Every morning on my drive to work, I pass a man walking down the side of the road with a baseball bat. I don’t know his story. Maybe he’s perfectly harmless. But I’ll be honest — every time I see him, something in me tightens up. I’ve already decided to keep my distance before he’s taken a single step in my direction.

Lately, there’s been another man on that same road. He carries a big walking stick. Same road, same hour, and he’s carrying something too. But nobody braces when they pass him. The stick says, “I’m out for a walk.” The bat says, “I’m ready for a fight.”

It got me thinking about how a lot of people see Christians coming.
If the only thing people ever see in our hands is a bat — the argument, the cornering, the condemnation, the Gospel shoved at every opening whether anyone asked or not — they’ll have their defenses up long before we reach them. They won’t hear the message. They’ll be too busy watching the swing.

Paul gave Timothy a different picture: “the servant of the Lord must not strive; but be gentle unto all men, apt to teach, patient, in meekness instructing those that oppose themselves” (2 Tim. 2:24–25). The word for “strive” there is machomai — to fight, to do battle. Paul isn’t describing a soft message. He’s describing a servant who refuses to bring a weapon to the conversation.

And that matters for the age we live in. In the early chapters of Acts, Peter stood before Israel and said, “ye have taken, and by wicked hands have crucified and slain” (Acts 2:23). That was an indictment of a covenant nation. But through Paul, God revealed something new — “the dispensation of the grace of God” (Eph. 3:2) — and with it a new message: “God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto himself, not imputing their trespasses unto them” (2 Cor. 5:19).

We aren’t prosecutors. We’re ambassadors. And an ambassador doesn’t carry a bat into a peace treaty. The moment we deliver a message of reconciliation like a threat, we’ve contradicted the very thing we came to say.

None of this means we go empty-handed. The man with the walking stick still carries something firm. He just carries it for his own walk, not to intimidate anyone else’s. Paul puts it this way: “Let your speech be alway with grace, seasoned with salt, that ye may know how ye ought to answer every man” (Col. 4:6). Notice the order. Grace first.

Salt is real — the truth doesn’t get watered down — but it’s seasoning, not the whole plate. And notice Paul expects people to ask. That only happens when they aren’t bracing for impact.

So the question isn’t whether you carry the truth. You should. The question is whether people see a walking stick or a bat when you come down the road. One gets avoided. The other gets a conversation.