Not ashamed

First off, I would like to apologize. I haven't blogged since Mother's Day. That means it's been, what, almost six weeks? If you didn't believe I was a slacker when I mentioned it before, I bet you do now, huh? But, I'm going to try to do better. In fact I'm going to try to post every Friday. We'll see how that goes... :)

Last week in my Sunday School class, we were talking about the stoning of Stephen. And (believe it or not) we got around to talking about witnessing. My Sunday School teacher asked us, "If someone was holding a gun to your head, and told you that if you didn't recant your faith in Jesus he would kill you, what would you do?" This in and of itself is a pretty hard question. But, most of us probably would say that we wouldn't recant Jesus. How could we reject our Saviour, who shed His own precious, holy, perfect blood for our sins? And even though we would die, we would fly straight to His arms. And we all answered that we wouldn't deny our faith. But then, we were faced with a much more difficult question. What if, instead of us, the gunman was threatening our sibling? Or our mother? Or our father? Or our best friend? What would we do then? None of us could answer. Tears filled many of our eyes as we thought about it. How could we sacrifice someone else's life by not recanting? But, how could we recant?
   Now, I'm not going to make you answer that question. But, did you know that other people in different countries are being forced to answer it? Their lives are being threatened because of their faith. They are presented with this question on a daily basis. Why? Because they're Christians. When they accept God's gift of salvation, they are putting their lives on the line. There are pastors, preachers, and Christians who risk the lives of themselves and their loved ones so they can share the gospel with a lost soul. But we Christians in America? We don't have to worry about that. We live in comfort. The only thing we have to fear when we share the gospel with someone else is being mocked and picked on. But that's just it. We don't like it when people make fun of us, we don't like it when people laugh at us and point at us and call us names. So, we keep quiet. We're 'Anonymous Christians', living the Christian life quietly and secretly while other Christians are enduring severe persecution for just knowing Jesus as their Saviour. And we're not sharing because we're afraid of a little ribbing. May we realize the horrible mistake we are making before it's too late to fix it.
  This week, for those of you who read this, I have a challenge. I challenge, no, Triple Dog Dare you  to witness to someone, or pass out a tract to someone this week. This goes for me to. If you do it, comment and tell me about it. :)

Have a good Father's Day weekend,

MR