Fishing or Fighting: It’s Your Choice!

Nancy came home for her lunch time women’s Bible study last Friday all excited. She said that the lesson was something that I have been harping on for some time. Of course, the study booklet put it more eloquently than I did. J She told me the study booklet said, “In your church, if you are not fishing, you are probably fighting.”

What a lesson for God’s people!

Christian fellowship is important, but the fact remains that God did not call us just to be part of a friendship club where we get together every Sabbath. God called us for many reasons, but one of our main functions is to be fishers of men! And, as Nancy’s study booklet pointed out, if we are not fishing, we are probably going to end up fighting.

I have been kinda making this point for some time, but in more of a sports metaphor. Have you ever been in a locker room after a basketball team loses another game? They have lost eight in a row and the losses are becoming unbearable. They take their frustrations out on each other. They point fingers. They play the blame game. Then punches get thrown.

Local churches are similar in this regard. A congregation sees its attendance decline year after year through splits or through normal attrition. There are less people to do the things that need to be done.

“We don’t have enough Sabbath school teachers.”

“We don’t have enough people to do volunteer work in the community.”

“Our local treasury is to the point that it’s hard to afford any new projects.”

These are the kinds of problems that cause church members to develop frustrations and lash out at each other. Again, it’s like being in a locker room after the team has lost one more heart breaker.

That’s the bad news. The good news is this: Apparently, it is in our church DNA to want to evangelize and grow! It seems to be in our nature to desire to promote the Gospel of the Kingdom of God. It’s as though the Holy Spirit is prodding us to want to be fishers of men. The problem is that too many times we just never learned how to evangelize!

There’s more good news: There seems to be a new awareness in the Churches of God of the desperate need to evangelize.

So who has the answers on how to bring people to Christ? No one. God’s people are going to have to learn to do this together. But, if we prayerfully rely on God to lead us into this type of work with a pure heart, we must go on faith that He will teach us.

Three important points:

1) You don’t always see the fruit of evangelism. Sometimes your efforts to preach the Gospel affect someone that you don’t even know about.

2) You don’t own the person you evangelize. A newly-converted person does not belong to any church or ministry or group. That new person belongs to Jesus. We shouldn’t care where the new person attends Sabbath services after baptism. Instead, we should rejoice that a sinner has been brought to Christ.

3) Sheep stealing is NOT preaching the Gospel. Convincing a person to leave one Church of God to attend another Church of God is not a form of evangelism.

God’s people should be working hard to bring new people to the real Jesus. Not the Jesus who was born on December 25, who was resurrected on Easter Sunday morning, and who did away with His Father’s Law.

Let’s rejoice that we have the freedom to preach Jesus. Praise God that His truths are precious and that He is inspiring many to want to work harder to teach these truths to the world!

By the way, we just added eight more exciting articles to this website. And we answered several more Bible questions on the Bible Q&A section. I hope you will check them out.