Are your eyes open?

There are over 32 million young people who don’t know Christ in the 11 countries where JV serves. Many of these have never even heard the gospel! As a team, we are praying that God would double the fruitfulness of our ministry in the next three years. To keep this simple we call it the 2X3 vision.

Of course, vision doesn’t become reality without a lot of concrete steps. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the habits that could increase our evangelistic fruit. Because I know you care about reaching your lost friends, let me share some key steps we are focusing on as a team.

Pray for open doors. When we specifically ask God to open doors to speak to people about Him, it is amazing what He does. Often we don’t see the open doors because we haven’t prayed for them.

Don’t wait for smooth transitions. Rarely do we get the perfect question or elegant transitions that lead into the gospel. Jesus often shifted abruptly into talking about the good news, and the Apostles did as well. If all else fails, just say “I’m curious, what do you think about God”, and follow up with the question, “Could I tell you how I came to know God?”

Tell your story and His story. People love stories. Be ready to tell the main points of Christ’s story as well as how he has changed your life. This is often more powerful than clever arguments or skillful apologetics.

Always leave them with a challenge. Even if they are not ready to put their faith in Christ, there is always a “next step” you can challenge them to. Many times this involves reading the Bible for themselves, or meeting with you again for coffee to discuss spiritual things. With the Spirit’s help, try to determine what the next step for them would be and then challenge them to take it.

After sharing these habits with our team at the September staff conference, several of them made immediate application. The Estonian team went down to a local Czech restaurant and spent an hour sharing the gospel with one of the waitresses – by drawing pictures on the order slips! The Serbian team invited a Serbian refugee living in the vicinity of our training center up for coffee – and led him to the Lord!

Jesus promised that the Harvest is ripe – we just need to open our eyes to see it.

Praying for more fruit,