Stepping Beyond Prayer: What is Next?

  So, we have prayed for peace. The communication is good, we and God are tight. That stuff about the covenant, the Lord will be our God and we will be God’s people, its gaining traction. We have been giving it serious thought and reflection. Our hearts are one in the desire to see God’s peace in the world. We don’t walk in lock step as to what we all believe about peace, or even about Christ, but that’s good. It is the Presbyterian way. 

We gather a group of believers and we are blessed by the diversity of the Spirit that speaks to the whole.

But now we need to talk to the world. I have two overwhelming visuals when it comes to sharing my faith. The first is the earnest Christian who is begging me not to end up in hell. “If you die tonight, where is your soul going?” Yah, I want to come hear more of that. Joyful, joyful we adore thee?

The second is the individual walking up and down the street with two enormous placards hanging in front and in back of their body, joined over the shoulders. The message on the placards and from the preaching is predicting the end of the world coming soon. Really soon. The message is basically, “get with God or get blowed up”. Yah, I want to go to church with that guy.

So how do we get the message out? God says ‘go’. Unfortunately, left on its own, that has proven to be a non-starter. We of the church are in a safe place to express that message to one another before we take it on the road. I love God, you love God. We are in a place where we can reasonably expect that the other person will be neither offended nor put off if we talk about that love. If we look for the words that are real to us to express that love. 

We pray for peace, we think about peace, we (and I am looking for a good verb to define this), we ‘heart’ about peace. Now we got to talk about it. The peace of Christ that passes all understanding. Great. Talk about what passes our understanding. There’s Jesus for us. 

Paul did it. Extensively. He maintained an extensive correspondence, a huge portion of which was set aside as inspiration for the rest of us by our God in our New Testament.