Recording for Uni Fellowship’s Pre-Season Conference 2021 second sermon in the series on Jonah. Listen to parts 1 and 3 here.
There’s a stat floating around that indicates that if something good has happened to us we’re likely to tell 3 people that good news. However, we’re more likely to tell 10 people if we have BAD news.
But when researchers asked Christians why they feel a bit shy to share the GOOD NEWS about Jesus with people, their response was that they were afraid that the good news about Jesus might come across as BAD NEWS.
Does that resonate with you?
I think a lot of us have felt that way.
How many of us have sat with that pit in our stomach of knowing friends and family who are under the judgement of God? In that moment, the message of the Bible feels like BAD NEWS.
In fact, who can relate to this cartoon I found recently?
There’s a mouse who says, “As a kid I was told about God, and how much he loved me. And how he’d send me to Hell forever if I made the wrong choices. For years my life felt like a trap door that could open at any moment into eternal suffering. The older I get the weirder I think it is to tell a kid something like that.”
Maybe this is you.
Maybe you have had that niggling feeling that maybe the message of the Bible is not good news for you or anyone you know.
Or maybe the people who told the mouse about God, didn’t get the whole story right.
Maybe, like we’ll see with Jonah today. They only told one part of the story and left out the good part.
At University Fellowship of Christians we are in a unique position to speak into the University realm of conversations and ideas and worldviews and point those who are questioning, confused by the world's lack of answers where authenticity, goodness and beauty has become the ethical standards.
Christians and churches (both local and further afield) partnering with us in this important work makes a massive difference in young people's lives as staff and students are showing up and are here for these types of conversations.