The Festering Question

This Blog is long in coming and after allowing it to mill around my thoughts for over a month I still do not know how to start. But as reluctantly my fingers move across the keys I pray that the Lord would take this and use it in the lives of others and in my own life. For quite some time now I have been bothered. The thing that as been my incessant nuisance is myself, and more specifically my fear in sharing my faith. This fear takes many forms and often transforming itself into wondrous rationalizations as to why I need not open my mouth, as to why perhaps it would be better to say less, as to why now would not be the best time, the sad list goes on.

I’ve known I should write about this since an evening service sometime last month when the speaker made mention of rights in our nation and the current state of affairs, alluding to the reality that believers right to biblically practice their faiths is already being infringed upon and could very really be made illegal, punishable in the highest degree. These comments were met with the typical responses of agreement throughout the small group present at the time. I began to agree and be frustrated with the wrongs of other, as sadly I too often do, when from out of somewhere (I don’t know where but I can venture a guess) came a clear convicting thought. It passed through my mind and I could not and cannot escape. “Why are you so bothered by this right being taken, you don’t really use it do you? Perhaps once in a great while you may share your faith with those who don’t already know, but even less of those times is with the desire to proselytize* them.”

I don’t know that those questions are in the exact words they were that night (for I don’t often think in such syntax… nor do I normally use words like syntax, but something happens when I begin to type and my vocabulary morphs) but those are the best words I can offer to represent the progression my thoughts took that night. And it bothered me… and it’s still bothering me. For if it were to become illegal for me to share my faith with the hope of converting another, a crime punishable by imprisonment but somehow I was left ignorant of this law, how long would I live a free man? I fear it would perhaps be a shamefully long time. And that bothers me.

Again tonight at my church the same conviction strikes and it bothers me. However, it does no good to be bothered; it does no good to be convicted if it does not lead to repentance. My feeling of conviction won’t save anyone from Hell.

Scripture says:

Romans 10:14 - “How, then, can they call on the one they have not believed in? And how can they believe in the one of whom they have not heard? And how can they hear without someone preaching to them?”

I work in a public school and I pray often almost daily for God to help me shine His light, for His love to show, 'Love take me over", that they would see Jesus in me, and the like. There are days I better allow God to do this through me than others, but even if these prayers are answered and they see it and I live it perfectly, if I never open my mouth and say, “this is why”, “Let me tell you the best news ever”, “Let me tell you why I am different”, if I never speak the name by which they must be saved and tell them how they may know him, it is all for not. For they won't even know what it is they are looking at.

At some point I must open my mouth. At some point I must stop being ashamed of the gospel I must stop fearing being counted as a fool for Christ sake.

And it can’t be later…

I know where this is supposed to start for me (with one individual in particular) I ask that you pray for me. I invite you to ask yourself some of the same questions that have been bothering me, and may we both act, in God’s speed.

*Proselytize - To convert a person from one belief, doctrine, cause, or faith to another.