The Confidence to Talk About God!

I sat down with my copy of The Methodist Recorder this afternoon and read with interest the report from the recent meeting of the Methodist Church Council.

One thing that particularly caught my eye was a statement attributed to our General Sectetary, Martyn Atkins, who is reported to have "asked council members for their views on how the Church and individual Methodists might recover their confidence in speaking about God."

This set me thinking, thinking about why Methodists seem to be reluctant to share the Good News of Jesus Christ.  Can it be that at least some are reluctant because their faith is so watered down that they are no longer convinced that they have any good news worth sharing?

Some Christians, particularly those of liberal and progressive persuasion, have cast doubt on the traditional evangelical understanding of Christ.  They no longer seem to believe that Jesus died on the cross in our place, taking the consequences of our sin in his own person.  They no longer seem to believe in the need for confession and repentance of sin and of the need to confess Jesus Christ as their Saviour and Lord.

These same liberals and progressives even seem to believe that all religions, or indeed even no religion, provide equally valid paths to God.  If any religion will do; if any faith path, no matter how bizarre, leads to God then why tell anybody about the Christian faith?  What is the point?  We're all going to heaven anyway - at least that is what they believe.  What do they think Jesus meant when he said, "I am the way, the truth and the life.  No-one comes to the Father except through me"?

If we are, as Christians, to recover our confidence in speaking about God then we must first recover our faith in the Christian message that has been preached since the earliest days of the Church; that through Christ's death and resurrection we can find forgiveness and eternal life if we confess and repent of our sins and accept him as our Lord and Saviour.  We must recover our confidence in the Bible as the uniquely inspired word of God.  We must reject compromise with contemporary societal values that are clearly in conflict with Scripture (and I confess that there are some things that are not clear) and hold to the eternal truths and values of the Christian religion.  Only then do we stand any chance of being confident to talk to others about God, because we will have something worth talking about!