Acts 1:8
But ye shall receive power, after that the Holy Ghost is come upon you: and ye shall be witnesses unto me both in Jerusalem, and in all Judaea, and in Samaria, and unto the uttermost part of the earth.
I receive a magazine called The Voice of the Martyrs. If you have never read it, I would strongly advise putting your name on their mailing list so you can receive this free publication. I say free because they do not charge money to send it to you. However, the articles within those pages were definitely not obtained freely.
Those articles were obtained through the price being paid by many witnesses for Christ. The stories of dedication to the call placed on each and every one of us who call ourselves Christians are nothing short of inspiring to say the least.
As I read those articles, I am always brought to my knees to repent. Here those people are willing to risk their very lives in order to share the gospel, yet we here in America find it difficult to witness in the local grocery store or in our own neighborhood. Is it because our neighbors or the cashier are wielding machétes? No, of course not! Instead, we tremble and shake at the thought of someone giving us a weird look or saying something rude to us. We fear rejection.
Maybe we fear rejection because we have not yet come to terms with the fact that people are not rejecting us; they are rejecting Jesus. Taking it one step further, maybe they are not rejecting anyone, but are merely not ready to receive Jesus as their Lord right at that moment. However, if we will get over our fears and just go ahead and be a witness, we might be amazed to know just how many people end up coming to know Jesus as their Lord and Savior as a result of our witnessing. Such is the topic of today's boast:
I remember sitting in my 11th grade homeroom class listening to a nice but kind of nerdy young man telling me about Jesus. If he was afraid of being rejected by a pretty and popular-with-the-partying-crowd young girl, he sure didn't show it. Every day he told me how much God loved me. He even brought me a red rose one day and used it tell me about the blood of Jesus that was shed for me. He told me I just had to have faith. I had no idea what he was talking about, and I did not ask Jesus to come into my heart right at that moment. I was too busy partying. Yet the seed had been planted in faith.
I dropped out the following year and never saw that young man again. Eventually all the partying I was doing brought me to a very dark place in my life. I was shooting up meth and spiraling downhill very, very quickly. One evening I was looking at the black and blue marks all over my arms from where I had missed my veins so many times trying to get a fix. I began to cry.
That crying turned into me reaching out to God. I asked him about the words that young man had said to me nearly a year earlier. I told God that if what that young man said was true...if God was real and loved me...then I wanted this thing called faith that the young man said I needed. I was about to say that was the moment that started my salvation, but it wasn't.
The moment my salvation started to be formed was the moment that young man planted the seed of God's love into my heart. Oh that we would realize how important it is to plant those seeds! We must be witnesses of the gospel! We must tell others about how much God loves them! Today, as every day, I am grateful that young man did not fear rejection. I am grateful that he allowed himself to be used by God to witness to me. As a result of his witness, many more have come to Christ through my witness and through my giving into ministries who are witnessing. None of that would have happened if it had not been for that young man opening his mouth. God is sooooo awesome!
No comments:
Post a Comment