“But sanctify Christ as Lord in your hearts, always being ready to make a defense to everyone who asks you to give an account for the hope that is in you, yet with gentleness and reverence.” (1 Peter 3:15)
There was a knock on my door. And I answered it. And, lo and behold, there were two very nicely dressed gentlemen all smiles standing there to greet me. They’d come to talk to me about the mess the world’s in and see if I agreed.
And, quite frankly, I really didn’t feel like talking with these Jehovah’s Witnesses. (I mean, after all it was Saturday and everything.) But I decided to do it anyway.
Oh, and they took me from this Scripture to that Scripture and back – up, down and around again. And from Satan being cast out of heaven (Luke 10:18) to swords being hammered into plowshares in the Millenium (Isaiah 2:4) to the Beatitudes, etc., etc. (Have you ever been through it?)
While they were sharing with me (and I didn’t let on, by the way, who I was or anything other than that I went to church) – but I couldn’t help but think of a whole lot of things including how these two were just as passionate about their beliefs as I was about mine. And so the best thing to hope for was that I could get some practice in telling them what I believed and comparing and contrasting it to what I understood of what they believed.
So I first mentioned how their Bible has been altered and is not the accepted Canon as Protestants acknowledge.
Secondly, I highlighted how they look at the Bible AND their publications as authoritative and inspired versus Protestantism which sees Scripture alone as the final rule of faith and practice.
Lastly, and most importantly, I emphasized how their Jesus is different than our Jesus. We believe that Jesus is God. And the Bible gives ample support for it. They believe (and even admitted it to me) that Jesus isn’t God, but the firstborn of God.
And so that’s how the conversation ended (because I said I had to go – they would have gone on and on!) with me making it clear that their faith wasn’t the same as classic Pentecostal faith.
And I know I probably was sowing on fallow ground. But only Jesus really knows.
With my experience in mind let us keep sharing our faith and keep up-to-date on it so that when the opportunity comes, we’ll be ready to.
Tell somebody about Jesus!
(Representation of the Sower’s Parable picture above licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license: click here. PD-US)
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