Building Bridges

Lots of Christians talk about “building bridges” with non-Christians. And I’m all for it. The problem, though, is that often once the bridge is built nothing of eternal significance is ever transported across. Intuitively many bridge builders don’t ever get around to talking about the eternal consequences of sin, God’s demand to repent, or the exclusivity of Christ, for fear that a roadblock will be constructed by their newfound non-Christian “friends.” 
 
Instead, many bridge builders use their bridges to try to prove that Christians are “good guys” and “not as square as everyone thinks.” But at some point we have to realize that quoting passages about Christ dining with “tax collectors and sinners” has no correspondence to what we are doing if we never bring lost people the message that Jesus brought. And before we say that Jesus just wanted people to know that God loved them, we’d better be sure to go back to read and reread Christ’s words to the lost—all of them. If we do we’ll see that he kept speaking of the eternal consequences of sin, God’s demand to repent, and his own exclusivity. 
 
So let’s build bridges. But let us also be sure to deliver the words of Christ. A hundred years from now no non-Christian will thank us for showing him that we were “good guys.” Instead, what they all really need is the message of Christ.