MEMORISE:
Blessed are ye, when men shall revile you, and persecute you, and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely, for my sake. Matthew 5:11
READ: Matthew 5:11-12
11 Blessed are ye, when men shall revile you, and persecute you, and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely, for my sake.
12 Rejoice, and be exceeding glad: for great is your reward in heaven: for so persecuted they the prophets which were before you.
MESSAGE:
To win souls for Christ, you need the Holy Spirit, and you would also have to develop a thick skin. Once in a while you will be insulted and even ridiculed for the sake of the gospel you are preaching. You need to ignore their insults and continue to go after the souls. If you let the insults get to you and fire back, the unbelievers will say “And you call yourself a Christian”. If you decide to stop preaching because of the insults, you would have allowed the devil to win.
Many times, the people insulting you are even doing so on purpose. Several years ago, one of my daughters begged me to talk to her father (a former military governor) about Jesus Christ. When I visited him, he attacked me with insults. “You, look at yourself. Ph.D. in mathematics and you are going about carrying Jesus on your head. I know what you are doing. You think I don’t know your tricks? You are taking money from poor women and students so you can be rich. That is how you are using your own Mathematics. I also know about the miracles that they say are happening in your Church. We know the babalawos (witch doctors) people like you consult”. He just went on and on and I kept smiling.
When he finally got born again years later and was giving his testimony, he said ‘ If my gun had been nearby that day, I would have shot you”. I asked why he would have done that and he said “Because I was trying to make you angry and the harder I tried, the more you laughed and it was killing me”.
When you are going to preach to souls, leave all your degrees and achievements at home. When you get there, if they accept your message, great. If they insult you, pray for them and leave. Some people have names they have been tagged with in their office or school because they keep preaching the gospel. A lot of these unbelievers know that what you are saying is the truth, but they just want to make you angry.
Winning souls is warfare because the one who you are trying to snatch them from is a strong man and will not let them go easily. He will also attack you in several ways for trying to snatch souls from him. He will attack your ego to get you to stop but you must not. When you compare the rejoicing that will happen in heaven over that one soul to the insults, your ego will not matter.
PRAYER POINT:
Father, as I go out to preach Your gospel, don’t let anything discourage me, in the mighty name of Jesus.
BIBLE IN ONE YEAR: Colossians 1-4
AUTHOR: PASTOR E. A. ADEBOYE
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