God Can Use You
If you’ve got people in your home, remember we’re all grown-ups here. We have different positions, we have different worldviews. For the people who tend to be more timid or maybe uncomfortable with the thought of making other people uncomfortable, how do you share the gospel? Here are a couple of things I would strongly recommend.
One is that you rehearse it. Maybe have a go-to verse or a thing that you want to say. I think of something like 1 Timothy where Paul says, “This is a faithful saying: that Jesus Christ came into the world to save sinners of whom I am the chief.”
With engaging stories from her own life-changing encounter with radically ordinary hospitality, Butterfield equips Christians to use their homes as a means to showing a post-Christian world what authentic love and faith really look like.
One of the first things you can do is realize that your testimony is your testimony, and very rarely are people going to argue with it, because they can’t. So, you can start by sharing your testimony briefly and as it fits into this. Maybe somebody will say something about how she has an anxiety disorder and she has really struggled with her medication and she doesn’t know what to do. And you can talk about how you also have struggled with anxiety, and the peace of God has been there for you. These are some of the verses that you use, and then offer to pray. Use your testimony as a way of answering someone’s problem and question.
Another thing you can do is, as people are just catching up on their weekends, say something like, Well, I went to church, and this is the sermon that I heard. And I thought it really applied not only to my life but to the situation we’re dealing with in the world right now.
God can use one person, one testimony, one Bible verse, one offer for prayer, one offer to put the hand of the suffering into the hand of the Savior.
No one is going to steal your point of view from you except for you. You might feel like, Well, what’s one more Christian in the world? How can I change the world?
Well, God can use one person, one testimony, one Bible verse, one offer for prayer, one offer to put the hand of the suffering into the hand of the Savior. It’s always that way. That’s how it always works.
So again, it helps to rehearse things. It helps to go in, in some ways, on your guard, being ready to be an ambassador. I don’t think anybody who’s good at sharing the gospel just sort of fell out of bed that way. Everybody had to think about how they wanted to come across and what they wanted to say. So you, too, give yourself time to prepare.
Rosaria Butterfield is the author of The Gospel Comes with a House Key: Practicing Radically Ordinary Hospitality in Our Post-Christian World.
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