Witnessing

K9_Trainer said:

We call that spamming. Not evangelizing.

To the OP: Don't do that ^

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I'm not scamming people!
And it is a sure way to get the message in front of people.
I've had people tell me "Thank you! I was just asking God for a sign, then I checked my email, and your miracle was in it."

We're called to spread the Good News to everyone. If you start criticizing different routes,"Oh I don't want to bother someone on the phone. Oh I don't want to bother someone at their home. Oh I don't want someone to waste 1 second on the most important message in the entire world!" you might end up doing nothing at all, or have a much smaller impact.

I think I'm getting ready to leave ChristianForums.com. This post got me legitimately angry. I feel people who want me to shut up on the cause of Gospel of Jesus Christ are encouraging other people to shut up too. I will not shut up. I will not be silenced. You should feel strongly about Jesus yourself, and tell everyone you can about him, because he loves you, he is king. When a fellow believer wants to lay down the law on what is the right and wrong way to talk about Jesus it legitimately makes me angry. Who is some random person's authority to lay claim on the right and wrong way to preach the Gospel? If you think it is nasty of me to "lash back" at you, you gotta think, I did warn people not to do it in my post. I think it is evil in origin for one person to criticize another person's witnessing for Jesus if there is nothing to be criticized.

If you want my opinion:
Tell everyone you can online.
Use email
Use Twitter
Use Facebook
Use forums
Use Video games
ETC ETC ETC.
Anyway you can get someone's ear to hear you, use it to preach the Good News that God loves them.

I think I'm likely leaving from this forum though. This has upset me thoroughly.

Love you K9_Trainer, you've been cool in the past. I don't hate you. I just feel really upset.

GoodNewsJim said:

I'm not scamming people so it is not negative in any way.
And it is a sure way to get the message in front of people.
I've had people tell me "Thank you! I was just asking God for a sign, then I checked my email, and your miracle was in it."

We're called to spread the Good News to everyone. If you start criticizing different routes,"Oh I don't want to bother someone on the phone. Oh I don't want to bother someone at their home. Oh I don't want someone to waste 1 second on the most important message in the entire world!" you might end up doing nothing at all, or have a much smaller impact.

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When it's done in the same manner that lumps it in with Nigerian princes willing to share their fortunes with you and the opportunity to pay 87% more for Viagra, it doesn't do it justice. People see e-mails like that and do the very same thing with all of them.

thankful_in_VT said:

Yes, it became much easier for me once I sat down and really took a hard look at my own testimony.

Asking yourself "What great changes has God made in my life?" and being thankful for His impact in your daily life is the key here.

"When you're in love you can't help it. You think about them all the time, you desire to make them happy and you end up using any excuse to drop their name into a conversation." I forget where I heard it. Yes it was a quote about being in love with person, but this is how I look at my relationship with Christ.

It also helps if you can sit down and discuss your testimony with another Christian. That's what really got me over sharing mine. Once it was out there and someone knew that I struggled with certain things that Christ set me free from; it became so much easier than just being ashamed of it and hiding my past.

Witnessing can also just be showing others the joy and peace you have found in salvation through walking your walk. If you're in a great mood because you realize how blessed you are in a situation, don't be afraid to say you're happy because God is good.

When we embrace that love and share it through our attitude towards life others will want to know why we're so happy.

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I truly love this!

I always thought I was never good at witnessing. I did not know how to start or what to say, and then I realized yesterday in a conversation we were having at work, I was witnessing. It was a very profound feeling for me to do that, and the person I was speaking too, thanked me later for making her feel more safe and comforted. It was truly wonderful to just share!

GoodNewsJim said:

I'm not scamming people!
And it is a sure way to get the message in front of people.
I've had people tell me "Thank you! I was just asking God for a sign, then I checked my email, and your miracle was in it."

We're called to spread the Good News to everyone. If you start criticizing different routes,"Oh I don't want to bother someone on the phone. Oh I don't want to bother someone at their home. Oh I don't want someone to waste 1 second on the most important message in the entire world!" you might end up doing nothing at all, or have a much smaller impact.

I think I'm getting ready to leave ChristianForums.com. This post got me legitimately angry. I feel people who want me to shut up on the cause of Gospel of Jesus Christ are encouraging other people to shut up too. I will not shut up. I will not be silenced. You should feel strongly about Jesus yourself, and tell everyone you can about him, because he loves you, he is king. When a fellow believer wants to lay down the law on what is the right and wrong way to talk about Jesus it legitimately makes me angry. Who is some random person's authority to lay claim on the right and wrong way to preach the Gospel? If you think it is nasty of me to "lash back" at you, you gotta think, I did warn people not to do it in my post. I think it is evil in origin for one person to criticize another person's witnessing for Jesus if there is nothing to be criticized.

If you want my opinion:
Tell everyone you can online.
Use email
Use Twitter
Use Facebook
Use forums
Use Video games
ETC ETC ETC.
Anyway you can get someone's ear to hear you, use it to preach the Good News that God loves them.

I think I'm likely leaving from this forum though. This has upset me thoroughly.

Love you K9_Trainer, you've been cool in the past. I don't hate you. I just feel really upset.

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I didn't mean to upset you my friend.

But I personally just feel that mass sending emails to people you don't even know to promote your denomination or religion is disrespectful, an abuse of having somebody's email address, and more of an annoyance than proper evangelizing. I think it also has the potential to lose you some credibility.

I get spam and scams all the time in my inbox. If somebody is trying to advertise, I don't even open it. I never click on links from addresses I don't know because most of the time they really ARE phishing scams. Thankfully, hotmail is able to put most of that junk in my spam box so I don't even have to see it or sort through it among my personal emails.

Honestly I don't mean to discourage you, your other ideas for using the internet to evangelize are great and very clever. But I don't think mass emailing is appropriate. That's just my opinion and anybody here is free to take it with a grain of salt of course.

I wouldn't do what I think of witnessing; mostly because I think "witnessing" is annoying.

I do however talk about Him if I have something to say. People at work come to me with all kinds of questions about the Bible, God, and Christianity. I take that as a good sign.

Also, I live my life in such a way that I don't have to go around being a bully and "witnessing" to people who don't want to hear me. Your words will fall on deaf ears that way. After all, if you don't want to hear something, how closely do you ACTUALLY listen?

I love what Thankful_in_VT had to say.

GoodNewsJim...

Don't be discouraged. Seriously. While the type of "witnessing" you mentioned may not be something that a lot of people do (myself included)...never be discouraged from telling others about needing Christ. Ever.

While I think that mass emailing people you don't know (by some means having obtained their email without their permission) may not be exactly the right way to go about it...I do think that emailing those you do know is a fantastic way to tell others about the Lord.

People everywhere, every single day are dying and going to hell. Forever. That fact frightens me to bits because I have lost friends and family. 150,000 people pass away on earth each day, most of whom do not know Jesus Christ. It is our responsibility to witness and to tell them they need Him as their Saviour.

So what if people get offended?! I would rather share the Gospel with them, show them scripture, leave a tract for someone to read so they can see Christ is the only way to heaven (and for them to be "offended") than to leave the opportunity pass by.

A family in our church were killed this April when their car was hit into a lake while on holiday in Mid-Wales. A father, grandmother and 2 teenage boys of 14 yrs of age all died when the car sunk to nearly 100ft under the surface. They all I expect, never dreamed that they would come face to face with eternity that day. Thankfully, they all knew Christ as their Lord...

The mother escaped somehow. From her testimony (I went to visit her after the accident) it seems the Lord rescued her so she could escape. Her seat belt came undone after it seemed to be stuck, she climbed through the car window and on the roadside were her mobile phone and glasses completely intact (both of which were in the car before the accident).

You see, we are not promised tomorrow. The mother of those who were killed even said so when I visited her. That has stuck with me ever since. If you know anyone who is lost it is our responsibility to witness and tell them the Gospel. Yes, it is sometimes hard for a lost person to hear that they are a sinner. Yes, they can be offended. As long as we share the Gospel in a sincere and compassionate way...leave the rest up to the Lord. If they become offended with God's Word...so be it. Let it be between them and God. Obey God...and leave the consequences upto Him.

So Jim...you keep doing what you are doing brother. (as long as it is done in sincerity and love)...Some have different ways to witness and that's fine too. Long as we all have a love for the lost then we won't go far wrong.

I basically just try to live a good life. My friends eventually learn what's important to me. Although I can be somewhat of an armchair philosopher/theologian when the conversation moves in that direction, I'm not a Bible thumper. If people have questions, they ask. God works through me however he sees fit, which is generally low key and personal rather than contrived.

GoodNewsJim said:

I'm not scamming people!
And it is a sure way to get the message in front of people.
I've had people tell me "Thank you! I was just asking God for a sign, then I checked my email, and your miracle was in it."

We're called to spread the Good News to everyone. If you start criticizing different routes,"Oh I don't want to bother someone on the phone. Oh I don't want to bother someone at their home. Oh I don't want someone to waste 1 second on the most important message in the entire world!" you might end up doing nothing at all, or have a much smaller impact.

I think I'm getting ready to leave ChristianForums.com. This post got me legitimately angry. I feel people who want me to shut up on the cause of Gospel of Jesus Christ are encouraging other people to shut up too. I will not shut up. I will not be silenced. You should feel strongly about Jesus yourself, and tell everyone you can about him, because he loves you, he is king. When a fellow believer wants to lay down the law on what is the right and wrong way to talk about Jesus it legitimately makes me angry. Who is some random person's authority to lay claim on the right and wrong way to preach the Gospel? If you think it is nasty of me to "lash back" at you, you gotta think, I did warn people not to do it in my post. I think it is evil in origin for one person to criticize another person's witnessing for Jesus if there is nothing to be criticized.

If you want my opinion:
Tell everyone you can online.
Use email
Use Twitter
Use Facebook
Use forums
Use Video games
ETC ETC ETC.
Anyway you can get someone's ear to hear you, use it to preach the Good News that God loves them.

I think I'm likely leaving from this forum though. This has upset me thoroughly.

Love you K9_Trainer, you've been cool in the past. I don't hate you. I just feel really upset.

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Umm if someone is able to go to someone and tell them, they are going to hell without believing in Jesus Christ and that everything they are doing is going to lead them to hell, which is a pretty big claim for anyone to do and a pretty big criticism on someone else, then that means someone else can criticize the means that you choose to do that, if they so choose to.

It works both ways Jim.

I think it's outdated....if by the time you're over 20 years old, you've heard of Christians before and you know what they believe.

Mass media and the lack of "hiding places" from it means that the idea of needing to get a message out there is useless. It's already out there.

I think it's important to consider different ways to witness in different situations. I know people who go on the streets with megaphones yelling about hell, sodomy, punishment, rapture etc. and I've yet to see much good come out of it; on the contrary I know that many people were creeped out by this "witnessing" technique and it certainly didn't make them approach or search for Christ.

It can certainly be hard to initiate a converstation about the faith with somebody totally foreign to spiritual matters. I do believe, however, that holding fast to our great moral imperatives laid down for us by Jesus Christ in showing love, compassion and empathy in our dealings with our neightbour can often be the strongest possible testimony and people interested in spiritual matters will then approach us if they know we're Christian. If you have a spirit of peace and an inner peace that comes from the Holy Spirit, then people who are open to the things of the Spirit will ask you how you arrived at the spirit of peace.

From talking to people on the street, most are polite if they are not interested, but most people are hungry and ask questions, want to hear what a prayer sounds like and what healing is. you are really sowing spiritual seeds of God's love into their hearts.
Another type of witness I haven't experienced is healing, but a friend has told me stories of healing before his eyes after street evangelising and people giving their hearts over to the Lord after it.

I'm a horrible witness. I'm terribly shy, and I don't like to share my personal stories with people face to face. I'm that closed off.

I also didn't have good experience with it, let alone a lot of experience. But if I have to tell someone face to face who Jesus really is, then I do. A lot of people don't understand Jesus even after you tell them, but believing in Christ takes a lot of patience and time. I think I'm slightly better now than before, although it's not to say that I'm a good Christian.

The thought of people dying without knowing Jesus frightens me. Yet, I can't allow myself to speak up for some reason. I don't know why... But honestly I'd rather speak to someone personally and on deeper level about Jesus.

I like to witness to everyone.
Usually people dislike me afterwards - christian or unbeliever alike.

I will admit to not sharing a common faith with many of you, I feel separate when it comes to this

I agree, your thoughts are far from my own and counter a lot of scripture I believe; but, we are all looking for the Same Christ

Hehe, that's why when I say I witness, I also mean to others who say they believe in God already

Going Merry said:

Hehe, that's why when I say I witness, I also mean to others who say they believe in God already

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I know doesn't mean you're right just that we share different opinions

I don't know that I make a deliberate point of it. I mostly just be myself and talk to people about things we are mutually interested in but if the topic comes up I will delve into it or if they ask me. I'm not so sure how I feel about just spewing off the gospel to someone I just met, unless it were a special circumstance where I felt it was appropriate. I'd prefer to get to know people and let it come up naturally.

Nom De Guerre said:

I know doesn't mean you're right just that we share different opinions

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what? of course it means i'm right