A Simple Way to Obey One of the Hardest Commands in the Bible
Do you find it uncomfortable to share your faith?
By Rosilind Jukic
Maybe the idea of telling someone about Jesus intimidates you.
Maybe your natural introverted side makes it hard for you to take the first step.
Whatever the reason, if you find it hard to share your faith, then you need to read on.
While I realize that some reading this will respond by saying that Jesus said that if we are ashamed of Him before men, He’d be ashamed of us before the Father (Matt. 10:32, Mark 8:38, Luke 9:26), I believe that for many people, the difficulty of sharing their faith is less about shame and more about method.
While there are many methods to share our faith, there are some that are effective and some that are not at all.
In fact, I’d go so far to say that some methods of sharing our faith are so ineffective that one could hardly even refer to them as “sharing our faith.”
I will be writing more about this in the next post, but first I think we need to understand why it is even necessary to share our faith.
The why is so important, because I firmly believe that when we understand the why, we’re already halfway there.
And I do believe that this generation of believers have been so indoctrinated with humanism, and are so void of true biblical doctrine, that they don’t even understand why sharing our faith is so important.
But when we understand that Christianity is not as inclusive as we think, the urgency to share our faith begins to grow exponentially.
Three Reasons to Share Your Faith
1. Hell is real.
There was a time when this truth is what drove people to share their faith. The reality of hell, and the seriousness of what the Bible says about hell, drove people to plead with friends and family to accept Christ so as to escape its horrors.
But we are more cultured now.
Demons and the devil are cartoon characters, and hell is as fictional as Harry Potter.
Satan’s strategy of deception has worked.
He has succeeded in removing the reality that there is a literal afterlife, an eternal, excruciating, and incomprehensible torment from which its prisoners can’t ever escape.
And when Christians are not very convinced that such a place exists, they do not feel compelled to rescue people.
But we must come back to the question asked a couple of weeks ago: If we talk about salvation, what are people being saved from?
If we are unsure of even that most elementary question, then suddenly the foundations of what we believe in are unstable, and the enemy is free to move in with his next deception:
All religions essentially lead to God.
If all religions lead to God, then 90 percent of the Bible is irrelevant at best and utter nonsense at worst, because the Old Testament is filled with examples of Israel conquering pagan nations and commands to destroy their pagan altars, while the New Testament commands us over and over again to go and preach the gospel.
However, when we expose Satan’s strategy of deception and become convinced of a literal hell and the exclusivity of the gospel—meaning that only those who have accepted Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior will escape hell and enjoy eternity in heaven—we suddenly become acutely aware of the dire need to share our faith with any and all who will listen.
2. The Bible commands us.
Throughout the New Testament we are commanded to share our faith, starting with Jesus’ command to His 12 disciples (Matt. 10) and then His 70 disciples (Luke 10). In Mark 16, He commanded us to go into all the world and preach the gospel.
Sharing our faith is not optional for believer, it is an essential element to the Christian way of life.
Peter said that it is God’s will that none perish, but how will people escape hell if they are not warned ahead of time of what awaits them on the other side of eternity?
3. It strengthens our faith.
In 1994, I had a crisis of faith. Having grown up in the church, I unquestionably believed everything I was taught and knew all of the pat answers for every question.
But suddenly being thrust on my own far from my family and home church, in a very toxic situation, I was no longer convinced of anything. Truth be told, I even wondered God was real and if Christianity was a valid religion.
One day, out of desperation, I sat down on my bedroom floor, with my Bible and all of the theological books I had surrounding me, and I cried out “God! I need you to show me in the Bible that You are who You say You are. I need to know beyond any shadow of any doubt that this life I’m living right now has meaning and validity!”
I spent hours reading and researching, and God answered my prayer. All of the theological things I had begun to doubt, one by one, were put to rest in my heart.
But now I no longer parroted what I had heard, the answers came from my heart—a heart that was deeply convinced on its own, because I now knew what I believed and why!
This crisis of faith was single-handedly the most pivotal moment of my Christian walk.
The Bible doesn’t just command us to share our faith as an effort to rescue people from Satan’s destruction, but also because sharing our faith forces us to examine what we believe and why.
One of the best ways to become convinced about a matter is being put in a situation where we are forced to defend our position.
When someone throws an argument at us that causes us to realize that we are just repeating talking points, without any real convincing data, we are forced to admit that it’s time to hit the books and really learn what the Bible says.
It is not admitting defeat or failure to say to someone, “I don’t know the answer to your question, but I promise I will go research it and let you know when I find the answer.”
But be sure to follow through on that.
Doing this will not only cause you to earn respect, it will also solidify your faith in a way nothing else will.
Now we know why we share our faith; in the next post, we will discover the best ways to do it.
Rosilind Jukic, a Pacific Northwest native, is a missionary living in Croatia and married to her Bosnian hero. Together they live with their two active boys where she enjoys fruity candles, good coffee and a hot cup of herbal tea on a blustery fall evening.
(Source: charismamag.com)
