God's Target Audience

The Super Bowl was last Sunday.  Maybe you were interested in it, maybe it weren’t.  Some people are absolute fanatics about the Super Bowl.  They watched the pre-game shows for the Super Bowl for over a week before the game was played.  Other people could not care less, did not watch even one minute of it, and could not even tell you who the teams were that played in it.  And of course, lots of people fall at points in between those two extremes.

One thing that sometimes gets people who are not interested to watch the game is the commercials.  Lots of companies spend lots of money to create special commercials for the Super Bowl.  Some of those commercials will be seen for months to come.  Others will never be seen again.  There are special shows that are dedicated to Super Bowl commercials.  Surveys are taken to see which ones people liked the best.  Super Bowl commercials are, for some people, more important than the game itself.

As I get older, I’ve noticed something about the commercials.  I don’t understand them.  Well, some of them I do, but a lot of them I don’t.  There are a lot of times I look at the commercials and say, “What was that supposed to be?”  Sometimes I can’t even figure out what it is the product is that they’re promoting.

There’s a reason for that.  The reason is that I’m sixty-one years old.  Advertisers on the Super Bowl are not targeting sixty-one-year-olds.  They’re targeting young people.  The theory is that young people do not yet have their buying habits established, and so can be persuaded to switch to a different product or to try a product they’ve not tried yet.  People my age and older are assumed to have our buying habits established, and we’re not likely to change our minds no matter how attractive the advertising is.

There’s nothing particularly wrong with that.  It’s just the way it is.  Companies, for the most part, don’t try to reach everybody.  Their products, for the most part, are not for everybody.  They’re for a certain group of people, so they target their advertising to reach that certain group of people.

But thankfully, God does not work that way.  God’s “product”, if you want to call it that, is salvation.  And salvation is available to everyone.  God does not target a certain group of people, nor does God exclude any group of people.  God wants everyone to accept the salvation and eternal life God offers through faith in Jesus Christ.  God targets everyone with that message.

And that’s what the church needs to do.  Yes, there are sometimes certain ways we can adapt God’s message so that it’s more easily understandable to certain groups.  But the message itself remains the same.  God does not give one message to young people and another to old people.  God does not give one message to men and another to women.  God does not give different messages to different ethnic groups.  God gives one message:  the way to salvation and eternal life is through faith in Jesus Christ as the Savior.  And that needs to be the church’s message, too.

If you watched the Super Bowl, and you didn’t understand the ads, that’s okay.  It probably means the ads weren’t aimed at you.  But God’s message is.  We are all part of the group God wants to reach.  Every one of us.