Accepting Christ

Gift cards make great stocking stuffers—just as long as you don’t stuff them in a drawer and forget about them after the holidays. Americans are expected to spend nearly $30 billion on gift cards this holiday season, according to the National Retail Federation. Restaurant gift cards are the most popular, making up one-third of those sales.

Most of those gift cards will be redeemed. Paytronix, which tracks restaurant gift card sales, says around 70% of gift cards are used within six months. But many cards—tens of billions of dollars’ worth—wind up forgotten or otherwise unused. That’s when the life of a gift card gets more complicated, with expiration dates or inactivity fees that can vary by state.

After clothing, gift cards will be the most popular present this holiday season. Nearly half of Americans plan to give them, according to the National Retail Federation. But many will remain unspent.

Gift cards get lost or forgotten, or recipients hang on to them for a special occasion. In a July survey, Bankrate found that 47% of U.S. adults had at least one unspent gift card or voucher. The average value of unused gift cards is $187 per person, a total of $23 billion.

While it may take gift cards years to expire, experts say it’s still wise to spend them quickly. Some cards—especially generic cash cards from Visa or MasterCard—will start accruing inactivity fees if they’re not used for a year, which eats away at their value. Inflation also makes cards less valuable over time. And if a retail store closes or goes bankrupt, a gift card could be worthless.

Possible Preaching Angle:

In the same way, the gifts of God (his promises, salvation, spiritual gifts, talents, the Bible) often remain unused, unopened by faith, and neglected by so many people.

Some people love them, some people hate them. Worse, a large number of us who receive them on special occasions are indifferent to them, or even forget about them entirely. Such is the sad fate of gift cards – millions of which go unused each year and have a collective value estimated to be in the billions of dollars.

Almost two-thirds of American consumers have at least one unspent gift card tucked away in a drawer, pocket, wallet, or purse. And at least half of those consumers lose a gift card before they use it, according to a new report from Credit Summit. The report said there is as much as $21 billion of unspent money tied up in unused and lost gift cards. Of those surveyed, a majority of respondents said their unredeemed cards were worth $200 or less.

Rebecca Stumpf, an editor with Credit Summit, said “Gift cards are extremely popular and almost everyone enjoys getting them. But many people leave them sitting in a drawer to redeem on a special occasion. Use them, don’t save them. If someone has given you a gift card, they want you to spend the money.”

So why aren’t we using up what people have taken the trouble to give us? According to Ted Rossman, a senior industry analyst with CreditCards.com and Bankrate.com:

Inertia is a big factor. Sometimes the gift card is for a store that you don’t particularly like or it’s not convenient to go there. Still, ignoring the gift of free money is unwise. They’re not going to get more valuable over time; it’s the exact opposite, as inflation eats away at the value. And the longer you hold onto these unused gift cards, the more likely you are to lose them or forget about them or have the store go out of business.

Possible Preaching Angle:

In the same way, the gifts of God (salvation, spiritual gifts, talents, the Bible) often remain unused, unopened by faith, and neglected by so many people.

In his memoir, Everything Sad Is Untrue, Daniel Nayeri tells the gripping story of his mother’s conversion from a devout Muslim background to a saving faith in Jesus Christ. She gave up wealth and social status, eventually being forced to flee from Iran under a death threat. But she was willing to pay the price. Nayeri writes about one example of her costly faith:

One time she hung a little cross necklace from the rearview mirror of her car, which was probably a reckless thing to do. ... My mom was like that. One day after work, she went to her car, and there was a note stuck to the windshield. It said, “Madame Doctor, if we see this cross again, we will kill you.”

To my dad, [who is not a Christian], this is the kind of story that proves his point. That my mom was picking a fight. That she could’ve lived quietly and saved everyone the heartaches that would come. If she had kept her head down. If she stopped telling people. If she pretended just a few holidays a year, that nothing had changed. She could still have everything.

My mom took the cross down that day. Then she got a cross so big it blocked half the windshield, and she put it up. Why would anybody live with their head down? Besides, the only way to stop believing something is to deny it yourself. To hide it. To act as if it hasn’t changed your life.

Another way to say it is that everybody is dying and going to die of something. And if you’re not spending your life on the stuff you believe, then what are you even doing? What is the point of the whole thing? It’s a tough question, because most people haven’t picked anything worthwhile.

Evangelicalism is now the largest religious demographic in Central America, according to a poll of about 4,000 people in five countries. More than a third of people from Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica told researchers that they are evangelical, while another 29 percent said they are “nondenominational believers.”

Only about a third of people in the region said they were Catholic—down from about 60 percent in the 1970s. Some scholars have attributed the shift to internal Catholic conflict and the long fallout from the church’s political affiliations on the extreme right and left, along with the disruptions of urbanization.

Evangelical theologian Samuel Escobar, noting the trend in an interview in 2006, said Catholics who moved to Central American cities found empowerment in their evangelical conversion. He said, “Their decision to accept Christ meant a change in patterns of behavior which helped people to reorient their lives.”

The radio program, This American Life, tells the story about the late writer David Rakoff, who had a hard time believing what was right in front of his eyes. In 1986, Rakoff’s company in Tokyo was working on a computer program that would allow expats like himself to write short little messages to one another after logging on to the network.

David was not impressed. He thought, “What kind of loser would log onto a computer [just to] talk to someone?” And in a moment of decisiveness, he went into work and quit. “Sayonara, suckers! Good luck with your ‘network’!” Of course, we can all guess what that network became. It was the beginning of a little thing called the internet.

David has other stories too. Earlier in the 1980s, he went to a dance club and heard a young blonde singer from Michigan and thought, “Boy, is she lousy!” That singer was later known by the name, “Madonna.” Again, working in publishing, he was handed a manuscript and passed it off as “subliterate drivel” and an “easy pass.” That turned out to be a book called Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus, which went on to sell 15 million copies as one of the best-selling works of the 1990s.

Apparently, seeing isn’t always believing--even when it’s right in front of your eyes.

In his article titled "Professional Soccer Was My God," former pro soccer player Gavin Peacock writes:

I was never going to be tall, so my dad (who was also a pro soccer player) would take me into our backyard in Southeast London and teach me how to quickly switch directions with the soccer ball at my feet. "The big guys won't be able to catch you!" he said. For hours I would practice turning to the left and right, dribbling in and out of cones, spinning this way and that. My dad was right: the art of turning served me well. Many of the goals I scored in the years to come were a result of that lesson.

At age 16, I left school and signed a professional contract with [English] Premier League Queens Park Rangers (QPR). I had achieved the goal—and I wasn't really happy. I was playing for the England Youth National Team, and it wasn't long before I broke into the starting eleven at QPR. But I was an insecure young man in the cutthroat world of professional sport. Soccer was my god. If I played well on a Saturday I was high, if I played poorly I was low. My sense of well-being depended entirely on my performance. I soon realized that achieving the goal wasn't all it was cracked up to be.

Then, when I was 18, God intervened in my life. I was still struggling to find purpose, so I decided to attend a local church. I don't remember what the minister preached on, but afterward he invited me to his house, where he and his wife hosted a weekly youth Bible study. I rolled up in the car I had bought, a 1980s icon, the Ford Escort XR3i. Yet when they spoke about Jesus, they displayed a life and joy that I did not have. They talked about sin as if it had consequence and about God as if they knew him.

I decided to return to the Bible study the following week and the next, and I began to hear the gospel for the first time. I realized that my biggest problem wasn't whether I met the disapproval of a 20,000-strong crowd on Saturday; my biggest problem was my sin and the disapproval of almighty God. I realized that the biggest obstacle to happiness was that soccer was king instead of Jesus, who provided a perfect righteousness for me. Over time, my eyes were opened through that Sunday meeting, and I turned, repented, and believed the gospel. My heart still burned for soccer, but it burned for Christ more.

At the age of 35, Peacock retired after playing for QPR, Chelsea, and Newcastle United, but the schoolboy dream was over. He currently serves as a pastor in Canada. He concludes, "All those years ago, my earthly father taught me the art of turning, but it was my heavenly Father who turned me first to Christ and then helped me turn others to Christ by preaching his gospel."

Bible scholar N.T. Wright uses the analogy of waking up in the morning for how some people come to Christ through a dramatic, instant conversion and others come to Christ through a gradual conversion:

Waking up offers one of the most basic pictures of what can happen when God takes a hand in someone's life. There are classic alarm-clock stories, Saul of Tarsus on the road to Damascus, blinded by a sudden light, stunned and speechless, discovered that the God he had worshipped had revealed himself in the crucified and risen Jesus of Nazareth. John Wesley found his heart becoming strangely warm and he never looked back. They and a few others are the famous ones, but there are millions more.

And there are many stories, thought they don't hit the headlines in the same way, of the half-awake and half-asleep variety. Some people take months, years, maybe even decades, during which they aren't sure whether they're on the outside of Christian faith looking in, or on the inside looking around to see if it's real.

As with ordinary waking up, there are many people who are somewhere in between. But the point is that there's such a thing as being asleep, and there's such a thing as being awake. And it's important to tell the difference, and to be sure you're awake by the time you have to be up and ready for action, whatever that action may be.

Nicole Cliffe became a Christian on July 7, 2015, after what she called "a very pleasant adult life of firm atheism." "The idea of a benign deity who created and loved us," she writes, "was obviously nonsense, and all that awaited us beyond the grave was joyful oblivion … I had no untapped, unanswered yearnings." But here's how she describes what happened to her:

First, I was worried about my child. One time I said "Be with me" to an empty room. It was embarrassing. I didn't know why I said it, or to whom. I brushed it off, I moved on, the situation resolved itself, I didn't think about it again.

Second, I came across John Ortberg's CT obituary for philosopher Dallas Willard. John's daughters are dear friends, and they have always struck me as sweetly deluded in their evangelical faith, so I read the article. Somebody once asked Dallas if he believed in total depravity."I believe in sufficient depravity," he responded immediately. "I believe that every human being is sufficiently depraved that when we get to heaven, no one will be able to say, 'I merited this.'" A few minutes into reading the piece, I burst into tears. Later that day, I burst into tears again. And the next day. While brushing my teeth, while falling asleep, while in the shower, while feeding my kids, I would burst into tears.

She read more Christian books and every time she cried all over again. She emailed a Christian friend and asked if she could talk about Jesus. She writes:

But about an hour before our call, I knew: I believed in God. Worse, I was a Christian … I was crying constantly while thinking about Jesus because I had begun to believe that Jesus really was who he said he was … So when my friend called, I told her, awkwardly, that I wanted to have a relationship with God, and we prayed … Since then, I have been dunked by a pastor in the Pacific Ocean while shivering in a too-small wetsuit. I have sung "Be Thou My Vision" and celebrated Communion on a beach, while weirded-out Californians tiptoed around me. I go to church. I pray …

[Evan after accepting Christ] I continue to cry a lot. [I read a news article] that literally sank me to my knees at how broken this world is, and yet how stubbornly resilient and joyful we can be in the face of that brokenness. My Christian conversion has granted me no simplicity. It has complicated all of my relationships, changed how I feel about money, messed up my public persona … Obviously, it's been very beautiful.

NPR (National Public Radio) reported on a new deli in rural Maine with a hotshot chef behind the counter. "Foodies" may recognize the chef's name—Matthew Secich, the chef for famous restaurants across the country, including The Oval Room in Washington, D.C. Secich shocked the foodie world when he became a Christian and moved his family and his kitchen off the grid. (Editor's Note: He also joined the local Amish community.)

As NPR reports,

His new spot, Charcuterie, is a converted cabin tucked away in a pine forest in Unity, Maine, population 2,000. You have to drive down a long, snowy track to get there, and you can smell the smokehouse before you can see it. … There are no Slim Jims here, but rather handmade meat sticks, fat as cigars, sitting in a jar by a hand-cranked register.

Even as a hotshot chef something was missing in Secich's life. According to the Portland (ME) Press-Herald:

[Secich's] perfectionist streak ruled his actions. "I burned people," he said. As in, held a line cook's hand to a hot fire for making a mistake at Charlie Trotter's restaurant in Chicago, where Secich was a chef from 2006 to 2008. "Four stars, that's all that matters." Then he grew disgusted.

"I went home one night and got on my knees and asked for forgiveness," he said. For his lack of compassion for others, his nights with restaurant friends and a fifth of Jim Beam with a side of Pabst Blue Ribbon, for that overactive ego. "I gave my life to the Lord, which I never would have imagined in the heyday of my chaos."

New York magazine interviewed several former inmates and asked them to describe their first hours or day of freedom. These men had been wrongfully convicted, but their first taste of freedom is no different than that of the guilty—or even those who have been forgiven by Christ. So pick your favorite quote, or two, or use all three:

Jeffrey Deskovic, age 41, spent 16 years in prison. He was freed on September 20, 2006:

At times I wasn't quite sure whether I really was out and free. I felt like a finger was tapping me on the back and saying, "What are you doing? They belong out here, but you don't. They don't really realize that you don't." So I just did something that I wanted to do for a long time: I wanted to sit outside in the nighttime and not have to go inside … I could see a few stars and the lights on in some of the other houses. It was just a minor thing that had been taken away from me.

Fernando Bermudez, age 46, spent 18 years in prison. He was freed on November 20, 2009:

The first thing I did, I went running in Inwood Hill Park … where I had all these childhood memories of wanting to be a geologist. I used to pick rocks and collect insects before I became less of a nerd and more a person in trouble. I'm coming off my run, and I'm doing something I had sorely missed: I'm looking at a tree, and I'm just admiring it. I had been deprived of nature for so long … I finally got to feel the bark. I was crying hugging the tree.

Derrick Hamilton, age 49, spent 21 years in prison. He was freed on December 7, 2011:

The day I walked out, my wife, my nephew, and my son was in the car waiting for me. There was a church right around the corner. I would always listen to the bells ringing when I was in jail. I didn't even know where the church really was. But I would pray when I would hear the bells. It was my only opportunity to pray at the same time people on the outside was praying. When I got out, that was one of the first things I wanted to do, just go around and pray in that church. I went in and thanked God for my release … Going into that church, it was like being born again.

Speaking about the power of Christ to redeem sinners and build his church, Russell Moore wrote:

The next Billy Graham might be drunk right now. The next Jonathan Edwards might be the man driving in front of you with the Darwin Fish bumper decal. The next Charles Wesley might currently be a misogynistic, profanity-spewing hip-hop artist. The next Charles Spurgeon might be managing an abortion clinic today. The next Augustine of Hippo might be a sexually promiscuous cult member right now, just like, come to think of it, the first Augustine of Hippo was.

But the Spirit of God can turn all that around. And seems to delight to do so. The new birth doesn't just transform lives, creating repentance and faith; it also provides new leadership to the church, and fulfills Jesus' promise to gift his church with everything needed for her onward march through space and time (Eph. 4:8-16).

To illustrate the paralysis of indecision, international speaker Michael Ramsden tells the story of three turtles who went off to a picnic. One turtle packed sandwiches, another provided the drinks, and the third one simply came along for company. As the turtles headed off into the woods, about halfway to their destination it started to rain so they took shelter under a large rock and began talking amongst themselves.

The first two turtles turned to the third and said, "Look, we made the sandwiches, we made the drinks, you brought nothing, so you should be the one to go home and get the umbrella's. Get some umbrella's, come back here, we'll go on into the woods and we'll have our picnic."

The third turtle said, "You must be joking. As soon as I'm around the corner you're going to eat the food, you're going to drink the drinks, and when I come back with the umbrella's there will be nothing left."

The first two turtles said, "We will do no such thing."

The third turtle said, "You absolutely will. There's no way I'm doing that." Eventually the first two turtles swear on their shells that they will not eat the sandwiches or drink the drinks until the third turtle comes back with the umbrellas.

So the third turtle leaves. Minutes go by. Minutes become hours, hours become days. On the tenth day the first turtle says to the second turtle, "Okay how about it, why don't we just eat the sandwiches and drink the drink?" As soon as the first turtle says this a voice from behind a rock says, "If you do I won't get the umbrellas!"

Possible Preaching Angles: (1) Leaders; Leadership; Decisions—Leaders who are people who need to make decisions. (2) Procrastination; Salvation—Perhaps you are putting off making an important decision, like accepting Christ, turning from sin, joining the church, and so forth.

I've heard people say, "I'm checking out Christianity, but I also understand Christians can't do this and the Bible says you're supposed to do that. You're supposed to love the poor or you're supposed to give up sex outside of marriage. I can't accept that." So people want to come to Christ with a list of conditions.

But the real question is this: Is there a God who is the source of all beauty and glory and life, and if knowing Christ will fill your life with his goodness and power and joy, so that you would live with him in endless ages with his life increasing in you every day? If that's true, you wouldn't say things like, "You mean, I have to give up ___ (like sex or something else)."

Let's say you have a friend who is dying of some terrible disease. So you take him to the doctor and the doctor says, "I have a remedy for you. If you just follow my advice you will be healed and you will live a long and fruitful life, but there's only one problem: while you're taking my remedy you can't eat chocolate." Now what if your friend turned to you and said, "Forget it. No chocolate? What's the use of living? I'll follow the doctor's remedy, but I will also keep eating chocolate."

If Christ is really God, then all the conditions are gone. To know Jesus Christ is to say, "Lord, anywhere your will touches my life, anywhere your Word speaks, I will say, "Lord, I will obey. There are no conditions anymore." If he's really God, he can't just be a supplement. We have to come to him and say, "Okay, Lord, I'm willing to let you start a complete reordering of my life."

Todd Skinner was one of the most respected rock climbers of his generation, but his greatest challenge was tackling Trango Tower, the world's highest freestanding spire, with a near-vertical drop. It's also located in one of the most hostile and remote regions on the planet. When Todd went to find a sponsor for his expedition to free-climb Trango Tower, the experts told the sponsors that a wall that big, in a place that remote, was simply not meant to be climbed.

But Todd moved forward anyway, finding the right climbing team, and planning logistics like travel, food, jeeps, porters, permits, equipment, clothing, and tents. The biggest challenge came when, after years of preparation and a rugged 10-day cross-country trek, the climbers came face-to-face with the largest, tallest, smoothest, steepest rock wall they had ever seen.

Here's how Todd described that moment: "We turned a corner and there it was … Trango Tower rose stunningly before us. The reality hit us like a shock wave. We stopped dead in the middle of the track … no amount of bluff or bravado could hide the fact that we were absolutely horrified."

The team members had come for this challenge, but now it seemed too high, too vertical, too difficult, even for some of the best bigwall climbers in the world. Todd realized that there was only one way forward. In his words, they had to "get on the wall" even if they weren't completely prepared. Todd said,

The final danger in the preparation process of an expedition is the tendency to postpone leaving until every question has been answered, forgetting that the mountain is the only place the answers can definitively be found. … No matter how well prepared you are, how honed your climbing skills, how vast your expertise, you cannot climb the mountain if you don't get to it.

So Todd and his three teammates "got on the wall." After 60 days on the wall, they finally reached the summit. Despite years of preparation and training, much of what they learned about climbing the tower was only learned after they "got on the wall."

Psychiatrist Dr. Stephen Grosz points to research that shows we usually don't respond when a fire alarm rings. Instead, of leaving the building immediately, we stand around and wait for more clues. But then even with more information, we still won't make a move—and sometimes that proves deadly. For instance, in 1985, 56 people were killed when a fire broke out in the stands of a soccer match in England. Close examination of television footage later showed that fans did not react immediately and continued to watch both the fire and the game, failing to move towards the exits.

Research has also shown that when we do move, we follow old habits. We don't trust emergency exits. We almost always try to exit a room through the same door we entered. After a fire in the Beverly Hills Supper Club in Kentucky left 177 people dead, forensic experts confirmed that many of the victims sought to pay before leaving, and so died in a queue.

Grosz concludes:

After 25 years as a psychoanalyst, I can't say that this surprises me. We resist change. Committing ourselves to a small change, even one that is unmistakably in our best interest, is often more frightening than ignoring a dangerous situation. We don't want an exit if we don't know exactly where it is going to take us, even—or perhaps especially—in an emergency … We want to know what new story we're stepping into before we exit the old one.

Possible Preaching Angles: (1) Change; Repentance; Spiritual growth—When we really need to change, we're often frozen in fear or complacency. Spiritual growth requires a willingness to take steps of repentance that lead to change. (2) Help from God; Salvation—When we're in the "fires" of life and we really need help from God (for salvation, guidance, rescue, forgiveness), we are often the most afraid to call out for help. We need to trust God and cry out for help.

A recent article from the BBC opens with a line that sounds like it could be from a sci-fi flick: "'When you are at 10C [50 degrees Fahrenheit], with no brain activity, no heartbeat, no blood—everyone would agree that you're dead,' says Peter Rhee at the University of Arizona, Tucson. 'But we can still bring you back.'"

Rhee's claim is true. He's referencing a bold new medical procedure that (though only tested on animals so far) drains the body of its blood, and cools it far below normal temperature, reducing cell activity that would normally lead to irreversible organ or brain damage. After a wound or injury is stabilized, the body's blood is put back in, and the patient is warmed. A heartbeat returns on its own as the body warms, and—at least in the animals tested—the patient wakes up groggy, but "back to normal" the next day.

Trials of the potentially life-saving procedure are planned to begin on critically wounded gunshot victims in Pittsburg, Pennsylvania in the near future. "Killing a patient to save his life" comments The New York Times.

Possible Preaching Angle:

It's a remarkable illustration of a spiritual principle. When we are critically wounded through sin and brokenness, the only hope for life is to pass through what appears to be death first—giving up everything for the "death" of following Jesus.