Expert: Eleanor Edwards - 10/7/2008

Question
I've gone to church all my life but just recently did I truly accept God into my life.  I'm happy for my newfound faith and I know there's much I've neglected and I am willing to learn about them.  However, recently my pastor has begun to preach about bringing others to Christ.  He asked the youth group to set a goal of bringing at least one friend to Christ by next year.  There is a friend I do have in mind that I want to help but I feel that I'm just learning about Christ myself.  There are things that I have trouble with and I feel that I am not the best person to help others right now.
Also, this friend is someone I've grown close to but she can be kind of abrasive sometimes.  She is a good person but recently I realize the things she says and does are wrong.  For example she can be racist, biased and superficial.  She is a good person and friend and I want to bring her to Christ but I'm not sure how to go about this because we don't talk about deep things and, especially since, as I mentioned before, I'm sort of new to my faith.    
I don't know what to do.

Answer
Hi Colan,
Thank you for your question and praise God that He has opened your heart to knowing Jesus and having a personal relationship with Him. I pray daily for people in the church who, like you, have gone to church all their life but don't yet know Jesus as their saviour so to hear from you is an answer to prayer. Thank you :)

The best and most important thing you can do for your friend is pray for her. She could be the nicest, sweetest, kindest, caring person alive but unless God reaches into her heart and allows her to see the truth of salvation through Jesus, she will not come to Him.

I can not overstate this enough. Prayer is the powerful weapon you have to bring this friend and many hundreds more like her, to Jesus. I spent too many years thinking that I must share Jesus with my friends and that, if for some reason I couldn't tell anyone about Jesus that day, prayer was better than nothing. But this is totally the wrong way round. Prayer must be the first thing we turn to each day. Without pray, God will not move in the hearts of our friends and families.

James 5:16 says, "The prayer of a righteous man is powerful and effective." This tells us two things to live by:

(1) Our prayers can be powerful and effective. They will accomplish what they ask of God.

(2) For our prayers to be the most effective and powerful that they can be, we need to be 'righteous'.

What does righteous means? A dictionary will tell you it is 'characterized by uprightness or morality' but Jesus was the ultimate and best example of what it means to be righteous. If we can live each day as Jesus would, we will become more and more like Jesus and our prayers will become effective and powerful.

Of course, to live each day as Jesus did is pretty impossible isn't?! He was perfect and we can never hope to be perfect. But with God helping us, we can become more like Him.

2 Peter 1:3 says, "His divine power has given us everything we need for life and godliness through our knowledge of him who called us by his own glory and goodness."

With God helping us, we can become more and more like Jesus. We just have to ask Him to help us (which comes back to praying lots so really we've gone full circle!)

As for the worry you have about not knowing what to say because you are so young in faith yourself, please don't worry. There are many 'old' Christians who worry what to say. I don't think this fear of not knowing what to say is something unique. But the best thing is that when you accept Jesus as your saviour, the Holy Spirit comes and lives in you. He will give you the words you need when you need them.

I've lost count of the number of times I've been talking to someone and in my head have said, "Help!" because I've felt out of my depth. In fact, the more we ask God to help us, the more effective we will become because He knows what the person we are speaking to needs to hear and can guide us and lead us as we speak with them.

I'm sitting here asking the Holy Spirit to tell me what else I need to share with you because I feel like if this is the only chance I have to empower you to live each day for Jesus, I want to do it right! That said, I don't know what else to say right now so I shall send you this message along with the promise of prayers that God may set you on fire for Him to make a difference in the lives of the people around you.

Please keep in touch (I've included my email below) as I'd love to hear how things are going.
In His love and service,
Eleanor
allexperts@eleanoredwards.co.uk

Romans 12:1-2
So here's what I want you to do, God helping you: Take your everyday, ordinary life—your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life—and place it before God as an offering. Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for him. Don't become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You'll be changed from the inside out. Readily recognize what he wants from you, and quickly respond to it. Unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down to its level of immaturity, God brings the best out of you, develops well-formed maturity in you.