Today I asked God to send me to one person, or to send one person to me.
When the Lord Jesus saved me He used a conversation with my sister to dispel my confusion and shine light into my darkness. I already knew she was a Christian and I had no doubt she cared deeply for me. I had seen her body shaking with emotion and her tears flowing freely on a prior occasion when she had spoken to me about my soul. That night God gave Lydia the unspeakable privilege of leading me to Christ.
After I was saved the Lord gave me the desire to reach others with the same Gospel. Often I preached in the open-air. Often I preached in more formal settings. Often I distributed Gospel tracts and booklets, New Testaments, Gospel calendars. Often I conversed with individuals.
As I have thought back over those years of service I have noticed something important: the people who have been saved are just like me. Each one is an individual with a life history. Each carries unique concerns and anxieties. They have burdens and weaknesses and negative experiences. They need great clouds of confusion and misunderstanding dispelled. They need light in the midst of darkness.
To put it plainly, many are on a journey and they need help to reach the right destination. Like the Ethiopian man travelling through the desert reading a part of the Bible and wondering what it was all about (Acts 8:26-40), they need someone like Philip to come alongside and tell them about Jesus (see v. 35).
I want to be that person. And so, today I asked God to send me to one person, or to send one person to me.
I’ve been at this long enough to know that, just as I learned to trust my sister before I trusted Christ, people may need to learn to trust me before they trust the Saviour I present. I’ve got to be willing for the long haul — the hard road of building a relationship, being dependable, showing compassion, being genuine, praying often. I have to live Christ in order to introduce someone to Him.
A good friend of mine is ill. She was an alcoholic for many years. I visited her weekly for years but she never seemed to understand the Gospel. One day I stood beside her bed in hospital, thinking she was slipping into eternity without Christ, and I pleaded with her to trust the Saviour I had told her of many times. I didn’t know it at the time but those words were, by God’s grace, effective. A short time later, after she was much recovered, she told me that through the fog of her pain relief medication she had heard my pleading and determined in that moment to trust the Saviour. She is a new creation in Christ, her alcoholism a thing of the past. She attends our local church gatherings and brings her sister along to hear the Gospel.
She’s ill again. She may well slip into eternity this time. But, praise the Lord, she has Christ as her Saviour and heaven will be her eternal home.
And so, I want God to send me another and another and another. The road may well be rough, mentally exhausting, emotionally draining, but it is surely worth it.
If you are a Christian can I ask you to pray that same prayer for me? Pray that God will send me a soul today. And pray that he’ll use me to lead that precious person to Christ.
Pray that prayer for yourself by all means, but please do pray it for me.
