I was preaching this morning on the story of Zacchaeus from Luke 19:1-10. Zacchaeus, you may remember, had to climb up a tree to see Jesus because of the crowds. This little man couldn’t see past them to get to Jesus. The crowd formed a barrier, preventing Zacchaeus from meeting Jesus.
This got thinking about the barriers in place today that stop people from meeting Jesus.
The church itself can be a barrier between people and Jesus. I have often heard it said that a person is interested in Jesus, but not in church. Part of the problem is that church is simply seen by many as irrelevant. Much of the music and language used in our churches belongs in another era; especially some of the language which belongs in Elizabethan England, not twenty-first century England. If somebody walked into the average Anglican or Methodist Church on a Sunday morning would they even be able to understand what was going on? Would they feel they were still in the twenty-first century or would they feel that they had been transported to a bygone age? Would they feel comfortable sitting on narrow and hard wooden pews in a building that isn’t properly heated? Would they even stay for the whole service in such discomfort? Why should they?
Our churches must be welcoming places, where people feel at home and comfortable. They must be places where the language used is, on the whole, contemporary modern English. They must be places where the music feels modern. They must be places where they can come to an encounter with the living Lord Jesus without any obstacles or barriers being put in their way. I’m not advocating getting rid of everything traditional in church, but rather being sensitive about how we blend that which is good in our traditions with the contemporary worship, music and language of the twenty-first century.
I don’t think the church as a body is the only barrier to knowing Christ, though; I think individual Christians can get in the way too; and I relate the following personal story by way of illustration.
I used to work in a public library. One morning I said, without thinking, to a colleague, “I’m glad you’ve just served that lady, she really gets on my nerves.” My colleague replied, “I thought you were a Christian.” This brought me up short and has continued to bother me; at that particularly moment in that particular situation I was a lousy witness for Jesus and maybe put up a barrier between my colleague and her own salvation. How easy it is for us to be a bad witness to Christ in the things we say and do.
It is said that the only way many people meet Jesus is in the lives of the Christian people they know. We can be a barrier, or we can be an open door leading people to Jesus. Nicky Gumbel tells the story, in one of the Alpha books, of a man who came to Christ after his wife’s witness to him, not through words but through the way she lived and built their marriage.
As individual Christians I pray that we would not be barriers to Christ but would all be open doors to lead people to Jesus Christ.
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