The hardest people to reach are often the ones closest to you. But whether your family believes is God's business, not your report card — your job is to love them faithfully, pray for them, and live your life before them. Leave the rest to Him.
Scripture: 约6:44
After coming to faith, many people carry the same weight in their hearts: the people closest to them still haven't believed — parents, a spouse, siblings, or grown children.
You've probably tried. You open your mouth and they say, "Believe what you want, just don't drag me into it." You try to reason with them seriously, and the meal ends in awkward tension. Eventually you stop bringing it up altogether — but you still lie awake at night worrying about them. Slowly you discover something discouraging: the closer someone is, the harder it is to talk about faith, and the harder you push, the more strained the relationship becomes.
You may even wonder: Is it something I'm doing wrong that's keeping them from believing?
Let me say something honest first: that inability to let go is itself love — love that God has placed in your heart. But the road ahead usually looks quite different from what you'd expect.
Family being hard to reach has little to do with how well you can explain things. The difficulty is simply that this relationship is too close.
An outsider only sees one side of you; your family has watched you for decades. Your temper, your weaknesses, the times you said one thing and did another — they've seen it all. So the moment you bring up faith, their first internal response is often: "I know exactly what you're like — do you think I don't?" That's not necessarily a rejection of Jesus; it's usually just over-familiarity.
In Chinese families, there are a few extra hurdles:
Once you see these clearly, you'll realize: much of the time, family members aren't resisting Jesus — they're resisting the religion in their minds, the one that "steals children and rejects ancestors." And the One you want them to meet is precisely the One who can, little by little, clear away those misunderstandings.
Here is something I hope you'll hold onto: whether your family believes is God's business, not your report card.
Jesus says it plainly:
"No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him." (John 6:44)
No one is argued into the kingdom, and no one is pressured in by family affection. What opens a person's heart is God. Your eloquence and your persistence cannot get you there. Paul describes his own ministry with disarming simplicity:
"I planted. Apollos watered. But God gave the increase." (1 Corinthians 3:6)
Planting and watering are what humans can do; making the seed actually come alive and grow — that is God's work. This sounds ordinary, but for someone who is anxious, it is a release: you just need to do your part of planting and watering. That "growth" you cannot give or take — it was never yours to control.
So, set down the thought "they haven't believed, so I've failed." Carrying it around, you'll unconsciously turn the gospel into pressure and love into coercion — and all that does is push people further away.
Your family knows you best, which means they are the most able — and the hardest — to refute when they see whether coming to faith has genuinely changed you.
When Peter writes to wives whose husbands haven't believed, he doesn't tell them to preach every day. He says:
"...they may be won without a word by the behavior of their wives." (1 Peter 3:1)
Jesus said something similar:
"Even so, let your light shine before men, that they may see your good works and glorify your Father who is in heaven." (Matthew 5:16)
You don't need to put on a spiritual performance. After coming to faith, life grows its own changes — and those are what your family is really watching. Maybe you used to flare up at the slightest provocation; now you can hold it together. Maybe you used to refuse to admit you were wrong; now you're willing to be the first to say sorry. Your family may not absorb a single word of theology, but these changes — they see them, day after day. When they sense that "since you believed, you've actually become more caring toward this family, easier to be around," that door begins to loosen on its own.
The reverse is equally true: if faith has made you more critical, more self-righteous, quicker to lecture the people at home — no matter how much you say, your manner will undo every word.
Loving your family also means treating them as people God made in his own image, with their own free will — not as targets waiting to be persuaded. The gospel is an invitation, not an interrogation.
There are two sides to hold here.
On one side: don't let fear of conflict keep you silent forever. If you love someone but never give them a chance to know the most important person in your life, that silence isn't consideration — it's a debt you owe them.
On the other side: don't treat sharing the gospel as a task to check off, stuffing it into every opportunity. If every meal circles back to Jesus and every conversation veers toward faith, people will raise their guard the moment they hear it coming.
The balance is in waiting. Scripture says:
"For everything there is a season, and a time for every purpose under heaven." (Ecclesiastes 3:1)
When someone is sick, discouraged, uncertain, or when they themselves open the door by asking — that's when the heart is soft. Those are often the moments God has prepared. Staying quiet before then isn't passivity. It's leaving room for God to work.
"Behold, the farmer waits for the precious fruit of the earth, being patient over it, until it receives the early and late rain." (James 5:7)
If there is one thing more important than speaking up, it is praying for your family. Since it is God who changes hearts, bringing your family before God matters more than bringing arguments before your family.
Prayer also means you don't have to carry this alone. You can pray specifically: ask God to make himself known personally to a family member, ask him to soften a heart that nothing you do seems to reach, and don't forget to ask him to work in you first — to make you look a little more like Christ.
And the answers to prayer sometimes come very slowly — slowly enough that you may not see them until the next generation. When Paul writes to Timothy, he notes where Timothy's faith came from:
"...having been reminded of the sincere faith that is in you, which lived first in your grandmother Lois and your mother Eunice, and, I am persuaded, in you also." (2 Timothy 1:5)
A grandmother's faith and prayers passed to her daughter, and finally bore fruit in her grandson. Church history holds the same kind of story: Augustine spent his youth in reckless rebellion, while his mother Monica wept and prayed for him for decades — and she lived to see her son return, a man who would shape Christian thought for a thousand years.
So the fact that you haven't seen results today does not mean the seed hasn't fallen. You may be the one planting; someone else will water; God will make it grow. You may simply be the hands laying groundwork for the next generation. Seen that way, the ache of "why haven't they believed yet" sits a little lighter on your shoulders.
Return to that worry that keeps you up at night.
The point isn't to tell you to stop caring — it's to help you carry it differently: don't bear it alone until love turns into anxiety and the relationship buckles under the weight. Hand it back to God. Those hands are stronger than yours, and they love your family even more than you do.
Your place has never been as your family's savior. It is to be someone who faithfully plants, faithfully waters, faithfully prays, and faithfully lives. These few things — you can do them today:
The seed is in your hands; the seasons and the rain are in God's. Just sow — and leave the rest, at peace, with him.
📖 To study evangelism more systematically, read Study Guide: Spreading the Gospel — From Preparing the Soil to Multiplying Disciples.