Theme:   Five Things I Don't Want to Miss this Christmas

This eDevotional was written by a volunteer from Timberlake Church. 

 Read: Colossians 4:5

Think: Pastor Nick shared a great message last weekend challenging us to get ready to celebrate Christmas… He didn’t mean trimming the tree or making the Christmas cookies – though that’s a lot of fun. He talked more in terms of our heart and our life focus.

His last point was that Christmas gives us a great chance to share Jesus with friends and neighbors who don’t know Him. If you’re like me that gives you a little nervous tick just thinking about it… But one of the best resources I’ve seen lately that helped allay that nervousness is Bill Hybels’ “Just Walk Across the Room”. Here’s what he had to say:

Sharing our faith with a non-believer doesn’t have to be a daunting task that inevitably results in the other person coming to Christ immediately. Many of us mistakenly believe that we must obtain a profession of faith from someone before our evangelism efforts are successful. In fact, experience has shown that most people accept Christ only after hearing seven or eight presentations of the Christian message. Consequently, we need to redefine our understanding of “evangelistic success” so we recognize that our role consists of taking only the steps that the Holy Spirit prompts us to take in each case. Our job begins with learning to look at people outside God’s family with a broken heart, like the way God looks at them. Then we must be attentive every day to the Holy Spirit guiding us toward people who need to know about God’s love, and we must actively look for these kinds of people in every social situation.

Remember what drives us to share our faith:

• God feels that every human being who is not part of his family is “missing,” and his heart goes out to all those people.
• Our part is to align our hearts with his so that we feel the same kind of distress that Jesus felt whenever he encountered a person who needed to know about God’s love.

 Introducing God to non-believers is our mission. There are multiple ways to introduce God, and many situations in our daily lives can be turned into such opportunities. Pray for the Holy Spirit’s wisdom to recognize the opportunities in our lives and guidance to open the doors leading to God for non-believers.

Do: Which of the following steps you can practice this week?

1)      See people who are far from God the way God sees them, putting our judgments aside.

2)      Commit to being open to the prompting of the Holy Spirit each day and not letting our feelings override his leading.

3)      Have our radar on in any social situation to see if anyone is in need of God’s encouragement and love, even when we feel uncomfortable.

4)      Give the greatest gift you can to anyone by sharing an introduction to the God who loves them.

Pray: God use me to reach the people that I encounter who don’t know you and who are missing out on the amazing purpose and plan you have for them. Give me eyes that can see who is open to hearing about your love and the words to speak that can share that clearly! Amen.