Finding the Middle Ground
Some people are so concerned about being sensitive to the state of our society that they don’t want to offend anyone with something that smacks of religiousness. Rather than speaking the word of God, they come at people to try to enlist them in the kingdom by every manner of nice conversation—just with a lot of loving deeds or activities—but never really speaking the word of God.
The Bible is the word of God. In this book are exceedingly great and precious promises that will radically change a person’s life. Do you know that no one will actually have their life changed except they hear the word of God? When you share with them the word of God—that Jesus loves them and came into the world to rescue them—you are paraphrasing scripture. By all means, paraphrase scripture, put it in your own words, and use a language that makes sense to the people that you’re speaking to.
On the other extreme, you have people whose only concept of sharing the Bible is to quote in King James English and sound like a parrot; spouting off one phrase after another. They’re not really even talking to anyone. They’re just pulling up scripture from their memory banks and spewing it around all over as though it were a garden hose, turned on full blast and nobody hanging onto it. They think that they’ve been really spiritual because they can give you the address of every verse that they quote.
Instead, we should find a middle ground where we take the truth of the word of God and ingest this truth into our mind and into our heart— and then speak out of what fills our heart—we speak to people the truth of the word of God, but in our own language. We can adopt new metaphors that explain things. We can share as normal people out of normal life, but we are speaking the truth of the word of God.
Can you feel difference between these two?
