In my closing words of the last session, I said this, as an evangelist, you are blest to be able to tell your story to someone.

The reason that I believe this is because your story could be the turning point in someone’s life.

What a wonderful thought this is. The day you gave your life to Jesus a wonderful story started to unfold within you. God took your life, whatever that life looked like, and he changed it. Paul puts it this way.

“This means that anyone who belongs to Christ has become a new person. The old life is gone; a new life has begun!”.

2 Corinthians 5:17 (NLT)

I believe though, that the story you have needs to be shared. If the good news of the Gospel was good for you, then it stands to reason that it will be good for someone else. 

I started ‘Telling Your Story Ministries’ a number of years ago in reaction to how afraid people were to “do evangelism”. We often talk about evangelism but in reality, for many believers it scares them.  Mention the word in a meeting and all eyes go down. Most people do not engage with it because of fear, and this in turn develops a lack of confidence. Obviously both attacks of the devil, Satan does not like evangelists.

But if we can get our heads round it, we have a powerful weapon in our armory against the devil, and at the same time sow the seeds of the Gospel. This is what an evangelist does. He/she tells their story and seeds are sown.

Now if you’re like me and I would imagine most other people, we like to see results.

I know this because when I speak at meetings, without doubt someone will come ask me how many people were saved tonight. If I am out on the streets, either alone or with a team, the same question, how many people did you see saved.

Now this used to anger me to some degree.

Not the question itself, but the answer.

When I preach, as I do often, souls are not saved every time. When I do street work souls are not saved every time. This used to bring me under condemnation. I would then think, if I was right with God, or if I was doing everything right people would be coming to Christ.

I allowed these thoughts to discourage me. 

Then many years ago I realised this very simple fact.

I cannot save anyone, God has not called me to save anyone, but He has called me to sow seeds.

Once I got my head round this it totally set me free.

In fact I began to work harder, I began to tell more people because I was free of the condemnation of not seeing someone saved, and strangely the results were, that more people did come to Christ.

We love to hear about a soul coming to Christ, but the work you do is about sowing seeds.  You will have sowed into lives; those people will have been saved and you or I may never hear about it.

But the reality is we don’t need to. The work is the Lords, and he gets all the glory.

Occasionally though a story comes your way, and I have found just when I needed it.

A while back I had a knock at my front door.

When I went to answer it, I could see a policeman, a traffic branch officer.

My first though was that I had broken some motoring law.

I opened the door and the officer introduced himself and asked if he could come in for a moment.

There was nothing wrong he just wanted to tell me his story, and it went something like this,

He was stationed in a town about thirty miles from where I live. In his station a Christian sergeant was always witnessing to the young officers telling them about Jesus.

In Peters (changed name) words, we were sick listening to him.

Anyway, one Friday night Peter and several His colleagues came to a club in my hometown for a night out drinking.

The club that they came to was the same club that we had an outreach at every weekend. 

During the evening Peter came outside for a cigarette.

Someone from our team offered him a cup of coffee which he accepted, and this gave our workers a chance to talk to Peter. 

He went back into the club, and nobody saw him again.

That is till he turned up on my doorstep.

As Peter was going home from the club that night, the Spirit of God began to convict him.  All the words his sergeant spoke to him came flooding back.  Words that members of our team spoke to him watered the seed.

A few days later Peter gave His life to Jesus.

He had been saved two years we didn’t know about it, but Heaven knew about it, and that is what is important.

So, in closing don’t get hung up on numbers getting saved. 

That is not up to you or me.

Keep praying, keep loving people, and keep sowing seeds.

The next part will focus on ‘Witnessing without saying a word’.

Written by Willis McDowell