This is Psalms to God, season five, episode nine, communicating Your Faith. You can find the show notes for this episode at www.psalmstogod.com.

Hey guys. Welcome back to the Psalms to God podcast. This season we've been talking about crucial conversations. There is no more crucial of a conversation than how you actually communicate your faith. And if I'm being honest, I feel like this is one of the hardest things to do because it's not really just a conversation. A lot of people try to communicate their faith through conversation, but I really feel like the best way to communicate your faith is through actions.

If you read the Bible and you look at the New Testament, what converted people—what convicted people—is not people walking around being like, let me tell you about our Lord and Savior. No! It was seeing the miracles. It was seeing people not back down. I mean, imagine not even just the New Testament. Imagine in the Old Testament you have Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. And they're being told to bow down or else they're gonna kill them. And they're like, “No, we're gonna serve our God.” Seeing that they’re not willing to back down, that they're gonna stand for their values, and then seeing them get thrown into the fire and they don't die—they come out.

Or seeing that, there's this decree that they can't pray to God and Daniel's still praying to God, so they throw him in the lion's den and he survived.

Yes. Right? Seeing that faith, seeing people who are willing to go where no one else is willing to go because they know that The Most High has their back. That is a powerful thing. But it's hard because number one, most of us don't have those kinds of moments every day, and in fact, we don't want those moments. As much as I would love to say that in that face, I would do the same thing as Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, I don't want that to be my everyday life choice. I don't know if my heart could take it. That's a lot of stress. That's a lot of anxiety. You know? He said, don't be anxious[1] but I don't know that I could not be anxious. Right?

But there are little things like. Exhibiting the fruit of the spirit.

Things like peace, patience, love, joy, right? Kindness. How we express these things and how we talk to people, and how we move, how we react to situations. People pick up on this, they notice this, and if they like the way you move, they gravitate towards you. They wanna know more about you. How do you do this? Why do you do this? But if you are reacting like everybody else, then you're just like everybody else, ain't nothing special. And all this other stuff you're saying is completely irrelevant. And so communicating that is very, very nuanced.

But what's even more is that everyone has their own perception. I talked about this when I talked about, you know, how do you define Christianity and stuff like that, but everyone has their own perspective when you talk about anything really.

Let's see example. So back in, I think the second season of the podcast, maybe the third season, I did an episode called

It becomes very difficult to show people your side because they're missing the conviction from the Holy Spirit. They're missing some piece; they're missing the relationship aspect, and it's very easy for things to get distorted when you're just using words. This has been one of the things that I've been trying to navigate.

Nobody else in my family keeps Sabbath and it's been an interesting thing. For instance, when my parents visit or when I visit my parents, it's always very difficult because they're doing things that I feel like don't honor the Sabbath and they don't particularly want to keep the Sabbath. My parents are very antsy type of people. They don't like to just relax or to just sit. They always wanna do something. So even if you get them to not do work, they wanna talk about the work, they wanna plan the work. It's very difficult to pull them out of that. And they're not necessarily the ones who, I mean, you're not gonna spend all day reading the Bible. And so trying to find activities that glorify the Sabbath, but also allow them to dispel this energy is always a very challenging thing when I'm with my parents during Sabbath.

And I've realized that—I mean that's true for any of my friends or family members during Sabbath, but it's true for so many other things. Trying to explain or to show people something that you love that they don't get, it's a very nuanced thing ‘cause usually there's a piece missing and how you give those people that piece is very difficult. And this is something I feel like the church struggles with in general, because that piece is the relationship with God. Until people have a relationship with the Father, a lot of the things that we are convicted of, they're not gonna be convicted of. So having the conversation just sounds like rules; it sounds like legalism.

Even within the church, you have people who profess to know the Father and profess to believe in the Father, and they'll tell you things are legalism that really, I'm like, “if you really experience it and you really experience the love, you won't see it that way because I'm not telling you you have to do that to be saved. I'm telling you that once you fully surrender, you will delight in those things.” Right? It's difficult because, people generally don't see it that way until they feel that way. It's like pulling teeth. And the same thing happens when you're talking about different sins.

It happens when you're trying to express love. I did an episode on how we communicate love. It's a similar thing, the way you see it versus how they see it. And it gets mingled and mangled and it's hard. But it's important. This is literally one of the missions of the body. We're supposed to be living out our faith, and in living out our faith, we become light.[2] We become the salt.[3] And in doing so, we're supposed to be converting other people to be light and to be salt. But it's very difficult to do.

I think that as I've aged and as I've grown in my faith, I've realized that the words will always fail. You cannot talk. I mean, you can talk about the Father, but you just, you can't talk people into belief. You can't talk people into relationship. You have to act. It has to be an action based thing. It has to be that they feel. The joy they feel, the love they feel, the compassion they feel, the patience that is coming from you through the Holy Spirit, or I should say, coming from the Holy Spirit through you. I think that's what I'm trying to say. That's what it actually means to introduce someone to the Father or to the Son: is that you're exhibiting the traits of the Father. You're exhibiting the traits of the Son.

And so when they see those traits, they're like, oh, I like that. They gravitate towards that. And then you say, “this is not me, it's the Father, it's the Holy Spirit.” And they're like, “oh, I want some of that. I wanna meet that.” Right? That's how we're actually supposed to be introducing people, not bashing their head up against a wall and screaming at them and knocking on doors and being like, “Let me tell you about our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ,” right? And then just beating them over the head with a book… That will never work.

And I think that's one of the reasons that you see so many people fall away from the faith, particularly young people, because they've been forced to go to a building once a week and they've been forced to sit in pews, and they've been forced to read. And no one's ever actually shown them their faith. No one's actually helped them to develop that relationship with the Father. And so there's a lack of communication between the Father and the person. There's a lack of communication about what faith really is.

And so I think it's important for each of us—I mean, it's important for the church as a body, but as members of the body—it is important for us to think about what we do and how it communicates our faith, or doesn't communicate our faith and how we interact with people and how we are actually communicating our faith. And we need to think about ways that we can communicate our faith that are not just words, that's not just, “Hey, let me do a Bible study with you,” or “Hey, let me tell you this.” And I'm not saying those aren't things that you, that you can't do those things. It's just in addition to, we need to be living it out. We need to think about how have I been a good Samaritan? How have I been helping my neighbor?

How have I been loving my neighbor? How have I been showing people the true spirit of The Most High? Okay. And that's what I want you to think about this week. That's what I want you to concentrate on and to share with the people around you and with other believers. And, you know, let us know in the comment section, what have you been doing?

Like what are your thoughts on this? And how do you think believers should be communicating their faith? What's the most important thing? If you converted later in life, what was it that was communicated to you that helped you to find your faith, and how would you suggest people go about having those types of interactions and conversations?

Thank you guys so much for tuning in. As always, don't be afraid to like, subscribe, share all of those wonderful things and I will see you guys soon. Bye.