When I was a kid, we’d hang around at the beach, where every Saturday, church vans arrived with Christians who carried very large Bibles. Then they’d walk down the beach looking for sinners to talk to.
My friends and I would go into the water and wait for them to go away, because we discovered that for some reason, the Christians never wanted to go into the ocean. Yet the best thing they could have done was paddle out to where we were, invade our little world, and talk to us about Jesus.
Now, there isn’t anything wrong with specifically going out to share your faith. And there’s a right way and a wrong way to do that, of course. But the Bible tells us,
“Preach the word of God. Be prepared, whether the time is favorable or not. Patiently correct, rebuke, and encourage your people with good teaching” (2 Timothy 4:2 NLT).
And what, exactly, should we preach? We should preach the gospel, which means “good news.”
It’s the simple message that we’re all separated from God by our sin. But God loved us so much that He sent His Son, Jesus Christ, to be born on this earth, live a perfect life, die on the cross for our sins, and then rise from the dead three days later.
If we will turn from our sin and put our faith in Jesus as Savior and Lord, then God will forgive us, and we will go to Heaven when we die. We can find the meaning and purpose of life.
That’s the gospel, and that’s the message we should proclaim.
So we shouldn’t just say, “Let’s go witnessing.” Instead, we should always look for and recognize opportunities to be witnesses because we never know when God will open a door.
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