Tuesday, July 20, 2021
Learning from the Master Evangelist
“He had to go through Samaria on the way” (John 4:4 NLT).
There’s no better example of how to do evangelism than Jesus Christ Himself. He is the master communicator and the master evangelist. We see this beautifully illustrated in John 4, when Jesus encountered the woman at the well in Samaria.
Now, no orthodox Jew in Jesus’s day would ever go to Galilee through Samaria even though it was a shortcut. It actually would shave a lot of time off the journey.
However, there was deep-seated bigotry and prejudice between Jews and Samaritans. Jews hated Samaritans. And Samaritans hated Jews.
Yet the Bible tells us that Jesus, both a Jew and a rabbi, “had to go through Samaria on the way” (John 4:4 NLT).
Why? Because there was a burned-out, empty, searching, immoral woman who had an appointment with God, unbeknownst to her. This serves as a reminder that the love of God knows no racial, economic, or even sinful boundaries.
It also reminds us that we have to go to where people are. So often Christians try to isolate themselves from nonbelievers. It seems as though their goal is to get through the day without coming into contact with people who aren’t yet believers.
But God has not called us to isolate; He has called us to infiltrate. That grumpy neighbor, that inquisitive coworker who’s always peppering you with questions, those people you’re around in your day-to-day living—they’re your mission field. God wants you to reach out to them.
We need to get past our comfort zones. Yes, it’s challenging to reach out to someone who’s younger or older or who might look different than you do. But we need to go where people are.
Jesus did not say that the whole world should go to church, but He did say that the Church should go to the whole world. We want to invade their world with the gospel.
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