This started as a footnote to today’s Left Behind post, which touches on the horrible way the heroes of those books treat poor Hattie Durham. The way Rayford and Buck treat Hattie reminds me a bit of the way David Wright and a pair of SportsCenter hosts treat the sad Wake Forest mascot in this ad:
You’re probably familiar with this scenario. A bunch of co-workers plan on a fun night out at happy hour after work, but for whatever reason they don’t want Deacon showing up. So they sneak around making their plans, carefully making sure he doesn’t find out.
Inevitably, poor Deacon will catch wind of their plans and realize that they’ve been deliberately evading him and excluding him. He’ll realize that they’re planning to have fun without him and to have fun because they’re without him and that’s going to hurt. He’s going to feel really, really awful for quite a while.
Now let’s imagine that one of those co-workers is a devout Christian who has been “witnessing” to poor Deacon. That’s now kaput. This good Christian has now lost any right or any ability to “witness” to Deacon in the foreseeable future.
(The analogy here is shaky — the sort of Christian co-worker likely to “witness” to Deacon probably wouldn’t be going out to happy hour. So make it a trip to Chick-fil-A instead.)
The point here is that evangelism ought to be an expression of love. This is true both on the normative level and as a practical matter. That is, this is how evangelism is supposed to work, and evangelism cannot “work” unless this is true.
If you want to share your faith with someone, then you have to love that person. So if you want to share your faith with a co-worker and he’s moving next weekend, then guess what? You’re going to have to help him move. This is not optional. You have to help him move, and to offer him a ride to the airport if he needs one, and to invite him to your parties, and to accept his invitations to parties.
You have to do these things because this is what friends do. And if you’re not willing to do the things that friends do — to be his friend — then you have no right to “witness” or to share your faith with him. You have to be a witness before you can turn that noun into a verb.
This is not to say that you should help this guy move or offer him rides or invite him to parties in order to be able to share your faith. You should do all these things for no reason other than love and friendship, with no ulterior motive. If you have ulterior motives, if you reduce love and friendship into means to some other ends, then you’re not being a friend, you’re being a salesperson. You’re treating the faith you hope to share like an Amway product and you’re not really loving or being a friend at all.
I’m making this sound more complicated than it really is. It’s as simple as this: Love God and love your neighbor.
That’s it. Six words. This is the whole of the law and the prophets. It’s everything you need to know about the Bible and everything you need to know about this whole business of evangelism or “witnessing” or sharing your faith.
“Faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.” You can’t share any of these three with someone if you refuse to share the best of the bunch. Love your neighbor. Share your love and then your faith and hope will follow along.
Please note, though, that “love your neighbor” has nothing to do with warm feelings of affection toward them. Love your neighbor isn’t about you feeling some abstract feeling toward the idea of your neighbor. It’s about carrying boxes, offering rides, extending and accepting invitations. Warm feelings of affection aren’t necessary. They may emerge, they may not, doesn’t matter.
To swipe a line from Woody Allen, 90 percent of “love your neighbor” is just showing up.
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