A pastor friend, R .B . Ouellette, related an experience of an evangelist he knows who was on vacation in Hawaii some years ago. He saw a man reading the Book of Mormon under a palm tree. He approached the man and asked if he was reading the book because he was a Mormon or because he was interested in Mormonism. The man responded that he was just looking for the truth. The evangelist then invited the man, whose name was Nick Porter, to his motel room. Nick went to get his wife, Mary, and they headed to the evangelist’s room. For the next three and a half hours, the evangelist did nothing but open up the Bible and answer the Porters’ questions. Then, Nick looked at Mary and said, “Well, do you have any more questions?” Mary replied that she didn’t, so Nick said, “I guess there’s just one thing for us to do, then. We might as well get saved.”
But, the story does not end there. The evangelist did not know that Nick Porter owned a large and successful construction company. A few months later, he received a check in the mail for $2,000. For several months, the checks continued in amounts between $1,200 and $2,000. Then, one day they stopped. Many months went by without hearing from the Porters before they sent the evangelist a letter that said, “I just thought you’d like to know what a couple of your spiritual kids have been up to. You didn’t know this, but Nick is fluent in the Russian language. When the Wall came down in Berlin and the Iron Curtain was lifted, we liquidated our business and went at our own expense to Russia to preach the gospel. Recently, we got stuck on an elevator with ten members of the Russian Olympic Wrestling Team. By the time the elevator had been repaired an hour later, six of them had trusted Christ as their Saviour. We have signed decision slips from 375,000 people who said they were saved in the campaigns we have conducted.”
Stories like that remind us how important it is to be faithful witnesses for our Saviour. We won’t get far by trying to force feed the gospel to someone who has no desire to hear it, but there are so many like Nick Porter, who are open to the truth of the gospel if it is caringly presented. But, we’ll seldom find those people if we choose to wait till they come to us. That’s why our command from the Lord goes, “Go ye…and preach the gospel to every creature.” There are some around us that you can reach with the truth of the Word in 2015 .