Light of the World Today
"However, I consider my life worth nothing to me; my only aim is to finish the race and complete the task the Lord Jesus has given me, the task of testifying to the good news of God's grace." Acts 20 verse 24 (NIV)
In Part One, we met Edward Kimball, the nervous Sunday School teacher who pressed through his hesitation and found Dwight L. Moody in the back of a shoe store. His was a quiet, gentle act of courage, the kind most of us can imagine ourselves attempting. No persecution. No danger. Just a man, a prayer, a hand on a shoulder, and a few stumbling words about the love of Christ.
But not every act of soul-winning ends that simply. And if we are going to talk honestly about winning people to Christ, we must talk about what happens when sharing the gospel costs you something. Because for many believers, around the world and perhaps right where you are, it does.
THE WARRIOR WHO WENT HOME
There is a story that John Piper recounts in his book Let the Nations Be Glad, told originally by the singer and writer Michael Card, about a Masai warrior named Joseph. Joseph was walking along a dusty African road one day when a stranger stopped him and shared the gospel of Jesus Christ. Something happened in Joseph that he could not explain. He received it. He believed it. And before the stranger had moved on, Joseph had given his life to Christ. The transformation was immediate and overwhelming. Joseph described being filled with an excitement and a joy he had never known, and the first thing he wanted to do was go back to his own village and tell everyone what had happened to him. He began going from house to house, telling his neighbours and his kinsmen about the cross of Jesus and the salvation it offered, fully expecting their faces to light up the way his had.
They did not light up. They became violent.
The men of the village seized him and held him to the ground while the women beat him with strands of barbed wire. He was left bleeding in the dust. When he recovered enough to stand, he went back. This time they attacked him before he could open his mouth. He was flogged again. When he recovered, he went back a third time. As they beat him for what he believed might be the last time, he spoke to them again of Jesus Christ, of the cross, of grace. Before he lost consciousness, the last thing he saw was that the women who had been beating him had begun to weep.
He woke up in his own bed. The people who had flogged him were now nursing him back to health. And the entire village had come to Christ.
Joseph later travelled to Amsterdam, where he attended the Billy Graham Itinerant Evangelists Conference, and shared his story with Dr Graham himself. The man who had beaten and been beaten for the sake of the gospel stood before thousands of preachers from around the world as living proof that the power of Christ cannot be contained, not by indifference, not by violence, not by fear.
His suffering was not a detour from the mission. It was part of the message.
When the village saw a man who was willing to bleed for the truth he was proclaiming, they did not see fanaticism. They saw conviction. They saw something worth dying for. And it made them want to know what it was.
THE FEAR WE DO NOT NAME
"For God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of a sound mind." 2 Timothy 1 verse 7 (NKJV)
Most of us in the Western world will never face a barbed wire flogging for sharing our faith. But we face something that, in its own way, stops us just as effectively: the fear of being thought foolish. The fear of the awkward silence after you mention Jesus in a conversation that was going perfectly well. The fear of the colleague who raises an eyebrow. The fear of the family member who changes the subject. The fear of being labelled narrow, naive, or out of touch. These fears are real. They deserve to be named rather than dismissed. But they also deserve to be examined honestly, because when we place them beside what Paul wrote from a prison cell, or what Joseph endured on that African road, they shift slightly in proportion.
Paul wrote to Timothy, not from a comfortable study, but from a Roman gaol. He had been beaten, shipwrecked, stoned and left for dead. He had lost friends, freedom and status. And from that place he wrote: God has not given us a spirit of fear. He was not saying that fear does not come. He was saying it does not come from God. Which means we have a choice about whether to obey it.
Courage is not the absence of fear. It is the decision that something matters more than fear.
What mattered more to Paul was the person standing in front of him. What mattered more to Joseph was the neighbour who did not yet know Christ. What mattered more to Edward Kimball was a boy in a stockroom who might live and die without ever hearing the gospel if Kimball turned back at the door. The question soul-winning always comes back to is this: does the person in front of you matter enough to make you uncomfortable?
SOWING IN TEARS
"Those who sow with tears will reap with songs of joy. Those who go out weeping, carrying seed to sow, will return with songs of joy, carrying sheaves with them." Psalm 126 verses 5 and 6 (NIV)
There is something important in this psalm that we often miss. It does not say that soul-winning is painless. It says that those who go out weeping will return rejoicing. The weeping is part of the journey. The tears are part of the sowing. What does it mean to go out weeping? It means going when you are not sure of the outcome. It means speaking when you cannot guarantee a warm reception. It means praying for someone for months or years with no visible change, trusting that the seed you are placing in the ground is not wasted, even when the soil looks hard.
Many of the greatest soul-winners in history describe this dimension of their work. George Whitefield, the eighteenth century evangelist whose open-air preaching drew tens of thousands across Britain and America, was regularly mocked, pelted with eggs, mud and stones, and condemned by the religious establishment of his day. He once wrote that he had been misrepresented so consistently that he had stopped being surprised by it. But he did not stop preaching. He wrote in his journal: "Let my name be forgotten, let me be trodden under the feet of all men, if Jesus may thereby be glorified."
Whitefield preached roughly 18,000 sermons in his lifetime. He died in harness, preaching his final sermon with a candle in his hand as his lungs gave out. He is buried in Newburyport, Massachusetts, far from the English soil where he was born, because he could not stop going where people needed to hear.
You do not choose when the harvest comes. You choose whether to go out with the seed.
The psalm promises a return. But it does not promise that the return will come in your lifetime, or in the way you expected, or even that you will see it. Edward Kimball never saw the full fruit of that shoe store conversation. What he saw was a boy who stood up straighter as he left for home. Heaven saw the rest.
THE PERSON WHO KEEPS SAYING NO
"Brothers and sisters, my heart's desire and prayer to God for the Israelites is that they may be saved." Romans 10 verse 1 (NIV)
There may be someone in your life who has heard you speak of Christ. Who has seen something different in you. Who has attended church with you once, perhaps twice, and returned to their life apparently unchanged. Someone you have prayed for so consistently that their name has worn a groove in your prayers. And they are still saying no. Paul had that same ache about his own people, the Israelites. He wrote to the Romans that his heart's desire and unceasing prayer was for their salvation. He was not passive about it. He was not resigned to it. He kept praying with a longing that he could not set down, even as many of them rejected the message he carried.
This is one of the harder edges of soul-winning that nobody talks about enough: what to do with the grief of people who are not yet home. The sibling who heard the gospel clearly and walked away unmoved. The friend you have loved and prayed for across a decade who still tells you they do not believe. The parent whose heart seems sealed. The answer the Bible gives is not to stop. It is to entrust. You plant. You water. You pray. You keep the relationship warm and honest and loving. You stay present without being a pressure. You do not take their refusal as your failure, because you were never the one doing the saving. That was always God's work. Your work is to remain faithful, to remain available, and to refuse to write anyone off as beyond reach. God specialised in the ones everyone else gave up on. Saul of Tarsus was killing Christians when the risen Christ met him on a road to Damascus and turned him into the greatest church planter the world has ever known. Nobody saw that coming. Nobody had reason to believe it was possible. God did it anyway.
Do not write off the ones who keep saying no. God has not written them off.
YOUR LIFE IS AN ARGUMENT
"You are the light of the world. A town built on a hill cannot be hidden. Neither do people light a lamp and put it under a bowl. Instead they put it on its stand, and it gives light to everyone in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before others, that they may see your good deeds and glorify your Father in heaven." Matthew 5 verses 14 to 16 (NIV)
There is a kind of soul-winning that requires no words at all, at least not at first. It is the kind that comes from a life so visibly different that people begin to ask questions on their own. When a colleague notices that you do not join in the gossip but you do stay late to help with their workload, that is an argument for the gospel. When your neighbour sees that you are patient with your children in the car park when every other parent is snapping, that is an argument for the gospel. When someone at the lowest point of their life calls you instead of someone else because they know you will not judge them, that is an argument for the gospel. Words matter enormously. They are not optional. Paul makes clear in Romans 10 that faith comes from hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ. At some point, you must speak. But the life you live before you speak either opens the door or closes it.
There is a well-known saying, often attributed to Francis of Assisi, that we should preach the gospel always and if necessary use words. This is sometimes used as an excuse not to speak at all, which was never the intent and is certainly not the biblical pattern. But the underlying truth it points to is real: the integrity of your daily life is the credibility of your message. People do not simply hear what you say about Christ. They watch how you carry yourself when things go wrong, how you treat the people who cannot do anything for you, how you respond to disappointment and injustice. They are measuring whether the thing you are inviting them into actually works.
Live in a way that makes the invitation convincing.
HOW TO APPLY THIS IN DAILY LIFE
1. Prepare yourself before the conversation, not during it.
The panic that overtakes us when a gospel opportunity appears is often because we have not been building our inner life. Spend time in scripture, spend time in prayer, keep your own walk with God alive, and you will find that words come more naturally in the moment than you expected.
2. Let people see your faith in ordinary suffering.
When something hard happens to you and you respond with a grace that puzzles people, that is an open door. Do not perform peace, but do not hide it either. Let people see what your faith actually does for you when life is difficult.
3. Stay in relationship with the people who say no.
Rejection is not a reason to withdraw. Some of the most powerful soul-winning happens across years of consistent, uncomplaining love shown to someone who keeps refusing. The love itself becomes part of the argument.
4. Keep a short account of what God has done in your life.
The freshest testimonies are the most compelling. When God answers a prayer, note it down. When He provides or protects or restores, write it somewhere. You will need these stories when the moment comes to speak, and the moment will come.
CLOSING WORD
Joseph the Masai warrior was flogged three times before his village came to Christ. George Whitefield died preaching with a candle in his fist. Paul wrote about fearlessness from a prison cell. Edward Kimball nearly did not go into the shoe store at all. None of them were extraordinary in themselves. What was extraordinary was the grace they carried and the God who backed them up.
That same God backs you up. The grace you carry is the same grace. The people who need to hear it are standing in your life right now, some of them patient, some of them hostile, some of them quietly desperate.
Go out with the seed, even weeping. The harvest is real. The Reaper is faithful.
MEMORY VERSE
"Those who sow with tears will reap with songs of joy. Those who go out weeping, carrying seed to sow, will return with songs of joy, carrying sheaves with them." Psalm 126 verses 5 and 6 (NIV)