Spiritual Receptivity: Catching Fish When They’re Hungry

By Pastor Rick Warren

Today we’re diving back into our series on Fishing in Your Pond, where we’re learning how to reach people based on Jesus’s call to be fishers of men. If you missed last week’s post, you can go back and read How to Reach Your Pond: Meeting the Needs of the People Around You.

Another principle of learning to fish for people like Jesus is to focus on fish that are hungry. It’s a waste of time to fish where the fish aren’t biting. Wise fishermen move on from one location to another. If nobody’s biting there, you just go somewhere else.

Most people are not hungry all the time—unless you’re a teenage boy. Then you’re hungry all the time. But at any moment, some people are hungry and other people aren’t. The same is true spiritually: at any moment there are some people around you who are ready to receive Christ, and there are other people who couldn’t care less.

“Be wise in the way you act toward those who are not believers.”
Colossians 4:5 (GNT)

This is called receptivity—how open people are to the Good News. It is important to realize that people go through a process in coming to faith in Christ, and they must be approached differently depending on where they are. Sometimes people are very open to the Gospel, and sometimes very closed to it. Sometimes they’ll talk to you about it, and sometimes they don’t want to talk about it at all. Their receptivity changes. People often require multiple exposures at each stage before moving on.

 

Clamshells and Kids: Reading Openness

People live at different levels of openness and receptivity to the gospel. Sometimes they’re very open and sometimes they’re very closed. They’re like shellfish. Like a clam. A clam will open up for a little while, but it’s going to close down real quick. A clam doesn’t stay open.

Any parent knows this. When my kids were growing up, the times when they were open for me to teach them were far and few between. Most of the time, they were closed, but sometimes they would open up a little bit, and I’d think, “Oh, here’s a chance to throw some spiritual truth into my children’s lives.”

They weren’t open all the time. In fact, I noticed they were more open side-by-side rather than face-to-face. If I sat down with my kids and said, “Josh, we need to talk,” – he’d immediately be closed! It’s like the four words every husband dreads: We need to talk.

What I discovered was that face-to-face, formal confrontations were almost always closed. I also noticed that the times my kids were most open was when I was in the front seat driving and they were in the back seat playing a video game. Then, all of a sudden, they were open. More of those good conversations came side-by-side than in one-on-one confrontations.

The same is true in evangelism. If you’re going to win people to Christ, you get to them sideways, not with, “Hey, buddy, do you know the Lord?” If you confront people, they’re going to clam up real quickly. Look for the sideways moment—on a plane, a bus, at a ball game, on a walk—where you can slide truth in a low pressure moment.

You can’t control openness—in your kids or in the people in your city. That is the Holy Spirit’s job. But you can learn to recognize those brief windows when the clam is open—and move gently toward them.

 

Near and Far: What Scripture Shows About Receptivity

The Bible describes people at different distances from God:

• “Listen to me, you stubborn-hearted, you who are far from righteousness.” — Isaiah 46:12 (NIV84)
  
• “[To an inquisitive man]… ‘You are not far from the Kingdom of God.’” — Mark 12:34 (TLB)
  
• “He has brought this Good News of peace to you Gentiles who were very far away from him, and to us Jews who were near.” — Ephesians 2:17 (TLB)
  
• “Though you once were far away from God, now you have been brought near…” — Ephesians 2:13 (NLT96)
  

People move through these stages at different speeds. Some move really quickly. For others, it takes years. People often require multiple exposures at each stage before moving on.

“My work was to plant the seed in your hearts, and Apollos’ work was to water it, but it was God… who made the garden grow in your hearts.”
1 Corinthians 3:6 (TLB)

Evangelism is a process. Our role in sharing the Good News is helping people take the next step from where they are.

 

Why We Don’t “Force the Fruit”

When I was head pastor at Saddleback, our weekend services were designed for seekers, but we didn’t give a come-forward invitation every single week. Why is that? We found it is more effective to draw the net every few weeks than to continually draw it week after week. Every time an unbeliever says “no,” their heart can get harder. If they say “no” ten times before they say “yes,” you may be making it easier to say “no” than “yes.”

It’s like going to the grocery store for milk, and every time they say, “You must buy steak today!” You’d stop going to that store. If a first-time guest hears “change your 40-year lifestyle on the basis of a 40-minute message,” that’s asking a lot. So we hold up what it means to live the Christian life every week—often through messages on growth—in a way that makes sense to an unbeliever. We pray and wait for God’s timing, and about every third or fourth week, we draw the net. Many tend come to Christ on those weekends.

That is intentional. People need multiple exposures. You probably didn’t come to Christ the very first time you heard the Good News. That’s okay. Take the time to make the right decision. God is working in hearts.

 

Practical Ways to Fish for the Receptive

• Pray for everyone by name. Ask God to soften hearts.
• Watch for windows. Notice when conversations naturally turn toward meaning, loss, purpose, or hope.
• Go side-by-side: rides, errands, meals, hobbies, walks. Avoid high-pressure face-to-face confrontation.
• Match your response to their openness. Plant, water, or harvest—but don’t force it.
• Trust the Holy Spirit. You don’t have to reach everybody; focus on the ones who are open right now.

 

Fish bite at different times. Be wise. Look for the brief moments when a heart opens like a clamshell, slide truth in sideways, and trust God with the growth.

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Next in This Series

Next week we’ll examine what the parable of the sower has to teach us about spiritual receptivity.

If you missed last week’s post, you can go back and read How to Reach Your Pond: Meeting the Needs of the People Around You.

For more resources on sharing your testimony, visit https://finishingthetask.com/believers/