Witnessing 101

Why do we need to witness?

Take a look around
your neighborhood
your place of employment
your school
the city street
at the young widow
at the drug addict
at the world we live

The Bible says that

God so loved this (emphasis mine) world that He sent
His only son to die for our sins

And if He loved this world and the people in it enough to die for us then who are we to turn our backs on, as the Bible says, our neighbors

To emphasize the importance of witnessing and of taking
God's message to the world the
first words of Jesus to His Disciples and to us
as recorded in
Matthew 4:19

I will make you fishers of men

Here Jesus tell us that we are not alone when we witness to others.
This can be seen in the words Jesus uses when he talks to the disciples. ( Jesus does not say You will make yourselves fishers of men, He says I will make you fishers of men, which implies that we will be given power by Jesus to do the work He calls us to do)

And since Jesus gives us all the power we need to witness to others we can see from other verses in the BIble that Jesus intends for us to Jesus intends for us to go. At the end of His earthly ministry Jesus again tells His disciples and us that since we have been given the power to witness we are to:

Go into all the world and preach the
Gospel to all creation

Mark 16:15

And

Go and make disciples of all Nations

Matthew 28:19

These two verses show us Jesus clear commands to share our faith.

So in the end we have two choices

The firsr is you can make excuses for not witnessing like

I don't have the time to witness becasue I am too busy
with my own life
or
I don’t know how to tell others about Jesus.
or
I am just not good at witnessing because
I don’t know how to talk to others
or
I am afraid of what people will say to me when
I witness to them

These excuses may all seem like good reasons for not witnessing but the:

Simple truth is this

Jesus said he will make you a fisher of men
and
Jesus said to go and do it.

A popular Christian group Petra once wrote a song with a line in it that says

“It is not my ability that you look at Lord, but my availability’”

God wants us to be available to tell His Gospel to others. This means we as Christians are to make available to God our hands, our voice, our feet and most importantly our hearts, God will take care of the rest, Jesus said so.

With this in mind we need to understand a few things about witnessing and I feel the wordless book can help better then any other tool in getting a simple message across to others, because that is what the Gospel is a simple message that we as Christians complicate more than it should be.

The wordless book begins with the color black!

To most people this is a symbol of our sinful hearts. I think the color black goes much deeper than that I think the color black stands for a broken relationship with God.

He simple fact is that we as humans need relationships to survive. We were designed as social beings. To be separated from other humans causes us great mental and emotional harm. It is the same way with God.

To be separate from God leaves a hole in our souls that cannot be filled by anything other than God.

No amount of drugs, drinking, sex or any other thing that man comes up will ever take the place of God.

To put it simply

Ø      As Men or Women we need relationships to survive,

the chief of which is our relationship with God.

Ø      We are currently living out a broken relationship with our Creator.

Ø      God wants to reestablish a relationship with us

Ø      We need to recognize our sinfulness in order to recognize the truth.

This is the essence of witnessing and the truth of the Gospel

I am not saying witnessing is going to be easy, if it was you would not be reading this.

I think one major thing you can do to be an effective witness is in seeing yourself as the person you are witnessing to. Think about all the objections you had when someone first told you about the Gospel and picture the person you are talking to as having these same objections.

Now think about how the person who witnessed to you reacted to your objections and answered your doubts.

With all of this in mind you most important tool for witnessing still needs to be

To Pray

To pray

To pray

Another goodd way to prepare yourself to witness is to read the Gospels. Delve deeply into the words of Jesus and see how he dealt with others when it became time to witness.

He was the message and the messanger all in one. Jesus would walk into a town a proclaim to the people I am the truth, I am the life
and I am the ONLY WAY unto God

A good number of times Jesus chosen method of witnessing was in using parables. Using the word pictures of the parables Jesus would craft a story in such a way as to get the people to see their own hearts and their need for a Savior.

Jesus had a way with words. Not only did he use parables to teach others about Himself but in one on one coverstionst He would also use what I will call reverse questioning to get people to see that they were separated from God by sin and that He was going to be the one to bring man and God back into a reconciled realtionship.

A good example of reverse question is when Jesus ask the disciples what the people think of Jesus and who He is.

He knew the questions of their hearts and simply used a question of His own open theri eyes to the truth.

Again I would strongly recommend to you that if you truly want to be an effective witness to do 2 things!

STUDY THE GOSPELS

AND

LEARN FROM JESUS

The only people Jesus was ever stern with was the religious leaders who should have known