Tag: witnessing

Categories
Serving Others

Serving God Can Be Uncomfortable. But That May Be On Purpose.

Sometimes God puts us in uncomfortable places to serve Him.

Paul went to Jerusalem knowing that he would be arrested. And yet he went anyway. From all indications, prison is uncomfortable.photo of prison bars remind us prison is uncomfortable

While in prison, Paul got the chance to speak to Felix, the Governor. The Bible tells us that Felix was hoping to get money from Paul, so he spoke to him often. So why didn’t Paul just go ahead and bribe Felix to get out of prison?

Alistair Begg mentions:

Certainly Paul would have known that the hints dropped by Felix would allow him to get out of prison. Certainly he could have asked for his supporters to give finances to help him get out of prison. What reason would Paul remain in prison when he could have bribed his way out?

Well, before I share with you Begg’s answer, I would venture to say that one reason could be that Paul knew that providing a bribe was not following the law and was not God-honoring. I hope that as we think about our own lives, that we strive to honor God by obedience to the law. According to the Bible, we are to obey the law until the law puts us in conflict with God’s commands. There are plenty of ways people try to “get around” the law even though it is not in conflict with God’s Word. Let’s make sure we don’t fall into that trap of damaging our witness by taking shortcuts or using deception to “get around” the law.

But I also really like Begg’s answer:

Since Paul had an opportunity to share the gospel with people who he would not otherwise be able to interact with, he remained in prison and remained able to attempt to influence Felix and those in the court.

Paul trusts that God has him exactly where he is supposed to be. He could have thought, “I can be more effective outside of this prison.” But he doesn’t seek for that release knowing that God has him in exactly the right spot. So instead of worrying about where he is, he sees his current location and situation as an opportunity.chalkboard with crisis crossed out since uncomfortable situations can be opportunities

I don’t know where God will place you today, but I do believe that He has you there for a reason. It may be (like Paul with Felix) that there is someone that will be there with you that is not open to hearing about God from anyone else but you. So don’t work so hard to get out of an uncomfortable place, if that’s where you find yourself. Instead, try to see it as a special opportunity to share with those God has placed around you. He placed you right where you are “for such a time as this!”

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Categories
Relationships

How To Market and Sell Jesus

When I first read the quote that I have included below, the words definitely resonated with me. It is because I feel the same way. I know people who love Jesus. I know people who want to share the joy they have found in Jesus with others. But there is a tension in how to do so. You might be one who also struggles with this. We have a hard time doing that thing that preachers call “sharing your faith.” When we are instructed to do this, we feel like we are being asked to go sell a product to people who haven’t asked for the sales pitch. stuffed penguins at a carnival booth representing our feelings of trying to market and sell JesusWe feel like telemarketers on a cold call or like carnival hawkers trying to entice a stranger to come win a stuffed penguin. And so we get awkward trying to market and sell Jesus.

But Jesus doesn’t need us to be His marketing agent nor a salesman for Him. Instead, we just need to let our honesty about our joy and belief in Him to flow out of us naturally. We just need to change our conversations slightly to point people in the direction of Jesus. Jesus can take care of the rest. Instead of becoming the pushy salesman or the marketing agent trying to come up with a cute jingle that’ll “hook” someone into wanting the “Product,” we just need to be honest with people about our feelings for and about Jesus. Jesus doesn’t need your marketing and sales skills. He is way more capable than you of drawing people to Himself. Here is an illustration of the point from Miller:

…when I share my faith, I feel like a network marketing guy…. Some of my friends who aren’t Christians think that Christians are insistent and demanding and intruding, but that isn’t the case. Those folks are the squeaky wheel. Most Christians have enormous respect for the space and freedom of others; it is only that they have found a joy in Jesus they want to share. There is the tension.

In a recent radio interview I was sternly asked by the host, who did not consider himself a Christian, to defend Christianity. I told him that I couldn’t do it, and moreover, that I didn’t want to defend the term. He asked me if I was a Christian, and I told him yes. “Then why don’t you want to defend Christianity?” he asked, confused. I told him I no longer knew what the term meant. Of the hundreds of thousands of people listening to his show that day, some of them had terrible experiences with Christianity; they may have been yelled at by a teacher in a Christian school, abused by a minister, or browbeaten by a Christian parent. To them, the term Christianity meant something that no Christian I know would defend. By fortifying the term, I am only making them more and more angry. I won’t do it. Stop ten people on the street and ask them what they think of when they hear the word Christianity, and they will give you ten different answers. How can I defend a term that means ten different things to ten different people?

I told the radio show host that I would rather talk about Jesus and how I came to believe that Jesus exists and that he likes me. The host looked back at me with tears in his eyes. When we were done, he asked me if we could go get lunch together. He told me how much he didn’t like Christianity but how he had always wanted to believe Jesus was the Son of God.

So how do we market and sell Jesus to others? We don’t. Instead we strive to live out an imitation of Christ in our lives and we honestly share the joy we have discovered in the fact that Jesus likes us. We can trust Jesus to be big enough to handle the rest.

How have you had similar experiences with feeling like Miller, like his friends that thought Christians were pushy, or like the radio host?

Categories
Sharing Jesus

Celebrating Failure

Fireworks are one of the ultimate expressions of celebrations. We are getting close to July 4th where many people will set up some amazing firework shows to celebrate the independence of our nation. We might also send up some fireworks for other personal celebrations, such as a birthday. But we don’t usually light off the fireworks when we experience some sort of failure. …Could that be a mistake? Fireworks representing our need to celebrate our failure in witnessing

Thinking about the issue of teaching our children how to fail (yesterday’s post) got me to thinking about another type of failure – the failure of sharing our faith and getting a “no” answer when asking if someone is ready to confess Christ as Savior and Lord. Is it possible that we should be celebrating our “failures” in witnessing?

Christians want to be obedient to share their faith beliefs with others. We want to share, and we want to lead others to know Jesus. But I have heard that it takes a person at least 8 times to hear the message about Jesus before they are open to the idea and in a mindset where they understand it well enough to even consider a personal relationship with Him. So from a statistical standpoint, that means that at least 7 out of 8 Christians need to be willing to share their faith while knowing that they will NOT lead the person they are speaking with to know Christ at that precise moment. But if we know this to be true and choose to be willing to speak the gospel message anyway, our “failure” has the possibility of moving them one step closer to trusting in Christ.

I know that sharing your faith is not a matter of math, but we need to realize that the statistics indicate that sharing your faith will lead you to hear the words “no” more often than “yes” when you ask for a response. But if we let that discourage us, we might stop witnessing all together. In fact, maybe that is one reason so many people do not share their faith… the fear of failure.

So maybe we start celebrating our failures and encouraging each other to fail more often. Maybe we say: “Hey celebrate with me – I failed in three different conversations with people about their desire to know Jesus!” And other believers would respond: “Hurray! Keep it up! We need more failures! More failures lead to more ‘yes’ decisions in time!” The more failures that we are willing to endure, the more chances that we will have a success. Let’s plant seeds no matter what the soil conditions, because if we choose not to plant due to our fear of failure, we will continue to find this next statement to be truth: With no planting comes no harvest.

“Time is too short; and the weather is too turbulent for business as usual in our Christian community.” (Mississippi Pastor Nathan Barber)

— brian rushing