An excerpt from “Honest Evangelism" by Rico Tice
If you’re going to take the gospel out to people, you’ve got to be yourself. After all, that’s who God has made you to be:
You created my inmost being;
you knit me together in my mother’s womb.
I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well. (Psalm 139 v 13-14)
God knows who you are, and he knew what he was doing when he made you. He gave you your particular skills, temperament, intellect, fears, likes and dislikes. We are all different, and we are all wired to serve God in a unique way.
Sometimes, evangelistic books and training basically say: Be more like him, or: Be more like her. And people get discouraged, because they’re not made that way.
But God could have made you to be a high-profile evangelist. He chose not to. He chose to make you to be you. And (as we saw in the last chapter) he put you exactly where you are. Maybe Billy Graham would be no good at witnessing to the others in your office. Perhaps Helen Roseveare’s personality would mean she would be less effective than you at witnessing to the parents of your children’s friends. God wants to harness what he has made you to be in order to reach a messed-up world with the unique combination of characteristics that you are.
I can’t tell you how often I see the liberating effects of this. You don’t have to be someone you’re not: just the person God made you. But it also leaves us without excuses! You don’t get a free pass out of evangelism because God didn’t make you to be an evangelist.
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