Engaging with Hindus: present Christ positively

This is an extract from the recently published Engaging with Hindus.

What is our aim as we engage further with our Hindu friends? Is it to find common ground and ways of living together in our divided society? Is it to persuade them to change their religion and be converted? Here are some suggested goals:

To seek to know the true and living God along with our Hindu friends which includes respecting their search for God and sharing with them our experience of God, so that they will also experience God’s love, grace, peace, forgiveness and justice shown to us all in the Lord Jesus Christ.

This combination of receiving (learning about, and respecting their search for God) and giving (sharing what we have experienced) reflects the example of Jesus himself. He condemned false religion, pride and selfishness. But he commended the faith of outsiders like Roman soldiers and Gentile women as they were drawn to him (see Matthew 8 v 5-13; 15 v 21-28). At the same time he invited them to focus their faith still further on him, so that through him they would find their place in the “kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 8 v 11). His life, teaching, death and resurrection opened the way to eternal life, under God’s perfect rule.

So our focus must always be on Jesus—not Christianity or the church. We do not come from a position of superiority in our culture, philosophy or religious background. Our task is humbly—and confidently—to share the treasure that we have discovered. We are like the trader who discovered the most valuable pearl in the world and sold everything to get it (Matthew 13 v 46).

And we must never think that our job is to “change their religion”. Religion does not save anyone. Christianity, as a religious system, is as powerless to save us as Hinduism is. All of us, as human beings, need to seek a relationship with God. But we cannot reach him by our own efforts: they will fail. He has offered us life, forgiveness, peace and union with him, through Jesus.

This is the good news that Jesus’ followers have experienced and want to share with everybody, whatever their religious background. We have not found God by our efforts. He has found us, and our job is to humbly and respectfully point others to Christ.

Explaining grace

While the truth of sin as rebellion against God may be new, many Hindus are deeply conscious of the reality of karma and its serious consequences. Hindus don’t need to be told that you reap what you sow. But that can make it difficult to accept the idea of salvation as a free gift through the sacrifice of Christ. For some this will immediately be liberating, a wonderful offer. Others may consider it too easy. How can another person pay for my karma? What will prevent me from sinning again—or more practically, how will we teach our young people not to do wrong if forgiveness is so easy?

These were the same questions that the apostle Paul faced in Romans 6, where he points out that forgiveness through Jesus’ death is actually a death to the old life. From now on we want to live in a way that pleases God, because we are so grateful for his free gift.

Here is one account of how a Hindu started to understand the good news and how it related to the categories of thought he had grown up with:

As I read Jesus’ teaching and the account of his life and death, I wrestled with my karmic debt. How could I ever pay this debt? I knew I was spiritually bankrupt. But I came to realise that either I would have to give up and hope for a better chance to pay it off in the next life, or believe that Christ really had paid for all my sins. I realised that no other guru had claimed to have paid for my karmic debt (my sins), only Jesus. I got on my knees and prayed for Jesus to come in and take control of my life.