Marry Her or Die?

I am finding more and more than as a Christian I cannot just listen to myself and my own ideas. All Christians need to get fed as well as feed others. Because of this I have become a huge fan of podcasted services from other churches. My favorite site to find worship services on is www.hotworship.com which is a portal to a whole bunch of churches that either stream or post their services online. Out of those, I regularly listen to Mark Driscoll from The Mars Hill Church in Seattle. You can find his messages at media.marshillchurch.org. I don’t agree with his take on a lot of stuff, and he is definitely from a different theological stream than I am, but he’s great to get me to look at a passage differently and to start me thinking. He is a brother in Christ, of that I have no doubt, and I have never left one of his messages without having something to think about.

I was listening to one of his sermons on John and he gave a perfect metaphor for modern evangelism. I hope he will forgive me if I borrow it here. Imagine that you are sitting at home, a single young man sitting in your house when there is a knock at the door. Someone you’ve never met is there waiting for you. He says that he has the perfect woman for you to marry. She’s beautiful, intelligent, just the right age, with a great sense of humor, and everything else you could want. The man at your door looks at you and says that she is really interested in marrying you. The only catch is you have to decide right now, will you marry her or not, sight unseen?

So what do you do? The guy tells you she’s awesome, absolutely perfect for you, but you have to decide while she’s still in there car. If you are like most of us, you’d slam the door in that guy’s face and tell him to bugger off forever. No one wants to enter into a lifetime commitment with someone you’ve never met before just because someone knocked on your door. So you tell the guy to stay away from you or you’ll get a restraining order, right?

But instead of immediately leaving you alone, the strange guy at your door tells you that while he understands your worry, the lady in the car has a loaded pistol and if you don’t marry her, she’s going to shoot you in the head. So either marry her or she’ll kill you. What do you decide? Most of us would still tell the guy to get out of our lives just because that’s really scary and frankly very creepy.

That’s what we do so often with people when we evangelize. We tell them God loves them and wants to have a relationship with them forever, but they need to decide right now, and if they don’t decide they will be sentenced to hell forever. Is it really any wonder we’re scaring people away from us in droves?

What a difference it would make if a good friend showed up at your door and invited you to a party with some of his and your friends. Your friend tells you that there is a really awesome lady there he wants you to meet. He describes her, but invites you to get to know her and her friends first, have a good time, see what other people think about her. Which would you prefer? If we are really inviting people to fall in love with God shouldn’t we do it the same kind, loving way that we would help two people to fall in love in the flesh? Not domineering, not through threats or trickery, but by inviting them to get to know the person, find out what they’re like from other people that know them, and make their own decisions? God is awesome, and if we let people see it they’ll think God is awesome too. But we can’t force love and devotion on someone.