When the Apostle Paul wrote these words to
Timothy, Paul believed that his days on Earth were coming to an end. Paul
wanted to help prepare Timothy to carry on the important work of taking the
Good News about Jesus Christ to those who had not yet heard. As long as one
person has not heard and understood about Salvation, our work as witnessing
Christians isn’t done, despite the challenges we may face to do so. That’s what
Paul wanted us to remember. In practice, Paul was simply reaffirming to another
generation what all followers of Jesus had been commanded to do by Him: After being saved through His grace, we must help
others receive the same gift. Why was that message important in the early
church? Few had heard of Jesus, and many who had heard disputed His Divine
nature.Jesus knew how important this task was because it was his last direction
to his eleven disciples in the book of Matthew. (See Matthew 28:19-20.) Last
messages are remembered best, and our Lord was again perfect in His wisdom in
choosing this message.
When Paul was still called Saul, he had a
hard heart toward Jesus and the early Christians, being a leader in rebuking,
punishing, and stoning them. Paul only accepted Jesus as Lord and Savior after
He appeared in His blinding glory on the road to Damascus and asked Paul why he
was persecuting Him. God’s plan wasn’t to repeat that method of conversion, as
was evidenced by Christ sending Paul a vision of Ananias restoring Paul’s sight
and then directing Ananias to perform the miracle and to baptize Paul in the
Holy Spirit.Despite this clear direction and the hard work of many great pastors,
missionaries, evangelists, and witnessing Christians for nearly two thousand
years, a global survey today would probably show that the majority of people on
Earth either don’t know about God’s promises to us or don’t believe those
promises. That’s a sad commentary on how well we are following the Lord’s
direction to bring His Good News to everyone. How many lost people are there
compared to those who are saved? Only God knows, but the ratio is surely no
more than ten to one and may well be as low as six to one. Some would argue
that the 30 percent of the world’s population that identify themselves as
Christians are a larger number, but many of
those self-proclaimed Christian
Testimonies have not repented of their sins and accepted
Jesus as their Lord and Savior. If we equally divided names of the lost into
individual lists for each Christian, there would only be six to ten names on
each list. If each Christian immediately began making contacts, each lost
person would hear the Good News very quickly. Some Christians would be done
making first contact in a single day to their share of the lost. If these
Christians repeated the contacts daily, most would have succeeded in getting
the message across in a convincing way to their share of the lost within a
month. As the number of Christians grew and more people joined in witnessing,
the number of people for each Christian to contact would become smaller and
each lost person would receive more testimonies. The combined effect of such a
concentrated effort would be marvelous. Some people undoubtedly have such hard
hearts that they wouldn’t receive the blessings of this heavenly information no
matter how many Christian Testimony Books they
heard. But the task of fulfilling God’s call to help all be saved would be as
complete as Christian efforts and prayers can Witnessing Made Easy: Yes, You
Can Make a Difference accomplish. Christians could then keep knocking on
the hard hearts and eventually many more souls would be saved.What’s our point?
If everyone does some witnessing, it’s not a big job. Why then is there so much
work to be done? It’s because most Christians don’t share their faith with lost
people. Many people estimate that over 90 percent of Christians have never
witnessed to anyone, and most of the rest have done little witnessing. Our
survey at Jubilee Worship Center (JWC) showed that the majority of church members
were either doing nothing or very little before being exposed to the church’s
emphasis on witnessing.Here is what one Christian woman told us about her
attitudes toward witnessing before
meeting in-congregation evangelists at JWC:
I have attended church for most of my adult
life and have been involved in many of the ministries of the church. I have
taught Sunday School to preschoolers through adults, served as an elder, served
as church secretary, served as janitor, etc., just as many other church members
have done. To me, this was what church was all about, and I found great
satisfaction in what I was doing. The internal workings of the church were my delight.
That was all I knew. The churches I
had attended placed little or no emphasis on evangelism …. We were under the
impression that anything to do with Evangelism
Training was under the job description of the pastors and the
missionaries. This was their duty and that’s why we hired them. We all knew
that passing out tracts or tapes or whatever was for the overboard fanatics …
all this was out of our scope.
Change satisfied witnessing inaction into inspired witnessing, and Christians will quickly and easily transform humanity in the ways that God intended. How do you get everyone busy witnessing? You need an in-congregation evangelist to light the fire of desire for witnessing and to fan its flames with teaching how to witness. Why do we say that? Because our survey answers showed that JWC members who responded (almost the whole congregation) became active witnesses after in-congregation evangelists were appointed.
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