What keeps you and me from talking about Jesus and sharing our faith in Him with others freely and easily, without embarrassment or hesitation, as a very natural part of our lives and conversation?
As I've analyzed it, I see two major reasons. First, our enemy Satan has a vested interest in keeping us from talking about Jesus. He knows full well that Jesus and only Jesus is the way to God, and he knows that if people become acquainted with who Jesus is, they are going to discover life and peace and joy. Since that is totally contrary to his objectives of leading people into depravity and sin and eventually to spiritual and physical death, he fights very hard to keep us from talking about Jesus. His best trick has been to make it appear that anyone who is committed to Jesus Christ is off the beaten track, over the deep end, slightly unbalanced, definitely fanatical.
With his deception and his lies, he has so manipulated the thinking and morals of our society, that we can be loony about sports or television shows or movie stars without anyone thinking twice. But as soon as we build our lives and our conversations around Jesus Christ, we are tagged as a religious weirdo.
And few of us want to be an outsider, unaccepted, or thought of as strange. All our natural human instincts, corrupted as they have been through sin and the world's influence, drive us to be accepted by our peers at any cost, to conform to standard, expected behavior, to fall in line, and to avoid being different. So, here we are in this society that frowns on Jesus fanatics, and here we are wanting to conform to what society expects of us, and so we avoid talking about Jesus, because hardly anyone else ever does, and we don't want to be different.
Is Jesus the most important person in your life? Would anyone else know it based on what you talk about? I want to challenge you and me to get serious about this, search our hearts and get a different perspective so that we are not being defeated by Satan's tactics.
Today, examine what you talk about. Just do a little mental review of what your conversations have covered already today, and as you go through the rest of this day, note your conversation topics. Especially those conversations where you have some control over the direction and the topic of the conversation. See if you can discover missed opportunities where you could have talked about Jesus. Ask yourself why you didn't.
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