Faith is a choice. No one can make you believe anything. You can be informed, educated, preached to or lectured at but it up to you what you do with that information. The trouble is, no one likes to be told what to do. We like to make up our own minds, find out for ourselves. How many times do you see a child about to make a mistake, try and warn them or explain to them the potential consequences, only to have to look on as it all goes horribly (and often painfully) wrong.
People who believe in Jesus, truly and passionately find it really hard to take the 'softly, softly' approach and are often accused of 'ramming it down people's necks'. Christianity isn't a marketing campaign, neither is it enforced without negotiation. It is choice, and a fairly simple choice. Are you in or are you out?
(Opting out is the easy option by the way.)
People who do believe, with a real and living faith, feel passion and joy. If these people are insisting on taking some time out of their day to pass this passion on, feel honoured. They care enough about you to try and make your life better.
Jesus told his followers "The gospel must first be preached to all the nations." This verse often gets given as the motivation for missionaries to venture into the deepest, darkest continents but this isn't the whole of it - the Oxford English Dictionary defines 'nation' as "a large body of people united by common descent, history, culture, or language, inhabiting a particular state or territory."
So if you are part of a family, history, or culture or inhabit somewhere, then Jesus was talking about you. He knew this without waiting around for the Oxford English Dictionary to be created almost some 2,000 years later.
So if everyone who believes in Jesus has a duty to tell everybody else, then this could feel like information overload, but the perception of 'bible bashing' or 'God bothering' is massively over exaggerated. If every day you heard about Jesus going to the cross for you, you might have a point. Chances are, in reality, you have to make a decision about what you believe very infrequently. But it is an important decision, and as Eleanor Roosevelt points out, who we are today is built on the decisions we made yesterday.
Jesus geeks will find the verse in Mark 13:10.
Image credit Tumblr.
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