Evangelistic despondency, seeds of hope

I don’t know about you, but my life has been full of evangelistic disappointment. With person after person I’ve got my hopes up as they’ve moved towards Jesus, but then somehow it’s all petered out into awkward nothingness.

If I’m honest, I sometimes wonder whether all the time and emotional effort was actually worth it.

An unexpected twist

But I heard a story recently that encouraged me. Someone, let’s call him Josh, told me about his old best friend from school, who we’ll call Alex. As teenagers they had loads of chats about faith. For years it was just an interesting disagreement; but then, in an unexpected moment at a CU event, Alex turned to Josh and said, 'You know, I think I believe this stuff.' Josh was so excited, he lent him books, invited him to church, and for a while it was all pretty encouraging. But when Alex went to uni he never really tried to find a church. He played rugby a lot, went out a lot, but didn’t respond to Josh’s messages much at all. Josh eventually wrote him a letter, pleading with him to take Jesus seriously. No response. A few years after uni Alex moved abroad for a lucrative job opportunity.

Then a few weeks ago they caught up. After a decade of sporadic contact and apparently zero spiritual interest, Alex announced that he wanted to talk about Jesus. He said he’d been thinking about their conversations a lot. He explained that he was extremely successful (he has made a lot of money, started his own business and has a beautiful long-term girlfriend) but he’d found it was all somehow empty. Purposeless. He’d tried every self-help ideology on the market but none of it worked. He said he knew deep down that the Jesus stuff was true, and asked Josh if he could help him work out where to start.

The subtle power of seeds

Jesus told a lot of stories about seeds. My favourite is the farmer who sows the seed, and then – whether he sleeps or gets up – it quietly grows, all of its own accord, until it’s ready for harvest. The point is: God’s message is really good seed. It’s powerful stuff. And it’s quite capable of growing and bearing beautiful fruit entirely behind our backs, when we are least expecting it.

So let me pass on the encouragement: if your life feels like it’s scattered with stories of evangelistic disappointment, then it must be scattered with seeds – times where you’ve loved someone enough to share with them the message about Jesus. Of course, heartbreakingly, some of those might come to nothing. A lot of good seed lands on stony ground. Even then, nothing we do with and for Christ is ever wasted, it is all precious to Him. But while some of those seeds might not ever take root, some will. And whether you sleep or get up, whether you’re in touch or not, whether it takes two years or ten years or fifty, they will grow into something eternally beautiful. You might get to be involved in the rest of the story, or you might be totally oblivious until the moment in the New Creation when you are gloriously surprised to see them, and they look you in the eye and say, 'Thank you.'

Sowing the seed of God’s good news with love is exhausting. It makes us emotionally vulnerable and disappointment cuts deep. But there will come a day when you and I look back and realise that it was more than worth it. That it was worth it beyond our wildest dreams.