I remember my former Pastor, who I was ordained under, Pastor Doug Logan (author of Soul-Winning Church) was serving at a church where he was being criticized for using the word ‘evangelism’ casually in sermons. There was a sense that the word itself wasn’t very inviting, and could be taken the wrong way. I get that, but I want you to know we got no problem with the word, and even less problems with the activity. Simply put we are called by God to share our faith.

“For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek.” Romans 1:18

If we believed what Paul does, we wouldn’t be ashamed either.  We would be praying.. as He does (Colossians 4:5-6) for divine appointments, for opportunities and that when they come for boldness and clarity to share this truth that can save peoples souls.

But often we don’t and I want to suggest 8 reasons we don’t share our faith.  Four reasons for part 1 right here, and another four reasons for part two.

1. We won’t share something, we aren’t enjoying. If you just kinda feel obligated, like you have to go to God, you won’t be too effective in inviting others to Him. I think this is honestly the greatest obstacle to sharing our faith.

You know who tend’s to bring the most people to faith? New Christians.  Why? (Hint, it’s not cause they know all the answers, or because they live like saints) But because they are in what the Bible call’s “their first love.” We aren’t suppose to loose this posture. “I may not know much, but I know Jesus is changing my life.” We drift in two directions that cause us to be ashamed of the gospel. 

We get religious, meaning we after beginning in the Spirit, we are now trying to finish in the flesh. (Gal. 3:3) We trade the joy, the power and a childlike faith in what God can do, with the kind of self-consciousness that looks like Adam and Eve trying to make clothes out of fig leaves. We start to act like we are grown in all the wrong ways, wearing a tuxedo and bringing our briefcase to the beach, instead of enjoying a beautiful day. We fall back into this very human desire to make something of ourselves and share the stage with our savior, as the hero of our story. When we ourselves are on this moral peloton, always spinning but going nowhere, we won’t be so eager to invite others

Or we drift into rebellion. Instead of a childlike trust, and a flexibility to follow the best we can whatever direction God calls us, we insist our way is best with teenage angst.  We abuse God’s grace.  We stay getting high, drunk, spending time with people we know we should of cut off. Or in a hundred other ways, that seem great in the eyes of the world we really just live for power comfort, pleasure, and security. The person God wants us to become isn’t the person we want to be so we run the other direction. But if we really do have the Spirit dwelling within us, we are never going to enjoy this life, because it isn’t the life God wants for us. So we aren’t going to invite people to a relationship with Jesus, when the one we got is so broken and dysfunctional.

2. We misunderstand the assignment.  It’s never been a solo mission.  When Jesus says in Matthew 4:19 “Follow me,” he told them, “and I will make you fish for people.” Jesus never meant for us to fish alone. I grew up fishing, I loved getting my own bait dug up after it rained by the side of the country road, lighting a lantern, sitting under a bridge at 2 am and catching bass, completely alone in my thoughts.. But this isn’t the picture the disciples ever had. They didn’t fish with poles, they fished with nets.  Jesus wasn’t inviting them to become people’s personal rabbi’s who ‘’travel land and sea to make one convert” (Matt 23:15). Yet entire movements and programs for evangelism and discipleship training have been built around this model of solo ministry. If you’ve been trained this way, it is going to be hard for you to fully accept and may take some time to unlearn, but Jesus always sends us out in teams and evangelism always means bringing people into a relationship not only with God but with a new faith family.

There is a part of our ego that enjoys mentoring up someone, and a part of everyone that is hungry for a spiritual father or mother. There is of course absolutely a role for relationships like this, but not in place of the new covenant community.  When we fish with nets, we don’t have to pretend like we have all the answers there’s other people in the body who might know more than us. When we fish with nets we don’t have to pretend to manifest every spiritual gift but in the body they can see the fullness of God’s truth, love and power through the diversity of the gifting His people have. One may bleed bible, another exercise hospitality and patience, another speaks prophetically, all showing the new believer how real and big God is. When we fish with nets, our weaknesses and sin patterns aren’t normalized and passed down to our disciples because they get exposed to other people who don’t struggle in the same way we do.  When we fish with nets we make disciples of Jesus, not clones of ourselves!

When we fish with nets, and are lead by Jesus, we need to help each other to pull in all the fish that get caught.

When we fish with nets we don’t spend all our time on the boat in the water, we spend a lot of time on the beach, with our knives cleaning and repairing the net.  We understand we have to have a healthy community, to bring people in to, or understandably the fish will just swim right through the broken, full of holes net.

3. We don’t know what the gospel is.  We either over complicated it, or have completely missed it. There are a lot of false gospels out there.  There’s Moralistic Therapeutic Deism, the Prosperity Gospel, New Age spirituality dressed up in charismatic language and more of course. It’s important for us to see where false gospels creep into our thinking. The good news isn’t that we “are enough” on our own, and it isn’t that God want’s to take away all the pain from your life if you just know and use the right spiritual laws.  Another false gospel is a political gospel, where we may not always say it out loud (although it is spoken out loud in today’s climate) but our training of new Christians have moved away from things like the great commission, the great commandment, the ten commandments, the Lord’s prayer, the creed, and has move towards one or the other sides of the culture wars podcasts, news outlets, and social media. When our passion to gain political power and implement our policies, and to convince people of our ideology is greater than it is for someone to know their sins are forgiven, we have bowed down to a false political gospel. When a ton of people in our churches are more familiar with their political party’s platform than they are with how to articulate the doctrine of the Trinity, we’ve failed to disciple them, or we have actively discipled them in the wrong way!

This is why we need pulpits that preach the gospel every week, that constantly speak the gospel to each other, and love and cherish the grace of God in our small group gatherings and informally as we just live and minister to each other through random calls, texts and times just hanging out. The good news is simply that Jesus came, and he died for our sins, and than He rose again from the dead and everyone who put’s their trust in Him, will know Him in this life and forever. If you want to really dig into this a little more, listen to this sermon by Jack Deere on “The simplicity of the gospel.”  But you already knew this right? So don’t overcomplicated it either. Tag you’re it, you are qualified to share your faith!

4. We don’t know how to ask questions and listen. Unlike Jesus who is the embodiment the Proverbs 20:5 “The purposes of a person’s heart are deep waters, but one who has insight draws them out.” We tend to treat people like projects instead of people made in the image of God.  We can be so quick to run down a list of things we want to say and get people to pray (and we will talk. next week about the usefulness of simple models that encourage people to get practice sharing their faith, otherwise we won’t get better at it).

But the danger of such models and evangelistic approaches, and the way we share our faith is sometimes creating the situation, that causes people to feel the way they do in that church Pastor Doug served. They felt used, they didn’t feel love. Or the people trying to share their faith, they felt like they were using people and they don’t want to.

I remember hosting a mission team, that came from outside D.C. and they were spending the week serving where I lived in West Kensington (inner city North Philadelphia). They said they loved to evangelize, and I do to so after some projects around the community, they spent the afternoon evangelizing. The first person they didn’t listen to was me, as I shared with them a little bit of how the neighborhood worked and some ways to lovingly approach people and connect with them. Then I watched in disgust as one group of adult men cornered and circled a female high school student. They asked her if she believed, and she said she did. She told them where she went to church, they kept asking questions, but not to listen, but to move the conversation to an inevitable end where they pressured her into praying with them (which was for them, the victory, the goal). She was trying to tell them she was a Christian, but they would just reply things like “going to church don’t make you a christian.” I was embarrassed, and immediately pulled the plug on their evangelism time, and explained if they wanted to serve with us, they would be painting homes, and weed whacking abandoned lots.

There is a profound difference in you sharing something that is beautiful, that changed your life, that brought you to life, than trying to pressure people to change, and folks can spot it from a mile away. So we ask questions and we listen to people, not just bide time to drop our gospel bomb at the right moment either. We listen to people, because that is what Jesus would do. If there is an opportunity to connect our story or the story of the gospel with them, we do it without shame, because we know it can save them!