When the Apostle Paul wrote these words to Timothy, Paul believed that his days on Earth were coming to an end. Paul wanted to help prepare Timothy to carry on the important work of taking the Good News about Jesus Christ to those who had not yet heard. As long as one person has not heard and understood about Salvation, our work as witnessing Christians isn’t done, despite the challenges we may face to do so. That’s what Paul wanted us to remember. In practice, Paul was simply reaffirming to another generation what all followers of Jesus had been commanded to do by Him: After  being saved through His grace, we must help others receive the same gift. Why was that message important in the early church? Few had heard of Jesus, and many who had heard disputed His Divine nature.Jesus knew how important this task was because it was his last direction to his eleven disciples in the book of Matthew. (See Matthew 28:19-20.) Last messages are remembered best, and our Lord was again perfect in His wisdom in choosing this message.

When Paul was still called Saul, he had a hard heart toward Jesus and the early Christians, being a leader in rebuking, punishing, and stoning them. Paul only accepted Jesus as Lord and Savior after He appeared in His blinding glory on the road to Damascus and asked Paul why he was persecuting Him. God’s plan wasn’t to repeat that method of conversion, as was evidenced by Christ sending Paul a vision of Ananias restoring Paul’s sight and then directing Ananias to perform the miracle and to baptize Paul in the Holy Spirit.Despite this clear direction and the hard work of many great pastors, missionaries, evangelists, and witnessing Christians for nearly two thousand years, a global survey today would probably show that the majority of people on Earth either don’t know about God’s promises to us or don’t believe those promises. That’s a sad commentary on how well we are following the Lord’s direction to bring His Good News to everyone. How many lost people are there compared to those who are saved? Only God knows, but the ratio is surely no more than ten to one and may well be as low as six to one. Some would argue that the 30 percent of the world’s population that identify themselves as

Christians are a larger number, but many of those self-proclaimed Christian Testimonies  have not repented of their sins and accepted Jesus as their Lord and Savior. If we equally divided names of the lost into individual lists for each Christian, there would only be six to ten names on each list. If each Christian immediately began making contacts, each lost person would hear the Good News very quickly. Some Christians would be done making first contact in a single day to their share of the lost. If these Christians repeated the contacts daily, most would have succeeded in getting the message across in a convincing way to their share of the lost within a month. As the number of Christians grew and more people joined in witnessing, the number of people for each Christian to contact would become smaller and each lost person would receive more testimonies. The combined effect of such a concentrated effort would be marvelous. Some people undoubtedly have such hard hearts that they wouldn’t receive the blessings of this heavenly information no matter how many Christian Testimony Books they heard. But the task of fulfilling God’s call to help all be saved would be as complete as Christian efforts and prayers can Witnessing Made Easy: Yes, You Can Make a Difference accomplish. Christians could then keep knocking on the hard hearts and eventually many more souls would be saved.What’s our point? If everyone does some witnessing, it’s not a big job. Why then is there so much work to be done? It’s because most Christians don’t share their faith with lost people. Many people estimate that over 90 percent of Christians have never witnessed to anyone, and most of the rest have done little witnessing. Our survey at Jubilee Worship Center (JWC) showed that the majority of church members were either doing nothing or very little before being exposed to the church’s emphasis on witnessing.Here is what one Christian woman told us about her attitudes  toward witnessing before meeting in-congregation evangelists at JWC:

I have attended church for most of my adult life and have been involved in many of the ministries of the church. I have taught Sunday School to preschoolers through adults, served as an elder, served as church secretary, served as janitor, etc., just as many other church members have done. To me, this was what church was all about, and I found great satisfaction in what I was doing. The internal workings of the church were my delight. That was all I knew.     The churches I had attended placed little or no emphasis on evangelism …. We were under the impression that anything to do with Evangelism Training was under the job description of the pastors and the missionaries. This was their duty and that’s why we hired them. We all knew that passing out tracts or tapes or whatever was for the overboard fanatics … all this was out of our scope.

Change satisfied witnessing inaction into inspired witnessing, and Christians will quickly and easily transform humanity in the ways that God intended. How do you get everyone busy witnessing? You need an in-congregation evangelist to light the fire of desire for witnessing and to fan its flames with teaching how to witness. Why do we say that? Because our survey answers showed that JWC members who responded (almost the whole congregation) became active witnesses after in-congregation evangelists were appointed.