Talking To People About God: Part 3 — A ‘Time With God’ Audio Devotion

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Transcript

Good morning. All this week we’re talking about, as a Christian, having conversations about God with people in our lives.

Well, today we want to go to the next step, and I want to give you a practical suggestion about having conversations about God with people in your life, and that is this: Move your conversations forward with a question that invites people to go deeper than the surface.

Move your conversations forward with people with a question that invites them to go deeper than the surface.

We’ve commented already this week that nobody likes someone who shoves their beliefs down other people’s throats. So do not be that person.

So how do you know who wants to talk about God and life issues with you? Not everybody does, but a lot of people do. Here’s how you know. You just ask a simple question that invites the conversation to go deeper, and their answer lets you know how deep they want to go.

Let me share with you a story that happened in our own lives.

Our family moved into our current neighbourhood quite a few years ago, and we knew that we wanted to have conversations about God with people in our neighbourhood.

A couple of years went by, we were so busy with life, and we’d not really met many of our neighbours, at least to go deeper than the surface in conversations with them. So how would we know which of our neighbours wanted to have those kinds of conversations? Well, we sat down for a morning Bible reading time with our kids, and we said, guys, when we moved in here, we knew God wanted us to be witnesses in our neighbourhood.

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So let’s just pray that God would work it out for us to get to know our neighbours, and that they’ll be out when we’re out, and we’ll meet them and get to have some deeper conversations with them. Let’s pray that that would just happen naturally. So we prayed that together. It was great to hear our kids praying that along with us.

When we finished praying, we were still sitting there on our couches, and the front doorbell rang, and I thought, well, who would be ringing the doorbell at this time of the morning? And I went to the door, and there was the wife of one of the couples that lived right next door to us, and we’d said hello to them, but nothing deeper than that.

Well, she said, hello, I’m so sorry to say this, but I didn’t realise your ute was parked across the street from our driveway, and I just backed my car into your ute.

Well, great. So I walked out the front door with her, and as I was closing the door, I realised this is just what we prayed for. It wasn’t how I expected God to answer it, but we went out, we exchanged information. She said, Oh, my, my husband’s coming out. He’ll talk to you. So I talked to him. They are an African couple. His name was Ibrahim, and I said,

Would you guys like to come over for a barbecue on Tuesday? I know this isn’t the way we wanted to get to know you but, – and they were really keen.

So they came over on Tuesday, and as you do, he came out with me to the barbecue as I was cooking sausages and lamb chops. And as we were out there, he said, what do you do for a living? And I thought, well, how can I share with him what I do? And I said, well, tell me your name is Ibrahim, that’s Abraham. That means you probably have a Muslim or a Christian background. Which is it?

And he said, Catholic, but we haven’t been to church in forever, and I know we need God in our lives.

You see what I mean by moving the conversation with a question that invites the conversation to go deeper, and they’ll let you know. That led to a beautiful conversation about God. You can do the same thing with people in your own life.

I’m John North.

To go deeper in your faith, visit AFCI.com.au.

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