What God has done for you

“The man from whom the demons had gone out begged to go with Him, but Jesus sent him away, saying, ‘Return home and tell how much God has done for you.’ So the man went away and told all over town how much Jesus had done for him.” Luke 8:38-39
Many people, especially those who come to Christ in their 20’s or 30’s, want to go into the ministry straight after their conversion. This is what this man, who was once possessed by a legion of demons (a Roman legion being 6,000 soldiers) and was so tormented that he lived like a wild animal, wanted to do. But Jesus refused. Instead, He told him to return to the town and tell the people there how much God had done for him. For this man – and for all of us – our most effective witness is to the people we know already. They knew our lives before we were saved, and they notice a difference in us. Simply tell what God has done for you. They can’t deny that you are a different person, a new creation, and that the reason for the change is Jesus Christ.
Certainly God does save some people in miraculous ways, in order that they might go into full-time ministry. We see this in the Bible in the life of the apostle Paul (see Acts 9:15). But even Paul didn’t become a missionary straight away. He spent fourteen years in obscurity before Barnabas sought him out a second time and brought him to Antioch (see Gal. 2:1-2, Acts 11:22-26). The Bible specifically says that leaders in the church should not be recent converts (1 Tim. 3:6). Sometimes, especially in countries where Christians are persecuted, churches grow so rapidly that leaders must be appointed who have only been believers for a short time. In those cases God is able to grant extra grace to those people. But I think we need to be careful who we appoint to leadership positions – that it really is a call of God and not simply the new-found exuberance that comes with conversion, where the person thinks that the only way to serve God fully is to ‘go into ministry’.