Sharing Your Everyday Faith Every Day
John S. Leonard
“Our biggest struggle as Christians is not the indwelling sin that keeps popping up in our lives, filling us with guilt and fear. It is our unwillingness to believe the gospel because it is just too good to be true.”
Get Real is a jolt of electricity to our evangelistic slumber. It awakens us to the truth that not only are so many of our assumptions, and therefore efforts, about how to tell people about Jesus unfruitful, but that they are actually unbiblical. Throughout, Leonard’s winnowing fork is in one hand as he sifts our internalised half-truths from the real deal. His sifting is gentle; tender even. Throughout, Leonard’s cement trowel is in the other hand, building up an alternative, concrete approach to sharing our faith that actually works.
The blocks that make up this evangelistic approach struck me as obvious. Always listen more than you speak. Be normal. Share the Bible holistically rather than only using passages deemed evangelism-friendly. Pray expectantly for God to bring to you those who he wants you to share Jesus with. But these blocks are only obvious in the way that dreams are not reality; until we have the benefit of hindsight, it is, alarmingly, not obvious at all. I found the most freeing of these obvious-but-not-that-obvious truths to be that we do not have to share the good news with everybody. As with the Twelve in Luke 9:5, when the gospel is unwelcome, we can shake the dust off our feet and move on.
However, it is Leonard’s own godliness permeating Get Real that is the greatest breath of fresh air. The jolt of electricity that he delivers could have been painful and guilt-ridden. The temptation for Leonard to point the finger must have been astronomical. But he doesn’t. Instead, his writing kindles a deep-seated yearning to share our faith and provides applicable machinery to do so. My approach to evangelism has been changed ever since reading it.
8.5/10
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