Have you ever shared your faith with someone who didn’t seem very interested? What happens if you take the risk and nothing happens? Or worse, what if you share and they get angry?
In this video, retired Major Wes Bowers shares about a time when conversations didn’t seem to be going very well. Unknown to Wes, God wasn’t finished yet.
Our role is very simple: to share the Good News in the power of the Spirit. That’s where our job ends. Only the Holy Spirit can turn a person’s heart toward God. Dr. Bill Bright, founder of CRU International, defined successful witnessing this way:
Successful witnessing is simply taking the initiative to share Christ in the power of the Holy Spirit and leaving the results to God.
Read that last part again; it’s important. The success of your witness is not dependant on whether or not the persons you are witnessing to accept Christ in that moment. It’s not even dependant on whether or not they accept Christ a decade from now.
Witnessing can seem overwhelming if we think that it’s all up to us. Waiting on God’s timing forces us to remember that absolutely nothing we can do will make people enter the Kingdom of God. We can’t love people into it; we can’t argue them into it. We can’t convince them or persuade them or entice them to accept Christ. That’s not our job and it’s not our role.
Galatians 6:9 says, Let us not become weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up.
Be encouraged! If you took the initiative to share your faith, you were a successful witness. Now keep going!