We recently sent a group of people from Crossroads Church to the country of Brazil to be part of an English teaching team. As you can imagine, when I first approached folks about being a part of the team their first response was, “I cannot teach English!” The goods news, I reassured them, is that we are not teaching them English as much as we are really helping them to practice their English. For this reason, we have aptly named the school Practically Speaking English.
As we prepared to go and teach English and share the good news of Jesus, many of the people on the team asked about how we were going to share the Gospel. To help them understand, I shared one of my favorite passages where Jesus explains about sharing our faith.
We read in Matthew 5:16, In the same way, let your good deeds shine out for all to see, so that everyone will praise your heavenly Father. (NLT)
This verse explains so well what happens when we go anywhere in the world to teach English. The truth is that when we come to a community and invite them to be part of the school, our main objective is not to convince them to follow Jesus. Our main objective is to give them the best conversational English school we can. We really do want to be a blessing to these people. When we let our light shine in front of them, we point them to Jesus. By keeping our word, we open a door to share the Gospel when the students begin to ask why we would come. We share Christ with them as the one who motivates us to love people the way that God loves them, and, as His followers, to be blessing to others. This makes them want to know more. After spending hours teaching and become friends, we get to share our stories of coming to Christ, and we see the Holy Spirit begin to change people’s lives.
We got a chance to see life-change happen in a young Brazilian lady named Fabryna. Fabryna came looking to learn English but gained a relationship with Jesus and friends from the church to help her grow in her new faith. The amazing thing is that we had 218 Brazilians come and be a part of the school, and 187 of them indicated that they had prayed to receive Christ during the week. We had 40 students join us at church on Sunday for worship for the very first time, and Fabryna received her very first Bible. Praise God as we see the words of Jesus coming true right before our eyes!
Maybe you have been praying for God to show you some next steps to take on your spiritual journey, and right now He is encouraging you to begin to think about being a part of our Global mission. I want to encourage you to not just let that thought pass, but really begin praying about being part of a mission team. If you want to know more about Crossroads mission trips, click HERE.
Let us all let our lights shine this week, and we will be amazed at what God will do!
