Evangelism in an Honor and Shame Culture, Part 1

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You can find out more about Ravi Zacharias and the team at www.rzim.org. When you're in an honor shame culture, oftentimes the communication and the wrestling over truth isn't really over truth, it's about honor. So you can actually miss out on the truth or even subvert the truth or hide the truth if it provides you honor and avoids shame.

Hello and welcome to Let My People Think. Sharing the gospel with those from different world views and cultures can be difficult. Many times it can be easy to assume that someone is hesitant to become a Christian because they don't fully believe, but that's not always the case.

As RZIM speaker Abdu Murray states in the open, sometimes the person you're talking with knows Christianity is true, but is hesitant because they know their family might ostracize them or it will incur shame. So how can you effectively share the gospel in these situations? Let's listen as Abdu shares part one of his message titled evangelism in an honor and shame culture. As I set the stage for the text I want to get into, not only is it from Romans 5, but also if you look at John chapter 9, it's the story I want to speak about. So you can turn in your Bibles or click on your devices or whatever way it is that you access scripture. Hold a place there because I want to set the context for the text I want to preach from this morning.

And it's in John chapter 9 verses 1 to 41. But the text really does have a context to it and that's the way to understand it. And as I think about this context, I think of something that happened just a few years ago. I got a message from a good friend of mine, his name is Mark, and he sent me a message on Twitter, direct message on Twitter, talking about the young Muslim man he was engaging with on Twitter. And he said this young guy really is open. We've gone back and forth on some of the objections. He's watched Nabeel's stuff, he's read Nabeel's stuff, he's watched your stuff, he's read your stuff, he's really embracing these things and I think he's getting really, really close to faith.

But there's still some barriers there. Would you be interested in talking with him? He lives in the Toronto area. Would you like to meet him sometime? And it just so happened that in three weeks' time I was going to be speaking in Toronto.

So I wrote Mark back and said absolutely, let's get in touch. They set up the meeting because I was speaking at a church there. And I met this young man and he's a bright guy, he is articulate, soft spoken, but very articulate and very thoughtful. And we sat down and I asked him what his questions were and we went through some of his questions and as I began to answer them he was agreeing with my answers which was already sort of taking me aback a bit. But then he would repeat the ground we had just covered and then he would object to the answer he just agreed to. And so there was a barrier, there was an emotional barrier, something going on there so I began, and I know what the story is because I've gone through it myself, I began to ask him about family and the background issues and what's really holding him back. And every time I got there he would switch it back to another issue and go away from that issue and make it some kind of intellectual issue. And I knew that it wasn't that because he kept on agreeing with the answers. He knew the truth but he was afraid of it. He was afraid of it. And then the event happened that night where we were speaking.

Logan Gates who's here in the audience joined me for a Q&A and this young man was there and we sat down and we talked with him afterwards because the crowd had cleared out and it was just me, him and Logan. We sat down and we began to go over some of the more of his questions and it was becoming quickly evident that he was nowhere to run intellectually. And not because we were clever, just because he had already acknowledged the truth. It was years I think of study or inquiry that had gotten him to the place where he was and I was going to press the family issue because that was the barrier and so I asked him about it. And what he had told me essentially was that he'd been striving his whole life to get his father's approval academically and professionally and all these things. He's in the middle between us and he's looking at the floor as if the answers to all of life's questions are on the floor.

And he says and the tears didn't just trickle out of his eyes, they were dripping out of his eyes. And these are the words he said, my father has never told me he's proud of me and if I become a Christian he never will. You know we're very individualistic here in the West and so we think to ourselves, well truth is worth standing up for and if you acknowledge the truth that this young man had been doing, what's the big deal?

What's the barrier? I mean I know someone might yell at you or get upset at you but we're Western, you know, we do what we want. We're individuals. He comes from an honor shame culture. He comes from a culture steeped in the idea that honor is to be sought and shame is to be avoided. Shame is the method by which morality is enforced. Here in the West we're more of a guilt innocence culture or at least it seems that way.

I think we're becoming very different the more and more we look around ourselves. But a guilt innocence culture is basically one where you have innocence is sought after and then that's that inner sense of guilt. That sense that we've done something wrong and there's a conscience within us. We individually think we need to go and fix something or confess a wrong we've done, whatever it might be. Or our fear of a guilty conscience prevents us from doing something wrong. In an honor shame culture it's different. The locus of enforcement of moral enforcement is not internal, it's external because the community and the family matters so much that you don't want to have shame. You don't want anybody else to know of your wrongdoings so you try to avoid doing those things so that no one else knows and no one else feels the shame, least of all yourself.

So you can see something very, very powerful going on is that and this is Richards and O'Brien in their book Misreading Scripture Through Western Eyes. They point this out is that in an innocence and guilt culture when you have broken a law or you've broken some moral standard of the community, whatever it is, you have done something wrong. Which means that you can do something to fix it. In an honor shame culture when you've broken some kind of social moray or whatever it might be, you have not done something wrong, you have become someone bad. And you need an identity change to fix it. You can't do something to fix it.

You have to become someone different to fix it. So you can see how the moral issues become so personalized in an honor shame culture where it prevents even maybe even a pursuit for the truth. Because religious identity is not part of your life, it is your life.

Even if you don't practice. I mean there's people who are Muslims who you would never know. If it was a crime to be a Muslim they couldn't be convicted of it. Because there's no evidence.

Short of a confession. But they will fight with you in a verbal death match over whether or not Christianity or Islam is true. Why is that? Because it's who they are. It's their identity. And I know this is true across the East and the Middle East.

You see this all the time. People who are nominally religious. But that nominalism is actually quite cultural. So it's not in name only, it's actually in identity only.

Which is paradoxical but it's true. This is the context behind what's going on in John chapter 9. But there's also another context I want to bring to light before we move into the text. It is this honor game. You see when you're in an honor shame culture, often times the communication and the wrestling over truth isn't really over truth, it's about honor. So you can actually miss out on the truth or even subvert the truth or hide the truth if it provides you honor and avoids shame. I want you to think about this, and Richards and O'Briens talk about this as well, the honor game. The honor game is played where public questions happen.

And you look at the scriptures and you can see this happening over and over again. Where whenever Jesus is questioned publicly, it's never to get answers. They don't ask Him questions in public to get answers. They ask Him questions in public to gain honor in the eyes of the people and diminish His honor in the eyes of the people.

I want you to think about this. Think of the Sadducees, for example. The Sadducees don't believe in a resurrection, and so they question Jesus on the resurrection in public.

What do they do? They set up this scenario to try to see, to try to show how silly the idea of the resurrection is from a conceptual standpoint. You know the story where they say, oh, there's a woman, she was married to a man, and before they had kids, he died, then she married his brother, and before they had kids, he died, and then it went on for seven people, and they said, whose wife will she be in the resurrection?

Jesus, because isn't the resurrection a silly idea? They were trying in the honor game. They didn't want an answer from Jesus. They wanted silence from Jesus, because that would diminish His honor and increase theirs in the eyes of the public. And of course, no one plays the honor game better than Jesus, and like an Aikido master, he throws it on them and says, you guys don't even know the scriptures, and yet you're quoting it to me. And they lost honor. What's interesting is understanding the honor and shame culture and understanding the honor game gives you an elucidation of the way scripture actually works. There are certain phrases that we gloss over that when you look at it with an honor shame mentality, you begin to see the power of them. You ever read the parts of scripture where it says, and they were astonished at His teachings, and no one dared ask Him any questions? Shouldn't good teaching foster questions? But the reason they didn't want to ask Him any questions is not because they didn't really want to know the truth, because if you read the scriptures, they did ask Him questions afterwards.

Now that's not a contradiction. What we mean by this is that no one dared ask Him public questions, which is why Nicodemus comes under cover of night, which is why disciples ask Him questions for information in private conversations. But no one, after Jesus had played the honor game with them, dared play it again, because they weren't really interested in the truth.

They were interested in honor and inflicting some measure of shame. It's interesting, and our teammates can all tell you this, every one of them, when you go to an audience, and whether it's a Middle Eastern or an Eastern culture that is either in the Middle East or the East, or a congregation with a lot of Easterners and Middle Easterners here in the West, you'll find out something. When they really want an answer to a question, and we have two abilities to ask questions at the open forums, we can text in or we can go to the microphone, the ones who text in want the answers. The ones who ask the questions at the microphones are trying to challenge you. I was at a church recently at a big, we had a Skeptics Night there.

Skeptics Night, as you know, is geared towards Skeptics at a church where we have people who are encouraged to bring their non-Christian friends. Some guys came to the microphone, and one guy in particular, he comes in sort of in a huff, he can't wait to ask me this question, as if he thought it was original, and he says to me, well, and I'm not being pejorative, that's the question I used to ask Christians all the time when I was a Muslim, and he comes up and he says, where does Jesus say these words, I am God, worship me? And he doesn't say those words, and he knows that, so he's trying to trap me in something, and so I began to answer his question, but he was very much in a huff. Then there was another guy who asked another question, but very much like this, guys from the East and the Middle East asked those kinds of questions, but here was another question that came in through text. What a marked difference in the way they were asked, and the question was this, over the text, I'm a Muslim, and I believe in the existence of God, but I still feel bored and even meaningless. Why is that?

Over text. You see, you can't admit to someone that you might have some doubts, because that's shameful, but you can't actually get information through the public questioning, because that would be considered a challenge, and the person who texted it in didn't want a challenge, they wanted an answer. Now, you might be asking yourself the question, why is this important for us? We're not evangelizing ourselves, many of us, in an honor-shame culture. Really?

Is that true? I want to sustain for you, by the time we're done reading this text and exploring some things, that I think the West is very much now becoming an honor-shame culture. If you don't understand this, how to witness in an honor-shame culture, I think we're going to miss out on opportunities. We also might forget why it is we have such a difficult time sharing the truth in our own cultures as well. I'm going to turn to the text now. All that is a backdrop. Understanding the central idea is that the fear of shame and the quest for honor in the East, Middle East, and even in the West, are barriers not only to accepting the truth, but they're also barriers to sharing the truth.

That's true here in the West. You read John chapter 9. I'm not going to read the whole thing because the passage is long.

You know the story. Jesus and disciples, they come across a man who was born blind. They ask him a question about how this could happen. Jesus says it's for the glory of God, essentially, that God will work in this amazing way.

Jesus is the light of the world in all this. He comes up to the man, and he spits on the ground, and he makes mud. He puts them on the man's eyes and says, go wash in the pool of Siloam. By the way, he didn't have to do any of that. We know that he's given sight to people by just putting his hands on them or whatever it might be, and we know he's healed people that he hasn't even touched.

He's walking in a crowd. A woman grabs his cloak, and she is healed, and she didn't even ask him for it. So we know he doesn't have to do that.

He could just think it and it'll happen. Why go through all the rigmarole of making mud and then putting on the guy's eyes and then saying, go wash in the pool of Siloam, which means scent? Why do all of that when he doesn't have to do any of it? And I think the reason is because Jesus is a troublemaker. It's a speculation on my part, but it's a pretty good educated guess that he's a troublemaker. He makes the mud, because the text specifically says he does it on the Sabbath.

And, of course, making the mud is somehow work. So he washes, he goes, the young man washes, and he goes, and he receives his sight, comes back, and everyone's asking him how this happened, how this happened. And they know it's Jesus who did it.

And he says, this guy put mud on my eyes, and I washed in the pool of Siloam, and now I have sight. And so there's this division among them, because they don't really know. Is this the same guy?

Because they can't believe it. Is this the same guy? And some say, yes, it's him.

Others say, no, it looks like him, and all this. And then you look at verse 13. They brought to the Pharisees the man who had formerly been blind. Now it was Sabbath day when Jesus made the mud and opened his eyes. That's my evidence that Jesus is a troublemaker. And then the Pharisees themselves are saying, wait, is this really a man from God?

Because no one does this kind of thing unless he comes from God. Others are saying, no, this is not what's going on here. And so there was division among them. Verse 18.

I'll read the text from here. The Jews did not believe that he had been blind and had received his sight until they called the parents of the man who had received his sight and asked them, is this your son who you say was born blind? How then does he now see?

See what's going on here? You say he was born blind. I think they suspect a scam. They're thinking, you say he's been born blind, but this guy begs for a living, and this is how he makes his money. And so in order to get a broader sympathy, you say he was born blind, though he really wasn't.

They suspect a scam because they can't possibly believe that Jesus is actually who he said he was. His parents answered, we know that this is our son and that he was born blind. But how he now sees, we do not know. Nor do we know who opened his eyes.

That's false. They do know who opened his eyes because in the passages before that, everyone knows it's Jesus. My guess is if you're a son of someone and you were blind your whole life and they've been praying for your sight to be restored and your sight is restored and you know who did it, you tend to tell your parents that kind of a thing. And yet they say to the Pharisees, they say, we don't know who did it.

I don't think it's true. Then they say this, ask him, he is of age. He will speak for himself. His parents said these things because they feared the Jews for the Jews had already agreed that if anyone should confess Jesus to be Christ, he was to be put out of the synagogue. Therefore, his parents said, he is of age.

Ask him. Verse 24, so for the second time they called the man who had been blind and said to him, give glory to God. We know that this man is a sinner. He answered, whether he's a sinner, I do not know. One thing I do know that though I was blind, now I see. They said to him, what did he do to you? How did he open your eyes? He answered them. I love this answer.

This is the best. I have told you already, and you would not listen. Why do you want to hear it again? You want to be his disciples also? This young guy, right? I mean, my goodness, what a juxtaposition by the way, if you notice this is that his parents who act like, like I said, likely were praying for this man's, this young man's sight to be returned. He was bearing the shame of being a beggar, and they were bearing the shame of being a parent of a beggar, and they were praying for this, and then their prayers are answered, and because it happens to be answered by Jesus, the one that none of the religious people like, they're so in fear of the shame that will come from being put out of the synagogue, they don't even claim to know this man, or who is the one who did it, and it's the one who now sees, who has the boldness to say, why do you want to know? Do you want to be a disciples too?

There's a lot of snark in there, but there's a lot of truth too. Amazing. And they reviled him saying, you are his disciple, but we are disciples of Moses. We know that God has spoken to Moses, but as for this man, we do not know where he comes from.

The man answered, why this is an amazing thing. You do not know where he comes from, and yet he opened my eyes. We know that God does not listen to sinners, but if anyone is a worshiper of God and does his will, God listens to him. Never since the world began has it been heard that anyone opened the eyes of a man born blind. If this man were not from God, he could do nothing. They answered him, you were born in utter sin and you would teach us, and they cast him out. Not out from their midst, I think it's out from the synagogue. You ever come across a passage of scripture that's too big?

It's got so much in it, you're thinking I cannot possibly talk about this in any one setting, and it's certainly not the case. You could talk about this for sermon after sermon after sermon, so many of the nuances, but I want to just point out a couple of things because I think it's important for us to understand what's going on in this passage, whether it's up to the honor shame culture and maybe even to our own lives. The first thing is this, how desperate is this young man? So Jesus walks along, he's blind, this man's blind. He doesn't know who walks up to him, and a guy makes mud, puts it on your eyes, thank you very much, I mean out of the blue he just puts mud under the guy's eyes and says go wash in this pool of Siloam, and the guy just does it. He just does it. He's like, well, what do I have to lose? More sight?

I don't have any now. So he goes and he does it. That's already amazing. Jesus makes the mud on the Sabbath because he's a troublemaker, and he wants to make a point, I think, and use the whole situation to bring glory to God and maybe honor to this young man. But what I also find fascinating, and maybe this is the Arab in me who likes to see that truth is not barely propositional.

It is propositional, but it's not barely propositional. It's power is conveyed in the way in which it's communicated. And only the Lord of history, and I'm telling you this right now as someone who used to hate the scriptures but now loves the scriptures so much, I see so much of God weaving a pattern. Jesus tells this young man to go and wash in the pool of Siloam. And the first thing I thought of when I was reading this passage and preparing for today was the fact that Naaman, the powerful general, comes, and he's got leprosy, and he comes to Elisha. He wants to be healed by the prophet, and the prophet doesn't even talk to him himself personally. He sends his servant that says, go wash in the Jordan River, this muddy little creek. And Naaman's like, wait, we have these muddy rivers and these clean, beautiful places in my homeland that I'm going to wash in some Jewish creek?

But he humbles himself and he does it. This is the thing that I think is beautiful about this. I really do think it's beautiful about it, and I don't have time to develop it, but I just love the way it is that God weaves the pattern of his message. He parallels things, Old and New Testament. He bridges centuries together, and he just doesn't have to tell him to go wash, but I think what he's doing is calling to mind the humility that comes, that a non-Jew is willing to humble himself in this way, and he brings glory to God, and he finds healing from the shameful disease of leprosy. And here's a young man, and he finds healing as well. God weaves his word together across centuries.

I think that's an amazing part of the word of God, and maybe even a powerful apologetic all itself. But then there's the characters I want to center on here as well, and it's the parents. They have this curious statement they make. They say, he is of age, ask him. Now, they could have just said, ask him. I'm going to speculate a moment if you don't mind, but why do they say he is of age? Likely because he doesn't look like it. Because he's a young man who maybe has just approached the age of adulthood, and he's just now the kind of person who could speak for himself, and so he's a young guy.

I don't think he's an older guy. I think he's a young guy, and his parents are so afraid of what might happen that they throw him to the wolves. In other words, they know the truth that Jesus is the one who healed their son, and they don't want to admit it. And so they don't admit the truth, and they throw their son to the wolves saying, you are the one.

Maybe they'll go easy on you because you're young. I don't know what it's going to be, but they certainly don't want to bear the shame of being put out of the synagogue, and so they throw him to the wolves. And of course, this young man who now sees, which is poetic all by itself, he's the one who's bold and points it out. The point I'm trying to make here is that truth is often obscured by fear of shame. Truth is often obscured by fear of shame or dishonor. And as I said before, it's not just accepting the truth that is obscured by fear or shame. It's sharing the truth that is obscured by fear of shame. I wonder how many of us can relate to that.

How many of us can relate to, if I say something, maybe they'll say something back, or maybe I'll lose a friend or two. Shame as an enforcement mechanism can be a tool of suppression, of accepting and sharing the truth. And we know this is the case in this particular culture, because just a few short chapters later in John chapter 12, verses 42 to 43, we read this, nevertheless, many even of the authorities believed in him.

They were believers in Jesus, but for fear of the Pharisees, they did not confess it so that they would not be put out of the synagogue, for they loved the glory that comes from man more than the glory that comes from God. That's about believers. That's why I know that shame can be such a powerful disincentive, not only to accepting the truth, but for those who are even sold out believers, to sharing the truth.

It's very difficult. That's why I think there's a bridge being built right now in our culture, is that we think of the West as an innocent, skilled culture. We think of the East as an honor-shame culture.

But that really isn't the case anymore, I don't think. I want you to think about Twitter and social media. When they ask a question on Twitter or politically, they send something out, are they really looking for an answer? Or are they looking for a Twitter war or some kind of social media war where they're back and forth in quite a bit and they want to have the last word.

They want to be the cleverest one, because the cleverest one gets more followers and the other one might lose followers. That's the honor game of the East. I think that we are looking more and more alike the more and more time goes on. And maybe in all of our modern Western sophistication, we should pay attention to a Jewish peasant from ancient times, because he has something to say to us.

The honor game is happening right now. And if you understand what the scripture actually says, I think there's another wonderful apologetic for scripture, is that it actually speaks to all of us all the time. That's what it means for the word to be living and active. It speaks to us today. It speaks to us today. And you're thinking about even more serious things. It's not just do you have the cleverest quip in 280 characters on a social media platform, but now we're engaged in what's called cancel culture, where if someone, and it usually happens to celebrities, they say something that is unpopular or controversial and people will cancel them.

They'll stop going to their concerts, stop buying their albums, stop going to their movies, whatever it is, they cancel them completely. You've been listening to RZIM speaker Abdu Murray in a message titled evangelism in an honor and shame culture. To order a copy of this message, be sure to call us at 1-800-448-6766. You can also order online or find more content from Abdu on our website at rzim.org. While you're on there, be sure to check his podcast called The Defense Rests.

In this podcast, Abdu examines Christianity and other worldviews in the courtroom as he addresses the claims and the objections against the Christian faith, all from a legal perspective. That web address again is rzim.org or rzim.ca for those in Canada. Or you can write to us at RZIM post office box 1820 Roswell, Georgia 30077. We're so thankful for your support and consider it an honor when we can pray for your requests. If there's something we can be praying about for you, be sure to call us or email us at RZIM at rzim.org. Let My People Think is a listener supported radio ministry and is furnished by RZIM in Atlanta, Georgia.