I talked too much

      I talked too much on Friday night.   For those of you who know me you might find this hard to believe (except when I preach :)) but it is the truth!  It seemed like I talked on and on and on and on and on.  My mouth was dry.  My throat hurt.  I talked too much!  Why?  I was trying to explain to my 6 year old son Ethan the game of football as I took him to his first vikings game on Friday!  Have you ever tried to explain football to someone who really has no idea about any of the rules of football?  It is exhausting!  I have watched, enjoyed, and played football for a good part of my life!  I love it!  I understand the game, the rules, and what both the offense and defense are trying to do.  When you know something really well, it can be hard to explain in such a way that someone who is clueless about it can understand.  One example of how this proved to be true at the vikings game!  It was a boring game, too many field goals and not enough touch downs!  Throughout the game I kept quizzing Ethan about how many points a team gets when the kicker kicks the ball between the uprights (the two yellow polls that are sticking up into the air).  He had it down, the answer was 3, he knew it!  However, near the end of the game the vikings scored a touchdown tying the game at 9-9!  After the touch-down we kicked the extra point!  To Ethan this seemed to be identical to a field-goal because the kicker kicked the ball between the two yellow polls sticking up in the air and he excitedly exclaimed, "Daddy, we now have 12 points!"  I then had to explain to him that when you kick the ball through the yellow things after you score a touchdown it is only worth 1 point, not 3.  In the midst of explaining field goals, how far a yard is, how you have four tries to get 10 yards, field position, penalties, punting, kicking off, offense, defense, and on and on, I was exhausted!  However, I think Ethan walked away with a much better understanding of the game of football as a result of the effort I put into explaining it in a way that would make sense to someone who was clueless about all the details of football.
      As we were driving home from the game (which in classic viking fashion we lost on a last second field goal, because surprise our prevent defense for the one millionth time did not work) I was thinking about how explaining Christianity to someone who has no knowledge of the Bible, Jesus, God, is very difficult and time consuming!  However, it is incredible important that we do it!  As fewer and fewer people have contact with the Church, and the Bible, the more important it will be for us to learn how to explain our faith in ways that make sense to people who don't understand the Biblical language.  We need to know how to explain extremely important concepts such as sin, repentance, salvation, redemption, propitiation, justification, sanctification, faith, grace, mercy, who God the Father is, who Jesus is, who the Holy Spirit is, the trinity, and so forth!
       So how would you do, how would I do, in begin able to explain these concepts to someone to whom these concepts are completely foreign?  Do you know these concepts well enough to explain them to a four year old?  If you don't we need to keep working on your understanding of these concepts.  It is true that if you know something really well, you will be able to explain even really complicated ideas, in an easy to understand way.  Do you engage in theology?  Do you study the above concepts?  Do you discuss these with your brothers and sisters in Christ?  Do you ask questions about the above concepts?  It is easy when your life is surrounded with the above concepts that we assume everyone knows what we are talking about.  They don't, and we need to do the hard work of preparing ourselves to explain the vital concepts of the Christian faith to those who desperately need to hear the good news of Jesus Christ!  Talking too much once in awhile might prove to make an eternal
difference!