Nurturing Faith in Others

Opening Prayer

Let’s open with prayer. If you have a prayer concern, just offer it up out loud in this space. It can be a situation, a need, a family member or friend. When I sense we are finished I will close out our prayer.

Lord, grow us to be people open to your Spirit and ready to answer your call. Amen.

Introduction

Intro series: Seven Practices that Shape Us...

Today we look at our sixth practice: Nurturing Faith in Others. I don’t know what immediately comes to mind, but I imagine for some of you the dreaded “E” word does - evangelism! Is there anything harder in the Christian life that doing that?! The answer to that probably depends on your background. I was raised in a tradition that stressed evangelism - which is a good thing - but it was a very confrontational kind of evangelism. We were armed with the Romans Road, and our job was to provoke people into a spiritual discussion where we could convince them they were going to Hell, give them some good news from the Bible, and then get them to say the Sinner’s Prayer.

In the course of my Christian life, I’ve learned numerous ways of leading someone to Christ. The Romans Road, Two Questions, Bad News/Good News, the Bridge Illustration, and probably several others I’ve forgotten. And please hear me, I’m not opposed to learning techniques to help you remember essential gospel truths to share with people. But what if we’ve made nurturing faith in others harder than it needs to be? Because unless you are a type “A” extrovert, these confrontational methods are never really going to fit you, and you will always feel like a failure in this most important of Christian practices.

Let me quickly explain what I mean by nurturing faith in others. Certainly it includes both evangelism and discipleship - these are two sides of the same coin. More simply, it means coming alongside of and being a spiritual friend to someone. But at its very core, I think nurturing faith in others means to help another person - no matter where they are on their spiritual journey - take one more step toward Jesus. Nurturing faith in others is simply bringing people to Jesus.

Why don’t we?

Before we look at our example in Scripture, lets address a glaring issue. Why don’t we? Why aren’t we more motivated to help people take a step toward Jesus? I think there are several reasons.

Risky - what if they think I’m a religious kook? What if they reject me or make fun of me? What if I lose a friendship?

Inconvenient - cultivating friendships with not-yet-believers is time consuming and not just a little inconvenient.

Inadequacy - what if I do it wrong? What if they go to Hell because I mess up?

Lack of urgency or concern - the ugly truth is that oftentimes we just don’t care that much. We know good and well there are consequences for people who die without Jesus, but our day-to-day life tends to crowd out that concern. It becomes “out of sight, out of mind”. Underneath this is evidence that perhaps we aren’t nurturing our own faith very well.

I think the solution to all these excuses is to begin asking God to give you his heart for the lost. To let his burden become your burden. If there is one thing I feel I need to grow in, and that our church needs to grow in, is nurturing people toward faith.

Nurturing faith

Let’s turn to our passage.

Right off the bat, the first thing we see is that Nurturing faith in others means pointing them to Jesus. That happens throughout the passage. First, John the Baptist points to Jesus, “Look, here is the Lamb of God!” Two of his disciples respond to this and begin following Jesus. One of them, Andrew, first goes and finds his brother Simon and as it says, “he brought Simon to Jesus”. Then Jesus travels north to Galilee and calls Philip to be a disciple. And what does Philip do? He goes and finds Nathaniel and brings him to Jesus. If we get nothing else from this passage, we should hear this loud and clear. Our primary role in nurturing faith in others is simply to point them to Jesus. This is first and foremost. This is something anyone can do. It doesn’t take any training. We are simply beggars telling other beggars where to find food.

Another thing we see is that Nurturing faith in others is a group project. I was taught evangelism as a solo sport. But the Bible consistently shows evangelism as inviting people into a community of faith. Several times in our passage people are invited, not to go be one-on-one with another disciple, but to come be a part of a group. John’s two disciples went together. Then Simon is brought into the group. Then Philip and Nathaniel are invited to join in. Nurturing faith in others happens best in a community. A simple way to do this is to just invite people to church. In my early Christian days we were told NOT to do this. “Don’t make it about church, make it about a relationship with Jesus” we were told. Our fear was that churches were full of people who hadn’t really surrendered to Jesus - meaning they didn’t have the kind of salvation experience we thought everyone should have. Now I know this is wrong-headed. DO bring people to church, for it is in the community of faith that people are best nurtured toward faith in Jesus.

We also see that We nurture faith from what we know, not from what we don’t. I think a common fear of sharing our faith with others is that they might ask us a question we can’t answer. And so we unknowingly get on this treadmill of “I don’t know enough yet to share my faith”. The problem is that we never feel like we reach the point of knowing enough. But look at our examples in this passage. How much did Andrew know before he went and found Simon? He thinks maybe Jesus could be Messiah they had been waiting for, but that’s about it. He knows virtually nothing, he just brings him to Jesus. What about Philip, what does he know? Again, not much. “We have found him about whom Moses in the law and also the prophets wrote.” None of these people have the Romans Road or any kind of technique. In fact, in that passage we see the very best answer to those who are skeptics. “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” “Come and see”. Nurturing faith in others allows Jesus to do the heavy lifting. We just invite people to “Come and see”. The most powerful way you can do that is to simply share your story with people. You don’t need a powerful Jesus-encounter salvation story. Simply share with people the many ways Jesus has changed your life. How is your life better because you met him? The Spirit will do more to create interest with that than anything else you could do.

We need to remember that Nurturing faith in others is a partnership with Jesus. We tend to think we are on our own, but Jesus goes before us by the Holy Spirit. He is always at work preparing people for a faith encounter. In our passage it is Jesus who invites John’s two disciples, it is Jesus who has already begun a transforming work in Peter. It is Jesus who “finds” Philip, and it is Jesus who “saw” Nathaniel under the fig tree. Jesus is still looking for his lost sheep, and our only job is to come alongside him in the endeavor.

One final thing. Nurturing faith in others begins with confidence in who we are bringing people to. At the end of this passage Jesus says a strange thing. “And he said to him, “Very truly, I tell you, you will see heaven opened and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man.”” (John 1:51, NRSV) Jesus is referring to a story in the OT all Jews would be familiar with. When Jacob is fleeing from his brother Esau, he lays down to sleep in the desert with a rock for a pillow. He dreams of a staircase connecting heaven and earth with angels ascending and descending on it. When he awakes he declares that surely this place where he laid is the very house of God, the place where heaven and earth are joined. And he called the place Bethel - house of God. Jesus now opening declares that he is the fulfillment of this dream. He is the bridge between heaven and earth. He is the one who is the living house of God where the full glory of God is present. This is who we bring people to. We don’t bring them to an idea or a theory or an ism or an ideology. We bring them to the living God. The one who made them and the one who loves them. The one who died and rose again for them. He is their good news, whether they know it yet or not. At the end of the day don’t over-complicate things. Nurturing faith in others is simply bringing people to Jesus.

Applications

You are a believer because someone did this for you. Someone - a parent, friend, coworker - brought you to Jesus. Every person I’ve ever baptized came to faith because they were invited into this community. Not one was baptized because of a 5-minute encounter at their front door or on an airplane. The apostle Paul, speaking of his ministry of bringing people to Jesus, wrote, “The love of Christ urges us on.” Both his love for Jesus, and Jesus’ love at work in him compelled him to share his faith with others. God wants to continue this work in you. The enemy and your own flesh will tell you that you aren’t ready, that you are a hypocrite, that you will screw it up, that you will be rejected. But you have the assurance that Jesus is with you in this work, and that the Holy Spirit will work within your weaknesses to empower you to do what you never thought you could.

You may not ever perform a healing or raise the dead or cast out a demon. But you can tell people your story of how God has changed your life. You can tell them what your life used to be like and what it is now since you’ve met Jesus. You can tell them about the peace, the joy, and the love you feel by knowing Christ. You may not ever have all the answers, but one thing you can always do, you can bring people to Jesus.

Ministry time...

Communion

Part of the joy of coming to this table is knowing that Jesus sought us out before we ever knew him. We were all Nathaniel at some point just hanging out under a fig tree. But Jesus saw, knew us, loved us, and came for us. At the Table we celebrate what he has done for us - his saving acts in his life, death, and resurrection. But even more, we celebrate his goodness that searches for his lost sheep, keeps looking for the prodigal, and invites us back again and again to come and see.

Join me in the prayer Jesus taught us...

The Lord’s Prayer

Words of Institution