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PROGRAM D-8366
Would you gladly share water with a thirsty person if you had water and she or he didn’t? Imagine that you see a person dying from thirst. I’m fairly certain that most of us would not even think twice about it: We’d offer the water to the dying person in a minute.
I doubt we would worry about looking pushy or aggressive. I don’t think we’d even expect a personal invitation in order to stop and offer water to this thirsty person. Our compassion and care for the concern of the dying person would cause us to act quickly in order to help.
Yet when it comes to sharing the water of life, we often hesitate. As born-again believers in a world that is dying of spiritual thirst, we have, so to speak, a bottle full of life-saving water which will quench the thirst and bring life to the people all around us. We have what the lost world needs. But we are far less likely to share our spiritual soul-saving water than we are to share life-saving bottled water with a thirsty person.
Why? Oh, we have our reasons:
- We don’t want to appear to be pushy, fanatical Christians.
- We’re afraid we can’t answer all the questions. We feel a lack of know-how or knowledge.
- We decide ahead of time that they don’t really want to know the gospel.
- We don’t feel as though we have our act together well enough; we’re not good enough Christians.
- We don’t want to appear foolish or make a fool out of ourselves.
I’m not trying to lay a guilt trip on us for not sharing our faith. Often I’ve felt a lot of guilt as I’ve listened to messages about witnessing because I wasn’t the bold witness I thought I should be.
Sharing our faith from guilt is not what it’s all about! Rather, we need to get a fresh view of what it means to share our faith, and how desperately many people need the good news that we have. Then, we will not be ashamed of the gospel and we will want to share it appropriately.
I’d like to focus on our hesitation to share our faith—especially on our jobs—give you some ideas, and hopefully inspire you to be more active as a witness of what Christ has done for you. We all want to be able to say, “I am not ashamed of the gospel of Jesus Christ!”