If you’re blessed with children, you probably have no problem finding words to share with others about how much you love your kids and about some of the reasons why.
Hopefully, you have the same ease of explaining to others about why you love your spouse so much.
Some of you certainly have no problem explaining why you support your favorite sports team or why your favorite movie is so important to you.
We’re used to telling others about why certain people or things are important to us, of how our life is better because those people or things are in our lives.
So we all should have no problem explaining to others about why we love Christ, right? It should be as natural as explaining why we support our Super Bowl-winning favorite football team, correct?
Hmmmm……
I Peter 3:15 says that if someone asks about our Christian hope, we should always be ready to explain it to them.
But how ready are we?
I want to encourage you to shift your thinking about evangelism away from a script mentality geared toward making a faith pitch. I believe you’ll be more likely to talk about your faith if it becomes a more natural event during the everyday conversations with those around you.
Think about your conversations with co-workers. You would never say, “OK, today I’m going to give you a 15-minute presentation about how wonderful my spouse is.”
Instead, you build up your spouse in the eyes of others, one brief comment to others at a time.
It might be a momentary word of praise for how your spouse did a long-needed, undesirable household chore without being asked. Such words of praise show the character and humility of your spouse and builds up his or her standing in the eyes of those around you.
The same principle applies with how you describe your children to co-workers, neighbors or other relatives. Brief, sincere, everyday-life affirmations are SO much more likely to be seen as valid rather than contrived.
And so it is with laying the foundation for our testimony of faith. A sentence or two about the following situations can lay solid blocks on the pathway of influence:
· A phone call blessing out of the blue from a haven’t-seen-forever friend who called when you needed a boost.
· A precious feeling of peace after a wayward child has come home and asked to be part of the family again.
· A soul-stirring worship service and sermon that helped to lift you out of a deep, emotional valley.
It is the random yet recurring tidbits of God’s intercessory love that often provide the stepping stones of influence across which we can later carry redemptive Truth as you share your faith.
Remember, explaining to others our hope for future requires explaining God’s help in our past.
Sharing faith can be SO much easier, more natural and more effective this way.
As always, I love you
Martin
