The Gospel and Friendship
Treasured Friends,
Recently I found myself reminiscing about an old fishing buddy: we’ll call him “Jim.” When I met him, Jim had only recently retired from a long career as a high school history teacher. He’d taught at the same school, lived in the same community, been married to the same woman, and raised two children. Shortly after I moved to take my first call as a pastor, Jim was very kind to take me under his wing and show me some of his favorite fishing spots. Over the next few years, we spent countless hours in conversation as we drove the backroads and traipsed along the trout streams of northeast Iowa.
One more thing about Jim: he was an ardent atheist. I did not know that about him when we first met, but he made it clear on our very first trip. In fact, that was his ultimatum: do not try to change my mind, and we’ll get along just fine. Oddly enough, over time, we ended up having some long conversations about faith and religion – all at his prompting. And I have no idea whether his mind might have been changed, or his atheistic convictions challenged. I certainly hope they were.
But Jim reminds me that God’s goodness often shines very brightly in those who do not know Him and outright deny Him. Why do non-believers still love their children and act with kindness toward others? Indeed, why do they sometimes outpace us Christians in decency and the other virtues? It is because God is at work providentially even in them. The Scriptures tell us that His common grace is poured out, just like the rain, on believers and unbelievers alike (Ps. 136:25; Ps. 145:8-9; Matt. 5:44-45; Acts 14:16-17). The impulse toward justice, peace, and love isn’t an accidental thing, the Scriptures teach. Rather, those virtues are on display because God is there, even in the lives of those who remain unaware even hostile to His presence (Rom. 2:14-15).
I sincerely pray my friend Jim eventually let go of his resistance and found saving faith by accepting Christ,* but I am also grateful for the ways God shines through in so many who deny Him, enabling them to live good and decent lives. I suspect we all have a Jim or two in our orbits, and if we don’t we ought to work to rectify that. A professor of mine used to say, “the gospel moves at the speed of friendship.” It is a rich blessing to glory in God together with fellow believers, but the gospel needs to fall on the barren fields too. Just as much as the good news is for us, it is also for those who haven’t yet heard it.
Chances are we’ll never say the one thing that will open a person’s eyes to the beauty and truth of Christ – and even if we do, we may never know – but simply seeing God living in us over the course of many conversations and experiences may prove far more important anyway. Thanks be to God that something as simple as friendship and fishing can be the way He pierces the someone’s darkness and brings His love and life into their heart!
On the journey with you,
Mike
*Note: “common grace” is differentiated from “saving grace” in that the one is what makes possible the normal functioning of all things, while the latter is what makes faith itself possible (see John 3:1-8 and compare it to the passages cited above).
To reiterate: plenty of non-believers are exceedingly virtuous, at times even more so than many Christians. However, it is only the special grace that comes as God’s gift to us through the Holy Spirit that enables us to hear and believe the truth about sin and salvation through Jesus Christ.
We might compare common grace to the force of gravity that is able to pull a car downhill all by itself, while saving grace is the gas that is able to power that same car back up the hill in a direction it could not otherwise go on its own.