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A Personal
Challenge
People who are
spiritually dead are all around us. People without a born-again, personal
relationship with Jesus Christ are in our workplace, our neighborhood, our
home.
As an evangelist,
I travel around quite a bit. I see churches with all of their activities and
programs that seemingly have little or nothing to do with bringing anyone to
know Jesus Christ. I think there are some hard questions that have to be
asked of the church today.
Hard Questions
How many of us
have been the means by which someone came to know Jesus Christ? Do we really
believe that unless someone is born again he is damned? Where's our sense of
urgency? I'm fearful for all of us, that when we stand before the living,
holy God we are going to be humbled into the dust because we have so
pitifully failed to carry out the Great Commission.
| "How many of us have been the means by
which someone came to know Jesus Christ?" |
We seem to have
forgotten our mission, and that God has provided everything we need to
fulfill it. The resurrection power of Christ, the power that raised Him from
the dead, lives in us. With that kind of power, what excuse are we going to
offer to God for not sharing our faith?
You Are
Needed
Out of 100
conversions, only 15 come to know Christ from an event like an evangelistic
service. Eight-five come to know Christ through a personal witness. That's
how important it is for us to speak to others about Christ.
If you have never
opened your mouth, you are guilty of the sin of silence. Maybe you think you
can't make much of a difference, but you can. Consider, for example, the
following story. One evening a deacon, for a reason known only to him, set
aside a visitation card that somebody had turned in to the church with a
request for a home visit. That week President John F. Kennedy was
assassinated. To that deacon's shock, the next Tuesday when he came back to
look at the cards for visitation, the name on that particular card was Lee
Harvey Oswald, the man who had shot the President.
Excuses
There is a
tendency for Christians today to expect someone else to evangelize. We have
the classic excuses: "I'm too busy." "It's the pastor's job." "I don't have
the gift of evangelism." We find excuse after excuse after excuse.
When Peter denied
Christ three times, he said, in so many words, that he had never seen or
heard of Jesus. None of us would have the audacity to say that. But we do
the same thing in another way: We deny Jesus Christ by our excuses and our
silence.
How Many
Share Their
Faith?
I want to ask a
very hard question. Have you, in the last year, taken your Bible and turned
the pages of Scripture, with someone who is unsaved, to show him how to
become a born-again Christian? I have never been in a church where more than
10% of the congregation indicated that they had shared their faith in the
last year. May God forgive us!
This is serious
business. A person without a born again, personal relationship with Christ
is on the way to hell. The endless torment, the darkness, the gnashing of
teeth. There is an urgency about sharing our faith. Yet some of us remain in
silence. I don't understand it.
A Dream
I had a dream. In
my dream was an ocean full of drowning people. There was a rock that came up
out of this ocean. Some people crawled up on that rock and got to safety.
| "There is an urgency about sharing our
faith. Yet some of us remain in silence. I don't understand it." |
As I watched, 10%
of the people on the rock became active in making ropes and ladders, getting
near the edge, trying to pull others up on the rock. But 90% became very
active in their rock gardens, their rock music, their rock jobs, their rock
lives. They had a lot of rock meetings where they spent lots of time
developing their programs to go back to the ocean -- but they never went.
The thought that
kept coming through all the time in this dream was, "Could they have
forgotten that they themselves were once in the sea?"
A small group of
people who seemed to be the leaders bothered me even more. They spent time
trying to get up higher on the rock. It seemed they didn't want to get near
the edge because it was risky down there. The dead, the diseased, the lost
-- they were down there. But the group on the rock spent more time
cloistered in false security on the higher parts of the rock. Yet every one
of them heard a voice say, "Will you come? Will you help Me?"
Will We
Take A Risk?
In my dream, the
rock was the cross of Calvary. The voice they heard was Jesus Christ,
calling you and me to come. There's only one thing that remains, and that is
whether or not we will. The question is, will you and I be different? Will
we be willing to hear the voice and take a risk and speak out in order to
rescue others?
If your answer is
yes, pray these words right now:
God, make me your willing
servant. I have been wrong to be silent. Every day, every moment, I will
endeavor to share You with others.
Remember:
Success is not leading someone to Christ. Success is acting out your
Christian life, sharing the gospel, and trusting God for the results.
Key
Words
-
Born Again:
to be given new spiritual life through Christ; to become a child of God (see
John3).
-
Christian:
someone who has personally accepted the free gift of salvation provided by
Jesus Christ.
-
Eternal Life:
the state of being in a right relationship with God, and existing forever in
heaven.
-
Faith: the
act of trusting, relying on, depending on someone to do something for you.
To be rescued from sin's penalty we need to trust Jesus Christ.
-
Forgiveness:
the removal of the penalty for the wrongs we have committed.
-
Gospel:
the truths about Jesus' life, death, and resurrection, and how we can have
eternal life.
-
Heaven:
the place of God's special presence and the eternal home of all who have
been forgiven.
-
Hell: the
place of eternal judgment for all who have rejected Christ.
-
Inner Peace:
a personal sense of joy and contentment that comes to those who are in a
right relationship with God.
-
Jesus Christ:
the second person of the triune God who became the God-man in order to pay
the penalty for our sin and restore us to God.
-
Salvation:
the work of God by which He rescues sinners bound for hell and grants
forgiveness because of what Christ has done on the cross.
-
Sin: any
violation of God's laws.
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