Daily devotion – Your story
There are times in our lives that the burden of our unsaved loved one’s falls extra heavy upon us. Our hearts desire is to see our relatives come to know Christ, to discover the wonder of God’s grace, to experience His joy just as we have tasted.
As a new Christian, my soul focus was to get my relatives to Church and hear my pastor preach. I felt that if they could just hear him, they would surely bow their hearts to Christ. A major part of this naive reaction was the total distrust of my capacity to be able to make the Gospel real to family myself. After all I didn’t know the Bible very well. What would I say? How would I answer any questions they had?
Now when people approach Helen and I with this massive burden to see their unsaved family come to Christ, we do not say, “Just get them to listen to us!” God forbid.
Firstly, let us recognise that salvation is an act of God, it is the conviction by the Holy Spirit on a heart that is open to receive the Gospel.
Ephesians 2: 8 For by grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God, 9 not of works, lest anyone should boast.
John 1: 12 But as many as received Him, to them He gave the right to become children of God, to those who believe in His name: 13 who were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God.
Secondly, we don’t have to have all the answers because we never will.
Thirdly, we do not need to be great orators able to speak with flowery words and great eloquence.
1Co 2:4 And my speech and my preaching were not with persuasive words of human wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power,
So, what do we do, what do we say, to our unsaved family, to see them come to Christ?
We tell them our own personal story, our testimony, how we came to surrender our lives to Jesus Christ and how He has now changed us completely to love Him, to serve Him and to follow Him.
Last Sunday here at CCSH, I listened with great joy to the men who prayed for the bread and the cup during our communion service. Both men prayed simply, to the point, without any special inflections or telling a story. They prayed from their hearts and their prayers were beautiful unto the Lord and for us to follow.
In John’s Gospel chapter 9, Jesus healed a blind man and shortly after the former blind man was brought before the Pharisees by his friends so they could see the miracle of this man’s sight.
When he was asked how he got his sight he simply replied, “He put clay on my eyes, and I washed, and I see.”
That is all our stories – once we were blind but now we can see and it was Jesus Christ who gave us new life and new vision for living!
Therefore, do not stress and clamber for the right words. Share your story from your heart!
Tell them the miracle of your salvation and how much now you love the Lord your Saviour Jesus Christ.