Zealotry is Good, Let’s Get Fired Up

In this article, I’m going to write about something that is near and dear to me: God given passion and drive. People often say negative things about Christian zealots. I don’t see how it is possible to say something negative about Christians when they’re doing their best to love and share the truth. This means I believe it is the enemy trying to influence the world into thinking zealotry is a negative thing. God really riles me up to spend most every moment of my day in servitude towards God. There are many reasons for this. The most important of which is: gratitude. I’m so thankful for my life and salvation that I want to do everything I can for God.

Technically: God doesn’t really need me or anyone to do anything. It is the truth that God needs nothing from people in order to accomplish his mission, but taking the route of apathy is sinful. You can’t just say,”God has everything under control, so I’ll just be lazy and keep to my own devices.” This is sinful if you have the ability to help. Proverbs 18:9 GNT A lazy person is as bad as someone who is destructive. God wants us to help. God doesn’t say,”Stand back, and let me do everything.” God calls us to be disciples. Matthew 28:19 GNT Go, then, to all peoples everywhere and make them my disciples: baptize them in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit,

So Jesus wants us to be a disciple of him. We’re called to learn about Jesus, follow his teachings, be loving and good to all. We’re also called to make everyone into disciples that do the same! This in itself is a mission. How do you teach someone to be a disciple of Jesus that in turn brings people that are disciples? There are a lot of ways to do this, and in all your ways, use love. If you want, email us here at [email protected], and discuss strategies.

At the very core, you want to tell everyone you can about Jesus. This means you need to find new faces to tell. If someone rejects you and doesn’t want to hear it, just go on to the next person. The precedent for this is in Matthew 10:14 GNT And if some home or town will not welcome you or listen to you, then leave that place and shake the dust off your feet. Just go find another person to tell about Jesus. There are billions of people in this world. You couldn’t speak a single word to everyone before you died. Yet if you find someone who wants a deep conversation about Jesus, entertain them.

I’ll be honest, I try my best to engage people in conversation to talk about God, but I seldom find anyone interested in deep philosophical discussion. Typically I hear things from fools who are just interested in slander or trolling. The most common folly I see fools say is,”If I was God, I could do it better. I would not let event X happen” This stance is to take the position of judging God. You’re judging God because you’re saying he is in the wrong, and you can do better. Of course, you don’t have all the information available to God, so you don’t know why God is doing the things he is doing. It is similar to a 5 year old being elected as Supreme Court Justice. He just wouldn’t understand the cases to judge adequately. In the same way, people who say they could do better than God are judging with incomplete information.

That is important to have answers ready for the common questions. 1 Peter 3:15 GNT But have reverence for Christ in your hearts, and honor him as Lord. Be ready at all times to answer anyone who asks you to explain the hope you have in you, By having quick answers for the common questions, you can help guide people to God. It is very important to be knowledgeable about God before you get your passion stoked to tell everyone about Jesus. I’ve had situations in my life where God put the brakes on me because I was too new to my faith, yet I wanted to go share it with everyone. Proverbs 19:2 GNT Enthusiasm without knowledge is not good; impatience will get you into trouble. So before you get riled up in a storm of passion to tell everyone about God, calm yourself down and read the Bible at least once first. And after you read it, seek to understand the questions you have about theology that you’re not fully understanding. You can even email us, or contact a pastor, or do online research. Just be certain when you do your research that everything is Biblicaly sound. There are a great number of people that don’t understand what they’re talking about but will still try and tell others. Don’t be one of those people. Be knowledgeable.

One of the best ways to have a solid foundation in your own life is to be good and loving to your friends and family the most. Proverbs 18:19 GNT Help your relatives and they will protect you like a strong city wall, but if you quarrel with them, they will close their doors to you. Most people don’t need to be told to love their family greatly because it is natural for the fiercest love to be found in families. So tell everyone who wants to listen to you about Jesus. If you never told your friends that you believe in Jesus, at least let them know your religious orientation. Then just focus on being cool, loving and good to them.

Now a lot of people get it wrong thinking they can just be good and loving to everyone without talking about Jesus at all. You need to let people know you believe in Jesus so they know that much about you. There is no shame in sharing Jesus. In fact you’re in a terrible shape if you have shame in sharing Jesus to others. Matthew 10:32 (Jesus says) “Those who declare publicly that they belong to me, I will do the same for them before my Father in heaven. 33 But those who reject me publicly, I will reject before my Father in heaven. People need to know the reason you’re good is because of God.

People don’t need to think,”People are good by nature.” because that teaches them something contrary to the Good News. Many people do think people are good by nature now, so much that it is really something to argue about. If you look throughout history, you find examples of people not being good by nature, especially if you go back a ways without modern law. I like to point to the Romans where they believed,”Enslave or be enslaved” so they conquered all lands around them. The idea,”Enslave or be enslaved” is exactly what everyone should take up if Jesus didn’t come for us. This is because all men are sinful(evil) by nature. What do you do with someone that is evil when everyone is evil? You use power to keep them under control. Thankfully Jesus forgives us from sin, so we can be good and loving to everyone. And since Jesus has changed the world, people are better towards each other. And because it isn’t clear to see,”People are born into sin”, even people who aren’t Christian are acting better towards each other. Look at the secular idea,”Do unto others as they do unto you.” which is contrasted with God,”Do unto others as you would want them to do unto you.”. If you’re good to those who are good to you, and bad to those who are bad to you, it sounds good at first. If everyone took this motto to heart, then there would be no reason to be evil to others as they’d take revenge. And if everyone helped each other, then the world is a better place. It the basic concept,”Don’t mess with me, or I’ll mess your day up!” It works to a degree, and many secular people have it. Well you add the Christians into the equation who are good and loving for every circumstance, and you see you have a situation where a lot of angry vengeance is diffused. The people who say,”I’m good if you’re good to me, and bad if you’re bad to me” end up being good to others more often. As you put more and more people acting good into the pool, eventually the pool seems like its natural state is everyone is good by nature. So be sure to at least drop the line that you’re Christian when you get a chance. It is a lot easier than arguing with someone,”People are sinful by nature.” It is actually such a subtle point, it is almost not worth arguing because it distracts from bigger topics to discuss.

Matthew 10:27 GNT (Jesus says) What I am telling you in the dark you must repeat in broad daylight, and what you have heard in private you must announce from the housetops. Matthew 5:15 GNT No one lights a lamp and puts it under a bowl; instead it is put on the lampstand, where it gives light for everyone in the house. So Jesus is telling us to go forth and tell others. We’re to grab people’s attention and tell them about the Good News. There are a lot of ways to do it, and I’ll explain ideas I use. I like to get to where people are. The Internet is great to get to people because you can reach a large number of people without leaving your house. Matthew 23:15 GNT “How terrible for you, teachers of the Law and Pharisees! You hypocrites! You sail the seas and cross whole countries to win one convert; and when you succeed, you make him twice as deserving of going to hell as you yourselves are! Here Jesus was tearing into people who teach people wrong things. But I bring it up for something interesting: There are people who will go to lengths to just win one person. “You sail the seas and cross whole countries to win one convert” We should not be inefficient like that if we can. But we should have the passion that if we could not convert anyone, we’d be willing to spend our whole lives just to help one person. So the Internet is interesting because instead of crossing seas and countries, you just type a few letters and you’re in a new pool of people on the Internet.

I have my favorite places to Evangelize on the Internet. My first method was,”Find email addresses the send out an email telling them I know Jesus is real.” I know Jesus is real. I hope you believe me. I pray you have an experience where you can know fully like I do. So you could do the same tactic I did: Find emails, then send out a hand crafted message telling that God loves them, Jesus is LORD. My next method was to ramp this up through mass mailings. Mass mailings are normally the domain of scammers and marketers who want to make money. I’m not interested in money but instead the salvation of souls. The motive is really what distinguishes me away from scammers. It is pretty clear to me, but if you can’t get it, mass emailing isn’t for you. It takes a degree of technical sophistication to even get to the mass emailing, but it is efficient. I sent out hundreds of thousands of emails telling people that God is real, Jesus is LORD. If you can’t get to this level of sophistication, you can at least search the web for email addresses and send out messages of Jesus. It doesn’t matter what reason they put their email on the Internet, what matters is that they’re a human and need Jesus. Everyone needs Jesus, so tell everyone! And if you can get your technical skills up, try mass mailing. Here are some tips you should do if you plan on emailing people: Don’t send people back a negative email. If they scream at you, it is just an email, and ignore them. Maybe they can send you a disturbing image, so disable images. Matthew 5:11 “Happy are you when people insult you and persecute you and tell all kinds of evil lies against you because you are my followers. 12 Be happy and glad, for a great reward is kept for you in heaven. This is how the prophets who lived before you were persecuted. So did you hear that? If you tell people politely about God being awesome and loving them, and they turn around to curse you, you actually get officially blessed by God! There is nothing to worry about people on Earth. Email insulates you against physical attack for the most part. Email insulates you away from hearing someone’s tirade because you can close the email as soon as it turns into a negative cursing spew fest. So that is the tip for people who are negative to you. Another tip you should have is never email people you emailed once and never got back a response. There are laws in some states which say you can’t email someone who emails you and replies,”Do not email me back”, so obey that if someone says it. Finally the tip I didn’t follow when I did emails was,”Keep a list of everyone who replies positively back to you.” If you ever run another encouraging campaign, you can email them. Or you can email them personally and start a pen pal friendship. Final tip: If you want to know how to get going on this by me, email us at [email protected]

Another thing I do is open a website with your message on it. Write a letter you want people to read just like your email would have been, and put it on a domain. Then link to it everywhere you can on the web to get viewers. As you get more web savvy, you can make a better website. If you provide a popular service in addition to your message, more people will link to you. It takes skill to properly run a website, but if you get popular, you aren’t out to make money, you’re out to tell people about Jesus. So every hit you get to your message is scoring points for the cause of Jesus. As you can see, I started with GoodNewsJim.com or Faithclub.net and now I’m running FatherSpiritSon.com which you could be on right now.

Another thing I do on the Internet is to view web forums that interest me. In my signature, I link www.FatherSpiritSon.com or www.goodnewsjim.com. As I get insightful and interest in what I have to say about the topic at hand, some people just get interested in me in general. If they want to learn about me, they’ll learn about Jesus. So you can always make your signatures in forums and email: God loves you, Jesus is LORD. It is simple, but people might see it. Also people don’t see it as pushing your values on them because it is just your signature.

In the same vein of putting a signature in a forum to get people to learn about Jesus because they want to learn about you, there is another way to do this. What you can do is excel in life in order to be a role model. This could be mentoring people. This could be fixing people’s computers for free. This could be mowing people’s lawn for free. But sadly the best way to probably do this is to become famous for something the world sees as important such as a sports figure or a wealthy business man. It seems so counter intuitive to the Good News to use something the world sees as important to gain followers, but it is really just grabbing the spot light. We can’t accuse the people in darkness that their priorities aren’t right because they’re in darkness. By definition of being in darkness, they don’t know what is around them. The important thing is to not just get famous for the sake of being famous if there is negative things attached to the way you got famous. Jesus doesn’t need any more bad publicity than he already gets. The news doesn’t always show Christians helping others, but they’ll hastily tell all about the one guy in a million who’s doing something wrong. Don’t be that guy.

The best thing I can tell you for the Internet right now to spread your faith though is Twitter. Twitter gets a wide audience. In short, all you need to do is start tweeting scripture, and people will get it. If you want to get fancy, start tweeting about Christian ideas and theology. The trick is,”Don’t talk about stuff unrelated to Christianity at all. Focus 100% on Jesus.” You can talk about different things in light of scripture, but don’t start going on about random unrelated stuff you may find interesting but your audience won’t. If you want you get really fancy, strive to talk about stuff that in #channels you know people are in that relate to Jesus. Another important thing on Twitter is to tweet as much as possible. The more you tweet about Jesus, the more people might stumble on what you’re tweeting and come to Jesus.

It may seem like you’re not doing anything with your life in terms of gaining money, but you’re spreading the Good News of God, and that is more important than money. One person’s salvation is worth more than all the money in the world. Spend the time, and try and get people to know God is real. 1 Corinthians 15:58 GNT So then, my dear friends, stand firm and steady. Keep busy always in your work for the Lord, since you know that nothing you do in the Lord’s service is ever useless. Then again if you’re good at making money, you can use money to help the poor. And helping the poor furthers the kingdom also. There are a lot of ways to serve the LORD. Whatever you do for God, do it with great passion! The world will try and drag you down and mock you for your passion. In reality when you show your passion to the world, you make the enemy fearful! The enemy can influence those under its influence(which just so happens to be the people who need the Good News), and such tries to take your steam away. If people try to take your steam away, that’s when you stoke the fires even more. Luke 12:49 GNT (Jesus says) “I came to set the earth on fire, and how I wish it were already kindled!

How lucky are we? We’re not guaranteed the suffering of the cross. The Earth is on fire. All we need to do is fan the flames. It may seem daunting to tell everyone about Jesus to the point of not expecting any allies in your path. Still, there will be allies from time to time. My greatest ally so far is Victor, and I think we’re pushing a charge with this website. Will you get stoked? Will you start going,”This life isn’t about my satisfaction?” Will you go,”I’m getting into fight mode about Jesus”? By fight mode, I mean the discipline to spread the Word of God as your mission, and not worrying about your own comfort as much. There’s a bit of a righteous high to be had when you’re doing nothing but serving God with every waking action. And rightly so, you should be high when you’re doing what is right in God’s eyes. Fight mode on Earth is nothing because when we finally get to Heaven we get to relax, and God will satisfy our very souls better than we can even imagine. Fight mode on Earth because we only have so much time on Earth. Fight mode on Earth because it is the only time in all Eternity where we can help suffering people. When we get into the New Heaven or New Earth, there will be no suffering and people won’t need anything from us. This is the time where we can help feed people starving to death. This is the time where we can help people research cures for diseases. This is where we can help save people’s lives and souls. So if you have enough faith to believe that God is real and the afterlife is going to be so awesome you’re not missing out of anything on Earth… If you have enough faith in God, why not kick it into high gear and make God’s mission your mission too. Go tell other people that God loves them, Jesus is LORD. Go tell it on the mountain.

If you need help figuring out how to maximally apply your talents in God’s service, maybe we can help, and email us at FatherSpiritSonmail.com. We’re here for you. We want you to be on your feet so you can bring others up on their feet. There could be a faith shock wave if everyone started recruiting people and encouraging them to encourage others.

-Jim Sager