Jan 28, 2022
On day five of the Marketplace Mission Trip, we talk about Speaking for Ourselves. Most of us spend the bulk of our lives in a world that doesn't want to be told what to believe. Let's talk today about how we speak when we're given the chance to relate to our faith.
Welcome back to the Follower of One Podcast. I'm Mike Henry Sr. Thanks for joining me. Today, as we talk about this statement made by the apostle Paul in second Corinthians three, two. "It is not that we are competent in ourselves to claim anything as coming from ourselves, but our adequacy is from God."
And that's from the Christian Standard Bible. I tend to talk like I'm right all the time. If you disagree with me, you're not thinking, or you're missing some facts. My kind of default mode is that I'm right. Whether you agree or not, and I've had to learn over the years really, that I'm generally more wrong than right.
Yep. There it is. I said it. In fact, as you listen to me, you may be more wrong than you think simply because you're listening to a guy who's generally wrong. I can get things often, very wrong.
Everything I know about my faith and most of what I remember about what happened to me, all of those things have a perspective. Now that I'm aware of my perspective, I've learned to speak for myself. I only talk about the things that I can with my own perspective. Even now, as I speak to you about the Bible, you're hearing my perspective in my learning, but even those things came to me through others, and at the hand of God. Those things come to me from the hand of God. I'm not competent in myself to claim anything as coming from me, but my adequacy comes from God. In second Corinthians. Paul's defending himself a bit. And in this verse, he's reminding the Corinthians that what he knows and what he has done have all come from God.
God is our adequacy. He's the foundation of what we do. Some other translations use words like sufficiency instead of adequacy. God operates his plan, and even our own degree of error is factored in. And that's why we talk about speaking for ourselves as the fifth daily activity in Follower of One. We can talk with some degree of certainty about the things that we've experienced and the things that we chose to believe. But to tell someone else that they must do something that they have to live a certain way to get to heaven, or that they have to do certain things to be Christians, I'm not so certain about many of those things. I'm not suggesting that we make our own Bible or make our own religion, but fortunately, our faith allows for a degree of error.
We each have a degree of error and that's why it's important. My degree of error is unknown to me. I'm certain it's there. We're all, some degree wrong. Romans 3:23 says we've all sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. We all come up short. That's the degree of error that I'm talking about. And I believe that degree of error is what challenges us to speak using the first person or to speak for ourselves.
Today, if you get an opportunity to speak about your faith, try and limit your words to statements that begin with I, or me. Let's talk about what God has done in our lives so that our coworkers and our friends can choose how they process that information. In the end, their salvation and their life with Christ is dependent upon choices they make while they're interacting directly with him, not things they say to us or how they behave.
Those factors don't matter. What matters is their relationship with Jesus Christ. And we want to challenge them to have a relationship with Jesus because we have a relationship with him and we experienced certain things. So let's try and limit things to the first person today and speak for ourselves. That way we avoid violating proprieties. And we are making a way for people to hear about our faith, without trying to tell them how to live. It's a necessity in our world.
Thanks for listening to me, stumble through some of this as we figure it out. Our job is to be witnesses, to do what we do because we believe who Jesus is and then tell others why.
Thanks so much for being a marketplace minister and thanks for serving other people in the workplace because you follow Jesus. Our actions matter. Today, let's focus on activity number five and speak for ourselves. Thanks very much.