Good evening brothers and sisters,
We are born into this world thinking that everything in our surrounding makes us the center of the whole universe. That beautiful day when you were born into this world, most of us had a group of people staring down at our face and were amazed at the life that they are holding. Your parents take you around and they receive praise of just how beautiful of a child you are, and we kept getting fed all this attention from birth that when we get rejected we just don’t know how to handle it anymore. This is one of the reasons why many Christians are afraid to evangelize to people in this dark world. This fear of rejection consumes them and paralyzes them from any sort of action. For example, in high school, as many of you are, many of you have crushes on certain people and you want to go tell that boy or girl that you have a crush. But you start to play this scenario out in your head:
Me: (thinking in my head) “Man, I should really want to go to that girl, but what if she slaps me in the face; or what if she screams, “ewwwww!”; or even worse what if she says, “so…."
The more you begin to ponder on the negative reaction you will never know how that person will respond. See, Jesus does not put it on us to go and save people, but he gives us His word that there are sheep out there who need to come under his protection. (John 10:16) He never puts the burden on us to go out and save the people of this world, that is His job and we are going along with our Master and doing what He has already exemplified for us. We have no idea who God calls to save, but when we evangelize there should be one undenying conviction for us: “I believe in Jesus Christ as the risen Savior who has died for my sin.” This is the only confession that we need to hold onto when we go out into the streets to bring the good news of Jesus Christ to them. Miracles, signs and wonders do not have to be the response from people for us to know that they are saved, believing in the gospel of Jesus Christ is the aim in our evangelism, and if as a result people get healed or supernatural works happen all we can say is, “Amen, Hallelujah, Praise the Lord!” Because we go out with the confidence of what Jesus Christ has finished for us on the cross there is guaranteed success.
And I have other sheep that are not of this fold. I must bring them also, and they will listen to my voice. So there will be one flock, one shepherd.