The last few weeks I’ve been discussing how to overcome the fear of sharing your faith with others. The first thing is to make it a matter of prayer, confessing your anxieties to the Lord and asking him for boldness and opportunities to witness. The second thing is to be as prepared as possible by knowing the Word of God, understanding cultural norms, and making Jesus the focus of conversation.

Today we’re considering another important aspect in replacing fear with fervor in personal evangelism: being proactive. This means making things happen instead of waiting for them to happen on their own. What fuels proactivity is passion, and in personal evangelism it’s being enthusiastic about Jesus, which springs from worship.

The Perception

There is a sense that worship is all about perception. The prophet Isaiah begins to recall his vision of God in the temple by saying, “I saw the Lord.” Following that experience the Lord asks, “Who shall I send and who will go?” The prophet’s response, “Here am I, send me.”

Isaiah was sent to proclaim God’s message to a hostile audience and he may have easily become fearful. If our focus is on ourselves, our fears and faults, and on the unfriendly world, we too may become fearful. Once our hearts are focused on the Lord, we will begin to see things in their true light.

At some point Isaiah must have become anxious because the Lord would later say to him, “I, I am he who comforts you, who are you that you are afraid of man who dies, of the son of man who is made like grass, and have forgotten the LORD, your Maker, who stretched out the heavens and laid the foundations of the earth, and you fear continually all day because of the wrath of the oppressor.” (Isaiah 51:12-13)

David was not at all intimidated by Goliath because previously, out in the pasture with the sheep under the starry heavens, he had a genuine worship experience. In Psalm 8, he wrote, “O LORD, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth! You have set your glory above the heavens…When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, what is man that you are mindful of him, and the son of man that you care for him?”

If you’ve developed a real fear about sharing you faith, your perception of reality is distorted. Your spiritual focus is off. God calls you to worship Him in spirit and in truth so that you will come to see everything else in His light.

The Purpose

Worship is not just fuel for evangelism, it is the whole purpose of it. John Piper addressed this in his book, Let the Nations Be Glad, saying:

“Missions is not the ultimate goal of the Church. Worship is. Missions exists because worship doesn’t. Worship is ultimate, not missions, because God is ultimate, not man. When this age is over, and the countless millions of the redeemed fall on their faces before the throne of God, missions will be no more. It is a temporary necessity. But worship abides forever.”

Once this truth grips our hearts, fear will flee. Like the Israelites who crawled out of their holes after seeing David defeat their great enemy, we too will join the offensive. Jesus is building His church, and the gates of hell cannot withstand the onslaught of an army passionate about their God.