Advertising our Faith

Friends,

What is the best advertisement campaign ever? Take Nike for example. Every year they spend millions of dollars on advertising their product. The ads are fancy. They are video. They are audio. They are paper. The ads are on television, radio, the internet and on billboards.

The product is marketed by professional athletes who are given access to as many shoes as they need. (It is hard to imagine buying a product from someone who doesn’t have to buy it himself, but that’s another point altogether.) Go to a ball game and see the wall signs. See the ads on players hats, shirts, pants, socks, and on the gloves and bats they use. Nike places their logo in just about any place they or anyone can imagine.

I suppose some of their best advertising comes in the form of spectacular television spots that are designed to stimulate the senses. But is this really where the best advertising comes from? Is this the best Nike can do? Is the television the place where Nike sells the most shoes? I don’t think so. Let me tell you how I discovered this.

I was walking through the snow one day in my pair of Nike’s that I managed to find at the bargain price of $25 or so on the sale rack at a local sports store. The snow was fresh, clean, and no one else had dared to walk where I was walking. It is one of the small pleasures in life being the first person to walk on a fresh blanket of snow. I don’t know why, but there is something rather thrilling about being the first person to leave a trail across a yard covered in beautiful gleaming white snow. I was doing this one day.

I happened to look down and I noticed that I had left a perfectly formed footprint in the fresh snow. You know what I could see? That’s right. There in the snow, in the center of my footprint, clear as day, plain as sky, was the outline of a perfectly shaped Nike Swoosh.

This got me to thinking about advertising. I don’t care how many Nike golf balls Tiger Woods hits into a green or how many Witnesses there are to Lebron James’ mastery of the basketball. The best advertising that Nike gets is every single step that ordinary folks like myself take in a pair of their shoes. Why? Because we leave a Nike Swoosh everywhere we go. It is stamped into the mud, the dust, the grass, the concrete, snow, slush, and hardwood floors. That image, that Swoosh, left in a billion footprints every day is the best advertising that Nike will ever get.

And so too it is with the church. It is not the great big campaigns that advertise Christianity the best. It is not the Billy Graham crusades. It is not 40 Days of Purpose. It is not Your Best Life Now (not that Best Life is an ad for Christianity). None of these things: Not the biggest mega-church or the most charismatic evangelist nor the preacher with the most miracles under his belt. The best advertising the Christians do is found in every single step we take. Trillions of steps taken each day in the Name of Jesus are the best advertising we can do.

With each step of perseverance, with each step taken despite opposition and persecution, with each step taken in spite of suffering, with each step we take in the race marked out for us we ‘advertise’ Jesus. This is because Christians, like Nike, leave an imprint on this world with each step we take. This is why we press on, ahead, and are commanded not to look back. If we look back we run the risk of gloating over our victory or grousing over our failure. Instead, we look straight ahead to Jesus who also had a path to walk (Hebrews 12).

And that path is hard to walk. Oh so hard to walk.

Lord, I’m too weak to walk. Too stupid to understand. Too ungracious to be graceful. Too unlovely to be lovable. Lord, I, like you, see all the ugliness inside of my heart. I see all that which is despiseable–all that which you suffered for. And yet you chose me to be an ad campaign for Jesus. You chose me to carry his marks, his wounds, in my life. Those wounds…Lord can wounds save even me? Help me walk the path marked out for me…sketched by your finger…traced by your eye…trod by your feet…mark the place in my heart Lord that is lonely and afraid on this journey…mark it with your grace. And I–I–carry the marks of Christ?

Soli Deo Gloria!