(By Jared Collins) – Before I moved to Waukegan, I lived in the Metro Detroit area. At that time I had convinced myself to work two jobs and go to school. Eventually the school became second priority to my work and I dropped out (which I don’t suggest doing). One of the jobs I held was at a failing coffee shop where I worked with the prestigious title of “Barista.” Because the coffee shop was so slow, I sat through a lot of down time in which there was not much to do because I needed to be ready to serve my caramel macchiatos and soy mochas with an extra shot and twice the whip. I filled the time with reading and I often got comments about the books I read. I remember one in particular being Catherine Booth’s Aggressive Christianity. I got quite a few more comments on that book than most of the other pop fiction that I would bring in. Mostly they were non-Christians saying, “As if Christianity was not aggressive enough!” I found great joy in that response, hoping that it was just a good Christian friend pestering them lovingly into the Kingdom because they couldn’t stand the thought of their non-Christian friend going to hell.
I found great sorrow however, in the responses I got from two older gentlemen who said they were Christians. “Do you think Christianity is not aggressive?”
I thought about my church and my friends and how many people I knew who would spend eternity away from God and said sincerely, “No.”
To which they responded, “You know, God isn’t concerned with numbers.”
I just about died. God is concerned about numbers. There are too many people that we all know that aren’t going to spend eternity with God and it may be something that we can easily change. Christ said as he was being taken up to heaven, “Go and make disciples of all nations.” ALL NATIONS! I wonder how many of us are so concerned with ourselves (as we Americans are so likely to be) that we fool ourselves into thinking that our job as evangelists ends with handing out a tract or participating once a year in I’ll Fight Day.
Catherine Booth wrote in her book that Satan had two ways of stopping the church from continuing to spread the way it did in Acts. The first way was to get weaker Christians to accept false doctrine. Hebrews 2 says to new Christians that we must “pay very close attention to what we have learned so we do not drift away.” Don’t be the weak Christian. Know firmly what you believe and hold close to it so as not to drift away. The second way was to get good Christians to think differently about their responsibility to the rest of the world. We got so concerned about not being of the world that we forgot to be in it.
So which are you? Are you a weaker Christian that doesn’t quite hold firmly enough to what you believe? Or are you a Christian who fools yourself into thinking that your responsibility ends with your own salvation. There are people dying, and God has charged us with showing them the way. Be aggressive.
Youth Department