When God LITERALLY puts the opportunity on your doorstep...

This past Saturday our neighborhood was visited by a local group of Jehovah's Witnesses.  I was excited because the last couple of times they had been through our community my family and I were not at home and so we only knew they had been there by the pamphlet left on the door.  But this day we were home.  I spent probably the better part of an hour speaking with a young man named Taylor.  We spent a very short amount of time in debate and I quickly tried to move to addressing his conscience.

All the while I'm praying in my mind, 'God please, please save this man.'  He was not at all receptive to the Gospel as one would obviously expect, he would not take a Gospel tract from me nor consent that he would even consider the claims I'd made in our conversation.

My heart was hurting for him, and then, seeing that he was making no progress in converting me, he was preparing to leave when he made a comment that sent my flesh raging but has since turned to sorrow and now conviction. (Hence the writing of this post)

Taylor said to me, "Sir, you seem fully convinced of the faith you hold." To which I replied, "I am, I know whom I have believed and am persuaded that He is able to keep that which I've committed unto Him against that day."  Taylor smiled and somewhat smugly said, "Well I live in Duncanville and if you are truly convinced that what you have told me is true, then start knocking on door sharing your message until you find me."

With that he promised to return some time in the future to speak with me again.  I know not whether I will ever see Taylor again at my door or whether I will ever find him in town to speak to him about the true Gospel again.  I can, at this point, only continue to pray that whether I ever see him again or not that God will save him and I will one day see him in Heaven.

My flesh was sent raging by his comment... my immediate thought was... how dare he suggest such a thing to me... that I have prove something to him...  I was enraged and because God has graciously given me opportunities and strength to witness on the streets I wanted to launch into a barrage of boasting of what I had done and planned on doing and so on... I wanted to shout at him, 'You foolish man!  REPENT!'

As I said, that was my flesh speaking and not the Spirit.  But I said nothing.  I smiled and shook his hand, thanked him for the polite conversation and left him to his way.

Since Saturday I have lost much sleep thinking about his words.  The question I posed to myself has been, do I excuse away a lack of witnessing often simply because I do it on occasion?  Do I feel that what time I do spend in evangelism is a cause for boasting in myself?  I'm afraid it often is, or at the least it is a temptation.  My wise friend, Rick, once told me that the heart of a legalist beats in us all.  How true that is.

His comments quickly moved me to sorrow.  Here he is, this man who is pushing a false gospel that does not save (Galatians 1:6-10) and he is hitting the streets under the conviction that what he believes is true.  Yet here we are with the truth (John 14:6) and we scarcely speak of Christ with friends let along strangers.

Christians, are we failing in our calling to fulfill the Great Commission (Mark 16:15).  Where are we?  I realize that the Mormons and Jehovah's Witnesses have made "door knocking" much more difficult and I realize that many people do not want to be bothered at their home.  Fine, get on the streets in the public parks and plead with sinners to turn from sin and find forgiveness in Christ Jesus who has died for them!

I am not being the best steward of the commission to witness that I ought to be and so I am asking you to pray for me and in turn I would love to pray for you.  That God would increase our boldness and shake us to the core with a passion for sharing His Gospel with every person we come in contact with.

And so the conviction, I'm praying God present me with more opportunities to share the Gospel and that when that time comes that I will not shirk away but be emboldened by His Spirit to plead with sinners to repent and turn to Christ (Mark 1:15).

“If every one of your Christians would every day make known Christ to somebody, what a missionary organization we should be!” -- Charles Spurgeon

-- Find out more on the beliefs of a Jehovah's Witness.

Never lose hope!

I want to write to all those who have prayed for your unbelieving family members, friends, and acquaintances and yet it seems to have been to no avail because that person has still not repented and trusted in Christ.  I want to share with you a story of a mother in our church.  Her name is Jannette.  Jannette was raised Jewish and had been a practicing Jew until 20 years ago when God graciously saved her and her husband Ray. 

Since coming to Christ, Jannette and Ray have prayed for Jannette's daughter Gaye, (Ray's step-daughter), that God would save her as well.  After God saved Jannette, Gaye had become somewhat disillusioned and confused.  Her mother had now abandoned the Jewish practices that she had once held dear and Gaye did not understand how such a change could happen so quickly.  It would be fair to say that she even held a certain amount of anger about the whole situation.  In any case, she remained a Jew in belief and stopped practicing.

For 20 years Jannette has prayed and pleaded with God to save Gaye.  She has shared the Gospel innumerable times with her in hopes that she would be broken over her sin and cling to Christ.  Twenty years of trying, twenty years with no results.

Two months ago, Gaye came to see me in my office.  She was asking questions about Christ.  Coming from a Jewish background, whom she had been taught Christ was is not who the Bible teaches Him to be.  So I answered them as best I could and after we'd finished talking she left and I gave her a couple of materials to look over. 

I  heard nothing for 2 months.  She called me yesterday and told me that the previous night (Tuesday), as she sat in her apartment thinking about what I'd shared with her.  Considering the Law and how that is God's standard and how we've broken it.  And then also the good news of the Gospel.  

She said that God finally brought her to the end of herself and that she had confessed her sin to Him and begged God to forgive her!  She had trusted in Jesus Christ and as she shared with me about it through the tears she spoke of a joy unexplainable that she now had and how she could tell that a burden had been lifted from her. 

I'm choking back tears myself even recounting the story.  A couple of things I want to share with you, brethren, to encourage you in your witnessing be it to family, friends, or strangers.

1.) Don't be discouraged!  God is still God!  He does things in His own time according to His own will and in His own way!  Your job is NOT to convert someone, it's to share the Gospel.  The power of God converts sinful souls.  Your job is to faithfully proclaim it.

2.) The lack of response from the person you witness to does not necessarily mean that you've failed or that you are unsuccessful.  Gaye had been prayed for by many many people for many many years before God broke her heart and saved her. 

3.) No matter how hard someone's heart may appear to be to us, no one can sin so far that they are outside the saving reach of God's grace.  Ours is not to determine who we think 'might' or 'might not' be saved one day, ours is to simply trust the One who gave us the message that we proclaim.

Keep praying for the lost, keep seeking them out, and keep sharing the whole Gospel with them!  And trust that God will do what is good and right.  You may never know the impact you have on others.  Then again, God may grant you the unique blessing of being used by Him to bring someone to repentance and faith in the Lord Jesus Christ.

Soli Deo Gloria,

j

Still true today...

One of the commentators I enjoy reading is J.F. Strombeck.  Ran across this quote from him the other day that rings all too true today.  Here's the crazy thing.  This quote is from 1940.  How sad that we still struggle with the same problem.

"There is an abundant life, widely advocated these days, but that is restricted entirely to the material and temporal.  A large part of the professing Christian church has, to an amazing extent, become concerned about the abundance of the material and temporal to the exclusion of the spiritual and eternal.  Moral reform, social uplift and economic problems have taken the place of the proclamation of a salvation that God freely offers to sin-cursed human race that is traveling at a terrific speed toward an everlasting separation from Him and all that flows from Him.  Even when the need for salvation is seen and faithfully presented, very often the temporal values derived therefrom, in the form of reformed lives and remade homes, are the most loudly acclaimed, while the spiritual and eternal values that come to the individual are in many, yes, very many, instances seldom mentioned and much less given their primary importance.  The present day emphasis upon lifting the human race out of its low state has largely become one of dealing with temporal values.  God's emphasis, on the other hand, as found in the Bible, is to deal with the problem of human sin and all its consequences on the basis of eternal values.  This is through Salvation.  Social welfare work and all moral reform, however good for the present, do not help men and women beyond the grace, and the grace is not the end of man.  He has an undying soul that goes on and on and on into eternity.  The salvation that God, and He alone, has accomplished through Jesus Christ provides for that undying soul of man and brings it into an unending infinitely glorious and blissful state."

Get out there Christian and PREACH THE GOSPEL!  Pastor, teach your flock to value the person and work of Jesus Christ.  Only through a right estimation of who He is and what He did that they will ever develop a passion for His name and the spreading of it.

2 Timothy 4:1-5 - I solemnly charge you in the presence of God and of Christ Jesus, who is to judge the living and the dead, and by His appearing and His kingdom:  2 preach the word; be ready in season and out of season; reprove, rebuke, exhort, with great patience and instruction.  3 For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine; but wanting to have their ears tickled, they will accumulate for themselves teachers in accordance to their own desires,  4 and will turn away their ears from the truth and will turn aside to myths.  5 But you, be sober in all things, endure hardship, do the work of an evangelist, fulfill your ministry.