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Motivatiom for Mission #17: The Time is Short
If this was your last day on earth, what would you do? How would you live it? That’s a good question. I bet you’ve got a bucket list of things that you want to do. People’s bucket-list dreams include travelling the world (which consistently tops the polls for the most desired aspiration), others include thrill-seeking such as parachute or bungee jumping, as well as having a child, buying a house or learning a language! Personally, I’d love to explore Alaska!
The question we all ask is, how long have I got to fulfill my goals? If I am going to have a long and healthy retirement, there’s no rush! The problem is that I don’t know and you don’t know either. And that is only about our own personal futures!
The book 2 Peter presents a vision of the world which doesn’t know how long it’s got left. Peter in his letter there says that this world is going to be dissolved, it’s going to be removed and replaced. Vividly he puts it like this: ”
But the day of the Lord will come like a thief. The heavens will disappear with a roar. (2Pe3:10)
Peter gives us a diagnosis, that this world is not permanent, but he doesn’t give us a prognosis, he doesn’t tell us how long we’ve got.
He tells us that Jesus is coming back and that we should live expectantly in the light of his return. He urges us to pursue of godliness, part of that has to be sharing the gospel. He prompts us into a sense of spiritual urgency by writing that we don’t know how long we’ve got, we don’t know how long is left.
The promise that the Lord will return is a good promise because it means the coming of the whole of the kingdom. So Peter urges us in fact to ‘hasten his return’ (2Pe3:12) which is a curious phrase! However, if we haven’t got long, and don’t know how long we’ve got, surely that is a reason to get about the Lord’s work, living holy godly lives and sharing the gospel because we’re in the business of getting this world ready to meet Christ either as judge or as saviour. Let’s share the gospel of peace with everybody we can because we simply don’t know how long we’ve got.
Prayer: Lord, help me to live with a sense of urgency that comes from the fact that our time on earth is not an infinite resource, and that one day you will return. Help me to use each day wisely and to prioritise well, not waste the gift of today, Help me to share you with someone today. Amen
The Pavement Parish: Street Evangelism for Everyone (with Isaac Olaleye)
What if evangelism on the street, speaking to random strangers, wasn’t the scariest thing ever? We are British, after all! PEP Talk is here to break down the barriers, exploring the role of prayer, the importance of community, the release of expectations and the joy of joining God’s work in sharing Jesus on the streets of London.
The Pavement Parish: Street Evangelism for Everyone (with Isaac Olaleye) – PEP Talk
Our Guest
Isaac Olaleye works in tech and is also a musician with a heart for people and community. He leads and teaches the evangelism team at Jubilee Church in North London, helping equip believers for monthly street evangelism and outreach. He also serves as a youth leader and is passionate about seeing people live out mission within their everyday lives.
About PEP Talk
The Persuasive Evangelism Podcast aims to equip listeners to share their faith more effectively in a sceptical world. Each episode, our hosts chat to a guest who has a great story, a useful resource, or some other expertise that helps equip you to talk persuasively, winsomely, and engagingly with your friends, colleagues and neighbours about Jesus.
Motivation for Mission #16: Even the rocks will cry out!
Why should we talk publicly about our faith in Jesus Christ? Well, there’s an intriguing encounter in the Gospels which sheds surprising light on that question … Jesus entered Jerusalem to great public acclaim and riding on a donkey in what we know as “the triumphal entry”, and the people came out into the streets to praise him. The people were vocal and vociferous in their praising of Jesus, saying:
‘Hosanna to the Son of David!’ ‘Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!’ ‘Hosanna in the highest heaven!’ When Jesus entered Jerusalem, the whole city was stirred and asked, ‘Who is this? The crowds answered, ‘This is Jesus, the prophet from Nazareth in Galilee’. (Matt 21:9)
The Pharisees and religious authorities were, of course, outraged by this and told Jesus to rebuke his disciples … Make them be quiet, there’s no place for this in our society, there’s no place for this in the public realm. This is indecent. This doesn’t fit in with our social norms. Make them shut up.
But Jesus replies: “if they’re silent, even the rocks will cry out.” (Lk 19:40)
Now, that’s really interesting because what he’s saying is this: that the whole of creation is bursting with the song of God, that its very purpose is to honour God and it is irrepressible. The whole of creation is singing the glory of Christ. And we have a choice. We either join in with the Spirit and all of creation, singing his praises and talking about him, or we allow ourselves to be silenced by the cultural forces and the authorities and the powers around us.
I know what I want. I want increasingly to be in tune with the Spirit of God and the song of creation, and less under the sway of the cultural forces all around me. Because if we’re silent, even the rocks will cry out. God must be glorified, Christ must be proclaimed!
Prayer: Lord, fill my heart with praise for you so that I become an irrepressisble worshipper in actions, songs and words. Help me to tell the world of your glory with a joy an infectious enthusiasm, that resonates with the fabric of creation which was made for your glory! Amen.
Were the Gospels Really Written by Matthew, Mark, Luke and John?
The truth of the Christian message depends heavily on the four biographies of Jesus contained in the Bible. Known as “Gospels”, they bear the names of their authors: Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. But were they really written by those obscure first-century men, with firsthand knowledge of the events they write about? In this Short Answers video, Derek McIntyre introduces some of the surprising evidence that points in that direction.
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Short Answers is a viewer-supported video series: if you enjoy them, please help us continue to make them by donating to Solas. Visit our Donate page and choose a free book as a thank-you gift!
How AI May Have Found What We Weren’t Looking For
In recent years, artificial intelligence has made huge leaps forward, not just in understanding human language, but also in recognising images. One of the ways it does this is by learning patterns. For example, when an AI reads billions of sentences, it starts to notice which words often appear together, which ones behave similarly, and how they tend to relate. Over time, it builds an internal “map” of language—almost like a mental dictionary—where similar words cluster near each other. Words like cat and dog, or London and Paris, naturally group together because they appear in similar contexts. This all happens beneath the surface, using complex maths, but the result is a surprisingly accurate sense of meaning.[1]
What no one expected was what happened next: and it turns out the implications go far beyond artificial intelligence.
For once an AI language model is trained, this vector space isn’t random noise but has remarkable geometry. For example, researchers have found that this space has linear subspaces corresponding to grammar (e.g. verb tense, gender, number); curved manifolds representing broader semantic fields like animals, colours, and emotions; and clusters and gradients that can be navigated smoothly; you can interpolate between happy and sad and get meaningful intermediate points.
Now here’s where things get strange, and deeply intriguing.
If you take a different AI—one that hasn’t read a single word, but has only been trained to look at millions of untagged pictures—it also builds an internal map. It learns to recognise patterns in images: shapes, colours, textures, and eventually objects. Without being told what anything is, it notices that certain kinds of images are similar: for example, all the different pictures of trees, or bicycles, or faces. That part isn’t too surprising either. But what happens next is surprising: when researchers compare the language map (built from words) and the image map (built from pictures), they find something remarkable. The two maps (trained completely separately) often line up. The “idea” of a dog in the image-trained AI ends up in roughly the same part of the conceptual map as “dog” in the language-trained AI.[2]
This matters because it’s unexpected and it’s potentially pointing to something deeper than just clever programming. For if language were just a human invention, a set of made-up labels we slap onto the world, then there’s no reason to think that an image-trained AI would carve up reality in the same way. The two systems could have ended up with very different mental maps. But instead, they agree. Even systems with no human-style consciousness, no biology, and no shared training, seem to be converging on the same structures. That suggests that meaning isn’t just something we impose, but rather it’s something that’s already there, waiting to be discovered—whether by people, or by machines.
Even more surprising is how this meaning is structured. These AI maps use mathematics, specifically vector spaces, which are like huge coordinate systems. Every word or image becomes a point in this multi-dimensional space,[3] and the AI can measure how close they are, or even do maths on the concepts. To take one famous example: take an AI’s vector concept of king, subtract man, then add woman and it lands astonishingly close to queen. That’s not just a gimmick but reveals that words and ideas behave like objects in space, and that meaning has a kind of geometry to it. It’s a bit like discovering you can solve a riddle using Pythagoras’ Theorem: it shouldn’t work, but it does. It’s as if meaning somehow follows invisible mathematical laws.
So here is the question. Why should meaning—something so human, so slippery and abstract—be something we can map with maths? Why should analogies, concepts, and categories follow the rules of geometry? This is the kind of thing that should make us pause. The universe, it seems, is not just material but it’s intelligible. It’s not just stuff, it’s structured. And even machines, deep learning algorithms with no soul and no self-awareness, can discover that structure.
SO WHAT’S GOING ON?
How do we explain this? Well, there are a few options on the table.
Constructivism says that meaning is just something humans made up. But if that were true, then different cultures and especially different modalities (language vs. images) and different architectures (e.g. modern transformer based LLMs vs. older embedding systems) should organise meaning in totally different ways. Yet we find remarkable convergence between text-trained and image-trained systems. That undermines the idea that meaning is purely invented. Furthermore, even when trained on entirely different human languages, these systems’ semantic maps can be aligned with a simple mathematical rotation, which would suggest that meaning’s geometry transcends culture.
Another option could be evolutionary naturalism, which might suggest that our brains evolved to carve up reality in useful ways, and that language reflects those categories. But that doesn’t explain why machines, with no evolutionary history, trained in totally different ways, also arrive at the same categories. Evolution can’t explain the shared geometry of entirely non-biological systems. If evolution explains why humans carve up reality this way, it does not explain why machines (with no ancestors and no instincts) do likewise. It seems that meaning is something external to us.
At this point, some secular thinkers leap for emergence as their last redoubt. This is the idea that meaning just “emerges” when you have enough complexity. To be fair, emergence is a serious idea: complexity does sometimes produce genuinely novel properties that couldn’t be predicted from the parts alone. But in this case, it’s a conjuring trick with semantics, not an explanation. Why should complex systems just happen to discover shared conceptual structure? That just raises the deeper question: why does meaning emerge at all? And why is it mathematical?
If all materialistic options have failed at this point, what about Platonism? This ancient philosophy might say these concepts are eternal abstract truths, that “dog-ness” or “table-ness” or “beauty” live in some transcendent realm of forms. But Platonism doesn’t explain where those forms come from, or why we (or machines!) should be able to access them. Perhaps the best place to locate such universals forms is in some kind of universal Mind. This was the very move that Augustine made when he located the Platonic forms in the mind of God.
Which leads us nicely to Theism. If there is a Creator who designed both the universe and human minds, then it makes sense that the world is filled with discoverable structure and that our minds (and even our machines) can tap into it. Christians believe that the universe was made through the Logos, the eternal Word of God (see John 1:1). In Greek philosophy, Logos meant not just ‘word’ but rational principle: the intelligible structure woven into the fabric of reality. This is why Augustine located the Platonic forms in the mind of God: universal meaning needs a universal Mind to ground it. If that is true, then the convergence we see in these AI systems isn’t a coincidence or a curiosity. It is exactly what we should expect in a universe created by a rational, personal God: a universe where meaning isn’t invented but discovered, whether by a poet, a philosopher, or a deep learning algorithm.
THE MIND BEHIND THE MEANING
It has long been observed that there is a mathematical structure underpinning physics, as the Hungarian theoretical physicist Eugene Wigner pointed out in a famous essay.[4] And many have argued that this is a powerful argument for God. For if numbers and maths are just human inventions, why should reality pay any heed to them? But now AIs and deep learning algorithms are discovering a similar mathematical structure underpinning language and meaning, epistemology and truth, the very conceptual way that nature is to be understood.
Either we are witnessing a cosmic coincidence of impossible precision—or mathematics is, once again, revealing that the universe has a Mind behind it. There’s something ironic, or perhaps beautiful, in all this: for as we have tried to teach machines to understand the written word, they have accidentally stumbled across the Divine Word.
[1] For an introduction to the maths behind machine learning, see Anil Ananthaswamy, Why Machines Learn: The Elegant Maths Behind Modern AI (London: Allen Lane, 2024).
[2] Santiago Acevedo et al., ‘A Quantitative Analysis of Semantic Information in Deep Representations of Text and Images’, arXiv 2505.17101 (preprint, 2026). Available online at: https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.17101
[3] It is not uncommon for deep learning systems to use vector spaces of 768, 1024, or even more than 4,096 dimensions.
[4] Eugene Wigner, ‘The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences’. Communications in Pure and Applied Mathematics 13.1 (1960) 1-14. Available online at: https://links.uwaterloo.ca/amath731docs/wigner_unreasonable_effectiveness_1960.pdf
Forward in Mission – Celebrating Granton Baptist Church’s Anniversary
It was a great privilege to be invited to speak at Granton Baptist Church in Edinburgh on the occasion of their 86th anniversary. They were founded in 1940 when Europe was being engulfed in war, bombs were falling, and as Churchill took over from Chamberlain as Prime Minister to lead the wartime coaltion government – and David Attenborough was a just fourteen year old schoolboy!
Now a vibrant, growing, multi-cultural church in the heart of the Granton Community in western Edinburgh it has a bold vision to share the love of Christ with all those around them – both in practical social concern and in determined evangelism. It was a delight to get to know a lot of the people there and to find the church in such good heart!
As their anniversary service was a chance to both look back and give thanks as well as look forward and press on in mission, we turned to the following text from Joshua 4
4 So Joshua called together the twelve men he had appointed from the Israelites, one from each tribe, 5 and said to them, ‘Go over before the ark of the Lord your God into the middle of the Jordan. Each of you is to take up a stone on his shoulder, according to the number of the tribes of the Israelites, 6 to serve as a sign among you. In the future, when your children ask you, “What do these stones mean?” 7 tell them that the flow of the Jordan was cut off before the ark of the covenant of the Lord. When it crossed the Jordan, the waters of the Jordan were cut off. These stones are to be a memorial to the people of Israel for ever.’
God’s people were to make a memorial to what God had done – and that was to serve an inspiration to them in their future service. For us today the same applies! So we looked at five lessons for God’s people on the move. You can watch the message here:
At Solas, we love serving local churches like this and pray that we can encourage them in their mission for God in their communities!
Fact-checking Faith (with Derek McIntyre)
“Did Jesus really live, die, and rise from the dead? ” Using ancient sources, historical records, and reasoned logic, Jesus the Evidence invites readers and listeners to explore the evidence and draw their own conclusions. Here on PEP Talk, we speak to the honest, no-nonsense Derek McIntyre about his own journey through the evidence and how he is bringing his findings to churches across the country.
Fact-checking Faith (with Derek McIntyre) – PEP Talk
Our Guest
Derek McIntyre comes from a science/engineering background and was a resolute agnostic until his early 40’s. He came to Christianity when he discovered the wealth of compelling evidence pointing to Jesus being the Son of God. He now shares this evidence with others through the Jesus: The Evidence website, presentation and booklet. Derek is also a Street Pastor in Glasgow and helps at Glasgow City Mission.
About PEP Talk
The Persuasive Evangelism Podcast aims to equip listeners to share their faith more effectively in a sceptical world. Each episode, our hosts chat to a guest who has a great story, a useful resource, or some other expertise that helps equip you to talk persuasively, winsomely, and engagingly with your friends, colleagues and neighbours about Jesus.
Spotlight on Christian History
If the gospel is “good news” what do we make of all the terrible events in Christian history? Did the church transform the world for the better or did it do more harm than good?
What Has Christianity Ever Done For Us?
Wouldn’t the world be better off if we’d never had religion? Andy Bannister looks at how Christianity shaped western society, and why its future still depends on it.
Page Menu
- What Has Christianity Ever Done For Us?
- Where Do Our Values Come From?
- Healthcare And Hospitality
- Who Created Human Rights
- What About The Witch-Trials, Holy Wars and Inquisition…?
- Or The Bible’s Strange Laws, Violence and “Anti-Scientific” Ideas? (Spotlight on Difficult Bible Questions)
- Does Christianity Impede Our Moral Progress?
- The Most Important Event In History
Where Do Our Values Come From?
Values and ideas shape every culture, so where do ours come from? Barney Zwartz looks at what the atheist historian Tom Holland discovered from his study of the ancient world.
CHRISTIAN HISTORY IN THE DOCK
A Good Legacy…?
Healthcare and Hospitality
Isn’t it obvious that you look after the needy? Jeff Fountain shows why healthcare and hospitality had religious roots.
Who Created Human Rights?
Human rights just exist, right? Andy shows why the ideas behind equality and justice need to come from somewhere.
…Or A Damaging Influence?
What About The Witch-Trials, Holy Wars And The Inquisition…?
Don’t the bad events in history disprove Christianity? Natasha Moore looks at how we make sense of the many dark episodes of the past.
…Or The Bible’s Strange Laws, Violence And “Anti-Scientific” Ideas?
The Bible contains some difficult passages that are hard to understand. Solas provides resources to help you understand Scripture better.
Doesn’t Christianity Impede Our Moral Progress?
Isn’t Christianity out-dated in our modern world? Andy explores whether it is a negative force that is holding humans back.
WHY HISTORY MATTERS
The Most Important Event In History
At the heart of Christian message is an extraordinary historical claim: that Jesus died and came back to life, so that people might have eternal life with God. If this is true, it changes everything!
But why should anyone believe it actually happened? Steve Osmond looks at the evidence that transformed his and countless lives throughout history.
Steve at the CS Lewis Institute (Belfast)
I had a wonderful weekend partnering with the CS Lewis Institute in Belfast for several events. It was such a joy and privilege to partner with them as a ministry, and to get to know their city Director, Stuart Horner.
I was invited to speak at their Fellows Programme training on cultural apologetics – which forms part of their wider year-long discipleship programme (although there were several other ‘Inklings events’ throughout the weekend too).
Stuart had very encouraging feedback, posting the following reflections:
Steve Osmond from Solas skilfully set out how we can defend our faith, giving a reason for the hope that we have, but doing that with gentleness and respect. At the afternoon workshop he gave our Fellows, mentors and guests the opportunity to put this learning into practice… On Friday evening we returned to T3 conference centre near Lisburn to hear from Steve on whether Belief in God is just blind faith, turns out it is not! Steve clearly and persuasively set out many of the reasons for belief in God. “
One of the things that really stood out for me, and encouraged me, is the hunger that people had to learn more and then to put what they’ve learned into practice, not just keeping it as knowledge but giving it legs. I was even more encouraged by the number of people asking what next steps they could take to equip their churches to defend and commend the faith better, and particularly how to equip young Christians well, and how they personally could keep growing in persuasive evangelism using the tools of good apologetics. Given the challenges of secular culture, sharing our faith can sometimes feel very daunting. But again and again I’ve seen that apprehension lifted when people learn good, simple conversational tools, and also come to see the reasonableness of Christianity – these things not only help to build our own faith, but can be a great catalyst to motivate us to share the hope that we have in the Gospel.
It was good to continue Solas’s partnership with the CSLI in Belfast, building on work last year, which will be continuing soon when both Andy and Gavin will be speaking at CSLI(B) events! Here’s a little gallery of photos from the trip!
Why Doesn’t God Reveal Himself More Clearly?
Throughout history, humans have wondered where God has hidden himself—or if he’s there at all! Wouldn’t everyone believe in him if he just showed himself more clearly? Even in the Bible, we find countless characters wondering why God’s presence isn’t more obvious. In this Short Answers video, David Nixon considers why God doesn’t force himself on us, but invites us to meet him face-to-face through Jesus Christ.
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Please share this video widely with friends or family and for more Short Answers videos, visit solas-cpc.org/shortanswers/, subscribe to our YouTube channel or visit us on Twitter, Instagram or Facebook.
Support
Short Answers is a viewer-supported video series: if you enjoy them, please help us continue to make them by donating to Solas. Visit our Donate page and choose a free book as a thank-you gift!
Motivation for Mission #15: The Gospel Liberates
I know someone who became a Christian from a background in alcoholism, and his coming to faith in Christ was instrumental in him breaking the power of addiction over his life. I know someone else who came into the church having relentlessly pursued the accumulation of money and found that it just didn’t satisfy him, it left him empty. I know someone else who came in and found Christian faith because he was burdened with a guilty conscience, labouring under a sense of his own sinfulness, and he found release in Christ.
Recently I was at a baptism service when I heard someone talking about the way that she had pursued all sorts of religious practises of various kinds, desperate to find meaning and truth and an encounter with something ultimate. She had now become a Christian, saying that – for all those years – she hadn’t realised that what she’d really been looking for was Jesus. I could look around my church and tell you story after story after story of people who have found liberation in Jesus Christ.
It is important that we keep telling those stories because sometimes our evangelistic fervour drops because we have lost sight of the fact that Jesus is the liberator. Jesus sets us free from the power of sin and death and evil, and gives us new life and the impetus for real change.
The Bible says that anyone who is in Christ “is a new creation, the old has gone, the new has come”, (2 Cor 5:17) and we see the truth of that all around us in our own lives and in other people’s stories. And that spurs us on in evangelism because the people live for things – in fact are ‘worshipping‘ things – that cannot bear the weight of their worship. Humans are instinctively worshipping creatures, and if we’re not worshipping God some idol will take his place. Idolatry means basing our lives on something created, rather than on the creator. Anything ‘created’ we worship functions as an idol and those idols are fallen, they’re broken, they let us down, they disappoint and ultimately will condemn us.
The gospel is the good news that liberates us from the worship of false idols which cannot bear the weight of our lives, which cannot bear the weight of our worship because they are not worthy of it. But Christ is – and we have the message that liberates.
Prayer: Thank you Lord that you came to liberate captives. Thank you that your truth sets people free and gives new life. I long to see more people set free by your word and your Spirit through the gospel. There are some people on my heart today Lord who need your liberation. Help me to point them to you.
Confident Christianity at Cowplain
This is the third time we have had the Solas team come for a weekend here at Cowplain Church. We love having them as it’s so helpful for our people to hear that it is possible to be able to share our faith with others. What’s great about the day conference is that it’s both informative and biblical in showing us practical ways to know the gospel, answer questions people ask and also to have a renewed confidence in talking to people about Christ. The sessions on how to deal with peoples questions which are often based on faulty assumptions they hold was especially helpful as it helped people to see that they don’t have to jump in to defend the Bible position. Instead we can ask questions in a gentle way which unlocks better conversations with unbelieving friends and family. – Pastor Phill Brown
Andy Bannister was joined by Gavin Matthews and Dave Hutchings for a day of Confident Christianity at Cowplain Church – a return visit to the Hampshire town for the Solas team. Phill Brown chaired proceedings and after his opening devotional talk and some sung worship to helpfully focus our minds on God himself, we got into the main content of the day.
Confident Christianity is Solas’s travelling conference which helps Christians to share and defend their faith more naturally, boldy and winsomely at home, amongst friends, and at work. These conferences have taken place with all kinds of churches, up and down the length and breadth of the UK. (If you want to know more about them, listen to this podcast).
These conferences get tweaked for each church and context in which Solas deliver them so no two are identical! In Cowplain, Andy Bannister led sessions on conversational evangelism, and connecting conversations to Jesus, Dave Hutchings looked at questions as conversational tools and a model for evangelism he uses, while Gavin looked at the biblical underpinnings for Solas’s approach and the problem of suffering, as it is raised as an objection….
Two lively sessions of Q&A were really enjoyable and engaging when people brought all manner of real-life scenarios to the table for discussion with the speakers. As ever several people didn’t want to talk about their situations publically but were keen to chat and pray personally with the Solas team about people for whom they are especially burdened. It is a huge privilege to hear these stories and join people in praying for the salvation of those they love.
Dave was especially encouraged to hear that his last visit to Cowplain had made a great impression on one young person. He had done a session on evidences for the existence for God -and the next week an RE teacher had asked for a show of hands for ‘Who here believes that God created the world?’ The pupil who had been at Confident Christianity bravely stuck up his hand (he was the only one!) and when the teacher challenged him to justify his belief, used several strands from Dave’s talk! The teacher was so impressed with his courage and thoughfulness that he contacted his parents to commend their son!
The weekend didn’t end with a Saturday conference, Andy stayed on to preach on the Parable of the Two Sons on Sunday morning, and then Dave and Andy spoke at at outreach event on the Sunday evening. From Solas’s perspective what can we say other than that it is a huge privelege to serve Christ alongside people like our friends at Cowplain Church.
Tackling the Toughest Topics (with Andrew Ollerton)
Whether it’s a young person encountering the first challenges to their childhood faith, or a curious person anonymously ordering a Bible online, it can be easy to be thrown off track by stories of slavery, animal sacrifice or other tricky topics found within the Bible. Or if we’re in a position to speak about the Bible to others, what happens when we’re asked a question about these potential pitfalls? Here on PEP Talk, we find out about a new book by Andrew Ollerton that takes the Bible on its own terms to help address the toughest topics.
Tackling the Toughest Questions (with Andrew Ollerton) – PEP Talk
Our Guest
Andrew Ollerton is a theologian, pastor, author and presenter who makes complex ideas simple and relevant. Andrew lives in Wales and regularly speaks at conferences, festivals and churches and films video content on locations around the world. Andrew recently developed a new edition of The Bible Course with Bible Society and published a new book called God’s Book: An Honest Look at the Bible’s 7 Toughest Topics. Andrew also works closely with the explorer Bear Grylls. They’ve published a Bible called the NIV for Young Explorers, produced a TV series in Israel and Andrew recently helped Bear develop a brilliant new book called The Greatest Story Ever Told.
About PEP Talk
The Persuasive Evangelism Podcast aims to equip listeners to share their faith more effectively in a sceptical world. Each episode, our hosts chat to a guest who has a great story, a useful resource, or some other expertise that helps equip you to talk persuasively, winsomely, and engagingly with your friends, colleagues and neighbours about Jesus.
Motivation for Mission #14: Overcoming Selfishness
A survey commissioned by London City Mission a couple of years ago revealed that “76% of practicing Christians wished to talk more about their faith with non-Christians”. The data is clear, we want to do better, we want to share our faith and talk more naturally and more often about Jesus. I can completely identify with that. I want to talk about him more than I do.
When I read those survey results, it made me reflect on why I am sometimes reluctant to share my faith, and I’m afraid to say that one of the reasons is actually just selfishness. I like all the things that Christ brings to my life, such as forgiveness, love and joy and peace and security, a sense of his presence in times of trial and so many other blessings. But I worry that I’m sometimes just so selfish that I am content to keep them to myself and not share them with other people.
The gospel begins with God’s motivation for mission! “For God so loved the world that he sent his Son, that whoever believes in him won’t perish but have eternal life”. So I wonder if my lack of action represents a lack of love. Does that explain why you and I are sometimes less-than-extravagant in our sharing of the gospel? Sometimes we simply don’t love as we ought to, and we’re selfish enough to sit and enjoy the blessings of God without sharing them with other people.
The only antidote to that I know is to ask the Holy Spirit to fill us again and to make us more Christ-like. Only he can give us the power to overcome self-centredness and make us more closely resemble Christ who came for the lost, whose great heart broke over the state of the world.
Don’t we need to be a bit more like him and just a bit less selfish?
Prayer: Father God, I repent of selfishness and ask for your forgiveness and cleansing. Please fill me with your Spirit and create in me a clean heart, which overflows with generosity and shares the riches of Christ with the world.