Square pegs and round holes aren’t a good match.
I learned this when I was a pre-schooler playing with those wooden, multi-colored toy sets that you played with, too, I’m sure.
Only one of the wooden cut-out pieces would fit through the complementary hole in the rectangular board.
When you are 2 years old, it takes a while to figure out which piece fits where.
But by the time your age has doubled to 4, you’re an old salt at such elementary things and you can put the right pegs in the right hole just as fast as you can pick them up.
It’s because you’ve learned what works where.
If only our knack for handling square pegs and round holes were as successful in all the realms of our faith.
It’s true that we generally know how to sit in church without embarrassing ourselves. And we know how to bow our heads in prayer along with everybody else in a home Bible study.
But what about those times when the Holy Spirit or our church leaders are calling us to do more than simply exist in faith but instead to exclaim our faith?
Do our brains slow down or even lock up?
When we’re called to explain the gospel to people or even to invite them to accept the gospel, have we ever appeared as the toddler who had never seen the wooden pegs/shaped holes toy?
If your Christian life is anything like mine, there have been times when you felt like a child with a beloved, cherished square peg in one hand and an unfamiliar board with a round hole in the other hand.
You and I felt as though we were trying to mix oil and water and we knew going in that it wasn’t going to succeed.
It turned out that we were right.
It wasn’t God’s fault.
And it wasn’t the fault of the person to whom we were speaking.
It was our fault.
We didn’t do enough praying to God or enough listening to the prospect or enough studying of the Word or enough conferring with Christians more experienced than we.
At such times, I was trying to put my square peg of faith — my history, my culture, my values, my understandings of the Bible — into the round hole of another person’s life.
When I learned that Christ’s love and sovereignty and power and grace transcends my experience, my culture, my values and my knowledge, then the light bulb came on evangelistically.
I realized that Christ wants to fill the hole in every soul’s heart crafted into it at conception.
That hole, however, is shaped according to that person’s life situation, purpose for God and past experience with God, whether distant or near.
Jesus offered one path of Truth to salvation but He did so in all sorts of settings with all sorts of people and all sorts of conversations.
What mattered was that they embraced and worshiped the Christ of the gospel, not the presentation technique for how they were introduced to Him.
Why this topic today?
The One-Year Bible reading for today included the following text:
“And no one pours new wine into old wineskins. If he does, the wine will burst the skins and both the wine and the wineskins will be ruined. No, he pours new wine into new wineskins” (Mark 2:22)
It is absolutely true that the unsaved or backslidden person in your life needs to see the love of God in your actions and hear the Truths of God in your words.
Your choice of “wine” in sharing the things above, however, will have a bearing on how your actions and words are received.
Pray for discernment of the “new wineskin” parts of the unsaved or backslidden person’s life. That way, your love and words can be expressed and expanded by the Holy Spirit in new ways that fill their hearts and minds with refreshment.
Don’t presume the square peg of gospel presentations that worked for you 30 years ago will automatically fit into the round hole punctured into somebody else’s life by the redemptive call of God.
Instead, pray that God will inspire and instruct your heart to learn that person’s life situation, past experiences with God, their culture and their fears.
Your new wine of adapted, ancient truths will likely find a receptive heart open to growth rather than a closed heart fearful of change that calls them to stretch.
As always, I love you
Martin
