ICE BREAKER

My Belief

When I enter the flight deck I feel like I have a very clear mission. I only have 2, 3 or even 4 days to find a way to share the hope that I have in Jesus with the guy or gal sitting next to me. Hopefully, with God’s help I will get a chance to share with some of the Flight Attendants in the back, as well. The Lord has helped me to form a very effective strategy regardless of the “type” of lost person I am flying with. It is simple but it works. I like politics and current events and most people have some sort of opinion or at least pay attention to what is going on in the world a little. Usually, when we have long overnights or long flights at cruise we “chit-chat” about union stuff, contract stuff, or career progression stuff…blah blah blah etc… I use this awesome forum as an opportunity to grill people on what their personal opinion is and what they think about the issues in the world. I NEVER talk at first! People love to hear themselves talk and so I just keep asking questions. More and more questions. For Example: What do you think about health care? What do you think about gay rights? What do you think about Iran and the middle east? etc… Then I just listen and listen. It is funny how the conversation always turns around after a bit. People love to keep talking to a point, then they change their tune. After a bombardment of questioning then something clicks over in their mind and they HAVE TO HEAR FROM ME. It drives them nuts. They say things like, “What about you? Don’t you have an opinion Mr. question guy? I’m doing all the talking here, tell me what you think?”. THAT IS WHEN I GET TO HIT THEM WITH MY ICEBREAKER. I tell them, “Well I don’t really fit the “norm”. I am a conservative that thinks the Republican party is CRAP and a Christian that thinks Religion is CRAP”. This also drives them nuts and causes them to start asking even more questions! The first one is usually “What-in-the-heck does that mean?!?!” This is where I get to start telling them about my Biblically based values and how no where in the Bible is “Religion” mentioned, except in a bad way. I tell them that I believe in a personal relationship with God that is given through his son Jesus Christ. I tell them that the story of the Bible is simple. God created everything, we screwed it up, and so he gave us a new way to fix it. This strategy usually provokes long and beautiful conversations about values, beliefs, and most importantly FAITH. In the end most of these conversations end great. They end with people telling me that they have never heard anybody present the Gospel like this and they found it very thought provoking and enjoyable. The conversation is always there and it just starts with a good ICEBREAKER.

Scripture

1 Peter 3:15

¹⁵ But in your hearts revere Christ as Lord. Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have. But do this with gentleness and respect,

Application for Life

It is important to know what is in the Bible so you can give it to the world around you. It is also important to find a way to present it to the people in the mission field that God has given you. Make it meaningful to yourself so that you can make it meaningful to those around you. Find a way start conversations that relate to people and then find a way to turn that conversation toward Jesus. We CANNOT convince people, but that is not what we are called to do. We are just called to till, plant, and water. The Lord God in the form of the Holy Spirit is the one who makes it ALL grow!

                  

White Chocolate vs. Jesus Jihadist

My Belief

We have a flight attendant that is infamous at our airline. Most people only know him as “White Chocolate”. His real name is Sean and I consider him a friend. If you saw him you would definitely do a double take. He is a pasty white man with gray hair. That gray hair is braded into something that looks like it is straight from the Caribbean Islands. He walks with the “swagger” of a black girl and has all of the attitude to match. He announces to everybody that he is a strong black man and he can’t stand all these “damn white people”. He was born and lives in Newark NJ and needless to say has had a hard life.

I have flown with Sean many times and the most recent was last September. I am always careful about what conversations I get into with Sean because they usually end up in the gutter pretty quick. The last time I flew with him I had a great chance give him a “healthy dose of Jesus”. I was surprised to learn that Sean told me that he had grown up in and sometimes still attends a “Black Church”. He knew a decent amount about the cross and the Bible, but we fundamentally disagreed on one thing. He told me, “I know all this stuff, but I am still going to Hell”. For just a few moments Sean took down his costume of attitude and anger and told me that he knew he was a big time sinner and in his mind he still would never make it to be with the Lord.

I bring this up now because I have started bumping into Sean in the crewroom a lot lately. He always greets me in the same loud way. He greets me as, “Hey White Jesus, Hey Jesus Jihadist, or simply JJ for short.” He usually then goes into some sort of tirade in front of other people to the effect of, “everybody need to go to the White Jesus Church because there you can Smoke and Drink and Cheat and Lie and your still going to heaven. In the church of the Black Jesus we condemn you to Hell if you do these things.”

This is the most important thing in the entire Bible! Salvation is not predicated on your good behavior. Salvation is given freely by grace. God already knows that we are liars, cheats, and drunkards just to mention a few. This is the entire point for Jesus. Our performance is to substandard to get us to the Father, so Jesus made a way for us. I hope and pray that “White Chocolate” will understand and hear the message of grace that I keep trying to tell him about.

Scripture

Ephesians 2:8-9 ⁸ For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God— ⁹ not by works, so that no one can boast.

Application for Life

While Sean makes fun of the “Church of the White Jesus” his description of it is absolutely correct. Jesus’s church is the church of tax collectors, cheaters, unclean, adulterers, drunkards and filthy sinners. Grace simply means that God has given it to us when we could not do it ourselves. We strive to be like Christ, but at heart we are all still dirty sinners covered in the blood of grace. Don’t think for a moment that you will ever stop being a sinner and some how become a “Good Christian”. NO such animal exists. Every time I fall off the wagon and let my old sin nature get the best of me, I am reminded of grace. As I sit there in my filthy wrong all I can do is come to the foot of the cross and thank the Lord for covering me in his merciful grace.

BAIT

My Belief

I flew with the same Jewish guy for 8 DAYS in a row! I was certain that God was going to give me some AWESOME opportunity to share some hard evidence from the “OLD” TESTIMENT on how Jesus Christ of Nazareth absolutely has to be the “Jewish” Messiah of Israel. I had it all mapped out in my mind. I just had to get him talking about the “Jewish Bible” (aka Old Testament) and his faith in Judaism. Then I would hit him with the fact that in Daniel Chapter 9, from the Old Testament, God gave Daniel the prophesy of the “Seventy-Sevens”. This prophesy clearly lists the ENTIRE time line for the Jewish people from the point in which God issued the decree to rebuilt their temple through the fact that Jesus would be cut off and killed in 31AD and then ends with Jesus Christ returning to destroy the Antichrist at the end of the age. In my minds eye it was perfect. I had a spiritual Left, Right, and an Upper Cut ready and I thought I was going to knock this guy out for Jesus!

Well, that didn’t happen. We agreed on everything. We agreed on politics and the direction of the country. We agreed that Israel was in the middle of a coming “Islamic meat grinder”. I got him to agree that the Jewish Bible had to be credible. I even got my Flight attendant in on the act. He was a Christian and we were both hitting this guy with how much faith we had in Jesus Christ. The real problem I had was when I tried to tell this guy I could prove it to him in the Old Testament. When I tried to start that conversation he would start getting sensitive. He would start telling me, “Well I don’t know enough about Daniel so I don’t want to talk about it”. He would also start side tracking the conversation or say he just wanted to read the paper. He was a great guy that loved intellectual and historical conversations until it came to Jesus. I could not believe how good he was at keeping me from giving him what I considered to be the “nail in the coffin” or cross for that matter. I ended 8 days of flying with this guy and felt very frustrated. I was praying to God, “ATHIESTS AREN’T EVEN THIS DIFFICULT”. The only peace I found was in a sermon I heard a while back about spiritual bait. My pastor preached that when Jesus offered the woman at the well “living water” that was His way of dangling spiritual bait. In the story she was excited to receive the water that would quench her thirst once and for all, but she also could have said, “get out of my way weirdo so I can draw water”. God only asks us to be open to opportunity. To dangle spiritual bait out there and then be prepared to give an account of the hope that we have in Christ. He did not say that everyone would take it.

Scripture

John 4:10

¹⁰ Jesus answered her, “If you knew the gift of God and who it is that asks you for a drink, you would have asked him and he would have given you living water.”

Application for Life

In these last days of the church we have to be willing to put ourselves out there as spiritual bait. Some men may stray away from it, some may nibble, and some may take the entire thing. One thing is for certain, no one will get it if we don’t “cast” it out there. Even though my Jewish friend and I had a lot of great conversations about Israel and the Bible, he never took the bait. He nibbled at it a little and maybe even was force fed a little because of the boldness God has given me. People don’t save people, only Jesus does. So even though I felt unsatisfied at the end of our trip, God will do the rest. He will take our conversations and hopefully the next time he flies with a Christian Captain the Holy Spirit will harvest that life for Christ.