Your everyday gusto — how you show up at work, at home, in whatever you put your hands to — is what God uses to make the gospel believable to the people watching you do it.
Central Image
The mystery shot: nobody lines up for an unknown cure from a source they don't trust — which is exactly the persuasion problem with announcing the one cure for what ails the human race.
The Turn
The assumption in the room: people ought to listen to the gospel because you're a nice person. Jesus's answer from Luke 16: nobody goes to an incompetent dentist just because he's pleasant. Competency, effort, and real enthusiasm are what make you someone people will actually hear.
Outline
The foolishness of persuasion
God chose the foolishness of preaching to spread the gospel — and the foolishness is this: persuasion. If you're all-powerful, why wait around trying to convince people? Why not a lightning bolt? But God, in His kindness, chose to win people over. Toby noted you don't have to persuade anyone that humanity's got ailments. The hard sell is that there's exactly one cure and it's Jesus Christ. For that, people have to trust the source.
Luke 16:1-13 — The Unjust Manager
A manager gets caught being lazy and incompetent — probably not stealing, just not delivering — and he's told to turn in the books. Panic produces something nobody saw in him before: hustle. He slashes the debts of his master's creditors to buy goodwill for when he's out on the street. The master commends him. Not for the dishonesty — for the sudden industriousness and competency. That's what the master wanted from him the whole time. Jesus says the sons of this age are more competent in their field than sons of light often are in theirs. That ought not to be so.
The Pharisees get caught in the back pews
The Pharisees have been making faces and cracking jokes. Jesus turns on them: your whole stick is justifying yourselves before men. And what people applaud, God calls an abomination — the worst category in the whole Old Testament taxonomy. Below holy, below common, below unclean. Abomination is death-penalty territory. Worse: the system they're hustling for ended with John the Baptist. The law and the prophets were until John; since then it's the kingdom, and people are pouring in with gusto — while the Pharisees sit back and play pretend with something that's already over. The law hasn't fallen — it can't, not a dot of an eye — but that administration ended.
Unrighteous mammon and eternal friends
Jesus tells the disciples: use unrighteous mammon — your job, your money, your position, whatever worldly leverage you have — to make friends so that when it runs out, they'll welcome you into eternal dwellings. Your competency and enthusiasm in things that seem purely worldly can have eternal consequences. The mechanism: if the people at your job know you as someone they can count on, your "weird God belief" becomes harder and harder to dismiss. You can't fake that cognitive dissonance away. Real enthusiasm is contagious, and backed by real effort, it opens people up. Toby pointed to a girl on Manny's track team — Kensington, sprinter and long jumper, electric, encouraging, possibly a state champion — as an example of what persuasive actually looks like when it's grounded in competency.
The dentist test
You won't let an incompetent dentist touch your teeth just because he's nice. The world doesn't care if you're pleasant — it cares whether you can get the job done with the right attitude. The temptation in church is to think it ought to just work out because we mean well. Jesus said no. The persuasion for the kingdom comes through people whose everyday lives earn them a hearing.
The Landing
Every one of us has a worldly life — a job, a household, a team, something we put our hands to. God gave us that life to leverage for heavenly things. Steward it with enough hustle that when eternity comes, there are people there to welcome you because of it.
Questions to Think About
- Toby opened with a mystery shot — no FDA approval, unknown contents, ten grand. Nobody lined up. Think of a time you actually took someone's advice or recommendation on something you had no way to verify. What made you trust them enough to try it?
- The master doesn't punish the unjust manager more when he catches him cutting deals with the debtors — he commends him. What does that tell us about what the master actually wanted from this guy the whole time?
- Jesus says the sons of this age are more competent in their sphere than the sons of light are in theirs. Why does that qualifier — "in their sphere" — matter? What exactly is he comparing?
- Toby drew a hard line: incompetent bum, nice guy, nobody cares. Think honestly about your actual job, your house, wherever you show up regularly. Would the people there say you're someone they can count on?
- The manager didn't know he had any hustle in him until he was about to lose everything. When was the last time you found effort or competency in yourself that surprised you — and what brought it out?
- Jesus tells the Pharisees the law and prophets were until John — but then immediately says it's easier for heaven and earth to disappear than for a dot of the law to fall. That's not a resolution, that's a tension. What does it mean for something to be over but still fully intact?
- Toby said that if the people at your job know you as someone they can count on, your "weird God belief" gets harder and harder for them to write off. What's the actual reputation of this church in Chester — not what we'd want it to be, but what do people here say about us?
- Jesus said to use unrighteous mammon to make friends who'll welcome you into eternal dwellings. Name one concrete thing — not a posture, not a resolution — you're going to do differently this week in your actual life that puts this to work.