This may sound strange but as a kid not only did I not feel called to Missions, the idea of sharing the Gospel scared me to death. Part of this had to do with my introverted personality [1] but in a deeper sense my fear of sharing the Gospel came from lies that Satan had been telling me about evangelism.
The Devil loves to deceive us when it comes to witnessing so we rely on our own power instead of God’s by telling us things like:
- You shouldn’t witness if you have fear so wait till there isn’t any [2].
- Your job is to prove that person is wrong [3]
- Witnessing is the responsibility of those who find it easy like extroverts
- You must have an answer to every question they ask
- And most importantly if everything doesn’t go smoothly you have failed
That last part always got to me as a young person because I was never good at small talk. Even today I’m more comfortable with a book in the corner than mingling with people. Because of this my attempts to share the Gospel were often awkward and uncomfortable…I walked away from many of them incredibly embarrassed.
Of course you know Satan was right there in those moments of embarrassment
- Wow you really made a fool of yourself there
- I bet those people are making fun of you right now!
- How many more times are you going to mess this up before you let some of the real people (extroverts) do it?
- You know you failed God right?
That one (you know you failed God) was a dagger in the heart because I believed like many Christians the goal was “to win someone to Christ” when in reality my goal is to share the Gospel clearly since NOTHING I do can lead a person to Salvation [4]. My misunderstanding of this meant every witnessing opportunity that didn’t result in Salvation was viewed as a failure.
So for many years I sat on the sidelines allowing fear of failure to keep me from sharing Christ. It wasn’t till God called me to missions as Junior in High School that I realized Satan had been lying to me for so long. The truly sad thing is in order to protect myself from what I viewed as failure [5] I willingly chose to take part in the actual failure….allowing my fear to keep me from sharing.
So let me give some words of hope to those who would rather get teeth pulled without pain meds than witness to their next door neighbour…
It’s okay if you fail
The truth is when we share the Gospel and its not accepted part of us will feel like a failure as Satan is screaming at us “you have failed!” but the reality is if we have shared God’s truth in a complete way we haven’t
- So its okay to have shaking hands
- and say Umm or uh fifty times
- or spend most of the conversation looking at the ground
- While making yourself look like a moron
The question we must ask ourselves afterwards is “did I share the Gospel in a clear way?” If the answer to that question is yes then you’ve succeeded no matter how much embarrassment was experienced.
The thing is we as a Church have been tricked by Satan into choosing failure so that we won’t experience what we view to be failure. So the answer is to understand the success or failure of a witness has absolutely nothing to do with how we feel…but instead about what we did with the Gospel of Christ.
[1]: I wrote about this a few weeks ago in a post that can be read here https://johnwilburn.org/2016/03/18/the-you-have-to-be-an-extrovert-to-evangelize-myth/ (https://johnwilburn.org/2016/03/18/the-you-have-to-be-an-extrovert-to-evangelize-myth/)
[2]: the truth is sharing Christ can still fill my heart with anxiety from time to time
[3]: actually this is God’s job through the Holy Spirits conviction instead of mine
[4]: I explained this in detail yesterday in my post https://johnwilburn.org/2016/04/04/its-not-your-job-to-save-anybody/ (https://johnwilburn.org/2016/04/04/its-not-your-job-to-save-anybody/)
[5]: not winning someone to Christ
svgmissionary.com 