. It´s a masterfully crafted intertwining of the author´s testimony with biblical arguments for the messiahship of Jesus. Telchin tells of his daughter´s going away to college and finding Jesus, an offense to his Jewish sensibilities that needed to be countered. He felt betrayed and set out on a year-long research project to prove his daughter wrong. What he found, instead, was irrefutable and irresistible evidence that led him, his wife, and their other daughter to faith in the Messiah. His book has been used countless times to lead Jewish people to faith. Surely, I thought, a book as wonderful as this would be the silver bullet that would usher my parents into the fold. My mother read it, made no comment, and then gave it away to someone who she said, really needed something like that.

Nothing worked. For decades. All the frontal assaults failed to have any kind of impact. To be honest, I have to tell you that at some point I gave up hope. I stopped praying and probably harbored some bitterness toward God that he hadn´t chosen my parents to be among the elect.

Then one day my Mom and I had a pivotal phone conversation. She recounted an experience she had at a funeral for a teacher at the high school I had attended. I knew this man. He was a sarcastic, bitter atheist who suffered for over two years as a debilitating cancer ate away at his body. Hearing the reports of his gradual demise was a painful process. Worse than the medical aspects of the story were the spiritual ones. He never softened as he approached death. In fact, it would be more accurate to say that he grew in bitterness as the end approached.

My mother, whose religious philosophy at the time could be summed up as everyone goes to heaven, told me of her attempts to comfort the deceased man´s grieving adult children.

Don´t worry, she told them, at least now your father is in a better place.

Their response surprised my mother. Having embraced their father´s skepticism, they rolled their eyes in disdain for my mother´s naiveté and rudely walked away from her. She told this, I believe, to elicit some sympathy from me. After all, I was her religious son, and I certainly would give credence to her attempts to point atheists toward the supernatural.

I was torn. I was grateful that my mother thought about the afterlife. But I couldn´t help thinking about numerous passages of Scripture that argue the exact opposite of my mom´s position. Indeed I did not believe my former teacher was in a better place. I had visions of flames and worms and gnashing of teeth. I wanted to preach an entire sermon, right there and then, on the phone, about everlasting torment, wrath, and sulfur.

I opted, instead, to ask my mother a question.

Mom, how do you know that?

Long pause.

How do I know what? she replied.

How do you know he´s in a better place? It sounds like you know that with a great deal of confidence. What makes you so sure?

I should tell you that Jewish-Mother-guilt can be conveyed with silence, even over the telephone, just as powerfully as face to face. I knew my mother was upset with me. But I also knew that, for seventy years, she had been stuck in a religious frame of reference that...

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