The Word of God is FOOLISHNESS to the non-believer.

About a year before I was saved, one of my best friends and my eventual Christian mentor, Victor Arreaga, gave me a book to read. I'd read it once before, in college, and upon this reading my opinion hadn't changed. Foolishness.

The book was C.S. Lewis' classic, Mere Christianity.


Without bogging you down in details (as a Christian or someone on the cusp, you really need to read it yourself!), the brilliant author of the Narnia Chronicles and many other works (read Perelandra sometime, too!) goes through the process of laying out irrefutable argument after argument as to the truth of God and the validity of Christianity above all other religions.

And, of course, I refuted every single argument in my head. It's all hogwash. Fantasy from a fantasy writer.

About a year later, as I said, I was saved by Christ, on an Amtrak train traveling from Winnemucca to Reno. (Long story. I've told it before, and undoubtedly I'll tell it again, but not now.) And Victor met me the next evening to start guiding me through those hazardous first few steps towards a life of Christian joy and safety.

Another year after that, I picked up Mere Christianity again. 

And I couldn't even figure out what I had objected to, much less muster those arguments again.

"For the preaching of the cross is to them who perish foolishness, but unto us which are saved, it is the power of God."   - Paul, in the 1st letter to the Corinthians, 1:18, King James version.

There is an entirely different way of thinking when you've taken the Holy Spirit on board to pilot your ship. Even that first day I'd been saved, I probably wouldn't have understood what Lewis was talking about, but once I'd gathered the Truth of the Gospel under my feet - my "feet shod with the preparation of the Gospel of Peace", Ephesians 6:15 - the whole story holds together and became, in fact, the ONLY Truth, capital T.

I had the same feeling about the Bible itself, for that matter. I'd read much of it as a young man, as well as other religious texts to try to ground myself in the ways of the world, and found them all generally reasonable but not overly enlightening. When I began reading the Bible with the Holy Spirit to guide my reading, suddenly the words lifted off the page as I read them! There were whole new meanings within phrases I hadn't given a second thought to, and as I go through my fifth time through the entire Bible (I do so every year, and I'm in my fifth full year as a Christian), I find new meanings throughout the book just for the asking (just for the praying, I should say!). 

As you try to share the Gospel with your non-Believing friends, don't forget this dichotomy!

They will NOT hear the same things YOU hear!    

When you try to tell them the story about this guy who was born in a barn, went around greater Israel preaching about how he was going to divide families, how he wanted you to eat his body and drink his blood, healed a lot of people and ticked all the religious folks of the time off ... but we're supposed to believe that he was actually God, even though he got himself killed barely three years into his ministry, and then this third piece of the same God (which is actually all one God) is going to come live inside you like some freak'n Alien movie? 

No thanks, mister. The football games come on before church gets out, anyway.

The key thing for you to remember is that it's not YOUR responsibility to "convert" ANYONE. That's the job of the Holy Spirit. When someone is ready, they'll come to the Lord. BUT, it is your job to expose them to the "foolishness" of the Gospel. When they're ready, they're ready, and you can lead them to Christ. If they're not ready, nothing you say will help - but one more exposure to the Truth never hurts. You have no way of knowing when someone is ready to accept Christ - so all you can do, and what you should do, is share the Gospel with them, and let Christ and the Spirit do the rest.

It hardly seems reasonable. Even Paul, the greatest evangelist in history bar none, recognized how ridiculous our task was - again, quoting from First Corinthians 1, verses 19-29 (this is from the ESV):

For it is written, 
          “I will destroy the wisdom of the wise,

                  and the discernment of the discerning I will thwart.”  (from Isaiah 29:14)

Where is the one who is wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? 

For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, it pleased God through the folly of what we preach to save those who believe. For Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men.

For consider your calling, brothers: not many of you were wise according to worldly standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are, so that no human being might boast in the presence of God.

The Gospel is unreasonable. That's why it requires FAITH to become a Christian. You cannot believe the foolishness of the Gospel until you've experienced the wisdom of God first-hand.