Provoked: Evangelism with Bobby McCreery

Brothers, what we do in life echoes in eternity.

I mean, this is what's wrong with the Christian church today. We don't know who God is, and we don't know who we are.

This is where we hold them. This is where we fight.

Officer, you need to repent of your lawless conduct. You don't know the law, and yet you pretend to represent it. That's not law enforcement, sir. That's being a thug.

We will not stop fighting and bothering you all until this monstrous, barbaric practice of legalized abortion ends, and we are teaching our children to be the same.

God's Word says that the shed blood of innocent humans cries out for justice, and mark my words, they will have their day in court.

Nobody gets saved by being treated nicely. They get saved by hearing the gospel. Faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the Word of Christ. If we don't open our mouths and commend Christ, we're not loving Him, no matter what we're doing with our hands.

Evangelism Must Be Done With Words

What's up, everybody? Welcome to another episode of Provoked. I'm sitting next to my very pretty and tiny sister. What's going on?

I'm doing well, just getting through this pregnancy and enjoying every minute. It's going well. How are you?

I'm doing well. How many weeks do you have left?

About ten.

Ten weeks. It's amazing.

It's a final countdown.

Because you and Jess are almost the same, and then you're like, oh, you're pregnant, but then I've got a whole lot of time.

Right.

But those nine months just go by so quickly. It's just absolutely incredible.

Yes, it does, especially when you have more than one kid. I feel like it goes by really fast. My first pregnancy felt really long, but the more kids you have, I feel like the quicker it goes because you're busy.

Yes, so busy. We're Provoked, and we hope you guys are enjoying our show. If you do, if you think that this show helps you, we don't want to be here just to jabber on and express our own opinions. I think the Bible says something in the book of Proverbs about the guy that just wants to go and express his own opinions.

No, we want to come alongside of the local church, our brothers and sisters in Christ, and simply be a helpful resource under the banner of the local church and equipping them. So if you feel like this show glorifies the Lord, gives honor to him, and really helps you, then we would hope that you would share it and support it.

Again, what are we doing here? We want to equip the church in three main areas. Preach the gospel, rescue babies, and destroy cultural idols. We've talked a lot about abortion in our first, I think, seven shows or so, but we are going to get into evangelism today, and we're going to have Pastor Luke come on in a couple weeks, and we're going to talk about cultural idols.

We're going to have some Mormon elders come on in the months to come and debate, discuss with them, and also a member of the Black Lives Matter community. So it's going to be an exciting couple months into the future.

Yeah, we're so glad that you've joined us today. Thank you for taking the time. And if this show has been a blessing to you, can you do us a favor and take a couple minutes and go onto our platforms, Facebook, on Instagram, iTunes.

If you can write us a rating and review, that's going to help kind of get us out of our little bubble and expand our reach because we want to bless as many people as we can. So we sure would appreciate it if you could take the time to do that, in addition to signing up for All Access as well.

Exactly. I was just about to say that. Go to Apologia Studios and become an All Access member. Please do that because we can't do what we do without the genius minds behind Apologia. We're so appreciative of Isaac and all that he does for our show as well as Carmen and everybody.

I mean, without Apologia Studios, we couldn't be doing what we're doing. And now we have multiple shows which require support to keep the lights on and to keep everything going the way that it needs to go.

Apologia is such a blessing. But if you go to Apologia All Access and become that member, you're going to get, again, a second to none. I say it every single time the same way. A second to none type of education for yourself.

I mean, there's so many resources in there. I mean, I can't even begin to touch how much you're going to learn. I mean, thousands of hours of lecturing from the top experts in the entire planet when it comes to what they're speaking about.

So you get that for you and your family. And then, again, you also support the ongoing work here at Apologia Studios. So ApologiaStudios .com, become an All Access member, and please do that today.

The Ministry of To the Ends of the Earth

So what are we doing today?

Well, we are going to have an evangelism clinic, a street evangelism clinic to where we can help you share the faith, help you and equip you to get out there and to preach the gospel in the public square.

And we're excited about today because we have a good friend of ours. Bobby McCreary is joining us, and we are going to pick his mind on everything evangelism. Now he is a street evangelist. He's pretty much a missionary to our nation.

He runs a ministry called To the Ends of the Earth Ministries. And I appreciate this brother so much. I remember the first time that I heard him preach was in 2013 Philadelphia at the Herald Society, the first Herald Society put on by Jeff Rose.

And what I noticed about Bobby so quickly and what I continue to praise God about when it comes to his ministry and his evangelistic kind of footprint out there is the balance that he has. You know as much as I know that you can pop on a YouTube channel and look at people quote-unquote evangelizing or representing Jesus Christ, and they can become very lopsided or out of balance.

What do I mean by that? They can preach fire, and a lot of what they're saying is true, but it's not done with grace. It's not done with compassion. It's not done with a heart of love for those people.

And you can also go on the other kind of flip side and see people who are all about preaching that Jesus is love, love, love, but they're not telling you the hard things. They're not telling you the essential things of the gospel.

So what I see in Bobby and what I noticed at the Herald Society quickly is a man who's balanced. And I think you can see it in his ministry effectiveness, that balance and how that kind of equates or how that kind of bears fruit.

So the content of his message, I don't think he compromises it. The way that he communicates, the way that he addresses questions, and the way that he handles abuse and hecklers I think is exemplary. So that's why we wanted to bring him on the show to learn from him and to pick his mind again about everything evangelism.

So welcome to the show, Bobby.

Thank you. Glad to be with you guys. Thanks for having me.

Of course.

So I want you to kind of tell us about the ministry, who you are, what you do, why you do it, and how we can support you.

Thanks, Zach. Yeah, To the End of the Earth is the ministry that the Lord has given to my family and I. You can find our website. It's all spelled out like from Acts 1 -8 to theendoftheearth .org. And so basically how everything started was God saved me.

I was a professing Christian most of my life. And at 34, God came and got me out of my own delusion and sin. And I knew I had to go tell the world about Jesus and tell them that Christianity was not what has been sold to the masses, especially in, let's say, places like the Bible Belt where I grew up.

And so I left my job. And December 31, 2010 was my last day of being at my former employment. And so the rest is history. God's had Kara, my wife, and I on this journey. Praise God, we've been married for 23 years, first half of that.

I was not saved. Kara was saved before me, and God's given us four beautiful children.

So we're grateful. I love looking at pictures. I don't know if I've ever seen a picture of you or your kids where you're not smiling. You have just a beautiful family, man, and I appreciate that so much.

Hey, how old are you?

I'm 45.

You're 45. So God saved you about 11 years ago.

Yeah, about 34. It was right in the very beginning of 2009.

Wow.

So you had only been a Christian for about four years before you started to the end of the earth. Is that correct?

Well, before I started, I pretty much started going out and witnessing in the open air as soon as God saved me. I think a lot, thanks in part a lot to really one of the main instruments God used to save me was a message by Ray Comfort called True and False Conversion.

Yeah.

A lot of people know Ray Comfort for Hell's Best Kept Secret. It's a crazy story, man. I was going to church, this really secret sensitive church. Actually, a client of mine had persistently invited me there, and I really didn't want to go.

I finally agreed to go, just hoping the guy would leave me alone. The first time we ever went to that church, yeah, it's funny. It is a funny story, Desi, because this guy asked me like three times. Every time I was meeting with this client, he would ask me.

The last time, literally, I remember I had this flash in my mind, like punch him in the face. I was getting so mad. I did not want to deal with this guy. Then I'm like, come to my senses. Are you crazy?

You'll probably go to jail. You'll lose your job. So I just said, give me the address. We'll come on Sunday.

Wow.

Then I could just tell the guy, okay, we came. We saw. Leave me alone.

Right.

But God had other plans, because the very first time we ever went there, God saved my wife.

That's awesome.

Praise the Lord.

Yeah, she was born again. She had a desire to read the Word of God and pray and live a holy life. All my life, if somebody asked me if I was a Christian, I would just say yeah, and hope they change the subject really quick.

Wow.

Over time, about another year and a half, we were going to that church. Like I said, it wasn't a great church, but God can use things for His own glory. I actually signed up to go on a mission trip there when I was still unsaved.

Wow.

Yeah, that's the crazy part. The guy that was leading our team, he wanted to train us using the way of the Master.

Really?

Yeah, and the church kind of frowned at that. They didn't really like the way of the Master, but he did it anyway. We went through the basic training course, and at the end, we still had a few months before the trip.

So I ordered some tracks. In the box of tracks, they sent me that. It's like a dual CD. It has Hell's Best Kept Secret and True and False Conversion on it. I listened to Hell's Best Kept Secret, and well, that's like a message for Christians.

Like, hey, Christian, why aren't you witnessing? So that didn't really mean much to me because I wasn't a Christian. But I began to listen to True and False Conversion, and around the same time, the same guy who had invited me to church gave me a copy of the message that's been heard around the world.

Paul Washer's, what do they call it? Shocking Message. Yeah, Shocking Message. And I was driving about 1 ,000 miles a week for my job, and for probably about three weeks, any moment I wasn't talking with a customer or an employee or a coworker, I was listening to one of those messages.

Wow.

And I was just—God was just grinding me down to the end of myself. My first kind of thought about it is I was, like, angry because I had the whole Southern Christian experience. I prayed the prayer. I did all that.

I mean, I got thrown into, like, three water tanks before I was ever actually born again. I went in a dry center, came out a wet center.

Right.

And I had done all that. And so I start listening to these guys preach, and I'm like, man, these guys are making me feel like I'm not saved. And I remember, you know, well-meaning, you know, VBS pastor guy saying, look, if you really meant that, then you're a Christian.

And, you know, all these things that we hear. And so I was angry. And then I started taking my Bible with me to work. And when they would quote a scripture, I would try and look it up because I thought maybe these guys are heretics.

Like, I went to a Christian school, kindergarten through sixth grade, so I knew enough to be dangerous, you know, to, like, myself and other people. And then I start looking up these scripture references, and I'm like, they're not twisting the Bible.

They're just quoting it. So then I'm terrified because I'm like, wow, I am lost. And I went through probably another week listening to those messages, and there was even times where I contemplated suicide.

I was, like, so undone, like, and I started asking myself questions like, why am I not in hell, like, right now?

Wow.

And thinking I should be in hell. And, you know, you talk about the Lord opening the heart. I mean, the gospel is clearly presented in both of those messages, but I didn't have ears to hear. And one day after listening to them probably dozens and dozens of times each one, I was driving on the interstate in my work truck, and I heard the gospel.

And it was like I heard it for the first time ever.

Wow.

And I just began to weep and tremble, and I had to pull aside the road, and I just began to cry out to the Lord. And, yeah, so that was when I signed up to go on this mission trip, this is the amazing thing.

We were sitting in the sanctuary of the church waiting for the service to start. And, I mean, this church was like smoke machine and, you know, lights and all this stuff.

Glitter.

Yeah, it was just a wild scene, and I committed to go on that trip. Like, I'm having this internal conversation with God. I believe he wants me to go, and I don't really understand why. And I just said to him, I thought money would be an obstacle.

So I said, well, show me how to get that money. I don't know how that's going to happen. But then I also just prayed this prayer, like, I don't understand why you would want someone like me, if you know what I'm like, you know, every day that I'm not in this place, why would you want someone like me to go to Bolivia and tell people about Jesus?

And I said, so I feel like something needs to change. If you really want me to do that, you need to change something in me. And so that day that I cried out to the Lord, and I believe the Lord saved me, was actually nine days before we left to go on the trip.

Wow.

That's awesome, man.

Yeah, the Lord is merciful and gracious.

He is, and that's just so kind of remarkable. I mean, thinking back to 2013 and, you know, all praise and glory and honor to God, but it just seems like he really matured you quickly. And, of course, you know, he brought Ray Comfort into your life.

He brought Ray Comfort into my life. I like what Tony Miano says, that Ray Comfort's going to have a lot of crowns to give back to Christ because of how instrumental. But I think that's kind of a good kind of segue because what we were just talking about is that we don't want to present biblical evangelism as some type of academic elitist group of people that only they can evangelize.

What we want to do in our show is equip the body, just the regular guy, because we're a bunch of regular people, you know, ordinary, about as ordinary as you can get. But what we want to do is, for the people watching, we want them to be empowered and emboldened and equipped to share the gospel.

And I think what we need to do in that is present the training of something that, again, you don't have to be an academic elitist. Unfortunately, I think a broader segment of the American evangelical church thinks, if only I knew everything about every topic out there or about every single religion out there, then I would be capable of sharing the faith.

Now, that's not to say we need to know what we're talking about. I mean, if you're talking to a member of the Mormon church, you need to know. If you're talking to a JW, you need to know or, you know, anybody else.

But we want to put it on the lower shelf level in the sense of just describing what biblical evangelism is. So as we move forward, this is going to be a clinic for you. It's going to be a clinic for the folks listening to be able to share the faith.

But what I want to do is kind of get in the mindset that people don't know at all how to share the faith. And what I think what we'll do as we discuss is we kind of have to peel back the layers a little bit.

And what I mean by that is there's a lot of false understanding of what biblical evangelism is, right, in the American evangelical church. There's a lot of, quote, unquote, evangelistic methods. There's a lot of definitions of biblical evangelism that really doesn't find its source in the scriptures.

So as we discuss, be thinking about, okay, number one, the people that we're talking to don't know how to share their faith. And number two, how can we kind of pull the curtains back and make sure we are pointing directly to the scriptures as our source for what we're saying?

Does that make sense?

Yeah.

Okay, cool.

The Essential Components of the Gospel

So number one, and we'll just throw out this question, throw out this topic, what is biblical evangelism? What is biblical evangelism? We'll start with you, Bobby.

Well, I mean, I would say it's pretty simple. You know, it comes from the Evangelion. It's just a simple message of the good news. So I would say it's the sharing of the good news about a holy creator, a fallen and sinful mankind, the punishment we deserve for our sin, and about redemption through the life, death, and resurrection of Christ, and then calling people to respond to that message through repentance and faith.

Yeah, good.

That's a good starting point. And it is. It is so much more simple than I think we can imagine what people tend to think. Because they, you know, so many people have told me, if only I knew, again, if only I knew this and I don't know enough here, then I would be able to evangelize.

But evangelism is, again, it's just the declaration of the true gospel message to the lost. Biblical evangelism, right, is going to the lost and sharing with them a message. And it's got to be done using words.

Right.

It's got to be done using words written down or words coming out of your mouth. But that is basically it. So what is the difference? And I know you went into the gospel components there a little bit. But let's dive into that for the people who are wanting to know what the essential components of the gospel message are.

But what's the difference between a false gospel message and the true gospel message?

Well, I mean, I think that a false gospel message will always, more often than not, it will be an incomplete message.

Right.

A partial message, or it will have things that are just wrong in it. I mean, obviously, if you're dealing with cults and things, they're going to have things that are not true about God. But I think in broader evangelicalism, a lot of the false gospels that get presented have to do with almost like truncations of the gospel.

Exactly.

You're just giving parts of it. I mean, I would say that probably the things that are most neglected today are talking about things like sin. Repentance is like a four-letter word in the broader evangelical church today.

You very rarely hear these things. And so a false gospel is not going to present all of the facts about God, man, sin, redemption, and repentance, and faith. It's going to cut somewhere in there. They're going to cut things out.

And generally that's because, I mean, let's face it, evangelism is, especially living in a post-Christian culture, I mean, you are going to be mocked, maligned, made fun of, and things like that. So I think a lot of these things have to do with attempts to soften the message in order to not have those things happen to you.

Yeah, absolutely. And I think that was just an excellent way of explaining it. A false gospel message is one that adds to the gospel, which I don't really see as much. And I think you're right. It's more or less a truncation, or it's a reducing of what the gospel is.

It's a taking out of essential components. And I think one of the reasons why we do that in the broader American evangelical church is because of the seeker-sensitive movement, right, that was built based upon Rick Warren and Bill Heibel's type of work there, to where, you know, we really have to, for lack of a better way of explaining it, kind of roll out the red carpet for the unbeliever to get them into church.

And once we get them into church, then we can share the gospel with them. But it's a very man-centered way of building the church. I mean, if you go back really to the roots of it, I think what they had done is they did a demographic study of their cities at that time, and they asked thousands, tens of thousands of people what they want the church to be, what they hate about the traditional church.

And then they went ahead and they built a church on that. When I was reading that book, Purpose-Driven Church, back in 1995, it really didn't dawn on me. I wasn't Reformed really at that time, and I think it was because of my Reformed theology.

Now that, you know, I didn't think of, hey, wait a second, you're actually going to people who are totally depraved, who hate God, they're in their nature enemies with God, and asking them how he should be worshiped and how the church should be constructed.

Right.

Yeah, that's a little bit of a problem there.

Yeah.

But the problem is that massive amount of churches within America, and of course globally now, are built on that type of philosophy of ministry.

Right.

That's the blueprint. It's the dead God-hating man. We cater to him. We placate to him so that he would come and sit down. And then once we got a whole lot of people in one location, then we're successful as a church.

And so what we've done is because of that philosophy of ministry, that's why the truncation of the gospel comes in. That's why we eliminate the hard components. And what you've done now is you've tried to get men just inside of a location, men and women.

You have built a church of the tares.

Right.

And not a church of the wheat, because if the gospel is not being proclaimed, if it has been reduced in any way, shape, or form from the biblical description, then you don't have a true gospel. So what are the essential components?

Because people are thinking right now, okay, I want to go share my faith. But what are the components in the message of the gospel that are non-negotiables, that are completely indispensable to the whole message?

I would say that, first of all, the gospel, we should always begin with God. And that's something because, you know, what did John Piper say? God is the gospel. At the chief end of our being is to glorify God.

And so I would say we should start with God. I didn't always get that or understand that, even when I got started. I would start with sin a lot. But I think it begins with God as a good and gracious creator, that he's the creator, that God is a righteous judge, and that there's only one true God.

Psalm 96 5, it says, All the gods of the peoples are worthless idols, but the Lord created the heavens. So I think we begin with God. I think we talk about the Bible being our foundation for who God is.

You know, I'm sure you guys have run into this a lot. You know, you get people saying, like, my God would never send anyone to hell, or my God this, or the Jesus I believe in. And so usually I'll say to someone, well, where do you get your information about that God?

Right. That's good.

You know, because if you're not talking about the God of Scripture, then you're just talking about some being that you invented in your own mind. So the Bible is a foundation, the Bible being God breathed.

I would say other essentials would be that Jesus was born of a virgin. I think that gets left out a lot. Why is that important? Because Jesus did not inherit a nature of sin by not having an earthly father, at least that he came from the seed of.

Jesus being God incarnate, that God is triune. So, you know, all we've talked about so far is God.

Right.

So then you move into, you know, God graciously created. He created man in his own image, and what did man do? He sinned. So you have to talk about the sinfulness of sin. You know, that's what Paul said.

But for the law and through the law, sin became exceedingly sinful. And you look through, I mean, if you want to see how sin has devastated us, I mean, obviously you just look around the world today, even what's happening in our own culture today.

But, I mean, just read the Old Testament.

Right.

And you see that people rebel and it has, you know, horrific consequences, oftentimes even on their own offspring.

Right.

And so you have a creator God who's a just judge and fallen man. And so then you have to have one who stood in their place, who was not a sinful person. And so there's Jesus again. Not only was he not born in sin, he never committed sin.

No deceit was found in his mouth. He was tempted in every way we are tempted, but without sin. And at the end of his life, he died on the cross as a substitute. There was a wrath appeasing sacrifice because the Bible says God is angry with the wicked every day.

So I think, you know, and these things are, I mean, we're talking about essentials, right? And I think you can explain these things in very simple ways, say like the work of justification. Well, we have a record of debt that needs to be wiped out.

And God does that through the imputation of Christ's righteousness. He closed the believer in the righteousness of Christ and he forgives their sin through the atonement or the propitiation of Christ by his blood.

And then another thing that gets left out a lot is the resurrection. And if you read first Corinthians 15, I mean, Paul says, you know, if Christ has not been raised, we are of all people most to be pitied.

So, you know, really our salvation is birthed through and hinged on the resurrected Christ defeating the power of hell, proving that he was not a sinner. And so I would say those would be essentials. And then that salvation is by grace through faith, that it's not of works, the necessity of the new birth.

And then I think the call, again, the call throughout the scriptures, if we look at the New Testament model and even the prophets would call the people to repentance. Today, you hear a lot of just believe in Jesus, just believe in Jesus.

But even Jesus' first words in his earthly ministry were, you know, the time is fulfilled, the kingdom of God is at hand. Repent and believe in the gospel.

Right.

So I would say those would be things that would be essential. I mean, can you get to them and, you know, every single one of them in every conversation? I mean, obviously not, but you try to get what you can and of all those things into conversation.

Right. Sometimes you have a five minute conversation. Sometimes you have a 30 second conversation or a 15 minute conversation. Right. But that was it. Go ahead, Des.

Oh, I was just going to say, yeah. And it's going back to Romans 1 16 of believing, you know, that the gospel is the power of salvation, you know. So I think like we were talking about the church, you know, kind of the American broader American evangelical church and what's kind of taking place and what the what we've seen just doing evangelism with trying to get people into the church, you're trying to get the unconverted to go to church and then hopefully hear a message.

We're really not believing that the gospel is the power of God unto salvation. So we're like taking this and we're using pragmatism to hopefully like get people to come into a church and maybe hear the gospel.

And so really focusing on like, no, no, that is the means. That is how God saves people. Because sometimes you'll just be talking to people and you're like, you know, they'll give you all these other ideas or methodologies and it can just get so muddied and gray.

And that's why when we're out, I feel like in the public and we get have, you know, self-proclaimed Christian after Christian criticizing, it's because that's what they're hearing at church. They're hearing, you know, just be nice to people, do good things.

Even you brought up, Bobby, like missionary trips. Sometimes they'll go down and they'll just give them food supplies and medical needs, which is great. Those are nice and good things to do. Things Christians, we should be doing those things.

But if we're not giving people the gospel, what are we doing?

Yeah, that's right. And we're going to we're going to be diving into that. And I think that's a good segue to the next topic. But I think, yeah, that was a great explanation of the essential components.

Like, I hope people go back and really memorize what you just said, because I think you've really encapsulated in not so many words those essential components. And again, I like what Ray says. He says, hey, look, if you're taking a medicine, some medicine that's going to cure you of a disease and you eliminate some essential chemical components, what that does is it dilutes down that particular medicine or that particular whatever it may be to help you.

And there's no curative powers. So we have to understand that in our presentation of the gospel, there is no essentials in there. It's not going to have any type of power. Like you just quoted Romans 116.

The gospel is the power of God into salvation. It's not about the messenger. It's just about the message. And I like what you also said, Bobbie, is we want to make sure as we're explaining it, people understand it.

So I really would encourage you as you're sharing the gospel with whoever on the street, a family member, whoever it may be, I would really encourage you to say, are you understanding this? Because sharing the gospel is not an opportunity to wax eloquent.

Sometimes we can get a little off in the deep end or away from really the mission at hand and we tend to think that we're just called to unload a bunch of biblical knowledge using a bunch of Christian words to people who have no clue of what we're talking about.

So we need to understand that, yeah, we need to take the time to explain, to break it down, to be simple. And if we're presenting the gospel message and the biblical methodology of sharing the gospel with people, we're presenting it in a very biblical way, of course, but a simple way, more people are going to do it.

But again, if we are just presenting it in a way that you have to be some type of orator or eloquent or some mega brain, the body of Christ is never going to do it. They're never going to do it. What we need to do, what we want to do primarily through Provoked is get the body preaching the gospel.