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A friend once told me about a business executive whose purpose in life is to "get to heaven and take as many people with me as I can." Wow! I wish I were like that, but I'm not.

All my life, I've had a monkey on my back. I can never escape the questions. "Are you witnessing for the Lord?" "When is the last time you shared your faith?" "If they don't hear about Jesus from you, who are they going to hear it from?"

I flunk every one of those questions. Can I really be a Christian? As much as I want God's approval, I have never brought myself to "witness" to anybody I didn't know. I'm chicken.

My mom was chicken too. When she was in the last months of her life after a long bout with breast cancer, I visited her in her hospital room late one night. It was quiet, except for the hiss of the oxygen flowing through the tube. I was bent over her bed, holding her hand, when I noticed a silent tear slip down her cheek. I whispered, "Hey, what's the matter? What are these tears for?"

"I've never talked to anyone about their soul," she said with a touch of shame. There was my mom—a selfless, godly, little old lady, not sure she would make it through the night—worried that she had failed at evangelism. She was fighting the monkey on her back.

Do you fight that monkey? If you're an evangelical, you probably do.

Somewhere along the line, you've sat in a church and heard a pastor tell about how he plopped down in an airplane seat next to a total stranger and, before the plane had landed, the stranger had become a Christian. The moral of the story? You can do it too! That's what is implied, anyway.

Well, maybe you can, but my bet is you won't. Even more, I'll bet the guy beside you on the plane will be better off if you don't try.

Am I promoting heresy? Absolutely not! Here's why.

Studies by the Barna Research Group show that most adults become Christians today through the influence of trusted friends. Yes, there are times when God orchestrates a meeting between a broken sinner and a gifted evangelist that leads to a conversion. But that's not what happens in the lives of most Christians, day by day.

If people live in America and they aren't Christians, it's for a reason. They've heard the gospel, but they haven't bought it. Whether they truly understand it is irrelevant. The fact is they have no felt need for God. They thrive on self-sufficiency. They don't need God, and they don't have time to think about it.

That's true until there's a disruption, such as an illness, unemployment, a failing marriage, a child in crisis, or a serious accident.

Then people realize they are not in control. If they know intuitively that there is a Creator behind this creation, they sense a need to connect to their Creator, who is in control.

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