Not Sugar-Coated
Kendall Hine
“Jesus said to him, ‘I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.’” John 14:6
I am a person who is bad with confrontation. My mind makes a nightmare movie roll of all the worst ways that the conversation could go and I begin to panic. My natural reaction is to sugarcoat things and skirt around the truth that can often be harsh. If we are honest, it can be hard to win people over when you lay down the law!
As a Christian living in a world full of a lot of “haters,” as the youth say, it can sometimes be hard to proclaim the truth of the Gospel, at least if you are bad at confrontation like me. It is easy to tell the world that we have a Heavenly Father that loves us despite every mistake we have ever made, but the story does not end with “God is love.”
John 14:6 says, “Jesus said to him, ‘I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.’” In a world that needs the Gospel so desperately, let us be reminded to not only show God’s love but to proclaim the clear truth of how to really know Him. There is coming a day where we will stand before the Creator of the universe, the King of kings and Lord of lords, and it will be made abundantly clear if we have accepted Him as our Savior and acknowledged our sin. It is not if we believed a sugarcoated version of the Gospel.
In our young adults’ Growth Community in Holly, Justin Dean challenged us to think about how we show our love to our non-Christian friends. He told us the story from the Gospel of Luke chapter 5 that depicts a paralyzed man whose friends wanted to bring him to Jesus to be healed. They carried him across town on a mat; and when they saw how crowded it was, they climbed onto the roof and made a hole in the roof. They did all of this so that he could be lowered to the feet of Jesus. Can you imagine how tired, out of breath, and sweaty those friends were? Can you also imagine their joy when this friend was healed and his sins forgiven? I would say all the effort was worth it.
So here is the challenge: Are you willing to carry your non-Christian friends across town and up on a roof just so they can meet Jesus? It is not just telling your friends that God loves them, but that they are in desperate need of a Savior. Yes, God is love, but He is also the only way to eternal life.
Kendall Hine
“Jesus said to him, ‘I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.’” John 14:6
I am a person who is bad with confrontation. My mind makes a nightmare movie roll of all the worst ways that the conversation could go and I begin to panic. My natural reaction is to sugarcoat things and skirt around the truth that can often be harsh. If we are honest, it can be hard to win people over when you lay down the law!
As a Christian living in a world full of a lot of “haters,” as the youth say, it can sometimes be hard to proclaim the truth of the Gospel, at least if you are bad at confrontation like me. It is easy to tell the world that we have a Heavenly Father that loves us despite every mistake we have ever made, but the story does not end with “God is love.”
John 14:6 says, “Jesus said to him, ‘I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.’” In a world that needs the Gospel so desperately, let us be reminded to not only show God’s love but to proclaim the clear truth of how to really know Him. There is coming a day where we will stand before the Creator of the universe, the King of kings and Lord of lords, and it will be made abundantly clear if we have accepted Him as our Savior and acknowledged our sin. It is not if we believed a sugarcoated version of the Gospel.
In our young adults’ Growth Community in Holly, Justin Dean challenged us to think about how we show our love to our non-Christian friends. He told us the story from the Gospel of Luke chapter 5 that depicts a paralyzed man whose friends wanted to bring him to Jesus to be healed. They carried him across town on a mat; and when they saw how crowded it was, they climbed onto the roof and made a hole in the roof. They did all of this so that he could be lowered to the feet of Jesus. Can you imagine how tired, out of breath, and sweaty those friends were? Can you also imagine their joy when this friend was healed and his sins forgiven? I would say all the effort was worth it.
So here is the challenge: Are you willing to carry your non-Christian friends across town and up on a roof just so they can meet Jesus? It is not just telling your friends that God loves them, but that they are in desperate need of a Savior. Yes, God is love, but He is also the only way to eternal life.
Posted in Upper Room
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