Do You Have This Conviction?

In this excerpt from the book Extreme Devotion the story is very poignant.  Read on and examine yourself.  Would you feel like a failure if you did this?  Or would you even care?  To get the book Extreme Devotion, click here.

“The teenager never came back.”

    The famous evangelist spoke from behind prison bars. A powerful preacher, known throughout Eastern Europe, he was telling how he could not find peace. This man had led thousands to Christ, so the other Christian prisoners could not understand his feeling of failure.
    

    “I had preached at an evangelistic meeting,” he explained. “I had poured out my heart, and, at the end, two hundred people had come forward to accept Christ. I was thrilled, but I was also exhausted. As I was leaving, one young man came to me. ‘Pastor, I need to talk to you,’ he said. I told him that I was too tired, and could he maybe come back in the morning. He never came back. The Communists arrested me later that evening. I was interrogated nonstop, day and night for five days. I answered all of their questions. I answered because I feared the tortures, the beatings I would receive if I did not answer. Out of fear of the Communists, I could speak for five days and nights without stopping.

    “Out of love toward God, however, I could not speak five minutes more to that teenaged boy looking for the way of life. How will I stand before God and account for bringing only two hundred to Christ that day when it could have been two hundred and one?”

We may choose to overlook opportunities that God puts before us to share Christ with others, thinking that we’ll get to it later or that we’ll have a better time. But we may never get another chance. When we choose to ignore a divinely given opportunity, we, like the evangelist, may find that the moment was fleeting—a once-in-a-lifetime gift. Tragically, it may be the only time a person asks to hear about God’s gift of eternal life through his Son, Jesus. In heaven, God may ask you why you did not share the gospel with someone when you had the opportunity to do so. How would you answer?