From 9/5/04 pm
SBC Philippi
How To Share Your Faith
John 4:7-30
Primary Purpose: To look at some rules for how to share your faith with others.
Someone once told me that 95% of all believers never share their faith with a single person. I have sometimes wondered why this is. It seems to me that many believers today are caught up in the superficial, the worldly amusements that this world has to offer. We are so caught up in what the world thinks is important that we don’t realize the lost opportunities that we have to share our faith with the lost around us. I don’t honestly think it’s because most people don’t care about people dying and going to hell. I think most Christians do care about the lost. I want to look at an experience that Jesus had with the Samaritan woman at the well and talk to you about some rules for sharing our faith with others by Jesus’ example. (Read Scripture)
Jesus is traveling a route that few people traveled in those days. He is going through the heart of Samaria. He has a divine appointment with a woman at a well. It isn’t that Jesus doesn’t know the history of this woman’s life. Actually, he knows tha she is caught up in shame and feels like a social outcast. She is isolated and only goes to draw water in the heat of the day, when she knows the other women won’t be there. Jesus could have given her a good moral lecture about how she should be living. He knew that she had had 5 husbands and was now living with a man. It isn’t that he condoned that. He simply didn’t expect the lost to act like the saved.
One of the first and most simple rules in sharing your faith is this: Share, don’t judge. v.17. It’s tempting sometimes to give the lost lessons on morality. We want to clean them up. That’s kinda like cleaning the outside of a coffin. Cleaning it on the outside doesn’t change the death on the inside.
We need to understand that the lost really are walking in hostility towards God. Their lost condition has caused a seperation between them and God.
I shouldn’t be shocked then when I see a lifestyle that doesn’t give God any glory and is completely selfish. A lot of people live like that.
My first obligation to the lost is to see them the way God sees them. God desires for these people to be saved. He desires for this woman at the well to be saved and all the towns people with her. He loved her, but hated her sin. One of the wonders of the church today is that we can be so unmoved by the lost around us.
C.H. Spurgeon once said “The Holy Spirit will move them by first moving you. If you can rest without their being saved, they will rest, too. But if you are filled with an agony for them, if you cannot bear that they should be lost, you will soon find that they are uneasy, too. I hope you get into such a state that you will dream about your child or your heareer perishing for lack of Christ, and start up at once and begin to cry, “Oh God, give me converts or I will die.” Then you will have converts. Most of us honestly don’t seem to have come to that point, where we are crying out to God on behalf of the lost around us.
The second rule to keep in mind is proclaim, don’t debate. There are a lot of people who when you share your faith with people they will want to argue with you about evolution or the dinosaurs or abortion or some other thing. It is tempting to go get on a soapbox about some minor point. The Samaritan woman tried to do that with Jesus twice in this story. First, she makes a belittling point saying in v.12 “You are not greater than our father Jacob are You, who gave us the well, and drank of it himself, and his sons, and his cattle?” I wonder if she kicked herself later for such a stupid question?
It is important that we share the elementary truths of the gospel with people clearly. We want to emphasize the life, death and resurrection of Jesus and what they mean. There is nothing to be gained by winning a debate on the dinosaurs and wasting a opportunity to clearly share the gospel. Paul said in 1 Corinthians 2:2-5
“For I determined to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ, and Him crucified. And I was with you in weakness and in fear and in much trembling. And my message and my preaching were not in persuasive words of wisdom but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power, that your faith should not rest on the wisdom of men, but on the power of God.”
Paul clearly wanted to focus on what is most important, so he emphasized the cross. He emphasized what Jesus did on the cross. He prayed that he would be clear and that the spirit would convict people when he taught. Later, in 1 Corinthians 15:1-3 he said, “Now I make known to you, brethren, the gospel which I preached to you, which also you received, in which also you stand, by which also you are aved, if you hold fast the word which I preached to you, unless you believed in vain. For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received, that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, and that He was buried, and that He was raised onthe third day according to the Scriptures,. . . .” Paul clearly said this was of first importance.
Later, Paul in 2 Timothy 2:23-26 would say to Timothy about debating and arguing with people
“But refuse foolish and ignorant speculations, knowing that they produce quarrels. And the Lord’s bond-servant must not be quarrelsome, but be kind to all, able to teach, patient when wronged, with gentleness correcting those who are in opposition, if perhaps God may grant them repentance leading to the knowledge of the truth.”
The third truth is this: Lead, don’t drag people to Jesus. Sometimes in our desire to see people saved we have a tendency to try to knock down doors that God hasn’t opened yet. Pastor Greg Laurie tells the story about a barber who went to attend a meeting one night where the speaker was stressing the need to share Christ with others. The barber was determined after that meeting that he would share Jesus with the first person he met that next morning in his chair. As Laurie tells this in “How to Share Your Faith”
“The next morning, after the customer had been seated and the apron was tucked around his neck, the barber began to strop his razor vigorously. Testing the edge, he turned to the man in the chair and blurted out, “Friend, are you ready to die and meet God?”
The man looked at the razor and fled out the door-apron and all! The barber had the right idea. He just needed to use a little tact.” pg.36.
We do more harm that good when we try to get ahead of the Holy Spirit. Remember what Paul said in 1 Corinthians 3:7 “So then neither the one who plants nor the one who waters is anything, but God who causes the growth.” So, just keep being faithful at doing your part, plant those seeds, be faithful to share your faith and God will bring a harvest in His time.
