Care before You Share

Then Philip went down to the city of Samaria and preached Christ to them.

—Acts 8:5

I was listening to a Christian radio broadcast the other day, and someone said he had come up with a lot of new conversation starters to turn a dialogue toward evangelism—clever little things we can say to get a person interested in hearing the gospel.

That is all good, but none of it matters if we don’t care about people. People can tell whether we care about them. (Even a dog can tell.) And people know whether we’re sharing with them out of sincerity or doing it out of a mere sense of duty.

Philip had a heart for nonbelievers. We read in the book of Acts that Philip, along with Stephen and others, were called to be deacons in the church. Stephen was martyred, and Saul of Tarsus began to attack Christians, so they spread out. And where did Philip go? He went to Samaria.

That is significant because Philip was a Jew. Jews hated Samaritans, and Samaritans hated Jews. They had a conflict that never ended, which was passed on from generation to generation. Yet Philip went to Samaria. He went to these people, the untouchables, that a Jew normally would not even have a conversation with, much less want to reach.

If we want to be effective communicators of the gospel, we need to be willing to go to people who are different from us. We tend to want to hang around people who are just like us, people who look like us, talk like us, and have the same interests as us.

Are you willing to leave your comfort zone and go to a person completely different from you with the message of the gospel? Everyone needs Jesus. May God give us a sense of compassion for people who do not yet know the Lord.