AMWAY and the Gospel

So I was at Best Buy the other day looking at the Wii games and this guy (coincidentally named Bryan and he even spelled it right which is a rarity) started asking me questions about Wii (what games are good, etc). So we struck up a normal conversation. Where are you from? Are you married? Do you have any kids? What do you do for a living? And then he said, "I work for a marketing company that is part of AMWAY." Instant brick wall came up in my mind. My initial thought was, "Oh now he is going to try to convince me to join AMWAY." He could have told me how it is free to join and you are guaranteed a million dollars in the first year but it didn't matter. Of course the rest of the conversation went about like a normal conversation, no sales pitches, no twisting my arm, nothing. He was genuinely just trying to have a genuine conversation.

That is one reason I was never a fan of sales. First of all, I don't like to try to convince people to buy something from me. Also, I probably assume that most people are just like me and once they realize they are in the middle of a sales pitch, they check out.

So on the drive home, I just couldn't get the conversation out of my mind and how it mirrors how my attitude was in the past and still is at times when it comes to sharing the Gospel. For so often, I used to think that I needed to convince people to "invite Christ into their lives". I remember one specific time when my grandpa was dying from cancer. We didn't know how long he had to live so one day, I made up my mind to witness to him. I remember sharing the Romans road with him. I remember after going through everything, I asked him if he wanted to be saved. He told me that he really wasn't sure. He didn't feel that God would accept him because of all of the sin he had committed. I told him that it didn't matter because Jesus' blood covers all of our sins once we are sins. He still seemed hesitant but I was determined, so after asking him several more times if he wanted to pray to be saved, he said yes and we prayed there in the motor home he had driven up from Florida in. Did my grandpa get saved that day? I like to believe he did. He went on to read the Bible when he got home to Florida which is something he didn't do before so it seems like there was a heart change. But my point is, I felt like I had to convince him. I felt like I needed to be a good salesman and sell him on Christianity.

I hadn't realized that as Paul says in his letter to the Romans that the gospel "is the power of God for salvation. (Romans 1:16)" God's power wasn't in my "lofty speech or wisdom (1 Cor. 2:1)" but in His Word. Man, if we truly embrace that, if we truly embrace the fact that God works through his words and through human vessels like us who proclaim Christ, how would that change or witnessing? If we realized that it wasn't dependent on us but dependent on God. That it was God who causes the heart change by putting his Spirit within someone and then and only then does a person call out "Abba Father". If we came to grips with the fact that it is our responsibility to be faithful in proclaiming Christ to a lost and dying world but not our responsibility to win people to Christ. Why? Because salvation is a work of God that only He can do. But praise God that he uses horrible salespeople like me to do so.