How Do You Make Christ More Appealing? A Good Word for Preachers

My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me. (John 10.27)

Have you ever been overcome with frustrated despair as you wonder how to get through to your professing Christian friend?  Have you looked into the eyes of an unbeliever and asked yourself how you might bring them to Christ?  Have you wondered how you might appeal to them and somehow have them follow the Savior?  If you are a pastor, have you sat in your study and wondered how you might help people to get it?

To one degree or another all believers have struggled through such thoughts. 

Often times though  in our noble ambitions we find ourselves retreating to unbiblical means.

We aim to make Christ more appealing to the one who seems to not think that he is so.  This usually means giving Jesus something of an extreme makeover so that the eligible unbeliever might be one over.  We might be tempted to change his message, his tone, his requirements, his work, his kingdom, and his demands.  Suddenly our ostensibly noble goal has placed in our hands the tools of idolatry as we craft a Jesus that looks like the rebel.

But this is not the way it works. Keep Reading>>>

Words From the Fire -- Just Released From Moody Publishers

The great philosophical crisis of our day is an epistemological crisis – a crisis of knowing and a crisis of knowledge. It is a challenge for the Christian thinker, the Christian theologian, the Christian minister, the Christian preacher, and the Christian institution – the whole of Christianity. The crisis can be summed up in one question: How do we know and teach what we claim to know and teach?

Francis Schaeffer well understood the epistemological crisis and accordingly titled his most significant contribution, He Is There and He Is Not Silent. I first read this classic as a sixteen-year-old. To be honest, I think the greatest assurance I got from the book at that age was that some really smart person believed in God. But even at that age, lacking the vocabulary to understand what I was experiencing, I understood the epistemological crisis. How do we know anything? How would we speak of anything? Furthermore, how do we jump from the empirical knowledge of what we can observe to speaking of God whom we cannot see? Read the rest HERE