God asked Jonah, “Should I not pity Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than 120,000 persons who do not know their right hand from their left?” (Jonah 4:11)
He’s asking us, “Should I not pity Honolulu, that great city?” There are hundreds of thousands of lost and dying people all around us. It’s time to get bold and start telling them about Jesus.
Maybe you don’t feel prepared. Maybe you don’t feel like you have a good strategy for sharing Christ. Maybe you don’t feel holy enough to be used by God. But God used Jonah, and he was a trainwreck!
Just look at Jonah’s evangelism strategy:
- When you have an opportunity for evangelism, run away.
- When God punishes you for running away, make the people who happen to be around you suffer alongside you for what you’ve done.
- Get saved from God’s punishment by a large fish, and praise God for his salvation, but only because it was you he saved.
- Respond to an evangelism opportunity by preaching a 5-word sermon that doesn’t mention sin, repentance, grace, forgiveness, or even God.
- Pray for God to kill the people you just preached to.
- Ask God to kill you.
I’m pretty sure that will stand as the worst evangelism strategy in the history of evangelism. But somehow, God still used Jonah to bring hundreds of thousands of people to repentance in a single day.
You don’t need to have the right words, you don’t need to have the right strategy, you just need to have Jesus. Like Paul said in 1 Corinthians 3, all you have to do is plant the seed of the gospel, and water it, and God will make it grow in people’s hearts.
Tell people about God’s justice and grace, and let God do the rest. “Salvation belongs to Yahweh!”