The Ice Bucket Challenge and the Gospel of Jesus Christ

Every day for the past two weeks, I have seen a new video on Facebook© of someone taking the Ice Bucket Challenge to raise money to find a cure of ALS or Lou Gehrig’s disease.  Before you think I am going to criticize people for taking up this challenge, I want to state from the beginning that I am very happy that people want to do something to help those suffering from this terrible disease.  My prayer is that the awareness and dollars raised will help us find a cure.

My question is this, would a challenge to share Christ with people go viral like the Ice Bucket Challenge?  You may say that these are two different things.  They are but there are similarities.  People say that sharing your faith is both frightening and embarrassing.  Well the Ice Bucket Challenge is a little bit of both.  Dumping ice water on you is a little frightening because it can be painful and it is a little embarrassing because I have seen what people do after having the ice water dumped on them.  People have overcome those obstacles in doing the challenge rather quickly and easily but sadly too many believers don’t overcome these obstacles in sharing their faith.

We get frightened because we don’t know how or believe we are unable.  We get embarrassed because we don’t know how people will respond.  But we can easily overcome these obstacles when we realize that all we have to do is tell our story.  When Jesus changed the life of the woman at the well in John 4, she simply went back to her town and told the story of what happened to her (John 4:29).  That is all we have to do, tell people our story.  I can tell people what Jesus has done for me. 

We know the story.  God created us to live in harmony with Him, each other, ourselves and all of creation.  But because sin came into the world, our relationship with God was broken and so was our relationships with others and our world.  God desires for us to be restored to a right relationship with Him so he sent Christ into the world to live, to die and to be raised again so that if we believe in Him we will be brought back to Him.  And one day, Jesus is coming again to make all things new, to bring us back to the purpose for which we were created.

The challenge is, with whom can I share my story and His story.  We have good news to share.  We have a Holy Spirit is at work in people’s lives around us.  I can share the story in the power of the Holy Spirit and leave the results to God.  My prayer is that this challenge will go viral.