Sharing Christmas, understanding yourself and your friends

How can I share about Christmas with my friends?
Before you can share the Christmas story, you need to know what you believe and why you believe it, you also need to be willing to understand your friends and take time to actually listen to them, so that you can share the message of Christmas with them, that is at a level for them to understand. Some of your mates will be up for hearing all about the Christmas message, whilst others will only really be up for the odd comment here or there about Jesus. You have to be wise. For example:

I recently went to see the new James Bond movie ‘Quantum of Solace’. My mates and I chatted later about the cars and the stunts. With others of my friends who I knew were real hardcore James Bond fans [who'd seen all the other movies over the years], I talked in geeky detail about the character development, the possible change in direction of using Daniel Craig, the product placement and the depth of character and general meaning behind the movie. Now, I use this example for two reasons:

I was comfortable with what I thought about the movie and was willing to discuss it.
Through past conversations with certain friends [and analysing the current conversations] I kind of knew what each of my friends thought and were willing to chat about.

Are You Comfortable With Christmas?
Are you comfortable with the Christmas story, about what you believe and understand from the Bible and from the teaching you have received in the past? Are you willing to discuss it with your mates?

You know your friends and you know exactly how to relate to them. Without thinking about it, it comes naturally. But I bet that you do not and you will not always agree with them; you can probably think of times when you have fallen out or argued over things like movies, football and relationships. And yet you'll probably agree that you still talk about those things anyway with your friends? If you are wise, you will be able to balance your conversations with each of your friends as in the example I used. You may not realise you have been doing this, but you may remember saying jokingly to others ‘Don’t talk to Dave about who was voted off, he gets really annoyed’. But we all use filters when sharing our faith with others and effective evangelism needs a balanced use of that filter: when to say things and when not to.

In the next section, let's explore how we can develop that filter, to be able to talk to our non-Christian friends about what we believe, in a way that doesn’t jump on them but does seize opportunities to share our faith.

So, let's get to grips with really knowing our friends