When Your Friend Thinks Following Jesus Can Wait

We all know someone who isn't hostile to Jesus, but they're just not in a hurry. They'll get around to it. Maybe someday. In this episode, John, Mary Jo, and Blaine talk about what's actually going on underneath that mindset: the quiet belief that following Jesus would be less satisfying than just living life on their own terms, and the assumption that there's plenty of time to deal with eternity later. They get into how to share what Jesus has genuinely done in your own life, why your behavior is often the thing that wins people over, and what scripture says to people who think they're in control of the timeline.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

They're not seeing love.

SPEAKER_00 0:01

They're not seeing joy. They're not seeing peace.

SPEAKER_02 0:03

My daughter actually said to me after I become a Christian, Mom, you're not petty anymore.

SPEAKER_00 0:09

It's this side of eternity where he begins to make a very real difference in our lives.

SPEAKER_02 0:17

How do I reach someone who views Christianity like laundry? You know, like I'll get to it tomorrow. That's our question from Scott in Houston. So, John, what would you say to our questioner?

SPEAKER_01 0:30

Yeah, I think it's a great question. In fact, Scott's my friend in Houston. So uh I thought it was when he brought this question up that um it was one we needed to handle on this on this uh podcast here. So um, you know, I don't know that I've heard anybody ever say to me, like, I'll get to it tomorrow, but that's the vibe they give, right? They're not necessarily against Christianity, they don't have all these sort of defenses, but it's like I'll I'll get to that later, maybe when I'm older, then I'll turn to Christianity. So I I think it's I think there's a lot of people that are in this camp. And so I think it's great that we're addressing this question. And when I think about this question, I think there's probably two beliefs that people have when they're sitting in a position where they're saying, I'll get to it tomorrow. The first is they believe that following Jesus today is a whole lot less satisfying than just doing their own thing, right? So they have that underlying belief there, right? And then I think the second belief that people have uh when they're sitting in this place is they think, I got time. I I can put it off because if if there is some eternity thing attached with following Jesus, well, I'll do that later after I've already lived life as I wanted to live it, and I'll have time to deal with it then. So I think those two beliefs probably uh underlie this sort of procrastinating position.

SPEAKER_02 1:58

Yeah, so let's suppose that someone has the first of those two beliefs that um you know following Jesus would be less satisfying than doing their own thing and would kind of cramp their vibe or you know, that's not something they want to do right now. What what would you what would you do or what how would you help them to change their perspective?

SPEAKER_01 2:18

Yeah. You know, I think in some ways I would turn it to myself. So I what I would do is I would uh let them know of the satisfaction that I find in Jesus. So I would say, I know you're afraid that following Jesus might, you know, take you down a road where life is it's restrictive or it's no fun or uh there's no joy there, whatever the case might be. But I would let them know, I would say, you know, what I found in following Jesus is it's it's really satisfied me at a deeper level than anything I experienced before. And in fact, if I think I would add this, I would say to them, I wish I would have started following Jesus sooner. Rather than, you know, their perspective is I'll put that off till later. And I want them to see in me that, wow, I wish I would have even gotten on the train faster because of what Jesus has brought to me. So rather than you know, pointing to them and saying, hey, get your act together and get on the train right now, I would point it back to myself and saying, I'm so glad I'm on the train because of what Jesus has brought to me.

SPEAKER_02 3:36

I mean, I think you're right on that. Um so now, Blaine, what do you think about this?

SPEAKER_00 3:40

Aaron Powell Well, I didn't grow up in a Christian home or environment or anything. And so I've been listening to this. I've heard these uh questions and experienced them too in just relationships that I've had over the years, but it makes me think that you know, we as Christians in general have probably done a bad job of talking to people because the fact that these questions are here shows what what people think. And it it was my experience before I became a Christian. I thought, you know, it's just basically rules and all the all the fun things of life, though everything goes away, and it it just couldn't be more opposite as you're describing. But I think we've got to do a better job of of living this out and having people see it, right? Because it really is much more satisfying to follow Jesus than to do all the things that really get us in trouble in the first place.

SPEAKER_01 4:34

Aaron Powell So when I'm saying that, when I'm saying, hey, we need to let people know that following Jesus is really more satisfying than not following Jesus, have you found that to be true?

SPEAKER_00 4:46

Aaron Ross Powell For me, I mean, enjoying I was a musician. I I think of music different and art and travel and uh nature and all the things that come along with that it's much more rich when viewed as as part of what God is is doing.

SPEAKER_04 5:06

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 5:06

Yeah. So last night I'm with dinner with uh with a fellow. He's a guy that tried to find satisfaction in money, in women, in drugs, in alcohol, all kinds of things, right? So um and he's really turned to the Lord recently, and his whole countenance is different. It's like he's taken off a hundred-pound bag. And he said, In fact, he said to me last night, he said, I had no idea the value of humility, just being humble before the Lord. It's like it's so freeing, he said. So it's just like it was amazing the satisfaction that has sort of come flooding into his life as he's been willing to follow Jesus. And so rather than it being something, you know, he would want to put off, he's like, I wish I would have come to this place sooner, right? I I wish I would have been coming with my knees before before Jesus. So, you know, one of the things I think about when we're talking about this subject is I think people on the outside want to wait for Jesus because they're not seeing what you know the Bible talks about as the fruit of the Spirit in our lives. They're not seeing love, they're not seeing joy, they're not seeing peace, patience, self-control. They're seeing someone who's in many ways often just like them. They see anger, unforgiveness, they see impatience in us, they see those kinds of things, and they're like, so I I want to follow Jesus, right? So I'm gonna be all those same things that you are, but then I got to go to church too. I gotta tithe. Two more time, give my money. No, thanks, right? So boy, if we're going to see people drawn into the life of God to want to follow Him today, that fruit, it needs to be evidenced in our lives.

SPEAKER_02 7:04

Yeah. So you're saying like basically you're saying Christians um should be attractive as imitators of Christ. That's right. And and the thing that um, you know, another another thing people don't see is that all of these things that people think are keeping them from God are actually heavy burdens to maintain, they're heavy loads to bear. That's right. Um, because you're trying to keep yourself happy, you're you're you know, chasing after the elusive happiness, and and Jesus says, Come to me, because you know, my yoke is easy and my burden is light, and you will have rest for your souls. And so instead of this endless seeking for what we think we want, we can find that uh that rest and that peace and that love in Jesus and experience all the goodness that He has for us. Now, on this, we've been talking about this a bit, but do you have any examples of you know how we can encourage people to seek Jesus today?

SPEAKER_01 7:59

I look at my wife, for example, and I think of the way that she follows Jesus just in what she does every single day. So she teaches tennis. She is so kind to the people that she teaches. So she's always got a smile on her face. It's not manufactured, it's who she is because of what Jesus has done in her life. And so as a result, there are a lot of people that she teaches that begin to lean in towards Jesus, right? I mean, she's a living example. So and I think that's what we have to be. We've got to be living examples of what Christ can do in our lives. Because if we're not, like, why would anybody want to follow Jesus today? Like, I'll get to that later if I need to sew up the eternity thing, but but not today if they're not seeing that in our lives. I also I I work with um in just sort of connecting with a lot of men in sort of the neighborhood that I live and and I and I work. And uh there's this one fellow, he's kind of quiet really, that all the other men in the neighborhood they know about him. And they know about him because he's so kind and so helpful and so just concerned about other men. He he's not this big evangelist guy, he's not throwing his Bible around, but they all know him. And I am quite certain that the pathway for me and sharing Jesus with these other men has been made a whole lot easier because of his presence in the community. In fact, there's this one fellow that I've been meeting with weekly lately, and and he's I think he's really come to the Lord in the last few weeks. I use this other man as an example, and he immediately, like, oh yeah. You know, not only is he great, but even his children are great. Like they he just seen the the love of Christ and the presence of Christ lived out in this fellow, and it's made him want to jump on board with Jesus now, not put Jesus off any further.

SPEAKER_00 9:59

Yeah, and it it makes me think of sometimes the version of Christianity that's out there in pop culture is this idea that you didn't just punch your ticket to get to heaven someday, which is maybe some of where this question comes from, right? That, oh yeah, I can get that, I'll just get that at the last second, because that's really all this whole thing is about, versus the idea that no, we actually get to live life with God now, and it's this side of eternity where he begins to make a very real difference in our in our lives. That's right. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 10:34

That's right. And you know, I think just to get back to this evangelistic tie-in, um, one verse that I find myself actually going to quite a bit is 1 Peter chapter 3 and verse 1. And and Peter there is addressing a wife who is married to a non-Christian. Okay. And Peter's advice to women in that situation, and of course I think it reverse a man married to a you know a woman who isn't believer, or you know, you're friends with someone who isn't a believer, his advice is to win them over without words by your behavior. Now, it doesn't mean that we don't share the words of the gospel, we do, but we often won't win them over to those words unless our behavior's there, right? So if if we're talking about like how do we woo someone, how do we actually win them over to the gospel, not just expose them to the gospel, but win them over to it, we're probably gonna do that by the behavior of our lives, by Christ living himself out in us in such a way that people go, I want that. I want that joy, I want that peace, I want that patience.

SPEAKER_02 11:47

Yeah. And I, you know, I want to make a point on this because having grown up uh not Christian, my view of uh Christianity and kind of the things that you're talking about, not to negate anything, was that people thought Christians are these goody two-shoe types, you know, like Puritan types. They they look um, they have to dress a certain way and look a certain way. And for me, it's like, no, you can be a snarky, fun, you know, whatever you are, you know, I'm kind of nerdy and I have all my fandoms and stuff. I can be that person and still have what you're talking about and still basically be kind and still basically have that compassion and live now redemptively, not just in the new heavens, new earth, but actually understanding there's a new heavens and new earth, that I can be redemptive in my conversations and behaviors now. So I can act in ways that are unexpected to people through grace or mercy or through uh not giving an eye for an eye or not being reactive in situations, but I can still be myself. I don't have to change personalities. That's not what we're talking about. Right.

SPEAKER_01 12:56

That's right, right? Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. No, I'm thinking, I mean, people know what our personality was, say, before and what it is now, but when they do see us react in different ways, like they used to always get mad at that. They're not getting mad at it anymore. I boy, you're unusually patient today, right? When they begin to see that, then they can begin to see the value of Jesus today. Ah, that's right.

SPEAKER_02 13:18

You said something my daughter actually said to me um after I had become a Christian. She said, Mom, you're not petty anymore. And at like whatever tender young age she was, preteen, I didn't even know she knew what that word meant.

SPEAKER_04 13:33

Right.

SPEAKER_02 13:33

So I was like, and I was like horrified. I was petty. I didn't even know that. That's just my MO, you know, like I was just operating. I was probably just what she meant was I was tired at the end of uh I used to teach band. I was just tired at the end of the day. And she caught all my tiredness and reactiveness and you know, short-tempered at the by that point. And so I had done something different, you know. So, mom, you're not petty anymore. I I mean, it just really what you were saying is they see the difference.

SPEAKER_03 14:02

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 14:02

Uh, I'm still fundamentally me, but something had changed in how I was treating others. Okay, so we've talked a bit about, you know, why would you want to have Jesus today and not put it off? Now we need to get a little bit practical here. And um, so you know, how do we address this when people are putting it off? Uh and they're not, they they think I've got all the time in the world. What what do we say to that?

SPEAKER_01 14:24

Yeah. I think I probably if they were expressing this, I'll get to it later. I probably would ask them this question. I said, have you had anybody in your life who who died unexpectedly? And just get them thinking. Most people have know somebody who they thought would live many more years and didn't live many more years. I mean, I I can think of two off the top of my head. So so one of them was a fellow that uh went to the church that I was at. He was um about to retire. He decided, hey, I'll work a couple more years. And it's when the uh all the oil fracking was just getting going in in uh South Dakota and North Dakota. So he went up there and he began to work there for two years and then, okay, I'm coming back, I'm going into retirement. And since it was only a two-year stay, he didn't move everything up there, it was just they lived in a small apartment, and his wife was following him back. They're both driving two cars to come back to live in Houston. His car hits ice and he dies instantly. So no retirement that they expected, right? So he expected to live longer and he didn't live longer. Now you might say, well, he was already 60 years old or whatever. At least he got a a decent amount of life. But what about my friend, you know, Hudson, a family friend named Hudson, who 19 years old, he's a counselor camp. He goes swimming in a one of the lakes there at the camp. Um, he thinks he's getting a fever, dies 48 hours of a brain-eating amoeba, right? Just like that, gone. You think, oh, he's got lots of years left. No, he didn't have lots of years left. So so sometimes we forget how fragile life is, right? And so helping to remind people that we may not have the amount of time that we think we have, like it might be a lot less than that. And most people have someone that they know, uh, you know, either personally or maybe through you know, somebody they followed, you know, on Instagram or whatever, and it's like all of a sudden that celebrity is gone. Like they didn't, they didn't last as long as they thought they would last. So um so just getting people to think about that, I think, can be really valuable in helping them see maybe I shouldn't put this off. Maybe I won't have time. Uh like I think I'll have time.

SPEAKER_02 16:46

Yeah. And I'm I'm wanting to push this a little bit back to the scriptures. So uh either of you guys, there's some scriptures that actually comment about uh when we think we have control over like when we're gonna die. Yeah. Um, which we, I mean, if you think about it philosophically, obviously not, right? But that seems to be something in our culture that we kind of feel like we have control, right? And uh, so what does the scripture actually tell us about that?

SPEAKER_01 17:12

Yeah. So Jesus, he really confronts this issue pretty head on. In other words, he gave a lot of warnings like, you don't know when it's gonna happen. So you don't know when you're going to have to account for your life. You don't know when I'm going to return. So you better be ready. I I think of you know three uh different parables. So so one of those parables is the rich fool, so who you know builds his barns and puts everything in it, and you know, I I'm set for life, I can party, eat, drink, and be merry, and then his life is taken from him and it's over. Like you don't have the time that you think. That one's important.

SPEAKER_02 17:51

That one's important because I think that really parallels our culture today. Yeah. I've done all the right things, I've saved all the money, and now I'm gonna have this great life and I'm in retirement and all of these things, never thinking that it might your life might end tonight.

SPEAKER_01 18:05

Okay. That's right. What else have you got? Absolutely. So I'm thinking also of uh where Jesus talked about uh the servant who sort of working for a master, the master goes away on a trip, and he figures, well, the master's gonna be away for a long time. And so he begins to do things actually that aren't very great. He mistreats other servants and he you know uh doesn't tend to the tasks of the master well, and then the master returns a lot sooner than he's ready for, and it doesn't go well for him. So so uh so I think that's one of the examples. That's in Matthew 24, the rich fool in in Luke 12, and then the other uh passage or and parable that I think of, and I think it's really helpful even to share these parables with people. I I found parables to be really helpful in in talking with people, but uh uh the the last parable that I think of out of Matthew 25 is the parable of the ten virgins. And so these there are these women who are uh uh waiting for the bridegroom, for there's going to be this party, there's going to be this wedding, and you know, they're going to attend the wedding. And five of them have their little lamps, and and and lamps at that point in time were only about this big in size. They're very small, and so they didn't carry much oil in them. You had to actually have an extra stash of oil for these little lamps that they were uh carrying around to get around in the dark. And uh the the bridegroom comes back in the middle of the night. They need these lamps here, but only five of the women had oil ready and five didn't. And so five were able to make it to the wedding, and five weren't able to make it because they weren't ready. And you know, Jesus presents himself as the bridegroom is coming back, and and it's a wedding feast we want to be a part of, and we need to be ready for that. And so again, five women weren't ready for it. They they weren't uh they're thinking they could put it off. I I've got more time, and they didn't have more time.

SPEAKER_02 20:07

Yeah, so scripture really does tell us that you know the hour of salvation is at hand. Um wrapping things up, do you have something that you want to add to that?

SPEAKER_00 20:16

It is a very loving thing to tell somebody, you know, you might not have the time. It might not last. Uh it could be sooner than you think. So but let's talk about Jesus.

SPEAKER_01 20:27

Yeah, when you put those two things together, the idea that, hey, following Jesus today is really satisfying. Like you don't want to put it off. And hey, you better not put it off because you don't know when the end is gonna come for you. I think you put those two things together and it can help move people past this place that they're in right now where they're just saying, I can wait till tomorrow.

SPEAKER_00 20:56

Thanks for listening to the Reach Podcast. If you've got a question that you'd like to submit, go do that on reachothers.org slash podcast. And that whole website, reachothers.org, was developed by Search Ministries, which is our parent organization. And Search has been doing relational evangelism in the United States for almost 50 years, and we want to give the best of what we've learned away to you, and that's what we've done on reachothers.org. Hope you enjoy it. Come back and listen to the next episode.