To try to present the deeper truths and unsolvable mysteries of the Bible to a budding not-yet believer without having first led them to the Cross is a major blunder. I mean, can you imagine prior to your true conversion if someone like me had sat down with you and tried to explain the ongoing argument between Calvinists and Armenians, or Jesus-as-pacifist vs Jesus-as-warrior? I imagine your head would have exploded and your return home to faith in Christ would have been at the very least delayed. I know mine would have been.

We run a very great risk of completely shutting the doors of a heart with that stuff if we introduce it too soon, and this actually is one of the biggest fears I have as a teacher and writer of this sort of stuff. God help me if I manage to unwittingly destroy the suitability of a soul for Christ’s inhabitance. The responsibility you take upon yourself as a leader of the faithful is, well, it’s incredible. Being a pastor or even just a sunday school teacher places a man in the same place occupied by every other leader of the faithful since Abraham. No matter how small the flock, responsibility for the spiritual nourishment and instruction of even ONE soul is a responsibility too weighty to handle without the support of God. Prayer and constant, deep Bible study, are therefore of vital importance if for no other reason than to maintain and strengthen the relationship you share with your Savior and through Him your Creator, so you He can be strong through you.

Before I stop this and go back to work, let me sort of define the way I “triage” biblical truths. I don’t have just two hands, that which is vitally important and that which is not. That would cause me to devalue a lot of important truth, since very little is truly WORTH breaking fellowship over.

1. Deal-Breakers. These are truths that are hills I’m willing to stand and die on, things that I will HAVE to break fellowship over since I believe without them no fellowship is possible. This category ONLY holds the fundamental truths of salvation. Some examples would be the existence of Sin in the world, the impossibility of creation to fully self-correct, the divinity of Christ and the power of His sacrifice to cleanse and “justify” us before our Creator. And before you say it, yes, several of these points are impossible to reach without…

2. Vitally-Important Truths. These are things that I’ll rant and rave about, but I won’t break fellowship over them, because I feel as long as we’re both talking about the same Jesus, we can manage to find common ground at some point. Usually disagreement on these truths stems from one party or both refusing to be intellectually honest about one thing or another, because of the bald-faced nature of the truths as presented by the Bible. Examples would be that Christ calls us to love God first and foremost, and then love others as we love ourselves, or that the Bible is a God-breathed, living document, a shard of the mind of God. Neither of these is required to ask for and receive salvation, but they are vitally important nonetheless and should follow on fairly closely.

3. Theological Pontifications of Man. We’ve reached a lot of very neat conclusions in our interpretation of Jesus’ teachings and later the Bible as a whole, and a lot of them are very important, including some we swear by today. None of them however are worth dismissing someone from the Christian brotherhood. Things like the always-annoying Calvinist vs Armenian argument, continuationism vs cessationism, etc. These things are such minor arguments in the greater scheme of things, especially when put into context against the power of the Gospel. Are they important? Possibly. Even likely, but never are they important enough to tell a fellow believer, “You’re just not a Christian unless you believe women should be subservient to their husbands,” or, “You’re just not a mature believer unless you believe in the 5 points of Calvinism.” Neither of these things are critical to my salvation, and neither of them affect the functionality of that salvation in my life! What does that tell you about their importance?

Now, where you put some things will depend on where you are and what you cling to, but if you’re honest, you have to look at those things you hold dear and ask, “Why is this thing, this idea that is objectively NOT critical to my salvation, so important to me?” You get to that point, like I am now, and you start to let go of a TON of the baggage and window-dressing we attach to Christ. Certainly the Bible is THE source of our knowledge of our salvation, and a fount of truth, as God is Truth… but I’m not about to spring that on someone I want to bring to the Cross until we’ve established the basis between us, so I have a foundation upon which to build those truths.

Hope this helps, buddy.

When you realize (as in you’re consciously aware of) the failure of every other functional savior in your life, the eyes necessarily turn outward for help. This state, by the way, is the perfect fertile soil for the seed of faith to grow. It’s its natural manure, and I believe it is the beginning of the depth of conviction of sin brought about by the Holy Spirit.

Of course there’s more to salvation than just the conviction of sin and a heart-made-ready, though! With any luck, or more truthfully the providence of God, the seeker will see the transformation wrought in the life of one of His servants, and for whatever reason, be it the urging of the Holy Spirit or some more human desire to possess the peaceful power exuded by the truly faithful, they stop that servant and ask, “What makes you so special? Last year you were cursing, I heard you lie more than once, and I heard you used to rail and curse at your kids a few years back, too. How come people seem to think you’re such a good guy now? What’s changed?”

If we’re on our toes and ready to do God’s work, we can lay out a quick witness of God’s power in a few sentences and begin the conversion process of a new believer. I think it’s our duty to BE ready at any time for this sort of thing. I don’t know if it’s ever happened to you like that before, but I’ve had more than one person approach me almost exactly like that, and within the last 6 months. (Different litany of sins, same result) I didn’t have a bible on me, and I have no idea where the words came from, but I was able to sit down and map out the simple, straightforward path of sin, depravity, salvation and grace for them.

That’s what I meant by bringing people to a saving knowledge of Christ without ever cracking a Bible. You do it by becoming a living testament to the transformative power of faith in Christ. By the time they come to you asking, the conviction of sin is ripe within them. All you have to do is show them what they already know. Sin has a history. It never produces positive long-term results. Their own heart is telling them these things, so leading them through that conviction of sin and labeling the things they’re feeling is like turning on a light. “A-ha!” the heart says.

Reaching the hardened hearts of the determined lost isn’t really what we ought to be about, honestly. There is nothing I can say to convince a staunch Atheist of his error. Nothing. When I was in those shoes, Christ could have peeled back the sky and personally spoken to me, and I’d have gone to a clinic to have my head checked. The very best thing we can do for these people is to, again, be a living testimony to the power of Christ’s faith, so that when the Holy Spirit has finally softened their hearts and convicted them, we can stand ready to help lead them to the Cross.

(continued in next bit to answer your last paragraph)

In your opening paragraph you talk of people looking for ‘functional saviors’ (excellent term btw), I agree whole heartedly with you on that fact. It is apparent to anyone who ‘pays attention’ that lost people are searching for something (even if they don’t know what that something is). I believe it is in our created nature to do just that (of course we could go a whole new tangent here but I digress). Next you assert that the failures of this ‘functional savior’ points to the true savior. I would assert that the failures of the ‘functional savior’ only point to a failure on the part of the object that did not satisfy their hunger for a relationship with the one true God. If that person was to come in to contact with a ‘Christian’ friend or simply witness then the equation changes due to this new interaction, but that contact plus the failure of a ‘functional savior’ do not equate to Salvation. Our difference here may not be a difference at all.

The main part of your post that I am having difficulty with is your suggestion in the next paragraph that this person is now ‘Saved’ because of 1) having some encounter in the past with a friend or ‘movie character’ who displayed Christian ‘Values’ and 2) the person has been failed by their ‘functional savior’. Is there not more to salvation than that? Is not there a moment when a person comes to repentance? Maybe I am misreading your intent?

From there you go on to talk about how there are many things a person cannot understand about the Bible until ‘after’ their Salvation experience when the Holy Spirit works within them. I couldn’t agree more. There are many things that Christians young and old (Spiritually speaking) don’t understand. The Holy Spirit reveals things to us as we are ready and if we search for them. Many Christians from traditional backgrounds seem to think that the ‘search’ is over when Salvation occurs….. Of course, this is not the case. Salvation is the beginning, not the end…that’s when things really start to get interesting. When the scales fall off the eyes and Biblical truths are revealed to a Christian is just makes one hungrier for more…… but now I am taking the topic in a different direction and digressing again…..

Pause – Notice what we’ve done here? I just arrived at Christ without the Bible directly causing that arrival. Sure, it indirectly informed the result, because our knowledge of our salvation flows from the Bible… but you can arrive at a saving knowledge of Christ without ever having touched one, through those who have!

Armed with this saving knowledge of Christ, you begin to read the Bible. Christ says, “I am the way, the truth and the life. No one comes before the father except through me.” (John 14:6) Reading this passage coming from the place I just described, what Jesus is saying here seems as naturally true as if he’d told Thomas, “The sky is blue and water is wet.” This exclusivity doesn’t extend from some elitist attitude or theology of the “elect,” but from the very nature of who Christ is and what those other idols and false ideologies aren’t. That is to say, Christ is the incarnation of God on Earth, then sent so He could be the sacrificial atonement for a sinful mankind.

Now back up and reapproach that scripture as a complete outsider to the faith, or even better, as a searcher looking for acceptance, the father-like relationship between us and Jesus. This passage looks and sounds, first of all, like the kind of ludicrous claim a madman would make. Christ is claiming here to be the singular, ONLY, path to communion with God, but not only that, claiming to BE God himself: “If you really knew me, you would know[b] my Father as well. From now on, you do know him and have seen him.” (John 14:7) (As C.S. Lewis asserts, either Jesus was a charlatan, a raving lunatic, or precisely what he claimed to be. There is no middle ground.) It can be a major turn-off to any potential believer to hear this sort of thing, because it leaves them thinking about Christianity like some sort of Country Club or Masonry Lodge. It is of course not, but that doesn’t stop that initial impression from being made, perhaps to the eternal damnation of a soul.

All this to say that first, in order for this scripture to make any kind of sense to the reader, there must be a faith invested by the Holy Spirit. That’s what I mean by secondary. There’s a lot of truth in the Bible that is nigh-inaccessible until there exists a God-invested faith in the reader. These truths are not only inaccessible but can even be an impediment to the movement of the Holy Spirit, and growth of that faith that is planted, in a seeker’s heart. We therefore have to be careful that we don’t dress up the gospel of salvation, in our excitement to share it, with all of the other truths that become much clearer and easier to understand after we accept the BIG Truth that is Jesus Christ. Through faith, things are made clear. Without that faith, it becomes a case of leading a horse to water only to watch it die of thirst. Our goal is to bring people to a saving knowledge of Christ, not bludgeon them with truths that will be all too apparent once they have made that transition.

Hope this helps, buddy.

(Edit: Added a conclusion, sorry was rambling there)

Feels great to be back, actually. Christ is now the center of my life, the rock on which I stand, and somehow my life, regardless of the rocking of the boat, seems nice and stable. Imagine that!

I’m actually studying and preparing for a life of ministry, as I’ve been called by my creator to do so. I seem to be gifted by His grace to be a teacher.

Also, I’d agree with that quote. At least with doubt you have to actively acknowledge God. In order to not believe in Him, you actually first have to acknowledge the possibility. *grin*

The opposite of faith isn’t doubt, it’s apathy.