When we lived in Buffalo, NY, I spent one year serving with the high school ministry. Although I did not find that age group my personal favorite to work with (I quickly then moved to serve in the nursery after that year), God used that time in my life for me to really think about what it meant to be ashamed of the Gospel. A regular song that that we rocked out in praise to on those Wednesday evenings (there really was an amazing praise band at that ministry) was Take It All. A line from that song is “Jesus we’re living for Your Name; we’ll never be ashamed of You.”
The lyrics of that song are amazing, the music makes you to jump up and down and wave your arms in praise, and it’s one of those songs that just gets stuck in your head for days. I pretty
much spent that year with this song in my head.
(here’s a you tube link to Hillsong http://youtu.be/EIngd6uvstw if you’ve never heard this song before.  I also attempted to embed the video--sorry if it's a randomly placed in the blog.)

In addition to that, it was a regular conversation amongst my small group of 9th grade girls—how does one live their life that way?

I don’t think we solved that completely for the 9th grade girls. But for me, I know that I
started looking at my interactions with others differently. I intentionally started to think in certain
situations….”Am I being ashamed of Jesus when really I should be ashamed of this interaction in front of Jesus?” I started to really think about the scripture,

Mark 8: 38 For whoever is ashamed of me and of my
words in thisadulterous and sinful generation, of him will the Son
of Man also be ashamed when he comes in the glory of his Father with the holy
angels.

I felt pulled to live in a way that I would care more about what God thought than what others thought of me.

Recently, an opportunity arose for me to contemplate this perspective again. In a conversation about taking the position of not being ashamed of the Gospel it was stated to me that I “had a desire to be bold.” Truthfully, I never looked at it as a boldness thing. It’s been an internal thought running through my head for 6 years “who am I ashamed of—Jesus or X (insert random co-worker, unsaved family member, neighbor, friend, etc)” and I never thought of it as being bold. So within this “opportunity” I went back and reflected more upon scripture.

Luke 9:26 For whoever is ashamed of me and of my words, of him will the Son of Man be ashamed when he comes in his glory and the glory of the Father and of the holy angels

Paul writes in Romans 1:16 ForI am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek.

And also writes in 2 Timothy 1:8 Therefore do not be ashamed of the testimony about our Lord, nor of me his prisoner, but share in suffering for the gospel by the power of God

I will admit that I am initially motivated by the verses in Mark and Luke—the thought
of Jesus being ashamed of me is heartbreaking and terrifying. But when I recently dug a little deeper, it’s an empowering thought as well. The scripture in 2 Timothy 1 goes on in verses
9-10 “who saved us and called us to a holy calling, not because of our works but because of his own purpose and grace, which he gave us in Christ Jesus before the ages began, and which now has been manifested through the appearing of our Savior Christ Jesus, who abolished death and brought life and immortality to light through the gospel.”

It was agreat reminder/lesson to me that when I’m making the decision to not be ashamed…to
say something that might come across “too Christian-y”…to be more concerned with offending God then offending political correctness—it’s not a matter of choosing the perfect words or saying the right thing. It’s about the power of God and His Grace—not my words. I’m only called to not be ashamed of Him. And if my neighbor looks at me like I’m weird or I lose a facebook friend—that’s a pretty small price to pay in terms of sharing in the suffering.