“A student asked Pastor Adrian Rogers for advice on how to lead a church in evangelism. Rogers said,
Your zeal is never any greater than your conviction. You can cheer others with your enthusiasm or their loyalty to the church or put them on a guilt trip for a while, but the only thing that will have a lasting effect is their love in the Lord Jesus Christ. It’s not even a love for souls that sends people out; it’s the love of Jesus that sends people out.
The highest level of motivation for sharing our faith is love.
We need not be “guilted” into sharing our faith. We need not be tricked or forced into telling others of Christ. We need a heart transplant. We need to develop a deeper love for God first and then choose to love people, even the unlovely, because Christ first loved us.”
- William McRaney Jr., The Art of Personal Evangelism (200-201)
Evangelism is something I struggle with. It’s not my strong point and usually my attempts leave me feeling like an evangelistic failure.
The other week I was remembering a missions trip I took to Ethiopia in 2007. It was the last day in our first village, a huge crowd gathered as we were beginning to leave. It came to the point that some of our translators and disciplermakers were beginning to fear for our safety urging us to quickly load in the vans and leave.
As we got in the vans were surrounded by people and, to be honest, I was nervous as our drivers were making their way through the crowd to the little dirt road. These weren’t the most sturdy vehicles and people weren’t exactly clearly the way.
Thankfully, we made it out safely.
As we made our way down the dusty road in the middle of a desert in Oromia people began running alongside of the van begging to be let in. Why? They wanted to hear about Jesus. It was almost comical in a way…one would jump in, profess faith, be prayed for then jump out and as they jumped out {of a moving vehicle} another would jump in. We started calling it drive-by salvation. It happened three times that day.
These people were chasing after a moving vehicle and jumping inside. We had a story to tell…one of hope and they were desperate to hear it.
People are dying all over the world and yet we wait–I wait–to tell them, to bring them hope. We craft sermons and programs and prepare our testimony and wait…and they’re just desperate for a little hope, a little light.
I wonder what is it that keeps us waiting? The perfect circumstances? A mission trip? When we know all the right answers? When we *finally* have our act together?
Or is it that our love for God is smaller than we’d like to admit? Are we motivated more by guilt and obligation than love?
Have I ever been so desperate for the Living Hope that is Jesus that I’d run alongside a moving car until they let me in? I don’t know. I think more often than naught my faith is comfortable and complacent. What about you?
What motivates you to share the Gospel?
Tagged as:
evangelism,
gospel,
Living Intentionally,
missions
