You’ve Really Given me Liberty

After teaching on evangelism this weekend Vida Abundante in Calidonia, Maria (not her real name) pulls me aside and tells me

Your teaching has relieved a giant burden I’ve been carrying. . ..

It’s Not Our Job

Maria had heard teaching on evangelism over many years that could be summarized like this

• Here is a script to memorize.
• Share that script with as many people as possible.
• Rejoice with those that pray a prayer.

This is a common teaching paradigm that focuses exclusively on the skills of sharing your faith and in many cases has divorced ongoing discipleship from evangelism.

For years, Maria had faithfully obeyed this teaching. She grew confident in talking to strangers, using gospel tracts, and fine tuning her presentation.

Yet in all her years of energetically “working the program” she hardly ever saw a conversion experience.

In spite of all her confident theology about God working mysteriously, she experienced

• the mounting feelings of disappointment,
• the growing pain of continued personal rejection, and
• the mental energy drained in trying to fight self-criticism.

Her desire to share her faith was diminishing.

She felt totally responsible for all the outcomes.

Evangelism had become a human work.

• If they don’t repent, I’m doing evangelism wrong.
• If they don’t accept Christ, it’s my fault.
• If they don’t repent now, it must be because of some problem in my life.

Evangelism becomes a burden after repeated failures and rejection.

Nobody wants to do that all the time.

There are better ways to enjoy life than experiencing rejection every time you talk about faith.

Finding Freedom

Maria heard me teach on How the How the Holy Spirit draws people to faith.

She saw how God works through a process of bringing people to faith — a conversion to Christ is often at the end of series of key events that God uses.

Watching her respond through the teaching, her face showed evidence of the proverbial “light bulbs” going off.

The emotional burdens that had grown on her from all her rejection experiences in evangelism were fading.

What was building in it’s place was a confidence in God’s sovereignty and a joy that comes with relief from burdens.

She pulled me aside and said

Your teaching has relieved a giant burden I’ve been carrying. . .

She proceeded to tell me how this teaching had

• transformed her view of evangelism,
• helped her to see God’s responsibility
• given her a new fearless freedom to be a vessel in God’s work.

What a joy

There is a profound joy in watching people accept and apply this teaching.

For our ministry partners, this is the fruit of your work — people finding liberty to be more effective witnesses for Christ.  You enable us to fulfill our vision for 2010 of impacting churches in the Americas to cooperate with the Holy Spirit in the work of missions and evangelism.