At the beginning of the year I made a slight adjustment in my priorities. As a young Christian I did very little to serve in a local church family, but prided my self in being on the front lines in evangelism. And worse yet my pride blinded me to just how poor an evangelist I was anyway. But the Lord is a good father and brought correction in order to teach me to fellowship from the heart, even within an imperfect church family. Actually an imperfect church family is a perfect fit with my own imperfections!
Yet committees and Sunday School teaching pushed evangelism to the back burner. So I have been asking the Lord for help to move evangelism up in priority while still involving my Christian friends from church.
One useful resource my own church is learning from is titled, You Can Tell It!, by EvanTell. The resource highlights just how simple the gospel is to explain. Perhaps our fear in evangelism isn’t the complexity of the message, but the uncertain response of our audience. Yet our duty in evangelism isn’t following our feelings or producing results, but obeying the Lord’s command. Fear over our audience’s response should be minor compared to fear over the consequence of not obeying the Lord’s command. We should not fear because we do not have the power to change hearts anyway, but God does.
So perhaps a series on evangelism could be better named You Can Tell It…with God’s Help! or You Cannot Tell It…without God’s Help! or You Will Not Tell It…without Obedience! or They Will Not Believe It Without God…but Tell It Anyway! or Why Tell It…Because God Said So! or Tell Your Self…It is God Who Saves!
The great prophet Isaiah has powerful words of motivation for the evangelist. Consider his short course in evangelism.
Just as a woman with child, who draws near the time of her delivery, is in pain and cries out in her pangs; so we have been before you, Yahweh. We have been with child. We have been in pain. We gave birth, it seems, only to wind.We have not worked any deliverance in the earth; neither have the inhabitants of the world fallen. Your dead shall live. My dead bodies shall arise.Awake and sing, you who dwell in the dust; for your dew is like the dew of herbs, and the earth will cast out the departed spirits.Isaiah 26:17-19 (WEB)
Isaiah’s words about our total inability in evangelism give us boldness to be confident and persistent evangelists… because God is able!
