Stop Praying for Opportunities to Witness

“I don’t pray for opportunities to witness anymore because they are all around us; we just don’t take them.” I don’t know who said this, but ouch! This is so true! We as Christians know we need to be sharing our faith but don’t to it. There are lost people walking all around us, yet we can’t gather enough nerve to open our mouths for the Gospel. We will gladly chat away when we run into a stranger who is wearing our favorite collage football team’s logo, but we are too afraid to share the Gospel with a stranger. This mentality plagued me for years. I knew I needed to share the Gospel, but I couldn’t; I didn’t know how to. I recently heard that only 2% of Christians share their faith. This is so sad. Why is this? Charles Finney put his finger on the reason why: “It is the great business of every Christian to save souls. People complain that they do not know how to take hold of this matter. Why, the reason is plain enough; they have never studied it. They have never taken the proper pains to qualify themselves for the work. If you do not make it a matter of study, how you may successfully act in building up the kingdom of Christ, you are acting a very wicked and absurd part as a Christian.” He is right!

So what are you going to do about it? You need to learn how to share your faith. Let me give you some suggestions as how to do that. Ray Comfort wrote a book call The Way of the Master. This book got the ball rolling in my life learning to actively share faith. If you look on the right of your screen you will see a link to listen to Ray Comfort’s message entitled, “Hell’s Best Kept Secret.” If you can, listen to that right now. It is a powerful message about evangelism. I have been doing a lot of “street evangelism.” No, this does not mean that I roam the streets at night witnessing to bums, thugs, prostitutes, and drug dealers. Street evangelism or “public evangelism,” as I like to call it, is all about going out in public, whether it be the mall, Walmart, courthouse, college campus, Wendy’s, or anywhere people are, with the purpose of deliberately sharing the Gospel with strangers. It is not a passive kind of witnessing where a Christian would wait for a lost person to ask why he or she is so different. It is not forming a two-year relationship throwing a Frisbee back and forth to develop trust and credibility to earn the right to share with someone. No no, this is going out, striking up a conversation with a stranger, moving the conversation over to spiritual matters, and then sharing the Gospel.

“I could never do that.” “That is too scary.” These are some of the remarks I get from Christians. On the right side of your screen is a ticker that shows how many people have died since you opened this page. Look at how fast that this runs. It is amazing how many people die each day, and Christians don’t seem concerned enough to swallow their pride and fear to go out and share the gospel with a stranger. If you love your neighbor as yourself, you will be concerned about where they spend eternity. I don’t doubt that you are concerned about where strangers will spend eternity, but will you do something about it? Charles Spurgeon said, “have you no wish for others to be saved, then you're not saved yourself be sure of that,” and Roy Hargrave said, “Reach out to lost people. Give them the truth. Be bold about it. Don't be sheepish or apologetic about it. What we do is the measure of what we really believe. The rest is just religious talk. Faith without works is dead.”