Ripe for Harvest: Prepared to Give an Answer

As you read through the book of Acts, look at every conversion, and see what happened right before it: what was said, who said it. The situations are the same today.    

A long time ago, my duty in the Officer’s Christian Fellowship was the east coast of the United States. I went to an officer’s office at Fort Lee, VA, and stayed overnight, then I went on to Norfolk and Fort Bragg.  

Forty years later, I was no longer on the staff of OCF, but I had to go to Denver. While I was in Denver, I checked in at the OCF offices. There was the same Air Force officer I had met in Fort Lee, retired now, a colonel. I had stayed in his house when he was a first lieutenant. He asked me, “Do you know what happened when you stayed overnight?”

I said, “No, I just remember staying in your home.”

He said, “You led the next-door neighbor to Christ.” I had no memory of it.  

Ten years after that, I was speaking at a banquet at the Hotel Salisbury, and who was there but this Air Force colonel’s wife. She came up to me and said, “You’re the man who led Dr. So-and-so to Christ.”

One remembered this event forty years afterwards, and the other remembered it 50 years afterwards. They told me, “When we moved to Fort Lee, we decided to be the best officer’s family on the base as a Christian.”

I said, “It looks like you were, and this next-door neighbor was waiting six months for you to tell him how to be like you.” I showed up, and he fell into the Kingdom. They thought it was unusual. It isn’t. The world is full of people saying, “What must I do to be saved?” If you are living like a Christian, they see your happiness, they see your character, they see all kinds of things you probably don’t realize, and they want answers, although they might not want to ask for them.

When I was still a midshipman, one of my classmates came to see me about some trouble he was having. He was about ready to get kicked out of the Academy, and he thought I was the person to see. But he had been giving me a bad time all the time for being a Christian. Non-Christians will give you a bad time because they know you’re different. They don’t want to give you any credit for it—until they get in trouble. Then they come to you, because they know you’ve done something right, and they hope you will have answers for them.

“Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have” (1 Pet. 3:15).

 

Written 2022.

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