The Spirit of God gives us both the desire and the ability to tell other people about Christ. This doesn’t mean we have to force feed people our religious beliefs. On the contrary, the most compelling thing we can ever do is tell someone about our own spiritual experiences. Tell them how we felt, tell them the parts we still don’t entirely understand, and be honest about how strongly we feel now. This is called witnessing—when we tell other people what God had done for us.
Evangelism, on the other hand, is when we tell other people what God can do for them. The Bible tells us there are people with the gift of evangelism (see Ephesians 4; 1 Corinthians 12), but all believers are required to witness (see Matthew 28; Acts 1). So, we aren’t required to tell people what God can do for them, only about our personal experiences. In fact, if you don’t have the gift of evangelism and you feel like you’re supposed to “evangelize,” you probably run the danger of coming off as confrontational. However, if we are obedient to the Second Testament text and share our story with words like “this is what Jesus Christ has done for me,” or “this is how I experience the power of the Holy Spirit,” or “this is how I know God,” then we can be sure of two things: first, nobody can argue with or doubt the validity of our experiences; second, no one feels threatened or boxed in by our religious rhetoric.
Adapted from Why God Died