Unreachable
With major back surgery or a bad back, it can seem impossible to put on your own socks. You can’t bend down and reach your feet to even pull on a sock over it. Yet someone came up with a clever way to manage the impossible. One company calls their device “Soxon Sock Aid”. It really does work. Throughout the ages men have been coming up with ways to solve problems that seem impossible to solve. Inventions like modern plumbing, the printing press, the automobile and pesticides have all solved problems and/or made life easier.
Even as Christians we have encountered what seems like unsolvable problems when we witness to others about Christ. For example, have you ever been trying to share Christ with someone and that person just comes up with one argument after another? They seem to have an excuse for everything. It becomes a very frustrating situation. In those situations we sometimes just decide to give up. We think they are unreachable. A miracle would have to happen before they would ever receive Christ. It is true that not everyone we witness to will receive Christ. There will be those who refuse God’s free gift. Yet many times it is just the way we are witnessing. We aren’t using the right tools to reach the unreachable.
We first must realize that we are in a spiritual battle. The devil doesn’t want us to reach anyone for Christ. He is going to bring out the heavy artillery against us. That’s when we put on our spiritual armor (Ephesians 6: 10 – 20). We sometimes forget that with God on our side nothing can come against us (Isaiah 54:17 and Romans 8:31). So as we engage in the battle to share the gospel with someone, we need to realize that the devil is working with them too. He helps to implant those arguments in their head even before we arrived and began the conversation with them. Read II Corinthians 10: 3 – 5.
3 For though we live in the body, we do not wage war in an unspiritual way, 4 since the weapons of our warfare are not worldly, but are powerful through God for the demolition of strongholds. We demolish arguments 5 and every high-minded thing that is raised up against the knowledge of God, taking every thought captive to obey Christ.
The Apostle Paul is reminding the Corinthians that they can break down those strongholds and every thought that is raised up against God. In other words, not only do we rely on Christ to help us break personal strongholds in our personal thought process, but we need to rely on Him to break those strongholds in others that we are working with. We need to seriously take these people we are working with to God in prayer. We need to pray for Christ to take their thoughts captive. We need to pray for the Holy Spirit to soften their hearts. We need to ask God to do all the prep work, so when we show up for our next conversation with them, they are ready to listen. Common sense dictates that we cannot just pounce on people with the gospel. We need to be praying for God to reveal people to us that He wants us to witness to and praying that He works with their hearts and minds. Common sense also dictates that we prepare for the spiritual battle we are entering. We need to make sure our own hearts and minds are right before the Lord and that we are walking in His ways.
So let God invent, engineer and create a way for you to be an effective witness for Him as you reach out to those who appear to be unreachable.
