Stepping Out In Faith

Jill, a Minneapolis homemaker, wanted to somehow affect her neighborhood with God’s love, but she became fearful every time she contemplated how to go about it. Then a friend, Joyce, a Cam­pus Crusade staff member with experience in personal evangelism, offered to give an evangelistic Christmas coffee in Jill’s home.

Jill agreed, but was so ap­prehensive that she made Joyce promise not to make her do anything but serve the food. “I don’t know how my neighbors will take this,” Jill explained nervously.

When the coffee was over and the guests were preparing to leave, Jill spoke up. “May I just say something?” she asked, as tears of love came to her eyes. “I have lived in this neighborhood for five years, and I’ve dreamed of having you all in my home. I’ve also dreamed of sharing the most important thing in my life with you, and that’s my relationship with Jesus Christ. Apart from this opportunity, I wouldn’t have done it.”

As tears streamed down Jill’s face, the fifteen neighborhood women were crying, too. A real, on­going ministry in the lives of those women be­gan on that day as the Lord changed Jill from an uneasy observer to a bold communicator of God’s love.

Burt, a surgeon in Wisconsin, taught an adult Sun­day school class, counseled drug ad­dicts, and had led several people to the Lord. He at­tended one of our Christian seminars for executives feeling “rather self-complacent, fully ex­pecting to counsel others rather than to be helped myself.”

Part of the seminar dealt with how to reach others for Christ through a simple, straightforward presentation of the gospel. Burt determined that he would begin sharing Christ with each of his patients, “even if I just handed them a booklet explaining the gospel with the remark that it had been meaningful in my life. As I did so, I received some terrific responses.”

Encouraged at his newfound effectiveness in witnessing, Burt decided to use these same meth­­ods in another arena. “I also work at the Ad­dic­tion Center in my city, counseling heroin addicts. Before the seminar I saw only haphazard results when I presented Christ as the only means of heal­ing. I was trying hard in my own efforts and failing miserably.

“After the seminar I decided to present a sim­ple gospel message and trust God with the results. When I asked a young man if he had ever investigated Christ’s claims, he said he had been to church and rejected the whole thing. But when I asked him if he had actually done any investigating, he had to say no. I shared the gospel with him, and he prayed with me, receiving Christ into his life.

“At my suggestion he got a modern translation of the Bi­ble. This aroused his mother’s curiosity, and she came in to see me. When I told her that her son had become a Chris­tian, tears came to her eyes, and she said that this was the answer to years of prayer.”

Burt reports that, since the seminar, “I am see­ing consistent results as others respond to God’s love through my witness.”

Kathy, a young commercial artist from Denver, was having a friendly visit with her next-door neighbor, Sue, when the subject of personal value systems came up. Kathy explained how, as a Chris­tian, her value system was centered around Jesus Christ and the Bible.

“I’ve wondered about those things,” Sue re­plied. “But they’ve never seemed very real to me. My only view of Christianity has been of ‘religious fanatics,’ but you don’t seem to fit that mold.”

Like many of these people, I have never found witnessing to come naturally and easily. Some of you may find this difficult to believe, but by na­ture I’m a shy, reserved person; initiating conversations with strangers is sometimes difficult for me. Even sharing the greatest news ever an­nounced—that “God so loved the world that He gave His only be­gotten Son, that whoever be­lieves in Him should not perish but have everlasting life”—is not always as easy for me as you might imagine.

So it might seem incongruous that God called a shy young man in 1951 to launch an evangelistic ministry on the campus of UCLA, a ministry which would become Campus Crusade for Christ International. Witnessing, and training laypeople to witness, is our primary calling. I don’t even know if evangelism is my spiritual gift.

What I do know is that God has made it crystal clear in His Word that every Christian is to “go and make disciples in all the nations,...and then teach these new disciples to obey all the commands I have given you” (Mat­thew 28:19,20). I’ve tried to be obedient to this command, and God has honored my obedience. Like the people whose true stories I’ve shared in these pages, God has transformed my personal witness from one of shy hesitancy to one of confident initiative.

If He can do it for me, and for Jill, Burt, and Kathy, and millions of oth­ers who have learned how to present the message of Jesus, He can do it for you, too.

By Bill Bright

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