I met a man the other day named William. At first, our conversation was about the mechanics of fitting a Pentel eraser to the aft end of a Zebra 301 pencil. But it soon turned toward God and the sheer goodness and awesomeness of His plan.
It’s always so refreshing to run across people like that, who take time out of their day to not only help you accomplish what you set out to do, but also make it simply pleasant. There’s nothing more energizing than talking about God!
I’ve been focusing lately on getting God in my conversations. I continually think nowadays about who around me needs what I have to give. Just asking someone where they go to church or telling them Jesus loves them can make their day. You have no idea the benefit it is for them when you take just a couple seconds to tell them about the Lord.
Something that seems so small and almost insignificant to us can be the world to the one you’re telling it to. For instance, the “God bless you” I said to Daniel. What does it cost you to ask a person if he knows Jesus? Or what liability is it to you to smile at them and tell the good news that Jesus loves them? Hardly any, but the returns are astronomical!
This past Sunday afternoon I had some time to myself and I spent it at the bookstore. I grabbed a couple of my favorite magazines and a Chai Latte, and I sat down for a treat. Then a fellow at another table spoke to me; John was his name. He asked me are those reading glasses I’m wearing? No, I said, and then the conversation turned almost immediately toward the Lord. I still don’t know how that happened.
But for the next thirty minutes or so we talked about God and our need to spread His love. We spoke earnestly—and with quite a bit of volume—about the call to take the Gospel to the lost. We lamented the state of Christianity, that no one cares about his fellow man’s eternity. We boldly spoke that the only way to salvation is through our Lord Jesus Christ. All of this at a coffee shop inside Borders.
I later attended a service at a nearby church. (We don’t have service on Sunday nights, so I wasn’t playing hooky!) Well, this church had a guest minister in, and boy, was he a fireball. He preached on being frozen in the fire. We Christians, if we don’t watch ourselves, can become complacent and lackadaisical with our relationship with God—even in the midst of revival. He gave some symptoms of a freezing Christian. One of them was having no compassion for the lost. Was God trying to say something to me that day?
To top it all off, this morning on the radio I heard Dr. David Jeremiah speak about the fact that there is a “proxyism,” as he calls it, concerning missions. A Proxy is something that stands in the place of another, and there has appeared in recent years a proxy for Christ’s Great Commission. People have said that if you can’t go, then send a substitute. Send money to a missionary, and that will be just the same. But God never said that! That’s not in the Word. The only thing mentioned in the word is “Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations.
” (Matthew 28:19 NKJV)
It’s an absolute lie that we don’t have to speak to others about Christ so long as we are putting money in the offering plate. You’ve got to do both. So, I encourage you to try it. Go out, find someone, and just start talking. Open up with something goofy, like inquiring about the genre of their spectacles! :o) You don’t have to pack up and move to Thailand or Timbuktu, but you do have to tell your neighbors wherever you are.
~Jonathan
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On June 24th, 2007, at 11:16 pm
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