Tag: faith

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Share Your Faith

Share Your Faith

Evangelism 101

When I was in college getting my music ministry degree, one of the required courses was Evangelism 101. In this class, we were required to share the gospel with one person (not another student) every week.  For this introverted, shy and quiet person, it was like asking me to get up on a stage in front of millions of people all staring me. My first thought was, “How am I going to get out of this?” followed by “I need this class to graduate!” As a Christian, I believe God when He says we are to go and make disciples of all nations (Matthew 28:16-20) and this class was forcing me out of my comfort zone, approach total strangers, and tell them about Jesus!!  (It also improved my prayer life.) Thanks, Dr. Jumper!

I’ll admit, the first week I seriously considered writing a work of fiction to turn in as my assignment. Pushing that thought aside, I asked myself what I was really afraid of; embarrassment, harassment, verbal abuse or worse? Okay, so I was afraid of getting tongue tied and embarrassing myself.  What if I said something really stupid? So, I armed myself with a little script to help me stay on track while trying to keep my cool.  Then I made a plan of attack.

Faith in Action

I would pretend to shop at the local Family Dollar while scoping out unsuspecting female shoppers who I could strike up a conversation.  It went something like this.

“Oh, hi!” <big smile> “Are you finding any good sales today?” <still smiling> They would usually politely smile back and then give me a look as if I worked there and was annoying them. Not giving up, I would continue with something like, “Do you go to church anywhere around here?” to which I would get a “yeah” for a response. Still smiling I would respond with, “That’s great! Where?” By this point, I would get the annoyed sigh and some mumbled response while she turned to escape. But sometimes, I would actually engage with her and we would start talking about church, faith, and Jesus. After 16 weeks of this, I got pretty good.

Lifestyle Evangelism

I passed the class and continued with my studies.  Do you want to know what changed?  Me. I now had a new lifestyle.  Wherever I went, I looked for opportunities to talk to someone about church, faith, and Jesus – always inviting them to church. This is a practice I continue to this day. Just last week we hired a plumber to fix our toilet.  I chatted with him about the details of the job we hired him to do and some questions we had. As he was finishing up, I asked him if he went to church anywhere. He said he did but not very often.  I invited him to church and he said he probably would. The rest is up to the Holy Spirit – not me.

Bob and I went out to dinner this weekend to celebrate our 25thanniversary and our server went above and beyond to make it special for us. As we were leaving I handed her a church business card and asked her if she went to church anywhere. She said yes with a big smile.  I told her about our church and invited her to join us sometime.

Invite Your One

The point is, preparation, practice, and prayer will help you overcome any fear or insecurities you may have sharing your faith or even just inviting someone to church. If you are not in the practice of inviting people to church, try it and you may be surprised how not scary it is and how often people say yes.  They’re just waiting for the invitation.

#SharetheLove this week and invite someone to church with you.  It doesn’t have to be a total stranger – maybe your neighbor, a family member or a friend to make it easy the first time. If we are to make disciples of all nations, it has to start in our own backyards.

Share Your Faith

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Pray Without Ceasing

Pray

The Holy Spirit led Paul to write to the believers in Thessalonica (1 Thessalonians 5:17), saying after “Rejoice always,” “Pray without ceasing.” I’m not any kind of Bible scholar, but I don’t think these statements are suggestions.

They are obviously imperatives—commands.

I can at least vaguely understand how I might be able to rejoice all the time, but pray all the time? Impossible! – At least as I had always understood it. I had a living to make, a house to keep up, and a husband and children to care for. I couldn’t be kneeling down, bowing my head, or whatever requirements there might be to be praying all the time.

Surely preachers and Sunday School teachers had tried to teach me better for years, but I never quite got the message. Until…until, as it so often happens, a circumstance, an occasion or an event comes along to make things clear.

                My daughter died in a vehicle accident. I was devastated and I cried out,

“My child, my daughter, my first-born, my, my, my!”

God spoke to me, not just a feeling inside, but translated to me in words inaudible to anyone else, “What’s this my business? I let you in on the fun of placing this little person on earth, but she never belonged to you. She was mine from the beginning because I was her creator and then she was mine multiplied over when she accepted my son Jesus as her Savior and Lord.

You had a great 33-year loan but I didn’t have to ask your permission to bring her home to me.”

His words were stern but not harsh. He was taking part in the dialogue of prayer.

Dialogue? Yes! Without intention or even recognizing what I was doing, I had engaged in true prayer.

His words were stern but not harsh

That prayer is a dialogue rather than some kind of monologue from me was the first lesson I learned. The second was perhaps even more wonderful. Prayer needn’t be an event with boundaries of time or place, but more of a state of being. It should be an ongoing, unceasing state of communication. At any moment I can reach out to my Dearest Abba Father and whisper, “I love you,” “I need you, please help me,” “I can’t understand this, would you please instruct your Holy Spirit inside me to teach me,” and most powerfully, “I don’t know how to pray right now. Please let your Holy Spirit know my heart and speak for me.

I guess these things are from my side again but with an open door for God to speak to me, sometimes in answers to what I have said, but often without my beginning any dialogue. Perhaps I can be looking in a mirror, frowning at what seems to be an obvious flaw or sign of aging to me, and I hear His gentle voice saying, “You are just as I made you and I love you just the way you are.” To my best-intentioned but still mid-excellent singing, “Trust me, one day you’ll do better up here.” At some time when I’ve really tried to do something which has been unnoticed by all the humans around me, simple words of encouragement: “Good job!” At a season of personal despair: “I cherish you.”

“I cherish you.”

Sometimes I forget the prayer lessons I’ve learned an unwittingly go back to those earlier misguided days, but it only takes a moment for His gentle reminder that our prayer time together is real and unceasing.

Do I pray for God’s guidance? Of course, I do, and sometimes I even do so in the same way I formerly thought was the only way to pray—a set-aside time either early in the morning or the last thing at night looking forward to the next day—asking His direction and blessing on that time to come.

I’m not trying to disparage this kind of action, but even asking for direction, I find that I now am more likely to follow the immediate and constant contact that has been given to me.

Whenever big decisions or events are imminent, I say, “Go before me, Lord, I always want to be following you. Open doors, but just as importantly, close doors before me. I would even prefer that you slam them to make your will clear to me. Help me remember that I want to follow only your will. That I would not be led off in trying to follow my own when I know that is hardly wise.”

Sometimes this prayer for guidance can even be for something simple or minor, yet remembering that the Father wants to hear about the little things of my life, too. My husband thinks my prayers can be kind of silly, but God and I don’t think so. “Lord, I just lost one of the lovely blue earrings that I’m so fond of.

If it’s your will, please lead me to it.” However much some bystanders might scoff, the number of times He has graciously answered such prayers is astounding.

Sometimes this prayer for guidance can even be for something simple or minor, yet remembering that the Father wants to hear about the little things of my life, too.

Praying without ceasing covers all areas of communication with God: guidance, protection, healing, provision, deliverance and intervention. Yet guidance actually covers them all and I have been so gifted to have this privilege of communication with the master and creator of the universe, my Dearest Abba Father.

-By Trudy Graham