We are approaching Christmas. It’s the time of each year which provides us with some of our greatest opportunities to talk about our faith with our friends who do not yet share it.
A Christmas carol service is not a difficult ask. Indeed, it can be a very popular one, for all sorts of reasons. But what about after that? It is worth underlining how important it is to get an interested friend into reading one of the Gospels and, if at all possible, to do it together on a regular basis, so as to deal with all the questions they may have. The New Year provides a natural point at which to start doing that, but to get there you may need to be prepared to deal with some current misconceptions about the Bible.
Obviously surprised
I was preaching evangelistically on Isaiah 53 recently, when a thoughtful, professional man came up afterwards to ask: ‘Where do you get all this Isaiah stuff from?’ As I explained the historical provenance of Isaiah’s life and prophecy, he was obviously surprised, since he had the impression that the Bible had been written by the church, centuries later, perhaps in the Middle Ages. That would explain why Isaiah 53 could provide such an amazing portrait of Christ crucified.
