It was my nightmare scenario, at least as far as evangelism was concerned. Here was a young Orthodox Jewish man staring daggers into me and yelling at me. He eventually ripped up the gospel tract I had given him into a hundred pieces, afterwards offering to rip up the stack in my hand.

The odd thing is, I wasn’t afraid. I wasn’t devastated. I wasn’t speechless. I responded to him calmly and politely. I was pleased he had at least read some of the tract.

Standing on a city sidewalk to hand out gospel tracts isn’t my thing. It’s not natural for me. It goes against my personality. If it had been up to me, I would not have been anywhere near that Jewish man on that day. Nor would I have been near the 50 people who received the tracts and didn’t rip them up. We actually saw several people later who were still reading them. And we had a few brief but constructive conversations.

As I said, that sort of thing isn’t natural for me. I was driven to it. There was a man I was discipling who had come from a thoroughly pagan past. After several years in another church and then in ours, he still hadn’t fit into the church culture. But he did want to know everything God had to say to him; he was a diligent student of the Bible.

At times he was hard to deal with. He asked a lot of questions, but he didn’t want my answers. If I started a sentence with the words, “I think,” he would interrupt and tell me he didn’t care what I thought. He wanted to know what God thought. I couldn’t argue.

He was a curmudgeon about evangelism, too. He had heard me explain how evangelism is done in many ways and over long periods of time. It is not just our words but our example and actions that count. It’s how we do our work, how we manage our finances, how we treat our friends and neighbors, etc.

That was never enough for him. At last I capitulated. I decided that I would not be a stumbling block to him; so I said I would do the type of evangelism he wanted to do. He selected passing out gospel tracts, and he picked one of the most difficult areas of our city in which to pass them out.

When we arrived, he informed me that he was going to count on me to show him how it was done. I was clueless, actually; but we had prayed fervently about this, and so had other people.

God carried us that day. I had seldom been in a situation where I had a greater realization that God was doing the work in people, and that I was an instrument. At the end we gave a ride to a young man we had given a tract to earlier, and we shared the gospel with him.

That day didn’t remove all my fears, didn’t change my personality, didn’t make me a tract aficianado, and didn’t alter my desire to be a witness by example and reformation. But God did change something about me that day—the thing that says it’s natural to have few specific gospel conversations with people, or that we should wait for the lost to come to us. You’ll read articles this month that find other Reformed Presbyterians learning those lessons too.