Unless you are spiritually sadistic, the proclamation of the coming judgment isn’t an easy topic to part from your lips. As we speak of the love and the lordship of the King Jesus we end with a call to repentance in some form or another. Repentance is logically predicated on our hostile relationship towards God and its consequences. Prickly stuff and rightly so.
Nobody (properly socialised) likes telling people that they’re wrong. So it is that our mind and our emotions meet at the frontline ready to duke it out. Our head says we have a message of repentance to tell, yet our hearts hinder us because it is a difficult message to say.
We need to retrain the heart and the tool for the job is with the mind. I’m encouraged as I am reminded that everyone is serving someone or something. If not a loving God, then an unforgiving vampiric idol. My heart needs, not just convincing, but a sort of emotional reminder that the message of repentance is one of a loving offer to serve someone better. It’s a message of freedom. I think I often need that reminder, and I have no doubt that you do too.
Another way of retraining the heart is by getting at our own desires and shaping them or replacing them with deeper desires. For example, we could replace our desire to avoid potential conflict or awkwardness with our own cultivated and greater desire for curiosity. The former is a disincentive, a barrier to be overcome, but it is a desire nonetheless. The latter is an incentive, a force moving us instead of stopping us . The idea is that what moves us should be stronger than what stops us.
I’ve personally found that the role of curiosity is a good motivator for me. Genuine curiosity is a means to practising humility. The basis to curiosity is that you do not know something. In the instance of evangelism, you might not know that person’s story or how they have or have not patched their worldview together. And much like ourselves, their desire to reject God is both terribly mundane (I simply want my own autonomy to run my own life the way I want to – basically sin), but the expression and reasoning behind this very basic and fundamental human condition is exponentially complex. You could simply address the most basic issue – autonomous self rule against God. There is a place for doing that. But like many things, the more time you put into it the more you may yield.
Use your curiosity to get beyond the superficial and understand deeper issues at the heart. Add to that the courage to tell of the darkness that ensares us, and the light that saves us.
Bigvai and Shiphrah 