Telling others#5: Gracious Words
| Conduct yourselves with wisdom toward outsiders, making the most of the opportunities. Let your speech always be gracious, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how you should answer everyone. (Colossians4:5-6) |
Life is full of opportunities to share our faith and all we need to do is use them. So many evangelism courses concentrate on making opportunities (like knocking on doors) rather than using opportunities. (That does not mean that knocking on doors is wrong, but I believe that there are many more natural opportunities that we miss every day.)
The crux of the matter is that we need to speak graciously. The word "gracious" is derived from "grace" ("Charis" in Greek) and one could explain grace with the acronym: God's Riches At Christ's Expense. If grace is about God's generosity, then gracious speech is kind, loving, considerate, and generous. Ultimately gracious speech will reflect on God's grace. Is that what your friends and colleagues hear when you speak?
If we stopped at gracious speech, there is a danger that people would just admire us because we are such nice people and never say mean and nasty things. But our speech must also be salty. (And I don't mean like the proverbial sailor (the old salt) who uses cuss-words!)
Our words must be aimed at preservation, purity, flavour, and thirst producing. At the end of the day we must find ways to speak about Jesus and His love in an attractive and sensitive way.
I have met far too many people who have been put off Christianity by someone who "Bible bashed" them in an insensitive clumsy way whilst leading a lifestyle that didn't match their words. If we believe that God is a Missional God, then we also need to believe that He is going ahead of us, opening doors and creating opportunities for us to be great examples and to speak gracious words. It's just up to us to "make the most of the opportunities..."
