Telling God's Stroy, God's Way // The Freedom to Share Jesus with Others, Part 5

Okay – so you want to tell someone about Jesus.  But how?  Where do you begin? What do you say?  Do you know enough?  All questions that we might ask ourselves. But how would Jesus tell people about Jesus? Or should we just leave it to the experts?

Let me ask you a question, if you had to get up at a barbecue with some dozen or so of your friends or work colleagues, people who may not know Jesus and you had just two minutes, only two minutes mind you, to tell them about Jesus, what would you say?

Just the thought’s enough to send the good many Christians into a panic attack. What would you say? How would you say it? You know that's one of the things that really stops a lot of Christians from sharing Jesus with others. It used to be my problem too until I discovered that God Himself is just the best communicator and He uses plain, simple, everyday language and everyday stories to get His point across.

Right at the beginning of the New Testament, in the second chapter of Matthew's gospel, if you have a Bible there's an amazing story. We know them as the three wise men. Now we don't actually know how many there were because Matthew just tells us there were a number of wise men.

But these wise men were following a star to go and find this Jesus who had been born in Bethlehem. They were looking for the Messiah. Now the word that Matthew uses for these wise men is Magi. And Magi were astrologers and soothsayers.

And to the Jews that was sinful and pagan and occultish. Kind of like today if some witches and warlocks wandered into a local Church. I guess there'd be more than a few Christians who would be a bit disturbed about that.

So these wise men, these Magi, were astrologers and the second thing that Matthew tells us about them is that they were from the east. Well that's kind of code that we may not understand today because east of Jerusalem was Babylon. And Babylon was like, I don't know, like the Third Reich to the Jews today.

Babylon was a place where several hundred years before they'd been exiled into slavery and so the symbolism of Babylon is probably pretty close to Adolph Hitler and the Third Reich. Okay, that's what they thought when they read "from the east".

So God calls some sinful pagan astrologers from Babylon, from hell, across to meet His Son. Now would we have called them? You and I, today, if we had some astrologers or some witches or whatever living next door, would we invite them over for a barbecue? Would we invite the tarot card reader down in the local mall, home over a barbecue to talk about Jesus?

"Ooh, no, no. That's a cult issue. Ooh, have to keep away from that." Well ... God invited them. He invited them when His Son was born to worship Jesus. But how does He get their attention? How does He get them to come from Babylon to meet Jesus?

Does He send them, say John the Baptist or a prophet or a preacher or a Billy Graham? No, He sends them a star. An astrological symbol, do you get it? God is the most amazing communicator. Would you or I (A) even have bothered to send them and (B) if we had would we have sent them a star?

And what that says to me is that, okay God hated their sin but He loved them so much more than He hated the stuff they were into. Here and now He is saying to us, "this is how I see people, I care about them no matter what. No matter what they are into, I love them." Jesus is here for everyone and God was prepared to send the astrologers a star. He was prepared to call even the astrologers from the Third Reich. That's God's way.

Jesus hung out with lepers and prostitutes and sinners and He told simple stories and sometimes we think we have to be theologians or carry text books or have a Bible under our arms. Look at this story, this simple story.

It must have been so shocking to the first century Jews who read it, to think that God would have called these astrologers and told them a simple story through a symbol that they could understand in their sin of astrology.

Do we need to convince people about Jesus through some erudite apologetic argument? Would it ever occur to us to go to astrologers with a star? What's your story about life and how you grew up and how Jesus came into your life? What has He done in your life? What is it like knowing Him? What are the things you've struggled with? What's the stuff you perhaps haven't got your head around?

I wonder, if you had these astrologers at your barbecue in your backyard. You know, some sausages, a bit of coleslaw, some onion perhaps and the conversation was flowing across the table. Well, I don't know about you but this is what is was like for me I guess, it was like this.

Maybe we could tell people about Jesus in plain, everyday language. Just the way He has impacted on our lives. Maybe we don't need to be theologians after all. Now I'm not suggesting you shouldn't go to Church and I'm not sugg