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Why Witness When Nothing Happens?

You pray. You invite your non-Christian friends to youth group. You share your Christian music with them. But you're still waiting for them to say, "I want to be a Christian!"

Tempting to give up, isn't it? Maybe you've wondered if you're doing it right, if you're really the strong Christian you think you are. Don't give up! Witnessing takes time. That's what 20th-century pastor and writer Oswald Chambers tells us in his book Workmen of God. He says witnessing is basically a waiting game—a lot like fishing.

Take … the phrase, "fishers of men." There are one or two significant things about that figure of speech. The early disciples were fishermen, and the Spirit of God seems to point out that their earthly employment was a parable of their divine vocation. David was a shepherd; he became the shepherd of Israel. Paul was a tentmaker; he was used by God for making people's bodies into tabernacles of the Holy Spirit.

I wonder how many of you know what it is to be out all night at sea fishing? I do. Before the early dawn, about three or four in the morning, you feel so amazingly cold and so amazingly indifferent that you don't know whether you care for anything, and there is an exact counterpart of those nights in work for God. Do you know what it is to have a relationship to God so consuming, a personal, passionate devotion to Jesus Christ so powerful, that it will stand you in good stead through every cold night while you are watching and waiting to land individuals for God? It is those cold nights of waiting that are the test. Cold nights of praying and preaching when, like Gideon's army over again, many leave and forsake, and just the few are left [see Judges 7].

What a marvelous illustration fishing is! Especially fishing with the net. Jesus Christ told the disciples He would make them fishers of men, catchers of human souls. Unless we have this divine passion for souls burning in us because of our personal love for Jesus Christ, we will quit the work before we are much older. It is an easy business to be a fisherman when you have all the enthusiasm of the catch; everybody then wants to be a fisherman … but God is wanting those who, through long nights, through difficult days of spiritual toil, have been trying to let down their nets to catch the fish.

Oh the skill, the patience, the gentleness, and the endurance that are needed for this passion for souls. A sense that people are perishing doesn't do it; only one thing will do it: a blazing passion, a devotion to the Lord Jesus Christ, an all-consuming passion. Then there is no night so long, no work so hard, and no crowd so difficult, but that love will outlast it all.

… May we see our passion for souls spring from [the Scripture] on which the Moravian Mission* founded its enterprise: Isaiah 53. Behind every face besotted with sin, they saw the face of the Son of God. Behind every broken piece of earthenware, they saw Jesus Christ. Behind every down-trodden mass of human corruption, they saw Calvary. That was the passion that was their motive. … That is the deep, true evangelical note for the passion for souls—the consuming passion that transfigures a man's self, that transfigures a woman's self, and makes him or her indeed wise and patient and an able fisher for human souls.

* The Moravian Church, founded in Germany in the mid-1700s, pioneered early evangelistic efforts worldwide.

Chambers, who was born in Aberdeen, Scotland, became a Christian as a teen. Later, after studying art and architecture in college, he felt called to ministry, so he switched schools and took up theology. Then he worked as a traveling Bible teacher in the United States, the United Kingdom and Japan. In 1911 he founded and began teaching at a Bible college in London. When the school was closed for World War I, he sailed to Egypt to minister to the troops. He died there, following surgery for a ruptured appendix.

So, if he only wrote one book, where did all the others come from? His wife Gertrude, whom he married in 1910, wrote them from her verbatim shorthand notes of his sermons and lectures. Married to Oswald for only seven years, she spent the next 50 creating his literary legacy. Now that's dedication! —Elesha Coffman

Copyright © 2000 by the author or Christianity Today International/Campus Life magazine. Click here for reprint information on Campus Life.
March/April 2000, Vol. 58, No. 8, Page 58

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