Feb. 1, 2016 Show with Tony Miano on “Cross Encounters–A Decade of Gospel Conversations”

Iron Sharpens Iron

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April 22, 2016

00:01: Live from the historic parsonage of 19th century gospel minister George Norcross in downtown
00:08: Carlisle, Pennsylvania, it's Iron Sharpens Iron, a radio platform on which pastors,
00:16: Christian scholars and theologians address the burning issues facing the church and the world today.
00:23: Proverbs 27 verse 17 tells us, Iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another.
00:32: Matthew Henry said that in this passage, we are cautioned to take heed whom we converse with and directed to have in view in conversation to make one another wiser and better.
00:46: It is our hope that this goal will be accomplished over the next hour and we hope to hear from you, the listener, with your own questions.
00:57: Now here's our host, Chris Arntzen. Good afternoon
01:02: Cumberland County and the rest of humanity living on the planet earth who are listening via live streaming.
01:09: This is Chris Arntzen, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron, wishing you all a happy Monday on this first day of February 2016 and we have technical difficulties that have crept back into our studio so for some reason
01:24: I cannot play my commercials or theme music or anything like that, at least for now
01:30: I can't, but that is not going to stop me from interviewing the illustrious and renowned
01:36: Tony Miano of Cross Connections and we are going to be discussing a very important new book that is soon to be in print via Solid Ground Christian Books, Cross Encounters, meant to say, not
01:54: Cross Connections, Cross Encounters, I apologize Tony. No, no worries. Cross Encounters, 10
02:00: Years of Gospel Conversations and it is my honor and privilege to welcome you back to Iron Sharpens Iron, Tony Miano.
02:09: Well the honor is mine brother, good to be with you. And first of all, let our listeners who are unfamiliar with you, let them know something about you.
02:19: I know that you are a retired law enforcement officer and you are involved in open air preaching and you take that very, very seriously.
02:30: You believed that it is an ordained calling, that somebody must be sent out from a local church and they must be under authority in order to be doing it appropriately and biblically.
02:41: You are not someone who endorses lone wolves and mavericks, but if you could give us something about your own background and what you are doing now with open air evangelism.
02:51: Sure, well you covered quite a bit there brother. As you mentioned,
02:57: I am a retired veteran of the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department. I served for 20 years as a deputy sheriff here in LA County.
03:04: I have been in full time ministry since the turn of the century, 1999. I served as, in addition to being a deputy sheriff,
03:12: I also served as a chaplain to the deputies of my department for eight years and served for four and a half years with Ray Comfort at Living Waters Ministries, leading up an aspect of his ministry that was called at the time the
03:27: Ambassadors Academy, where we would invite 50 people from around the world to come out for three and a half days of intensive street evangelism training.
03:37: And since 2012, mid -2012, I have been out on my own, leading Cross Encounters Ministries and preaching the gospel throughout the country and Canada and parts of Europe.
03:49: And that is my full -time ministry, my full -time vocation and what I love to do.
03:55: Great. And your website is crossencounters .us, correct?
04:01: It's crossencountersmin .com. Oh wow, I just totally blew that.
04:06: No, that's okay. It gave me a chance to say it out loud, crossencountersmin .com. Okay. And there, folks will find my blog, and they'll also find links to my
04:17: YouTube channel. I've got over 400 audios on a sermon audio page, Pulpit and Streets, with pulpit sermons, open -air sermons, one -to -one conversations, you name it.
04:27: Great. And well, tell us something about... And by the way,
04:33: I just typed in crossencounters .us and I got your website.
04:38: Yeah. Okay. It's okay. Yeah, we've got a couple of domain names that point there.
04:44: Okay. So yes, if they go either way, they're going to get there. Okay. That just makes me feel a little bit more sane than I just felt a few minutes ago.
04:56: Tell us something about your new book that is being published by our friends at Solid Grand Christian Books, who are sponsors of Iron Sharpens Iron.
05:05: Yeah, I couldn't be more excited to be working with Mike Gadosh at Solid Ground Books on what will be my third book.
05:14: And it's called Cross Encounters, a Decade of Gospel Conversations. No, it does not include every conversation
05:22: I've had over the last 10 years of street ministry. That might be a bit too voluminous for hardback or paperback.
05:32: But it includes a good number of encounters that I've had over the street, on the street, over the last decade or so on college campuses.
05:46: While I'm out in the community carrying a wooden cross that says, are you ready to cross the cross beam outside of abortion clinics, bus stations, train stations, 30 ,000 feet in a plane.
06:00: And one of the reasons why I'm so excited about this book, Chris, is that it is written for every
06:08: Christian. Every Christian is called by God to go and proclaim the gospel to every creature, to go and make disciples of people of every nation.
06:21: And it is not, evangelism isn't a spiritual gift per se. It is a command of God, something that all
06:29: Christians are to do. And what I hope this book will do is not only encourage them, warm their hearts with the story, but will encourage them and further empower them to go out, whether on the streets or at Starbucks or across the cubicles at work or across our dinner table at home, and be able to biblically proclaim the gospel to people.
06:53: Praise God. And I know that it is not yet off the printing press, but you can contact solid -ground -books .com,
07:04: solid -ground -books .com, or crossencountersmen .com,
07:11: crossencountersmen .com. This book that inspired you to write this new book, the book,
07:24: I should say, that inspired you to write your own book, A Pastor's Sketches by Ichabod Spencer, tell us more about why this had such a profound impact on you, and it actually has been having quite a profound impact on a whole host of pastors globally who are discovering it for the first time.
07:46: Yeah, and again, I am so thankful to Mike Gaydosh for republishing this work.
07:52: He's published a beautiful one -volume edition of A Pastor's Sketches by Ichabod Spencer.
08:00: I was made aware of the book by our friend Jeff Rose with the Jeremiah Crime Ministry.
08:06: In addition to being a lion out on the street, Jeff is a wonderful historian of open -air preaching and evangelistic ministry, and he scours the libraries of the world and bookstores of the world looking for vintage work, biographies about great men of the faith, the
08:27: Puritans, and so on, and some of the great open -air preachers of old, not only the
08:33: Whitfields and the Westleys and men like that, but lesser -known names as well who had great impact during various revivals and awakenings over the years.
08:45: And so Jeff said that he had found a copy of the book and asked if I wanted it, and I gobbled it up.
08:54: And from the very first chapter, I'm one who's out on the streets all the time.
09:02: I mean, evangelism's a way of life for me. But this book, A Pastor's Sketches, fired me up even more to get out on the streets and do evangelism.
09:10: This was a 19th century book? Yeah, 19th century. Published, I believe, shortly after his death in the 1850s or so.
09:19: He was a pastor of a church in Brooklyn, Ichabod Spencer was, and one of his spiritual disciplines was after a long day of ministry, doing door -to -door evangelism, doing house -to -house ministry of his congregants, he would come home after ministering to his family, he would come home and he would spend two or three or four hours by candlelight writing verbatim about the conversations he had during the day.
09:49: And he did this for years, and now we have this multi -hundred page volume that Mike Gadosh is republishing,
09:59: A Pastor's Sketches, that chronicles these amazing conversations he had with real people in real time.
10:08: And in fact, the very first chapter, you get an idea of the mind of Pastor Ichabod Spencer.
10:18: He utilizes presuppositional apologetics before it had a name. And it was just phenomenal how he reasoned with this particular atheist, who, for all intents and purposes, was on his deathbed.
10:33: And so the stories are real, unlike a lot of evangelism testimonial books where every story ends in someone dropping to their knees and saying, what must
10:44: I do to be saved? This is a real book chronicling real conversations where not everybody turns to Christ.
10:54: And those of us, like yourself, who are involved in evangelistic ministry realize what the Bible says is true, that the way is narrow that leads to life, and few therefore will find it.
11:04: And that's true in my own book as well. Not every story has a happy ending.
11:10: Not every person repents and believes the gospel. And I did that by design, one, because I was so encouraged by Pastor Spencer's stories.
11:23: But I want Christians to come away from the book realizing that the only time a
11:29: Christian fails in evangelism, if they're doing it biblically, is when they fail to evangelize.
11:35: And that the decision of a person, the changing of the person's heart, is not up to them.
11:41: It's entirely up to the Lord. As Christians, we should bring every human being right up to the foot of the cross and trust in the sovereign
11:50: God of all creation to do with that person, with that soul, what he will. Yeah, that brings up a very crucial area of evangelism.
12:01: One of the reasons why theology matters, or theology and doctrine are very important, unlike what many people in modern evangelicalism would say today, is that it can really affect, radically affect, who we deem to be a genuine brother in Christ, and it can affect how that person views the state of their own soul.
12:30: And you were saying before that not everybody immediately responds by saying that they believe in Christ after being evangelized.
12:41: In fact, the vast majority of people probably do not. It's usually a number of encounters, as you call your ministry, cross -encounters.
12:52: It's usually a number of encounters, either by the same Christian evangelizing them or a number of people that God providentially brings into their path, that chip away at the person's wall that they have erected to shield them from the truth of the gospel.
13:12: And the false notion of evangelism that some of the more modern folks that made it famous were people like Jack Hiles and others, where people were being coached and trained to just read, to have people read through a series of brief questions to lead people to make a decision, and sometimes even using trickery of sorts, emotional gimmickry, to get them to decide for Christ.
13:44: And very often these people are just saying a prayer or something that is being treated like a magical spell, and the person walks away just as lost as they were before, but this time deceived into thinking that they're saved because they've been pronounced as being saved.
14:02: Right, and we can go all the way back to 18th, 19th century American revivalism, thanks to Charles Finney.
14:11: We can attribute most of what is wrong with American evangelical evangelism back to the institution of the sinner's prayer, which we could trace back to men like Finney.
14:24: And in fact, you know, Chris, if we believe the statistics coming out of American evangelicalism this day, the entire continent of South America has been saved six times.
14:37: Yeah, and Charles Finney, not only did he just have a poor blueprint for evangelism,
14:47: I mean, he also brought the altar call system into the church. A lot of people think that that's the old -time religion, but it's not very old.
14:55: It only goes back to the 1800s. But he was just a rank heretic.
15:00: The man did not even believe that Christ's death on Calvary truly atoned for sin.
15:10: Right. In fact, anybody who wants to get a hold of a fascinating two -hour interview
15:16: I did with Jerry Johnson on Charles Finney, send me an email at chrisarnson at gmail .com.
15:23: I'll get you the MP3, and God willing, it will also be archived on my website as soon as we get a webmaster replacement for the program.
15:35: Put me down for that MP3, Chris, because I'd love to hear that. Oh, yeah. I mean, Charles Finney, a lot of people today, a lot of fundamentalists and others, a lot of mainstream evangelicals and people like Billy Graham and even some reformed people like J .I.
15:50: Packer and others have pronounced Finney to be a great man of God, of American history.
16:00: And the man, as Jerry Johnson put it, Charles Finney was a monergist, but not the right kind of monergist.
16:12: It was that man alone really is involved in bringing himself to repentance and salvation.
16:19: And it's really a horrible heresy that even
16:24: Arminians would, for the most part, think of as being really dangerous and heretical.
16:32: Yeah, he was closer to being a palumpal agent than he was an Arminian. And sadly, Chris, as you know, there are a number of open air preachers, and sadly the number is growing, who look to men like Charles Finney as a mentor, not only evangelistically, but theologically as well.
16:50: Yes. And I have to believe that most of these folks who hold up Finney as a hero have never really thoroughly read what he has written, even in his own systematic theology and so on.
17:04: I just don't, I can't believe that they could have actually examined what he said, because fundamentalists are quick to call people heretics, and this man was more of a
17:16: Pelagian than any Roman Catholic that I know. Sadly, that is true, yeah. Yeah.
17:21: And I'm going to give our email address if anybody would like to join us on the air with a question of your own for Tony Miano about evangelism, about perhaps ways to bring up the gospel when you are encountering individuals who are lost, or perhaps they think they are saved because they were raised in some kind of a home that professed to be a
17:49: Christian home in some way, or perhaps it's somebody from another religion, or perhaps it's an atheist, or just a secular humanist, or liberal.
18:00: You can give us, shoot us an email at chrisarnsen at gmail .com, c -h -r -i -s -a -r -n -z -e -n at gmail .com.
18:11: And perhaps you can go through some of these gospel conversations that stick in your head that are worthy of informing our listeners about, that may give the equipment that our listeners need, and even yours truly, the equipment that I need to be a more effective evangelist when
18:39: I am locking horns with people in the public square, or perhaps just having a polite meal over lunch during a break at work, or what have you,
18:54: Thanksgiving dinner, Easter dinner, whatever, Christmas dinner. Give our listeners some of these examples.
19:00: Sure. Well, first, I want to just briefly mention something we've talked about in the past,
19:06: Chris, and that's that Christians, if they are serious about engaging people in evangelistic conversation, they have to set aside the false and unbiblical
19:19: American evangelical tradition that they first have to have a relationship with someone before they can have these gospel conversations.
19:29: We do not see anywhere in the Word of God where Jesus or the Apostles spent weeks, months, or years establishing relationships with people before calling them to repent and leave the gospel.
19:43: One of the best examples is in the Gospel of John, John chapter 4, where Jesus encounters the woman at the well.
19:51: He takes but a few moments to establish a rapport with her, and then he calls her on her sin of adultery.
19:58: Now, granted, we're not going to immediately call people on their sin of adultery because we do not have the perfect knowledge of Almighty God.
20:06: But the point of that is that he took but a few moments to establish a rapport with someone, engage them in dialogue, before going right into spiritual things.
20:18: One of the things that I hope readers will be encouraged by these stories is that I don't engage in any kind of bait and switch.
20:28: Now, what would that look like in personal evangelism? Well, it is the idea of approaching someone and leading them to believe that you're contacting them for some other reason other than sharing the gospel with them.
20:46: And that could be many different things. Now, I'm not against doing surveys. I'm not against many of the icebreakers people use to start conversations.
20:57: But sadly, and you can see it in a person's face, that when Christians transition their conversation from the natural, from talking about temporal things, into spiritual things, the person they're talking to immediately gets this look on their face like, wow,
21:13: I wish I would have known this at the start of the conversation. I could have saved us both 10 minutes. And so I encourage
21:20: I encourage Christians to be honest from the get -go, immediately letting people know why they're talking to them.
21:30: You know, hi, I'm Tony. I'm out here sharing the gospel with people. Can I ask you what your spiritual beliefs are?
21:38: My name's Tony, and did you hear about that plane crash today? You know, those kind of things make people think about their mortality.
21:47: What do you think's going to happen to you when you die? And just being up front. People know.
21:54: People know when they're being sold a bill of goods. People know when someone is trying to scam them.
22:01: People are smart, and people appreciate honesty. Even if it results in them saying, look,
22:06: I don't really want to talk about this right now. At least you approach them honestly. At least you approach them with integrity.
22:13: And that's one of the reasons why we should always have gospel tracks on us.
22:19: Because not everybody we approach is going to want to engage in conversation. And so you can leave them with a gospel track, with a gospel message that will go places you cannot go.
22:30: As they board their train, or get into a cab, or get into their apartment at the end of the night, and they reach into their purse, their pocket, and they pull out this piece of paper that this funny guy or girl gave them on the train.
22:44: And of course, when you run out of tracks, you can look around on the ground for those tracks that have been thrown away by the people who didn't even want to read the tracks.
22:53: That's right. And Chris, you bring up a really good point there. I hear pastors and lay people all the time decrying the ineffectiveness of gospel tracks.
23:06: I hear it all the time. And sadly, what they're really saying is that the gospel in and of itself is not effective.
23:14: Because a good gospel track, that's all it contains, is the gospel. Every time
23:19: I see a gospel track laying on the ground, I praise God. Because that means the person probably turned it over, started to read it, felt some conviction over their sin, and tossed it to the ground.
23:32: That is not a failed evangelistic endeavor. Again, because the only time we fail in evangelism, if we're doing it biblically, is when we fail to evangelize.
23:44: So throughout the book, I have a number of different encounters where I'm meeting people under different circumstances.
23:54: But people are going to see a great deal of similarity in the conversations. And that's part of the encouragement that I want people to take away from the book.
24:03: Whether I'm talking to an African -American young girl on a college campus who readily admits to adultery in tears, or I'm talking to a teenage high school student while I'm standing with my cross, and she walks up to me and says, should
24:20: I forgive my father who abused me? Or Bert, a broken Hispanic man hooked on heroin and has spent most of his adult life in prison at a bus stop.
24:32: Or a businessman at 30 ,000 feet flying home from the
24:39: Philadelphia outreach, the No Hope and the Pope tour that I did with Jeff Rose and Jeremiah Cry.
24:46: I'm sitting next to the man, I have my Bible out, I'm reading my Bible, and he asked me if I had gone to Philadelphia for the festivities.
24:56: And I said, well, yes, but probably not in the way that you think. And gave me an opportunity to share with him, and by speaking a little louder to the two or three
25:09: Roman Catholic priests seated a couple of rows ahead of me, what is wrong with Roman Catholicism, why it is not biblical.
25:16: I was able to open up the Word of God with him and show him from the Word of God what the Gospel is.
25:22: And the conversation didn't end with him pulling the emergency handle on the door of the plane and begging to get out or having me arrested by airport police when we landed in LA.
25:35: He thanked me for the conversation and left him with a Gospel tract and my card and went our separate ways.
25:44: And so this book is filled with conversations like that where if you're honest about why you're talking to someone and you have a biblical understanding of the
25:56: Gospel, it really doesn't matter who the person is or what their circumstances are in life or how different you may be culturally.
26:06: The Gospel is the power of God for salvation to all who believe, to the Jew first and also to the
26:12: Greek. And one of the things that will happen to most of us, perhaps not somebody who is as seasoned as you anymore,
26:24: I'm sure that it did happen though before when you were more of a novice or a new believer or new at outdoor evangelism and so on, is that most of us,
26:37: I'm assuming most of us who evangelize go through this, but we unfortunately allow ourselves to get sidetracked and go on rabbit trails that end nowhere.
26:52: I know someone very well who was a professing believer for about a decade back in the 1970s who later pretty much abandoned the church.
27:08: He would not say or admit, I don't believe, that he abandoned the faith or that he abandoned
27:14: God, but I think through observation of his life that that is largely true, that he did abandon
27:22: God himself, that he will, knowing the
27:28: Scriptures somewhat, will often bring up theological issues that he knows will have people tongue -tied.
27:37: He will bring up obscure things like baptism for the dead and, you know, why is that mentioned and all kinds of things that send people on rabbit trails, and most of us, when we're not experienced, we bite into the bait, we go for it, and we wind up just getting frustrated, and the person usually winds up being very satisfied that the
28:01: Christian evangelist has been defeated. But if you could speak for a moment on that.
28:06: Sure. Yeah, I've run into things like that all the time, and one of the things
28:13: I ask people, Chris, who are like that is, I'll stop them for a moment and I'll say, look, if I answer all of your questions to your satisfaction, are you going to drop your knees, drop to your knees, repent of your sin, and put your trust in Christ?
28:30: And usually, usually the answer is no, and so then
28:37: I politely say to them, well, then there's no reason for us to continue talking. I'm not going to allow you to justify your unbelief at my expense and just heap up more wrath upon yourself for the day of wrath.
28:50: You are going to stand before God. He is going to judge you according to the law he's written on your heart. He will find you guilty and you will perish in your sin.
28:59: I'd love to tell you how you could avoid his wrath, because it was placed upon someone else for sinners like you and me, but if you're just looking for an argument,
29:08: I'm not your guy. And that unfortunately makes many Christians just gasp.
29:14: How can you do that? Well, because the Word of God makes it clear that we're not to cast our pearls before swine.
29:21: You know, we are to lift up the name of Jesus Christ. We are to defend our faith, but that doesn't mean that we simply argue with people who don't want to hear.
29:32: And if people ask, on another note, if people ask me a question that I don't have the answer to,
29:40: I ask them, hey, can we exchange email addresses? I'd love to go study this out and get an answer for you and get back to you.
29:47: Oh, no, no, no, no. I don't want to do that. Oh, so you don't actually want the answer to the question. Right.
29:52: You're just trying to justify your unbelief. Well, when you stand before God to give an account for your sin, you are not going to be able to use my inability to answer your question as defense.
30:04: And one of the things that Mark Spence from Living Waters taught me a number of years ago, which I've always carried with me and I encourage others with, is that if you are asked a question you can't answer, then you make that the point of study for the next week.
30:18: You go to study to show yourself approved. You go to study to be prepared to be able to give a defense for the hope that is in you.
30:27: And so that the next time you're asked a question like that, you'll be ready to give an answer.
30:35: So, and again, many Christians, because they are so synergistic in their thought, because they believe that they've had a hand in their own salvation, believe that they have to have a hand in someone else's too.
30:49: And so they would look at a conversation like what I just described as a failure because the person didn't pray a prayer and ask
30:56: Jesus into their heart. When the word of the cross and the word of Christ is not only an aroma of life for life to those who are being saved, but it is an aroma of death for death to those who are perishing.
31:10: We're going to go to a break right now, at least we're going to try to go to a word from one of our sponsors.
31:18: And if you'd like to join us on the air with a question of your own for Tony Our email address is
31:24: ChrisArnzen at gmail .com. That's C -H -R -I -S -A -R -N -Z -E -N at gmail .com.
31:31: Please give us your first name, at least the city and state where you reside in the country where you reside if you live outside of the
31:37: United States. And if this is about a personal and private matter where you feel uncomfortable revealing your identity, or perhaps it's not wise to reveal your identity because of what you're going to ask,
31:51: Tony, you may feel free to remain anonymous and I will respect that request.
32:01: So it's ChrisArnzen at gmail .com. ChrisArnzen at gmail .com. Don't go away.
32:06: We're going to be right back with Tony Miano and our discussion on Cross Encounters 10 conversations, 10 years of gospel conversations.
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33:41: Welcome back. This is Chris Arns. And if you've just joined us, our guest today is Tony Miano.
33:47: Tony Miano is an open air evangelist. He is also the founder of Cross Encounters.
33:56: And he has a new book coming out, courtesy of Solid Ground Christian Books.
34:03: And Solid Ground Christian Books, for those of you who listen to Iron Sharpens Iron, is one of the sponsors of our broadcast and we thank
34:09: God for them. Their website is solid -ground -books .com. And if you would like to join us on the air with a question for Tony Miano, you can email us at chrisarnson at gmail .com.
34:28: chrisarnson at gmail .com. We do have
34:33: CJ in Lindenhurst, Long Island, New York, who asked the question, is it a mistake at times to bring up labels that are in -house distinctions that we use, such as Reformed and Calvinist, when you are evangelizing the lost and they don't even have a clue what you mean by those terms?
34:56: Yeah, CJ, that's a great question. And the answer to that question is yes.
35:03: We should not have Bible studies with unbelievers in the sense that we should not engage in Bible study with unbelievers thinking that they are thinking like a
35:15: Christian and have had the scales removed from their eyes and their ears unstopped, and that they can understand the
35:22: Word of God as a believer can. John Calvin, the name
35:30: John Calvin, means nothing to an unbeliever, nor does it mean anything to an unbeliever's salvation.
35:37: And so we should avoid those deeper doctrinal discussions with unbelievers.
35:46: We should present them with the law and the gospel clearly. Now, if they're part of another religion, or if they've been brought up in a liberal denomination, then you may have to go into deeper detail about issues such as salvation by grace through faith alone, particularly if you're talking to, well, any other religion,
36:10: Roman Catholic, Muslim, Jehovah's Witness, Mormon.
36:17: But as far as going into these deeper theological discussions that Christians have disagreed on for 1 ,500 to 2 ,000 years, it serves no point bringing those things up with an unbeliever.
36:33: Now, obviously, you're not saying that the teachings that we both hold very dear, the doctrines of sovereign grace, that they are not to be brought up because some of these things lie at the root of man's pride and his inability to, in and of himself, freely choose to believe in and follow
36:57: Christ, and there are other things involved in those precious doctrines that we,
37:02: I'm assuming you believe, we shouldn't avoid. Right. Of course. And in fact, I would hold,
37:09: Chris, that you can't rightly preach the gospel of Jesus Christ without articulating the doctrines of grace.
37:16: But in articulating the depravity of man and the predetermined will of God and the definite atonement of Christ and the irresistible grace of the
37:27: Holy Spirit and the assurance of salvation for the believer, we can articulate all of those precious doctrines without labeling them as predestination, without labeling it as limited or definite atonement, without labeling it as irresistible grace, without even using the term doctrine of grace or Calvinism.
37:52: And I think that's where C .J. was going, is that we should avoid the titles of some of these doctrinal distinctives, but yet, of course, we've got to preach the whole counsel of God's Word as we're articulating the law and the gospel to people.
38:07: And of course, there's nothing wrong with using them if you're actually speaking to a professing Christian who is trying to attack those beliefs or who thinks he knows what you believe but in reality doesn't.
38:20: Now, you know, it's not just Reform people who throw around labels and language that the unbeliever is unfamiliar with.
38:33: Very often you will hear an evangelist or just a zealous Christian who rightly wants to proclaim the gospel to those he encounters, whether they be friends, family, or just people sitting next to them on a bus or a train or a plane.
38:54: But they'll say things using language and catchphrases and buzzwords that mean nothing to the person.
39:02: Like, for instance, do you know that you're saved? And things like that, when you don't even have any definition or explanation about the person's soul.
39:11: Yeah, have you been regenerated? Are you born again?
39:16: You know, to the average person, are you born again?
39:21: That means are you a member of the Holy Roller Church down the road or, you know, whatever.
39:29: It could even be a Baptist or a fundamentalist church. But they view that as a denomination or a
39:35: Christian sect or even a cult. They don't even know what you're talking about when you say, are you born again? Yeah, Chris, when
39:40: I'm engaging someone in conversation, particularly someone I don't know, I find one of the best opening questions that crosses all denominational lines and avoids the
39:52: Christianese that Christians sometimes get themselves tangled up in.
39:59: It's simply asking the person, do you know if your sins are forgiven? And if they say no, well, can
40:06: I tell you how your sins can be forgiven? If they say yes, well, how do you know?
40:12: On what basis do you believe your sins are forgiven? Either way, I'm into a gospel conversation and I've talked to them in a language that anyone can understand.
40:26: And we have Arnie in Perry County, Pennsylvania.
40:34: He wants to know, well, he says, I am a white Christian and I have found it to be very interesting in my experience when
40:45: I am passing out tracts and doing any kind of public evangelism that black people seem to be far more receptive to receiving a tract or hearing a word of evangelism than white people are in my experience.
41:00: And I repeat, I say this as a white person. Do you concur? I do. I absolutely do.
41:07: And it doesn't matter where I'm at in the world, Chris, whether I'm in the lower 48 or I'm in Canada or I'm in England or I'm in Scotland, uh, people of color seem far more, uh, ready and amiable to not only receiving a gospel tract, but engaging in conversation.
41:29: I would affirm, I would affirm what, uh, what was her first name again? It was a man,
41:35: Arnie. I'm assuming that's a man. Yeah. I would affirm what, I would affirm Arnie's observation wholeheartedly.
41:41: Um, now we could speculate as to all the reasons why, I don't know how profitable that might be, but, but I certainly affirm that people of color seem to be more ready to receive a gospel tract.
41:54: Um, with, um, I love to give out Bibles. I like to give them out as, you know, as if they were gospel tracts and I'll go through 20 or a hundred a day, uh, sometimes.
42:05: And I have English and Spanish Bibles and the
42:11: English Bibles by and large go to people of color and the Spanish Bibles fly out of my hand.
42:18: They literally do. And, uh, and so I affirm, I affirm Arnie's observation.
42:24: We have Harrison in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania that asks, isn't it very dangerous for a
42:34: Christian, and I don't mean physically, uh, to venture out into evangelizing people involved in cults aggressively when you know nothing about what they believe.
42:49: I'm speaking specifically, if you were to be in the nearby vicinity of an event or celebration or special occasion that the cult or false religion is having, where people may have already been warned that there would be
43:07: Christians trying to evangelize them and they may be all prepared with a rehearsed script of some kind.
43:16: Shouldn't we be very careful as a, as a novice from trying to guess or pretend that we know what they believe?
43:25: Well, there's a, there's a lot there. And, uh, and so let me unpack that a little bit.
43:31: Um, uh, the, the person who emailed, I'm sorry, her first name? It's, uh,
43:37: Harrison. Harrison. Uh, first of all, um, Harrison was, uh, made a point of specifying that he wasn't speaking of physical danger.
43:49: So I'm left to assume that he was referring to spiritual danger. If a, if a person is in fact a genuine born again, follower of Jesus Christ, they are in no spiritual danger around cult members.
44:04: They're, they're in no spiritual danger around any unbeliever because he who is in the believer is greater than he who is in the world.
44:15: Um, if, if, uh, you are a born again, follower of Jesus Christ, a Mormon, a
44:20: Jehovah's witness, a black Hebrew Israelite, a Muslim, a Roman Catholic is not going to talk you out of your faith.
44:28: Um, so you are in no spiritual danger in that regard. Um, regarding engaging members of cult, um, with little or no knowledge of the cult,
44:39: I still say you're in no danger. And this is what I mean. Um, first I would,
44:45: I would say, yes, learn about these alternate religions. Um, learn about Mormonism, Islam certainly, the
44:53: Jehovah's Witnesses who seem to be everywhere I go. Um, you know, these major false religions around the world,
45:01: Roman Catholicism. Yes, I would, I would take time to learn what some of the basic tenets are of the religion, but even having that information, you cannot assume that the person in front of you even knows what their religion believes.
45:17: Uh, for instance, I, I, I take, I talk to Muslims, uh, frequently and Westernized Americanized Muslims don't, and, and this certainly isn't a blanket statement for all, but many of them don't know the
45:31: Quran any better than I do. Um, uh, because, because, uh, just like there are false converts to Christianity in the
45:40: United States, there are false converts to Islam as well. And the false convert to Christianity and the false convert to Islam have one thing in common.
45:49: Neither one of them really believe or know the book they claim to believe. Uh, somebody that both you and I are friends with, uh,
45:57: Dr. James R. White of Alpha Omega Ministries. Uh, it may surprise some of you, uh, because you know that he has written a book called what every
46:08: Christian needs to know about the Quran. And we read regularly of James traveling the globe, debating
46:15: Muslims, and even debating them in mosques. Uh, and, uh, I personally have arranged several debates between Dr.
46:23: White and Muslim clerics and Muslim apologists. And people listening may have seen him on video doing the same thing, uh, debating these
46:34: Muslims. But there was a time, uh, when Dr. White did not know much of anything about Islam.
46:41: I arranged his very first debate with a Muslim, Hamza Abdul Malik, who was a, uh, person who
46:49: I believe was raised in a nominal Christian home, African American gentleman who was a convert to Islam.
46:57: And so when James was debating Hamza, agreed to debate him, he insisted that the debate be on a
47:05: Christian tenet of faith, a vital core belief of Christianity, uh, which was, does the
47:13: New Testament teach the deity of Christ? That was the theme of the debate. So there you have someone as brilliant as Dr.
47:20: White realizing that the conversation that he had with this man at that time, this was back in the 90s before he had become the scholar of the
47:31: Quran that he is today, um, he realized the wisdom in just staying to what he knew like he knew the back of his hand and the, the, the most important thing that needed to be realized by the
47:46: Muslim anyway. Uh, so it, to take a little bit of a different, uh, take on what
47:55: Harrison was asking about, isn't it wise not to start talking about the person's religion if you don't know about it?
48:03: Yeah, no, Chris, great points. And, uh, and to just piggyback off of what you just said, you know, serving in law enforcement for 20 years, there were occasions where counterfeit money would come into our community.
48:15: And we, when that happened, we didn't spend any time studying the counterfeit money. We made sure that we knew, uh, frontward and backward, inside and out, the real thing.
48:29: Because the better we knew the real thing, the more the phony money would stand out regardless of who made the money.
48:37: Right? And so, and so while, yes, while it's good to have some basic knowledge of some of these religions, far better for Harrison and me and you and every other
48:46: Christian to know our Bible backward and forward and so on. Now, to your last point,
48:53: I agree 100%. If you want, if you want to end a conversation with a Roman Catholic in 3 .2
48:59: seconds, start by talking about the Virgin Mary. That's all you gotta do.
49:05: That's all you have to do. If you want to make sure a conversation with a Muslim ends before it starts, bring up pedophilia and Muhammad.
49:14: If it's one out of the conversation, that's all you've got to do. If, uh, if you want to, if you want to end a conversation with a
49:22: Mormon, just bring up the polygamy and false prophecies of Joseph Smith and you're out, man.
49:28: You're free to go. But if you actually love these people and care about these people, then you are going to start with the truth of God's word.
49:37: Now you may find yourself talking about the religion at some point, but if you begin by attacking their religion, whatever it is, a wall is going to go up and they're not going to hear a word you're saying.
49:49: Amen. And let me repeat our email address. It's chrisarnson at gmail .com.
49:56: chrisarnson at gmail .com. Uh, what are good suggestions that you may have when you are, uh, sitting around in your living room after a
50:10: Thanksgiving dinner or wherever, whatever reason that you have, uh, friends or family, uh, sitting around that, uh, do not know
50:19: Christ. Uh, what ways that aren't gimmicks? I'm not talking about gimmicks obviously, but what ways could you recommend that we introduce
50:29: Christ and the gospel into the conversation? Yeah, excellent question. And, and, and Chris, what you're bringing up brings up one of the great tragic flaws of friendship evangelism, because what
50:45: Christians inevitably do, and I would go as far as to say that, that there is not a single professing
50:53: Christian engaged in friendship evangelism who wants anyone to go to hell. Okay. I'm going to give all professing
51:00: Christians who engage in friendship evangelism the benefit of the doubt, and they want to see their friends.
51:06: They want to see the people they know in heaven with Christ. Okay. But here's what happened. They're led to believe, uh, by pastors who have set aside the authority of scripture, uh, and replaced it with the philosophies of men.
51:20: They've been led to believe that people are not going to want to hear the gospel from you until they know you care about them, until you establish a relationship, until you've earned the right to share the gospel.
51:32: That last one was a blasphemous statement, quite frankly. And so what people do is, what
51:37: Christians do, well -intended Christians will do, is they will work very hard to establish relationships with unbelievers, and over time they will establish wonderful, maybe even lifelong friendships with people.
51:50: And if and when they ever get the courage or the gumption to mention the things of Christ, oftentimes they won't.
51:58: Why? Because they don't want to do anything to damage the relationship they worked so hard to build.
52:05: So in the end, even if you were to ask them, do you want your lost friend to go to heaven? And they would say, yes.
52:11: In the end, they actually care more about the friendship than the soul of the friend. Now, who is the one group of people that it's most difficult to talk about Christ with?
52:28: I would think that it would be people who think they're Christians, but I may be wrong. Who do you think it is?
52:34: Well, in regard to, I think that's a good point. I mean, you go to some places in the country where people have been baptized six, seven, eight times.
52:42: They've been in the water so much their skin's pruney. Yeah, it's hard to talk to the folks like that sometimes, but I would say it's the people who's closest to us.
52:52: Our friends, our family members, you know, Aunt Millie, who made the creamy mashed potatoes there at the
52:59: Thanksgiving table. Those are the people that are hardest to talk to because we have so much personally invested.
53:08: And yet Friendship Evangelism says, go work really hard to personally invest so that you can develop these relationships that you'll be so invested in you won't ever talk to them about Jesus.
53:18: See? Yeah. To your point, to your question, I have found, particularly with the older generation, our parents,
53:28: Chris, our uncles, our aunts, you know, grandparents. You and I probably don't have grandparents still living, maybe you do, but the older generation, they don't like to be taught by kids, even if the kids are 50.
53:46: Some of the older generation, they don't talk about religion. They don't talk about politics. They don't wear their emotions on their sleeves.
53:53: They don't talk about how they're feeling. They very much keep to themselves.
54:00: And so, if I were to walk into the living room of our Thanksgiving gathering with my father -in -law and Uncle Chuck and Aunt Bonnie and Uncle Larry, people who are old enough to be my parents, and they're all in that tryptophan state of mental flux after the meal, and I say,
54:25: I want to take you all to the good person test. How many of you told a lie? Who's going to be the first to admit it?
54:30: Aunt Bonnie? Uncle Larry? That's not going to go over real well. And so, what
54:37: I have found with my own family, what I have found has been a very profitable way to engage them in gospel conversation is by doing it in the first person.
54:50: By using, and I'm going to want to preface this a little bit once I say this, but by using my testimony to communicate the law and the gospel.
55:00: By telling my aunts and my uncles, my mom and my dad, my cousins, who I was before Christ, what
55:07: Christ did to me, what He did on the cross on my behalf, and who I am today because of Christ.
55:13: So, by doing it that way, I'm not putting them in a corner. I'm not pointing an accusatory finger at them.
55:20: I'm not putting, I'm not backing them up against the wall expecting them to answer very personal probative questions.
55:28: And so, by doing it in the first person, I can get the law and the gospel to my relatives. They may still be a little bit uncomfortable, but I'm still going to be invited back to Thanksgiving the next year.
55:43: Now, the important thing, Chris. Well, I guess it depends on what your background was. You know what?
55:52: You bring up another good point, because unfortunately, the way testimonies are shared today, if the people sharing them are even saved, the person will spend 10 minutes talking, almost to an embarrassing degree, about what a wretched sinner they were, and then they'll spend 30 seconds making much of Christ.
56:15: So, they make everyone uncomfortable in the room. Aunt Bonnie and Mom and the other aunts and uncles are listening to your sexual proclivity before you came to faith in Christ, right?
56:34: And everyone's blushing. Grandma has passed out. They're panning her. They've got smoke bombs under her.
56:40: You think they're being moved by the Holy Spirit, but they're actually embarrassed to be in the same room by you, with you.
56:49: And so, unfortunately, in a lot of testimonies, we hear
56:54: Christians, and I'm sure many, if not most of them, well -intended, they spend a lot of time making much of their sin, and spend very little time making much about Christ, who saved them from their sin.
57:09: In Acts, Paul gives two, three, four different examples of sharing his testimony in a biblical way.
57:19: So, I would encourage listeners to go look for those biblical accounts where Paul is standing in front of people and giving his testimony, his life before Christ, how
57:29: Christ saved him, his life since Christ saved him, and you will see in his testimony that Christ is being exalted.
57:38: They want to stone Paul, not because he killed Christians before he came to faith in Christ, but because he was making so much of the
57:46: Christ who saved him. Amen. And it's interesting that if anybody would have had a titillating testimony to tell, it was the
57:53: Apostle Paul, and we know very little of the detail. We don't have the gory details of what he did.
58:00: We just know the facts that he did have men and women brought to their deaths, but we don't have a step -by -step, blow -by -blow description of it in the
58:11: Scriptures. That's one of the things about the testimonies.
58:17: It's a difficult subject because on the one hand, you don't want to be disingenuous with people and have them think that you're hiding something about your background, that you are some holier -than -thou person, as the accusation is frequently thrown at us.
58:37: And on the other hand, there are people, as you know, who glory in their past and really give us every vivid detail in their testimony to glamorize the sin that they were involved in.
58:53: And that might not be their intention, but that's what they're doing. Right. And it's the same thing that you have seen, or I'm not saying that you have seen, but I have seen at AA meetings and things like that, where you have these people, really, it's up one -manship, where there's almost a contest on who had the worst background in the room.
59:13: Yeah, yeah. And you know what, Chris, one of the people who I've seen handle this particular issue the best is
59:20: Ray Comfort, because when he's going through the wall, when he's open -air preaching, or even in a one -to -one conversation, and he broaches the subject of adultery, oftentimes, as a defense mechanism, the personal snap back, well, have you ever committed adultery?
59:37: Now, Ray doesn't say, well, let me tell you about the time. Ray says,
59:43: I've broken all of God's law. I'm guilty of breaking God's law, too. And then he gets back to the person that he's talking to.
59:51: Mm. And we're going to be going to another break right now. If you would like to join us on the air with a question of your own, our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com.
01:00:02: chrisarnson at gmail .com. We do have a couple of people waiting for their questions to be answered by Tony.
01:00:08: Please give us your first name, at least, if it's not a question that involves a personal and private matter where you must remain anonymous.
01:00:16: But if that is the case, you may feel free to remain anonymous if it makes you feel more comfortable. chrisarnson at gmail .com.
01:00:24: Don't go away. We're going to be right back with Tony Miano and cross -encounters 10 years of gospel conversations.
01:00:35: Paul wrote to the church at Galatia, For am I now seeking the approval of man, or of God? Or am
01:00:41: I trying to please man? If I were still trying to please man, I would not be a servant of Christ. Hi, I'm Mark Lukens, pastor of Providence Baptist Church.
01:00:49: We are a Reformed Baptist Church and we hold to the London Baptist Confession of Faith of 1689. We are in Norfolk, Massachusetts.
01:00:57: We strive to reflect Paul's mindset to be much more concerned with how God views what we say and what we do, than how men view these things.
01:01:05: That's not the best recipe for popularity, but since that wasn't the apostles' priority, it must not be ours either.
01:01:12: We believe, by God's grace, that we are called to demonstrate love and compassion to our fellow man, and to be vessels of Christ's mercy to a lost and hurting community around us, and to build up the body of Christ in truth and love.
01:01:24: If you live near Norfolk, Massachusetts, or plan to visit our area, please come and join us for worship and fellowship.
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01:01:48: that's providencebaptistchurchma .org, or even on sermonaudio .com. Providence Baptist Church is delighted to sponsor
01:01:56: Iron Sharpens Iron Radio. Welcome back. If you've just tuned us in, our guest today is
01:02:01: Tony Miano. He is the director of Cross Encounters and the author of a soon -to -be -released book,
01:02:11: Cross Encounters, 10 Years of Gospel Conversations. Did I get that title right, Tony? Yes, sir.
01:02:17: And that's being published by our friends at Solid Ground Christian Books in Birmingham, Alabama, and their website is solid -ground -books .com,
01:02:28: solid -ground -books .com. And we thank Mike Gaydosh and everyone at Solid Ground Christian Books from the bottom of our hearts for all they do to keep
01:02:38: Iron Sharpens Iron on the air. And if you'd like to join us on the air with a question of your own, our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com,
01:02:49: chrisarnson at gmail .com. Christopher in Suffolk County, Long Island, New York asks the question, uh, should women be involved in evangelizing men in public other than obviously those who are friends, family, and loved ones, colleagues, etc.,
01:03:11: people they know? But is it too far a dangerous endeavor for women to be evangelizing men in public, and is it even appropriate?
01:03:22: Wow, that's an excellent question. In fact, I, uh, shameless plug, um, I, I answer that question among others in, uh, in a book that I wrote called
01:03:30: Should She Preach? Biblical Evangelism for Women, which is available on Amazon in, uh,
01:03:37: Kindle form right now. And, uh, that is an excellent question. By the way, I would like to have you back on to discuss that topic on a future interview because I want to get rid of some friends that I have.
01:03:48: Yeah, the sequel to that is how to make friends and influence people.
01:04:05: But, uh, but to the question, um, if, if at all possible,
01:04:13: I, I think for every practical reason, not simply pragmatic one, but also spiritual one, if at all possible, it is best in a one -to -one conversation setting, uh, particularly with a stranger or an acquaintance, that if it is men talking to men and women talking to women.
01:04:32: Um, when we are talking about spiritual things with people, uh, these are very personal, uh, conversations.
01:04:42: These can be very intimate, not in a sexual way, but intimate as far as the kind of information, uh, that is, uh, that is being exchanged.
01:04:51: Uh, these conversations can be emotional and opposite sex attract.
01:04:58: And so a guy, uh, is able to pour out his heart to a woman he just met and he's soon thinking of that woman in a way he ought not think about her.
01:05:09: And the same is true vice versa. A woman is pouring out her heart, uh, to a man and the next thing you know, uh, she wants to put her head on his shoulder or something like that.
01:05:21: I, I've been in these situations a number of times. I can remember one very specifically.
01:05:27: Um, I have a dear sister in Christ from Georgia. Her name is Karen Blackburn. And, uh, we were at the
01:05:34: Superbowl outreach in New Orleans along with 90 or a hundred, um, other people.
01:05:40: And a, a lady comes staggering up to where we're doing evangelism.
01:05:46: I say staggering because she is three sheets to the wind and she wants to interrupt the preaching.
01:05:54: I distract her, get her to take a few steps to the side. Um, I, even through her drunken haze, she's able to engage in conversation and I begin to share the law and the gospel with her.
01:06:06: She begins to break down and, and weep and begins to confess sin. And I immediately called
01:06:13: Karen over and Karen took this lady by the shoulder, comforted her, consoled her, and continued the conversation with her to, to protect myself spiritually from getting too far, too emotionally attached, too intimate in a conversation with a woman who was not my wife.
01:06:36: Um, you know, I think it's foolhardy, especially for men. I think it's foolhardy for them to think that they can engage women in conversation and will not ever stumble in any way.
01:06:49: I think that's ridiculous. I was at a major outreach once. There was a man on my team who
01:06:56: I had not met and had not met previous to that. And every time
01:07:01: I turned around, he was leaning against the wall in close proximity, talking to a woman and would come to find out later that he was having trouble at home with his marriage.
01:07:15: And lo and behold, every person he's sharing the gospel with is a woman. And so, so engaging in conversation with the opposite sex is fraught with danger.
01:07:29: That's one of the reasons why I recommend that people carry digital recorders with them and, and are able to document the conversations they have.
01:07:39: Maybe not necessarily to put on the internet or anything like that, but it's happened to open air preachers before.
01:07:45: It's happened to evangelists before where the conversation seems to be going fine. You're talking to a member of the opposite sex.
01:07:53: Um, they begin to get upset. Next thing you know, you have a police officer standing next to you saying, this woman said that you made advances toward her.
01:08:00: This woman said that you're harassing her. This woman said that you're threatening her. This woman said you're stalking her.
01:08:06: Well, no officer would you like to listen to the conversation? That's not true. So now at the same time, at the same time, um,
01:08:16: I don't think we should be so legalistic about this to say, look, if you're a man sharing the gospel with a woman, you're in sin or vice versa.
01:08:24: We can't say that, but we should do everything we can to avoid then in all of our evangelistic endeavors, certainly when engaged with members of the opposite sex.
01:08:34: So for the purpose of accountability, have another brother or sister with you if you're going to engage someone in conversation of the opposite sex.
01:08:42: So you have that immediate accountability. You have the physical protection of another, another body there.
01:08:49: Yeah. And I'm assuming that although this is not our primary focus of discussion, that, uh, you would, uh, have very strict warnings, uh, even to men in leadership and pastors about counseling women alone.
01:09:03: Oh yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And, um, I would, I would go as far as to say, look, if you're, if you're, even if you're counseling someone, you know, and it's a member of the opposite sex.
01:09:17: Um, if you're doing it in your office at the church and the doors open, that's one thing. If you're meeting at Starbucks or something like that, you ought to have a third person with you because that's how rumors start.
01:09:30: Okay. So people in my community, uh, saved and unsaved, they know who I am. They know who my wife
01:09:36: Maria is. They see me one day at Starbucks looking like I'm having a very pleasant conversation with a woman who's not my wife.
01:09:45: And now they're asking themselves questions like, well, who is this woman? Is Maria okay?
01:09:50: Is there a problem in their marriage? And people are being caused to stumble. I'm no longer above reproach in the eyes of people outside the church.
01:09:58: And I haven't done anything wrong per se. And so for the sake of the name and the glory of Christ, we should take whatever precautions necessary to safeguard ourselves and his great name when we are engaged in any kind of ministry with someone of the opposite sex.
01:10:19: Uh, we have Christian in Cumberland County, Pennsylvania that wants to know, should you even bother evangelizing someone who is heavily intoxicated?
01:10:31: Ah, excellent question. That's a great question. Um, I would say nine times out of 10, no, to this extent.
01:10:39: Now being a, uh, a retired, uh, deputy sheriff, I had a lot of interaction with drunk and I've had it happen where one moment, the person wants to, wants me to adopt them as their son or daughter.
01:10:54: And the next moment I'm rolling around in the streets, fighting for my gun. You know, the switch can go off that quick.
01:11:04: Okay. And so I find, and again, this is another reason why gospel tracts are such a powerful weapon.
01:11:11: I find the best thing to do is to reason calmly with them. Um, you know, don't say,
01:11:16: Hey, get out of here. You're drunk. Something like that. But you know, to try to, uh, to try to end the conversation quickly and calmly, uh, speak calmly to them, get them to take a gospel tract.
01:11:27: I've heard testimony after testimony of men and women who have woken up the next day, not remembering the night before pulling a gospel tract out of their pants pocket or out of their purse and coming to repentance and faith in Christ.
01:11:42: And so, um, so I think it's best depending on the level of intoxication.
01:11:48: I think it's best not to engage in protracted conversations with intoxicated people.
01:11:55: Um, I, I strongly recommend not getting into argument with, uh, with intoxicated people.
01:12:02: Let your swallow your pride, let them get the last word. Um, don't think that you have to end the conversation, you know, um, you know, with all drunkards we'll, we'll go to hell or something like that.
01:12:14: Um, get a gospel tract into their hand and let the gospel tract do the talking for you.
01:12:20: By the way, uh, I think that was a good segue into you letting our listeners know where you think they can get the finest in gospel tracts.
01:12:31: Ah, well, well, there are a couple of places. The first one I'm going to mention is, uh, somewhat selfish, forgive me.
01:12:37: Uh, it's onemilliontracks .com. One million, O -N -E, million tracks .com.
01:12:43: Uh, the, uh, designer publisher of those gospel tracts is Marv Plementosh. And, uh, all of the titles that I write,
01:12:51: I write with Marv. Uh, he comes up with an idea. I write the text. He comes up with the design and we publish tracts together.
01:12:58: We've done more than a dozen, uh, together so far. Um, one of the things that Ray Comfort taught me, uh,
01:13:05: Ray has taught me many things over the years. One of the things Ray taught me about writing, uh, publishing gospel tracts is don't expect anyone else to hand out a gospel tract you yourself won't hand out.
01:13:17: Right. And so the gospel tracts Marv and I write together are gospel tracts we use.
01:13:23: Um, certainly, uh, another place to go for gospel tracts is Living Waters, uh, which is Ray Comfort's ministry.
01:13:30: Um, Ray has written hundreds, if not thousands of titles over the last 30, 40 years.
01:13:36: And, uh, he writes good gospel tracts as well. Another place, a really, really good place. And if you're on a tight budget, this is the place for you.
01:13:44: It is Chapel Library, Chapel Library, uh, Mount Zion Publications, Chapel Library led by Pastor Jeff Pollard.
01:13:53: Um, they specialize in tracts written by dead guys.
01:14:00: Not all of them, but not all of them, but, but one of the reasons they do that, I found this so fascinating and so profoundly wise in talking to, uh, to Jeff Pollard about, uh, publication of tracts and booklets and things like that.
01:14:16: He said, Tony, one of the reasons why we focus primarily on dead guys, not exclusively, but primarily on dead guys is because their theology never changes.
01:14:28: Think about it. Think about it. You publish someone's work. They're squared away. They're a five point
01:14:34: Calvinist. They go off, they go off the, they go off the reservation and they end up, they end up being
01:14:40: Rob Bell's cohost on his Oprah show. And you're stuck with a million pieces of paper you're never going to give to anybody.
01:14:49: Right? Well, but by the way, I just have to tell this story that still cracks me up when
01:14:55: I think about it to this day. I don't know if you're familiar with John Riesinger, but years ago,
01:15:01: John said that he knew someone who spent thousands of dollars on printing a reprint of a
01:15:10: J .C. Ryle tract. And J .C. Ryle, as you know, is a great, great man of God from 19th century, low church
01:15:17: Episcopal or Anglican Bishop, I should say. Solid Calvinist, great man of God.
01:15:24: But the guy who brought this tract into print failed to rename the sermon that J .C.
01:15:32: Ryle picked. So this man had boxes of thousands of tracts called Letters to a
01:15:38: Gay Friend. Yeah. Well, hey, you know, the
01:15:45: Superbowl outreaches in San Francisco. We could probably unload those for the guy.
01:15:56: And obviously, if that upsets you, just email Chris Arntzen at gmail .org.
01:16:04: By the way, Chapel Library's website is chapellibrary .org. Oh, great site. Chapellibrary .org.
01:16:11: Chapellibrary .org. Great, great ministry. When I first came to Faith in Christ some 27, 28 years ago,
01:16:19: I believe they're still doing it today, but they had Bible studies designed for prisoners, for inmates, for men and women in jail.
01:16:29: And I was working in the jails at the time as a young deputy. I became familiar with their ministry.
01:16:35: I started doing some of their jail Bible studies as a deputy working in the jail.
01:16:40: I mean, I've appreciated their ministry for almost three decades. Yes, I've spoken to prison inmates and those who were released from prison, paroled and so on, who said that the
01:16:54: Chapel Library tracts had a significant impact on their lives in prison. In fact, the
01:17:00: Lord used, in some of these cases, used those tracts to bring them into salvation.
01:17:06: Amen, amen. And so we thank God for Chapel Library. And yeah, what you were saying before about don't give out tracts that you, you know, you have to make sure that you're thoroughly in agreement with the theology in the tract.
01:17:23: Right. Yeah, absolutely. Whenever a brother or sister in Christ comes up to me when
01:17:29: I'm out on the street and says, hey, can I help you hand out some tracts? I'll hand them one of each of the titles that I have.
01:17:36: And I say, read these first before you hand them out. Make sure you agree with what I've written on these tracts before you put them in the hands of someone else.
01:17:44: Now, what do you think about something that a friend of mine does? He gets a whole box full of tracts and he will go into the local
01:17:55: Catholic church that is open for the public to just stroll in whenever they want to pray before an idol or something.
01:18:02: And he'll go in the pews and he'll start stuffing the pews with these tracts. And he does that in other areas where, you know, there are areas for free literature or whatever, and they are not
01:18:17: Christian or evangelical. And he just stuffs these boxes and shelves and things with Christian tracts.
01:18:26: What do you think about that? Yeah, no harm, no foul. If he's got a legitimate reason to be there and there is take -away literature there, go for it.
01:18:34: Great. And so keep doing that. You know who you are if you're listening. ChrisArnzen at gmail .com.
01:18:44: ChrisArnzen at gmail .com. We do have an anonymous listener who wants to know, is it very unproductive to bring up tertiary things when you are evangelizing
01:19:05: Roman Catholics? I have friends and family members who are
01:19:11: Catholic, and I think that I have found it to be most profitable when
01:19:17: I just stick to the essence of the Gospel rather than bringing up other things that involve eschatological predictions and so on.
01:19:26: Yeah, there's a lot in that question. Some terms I think would need to be defined.
01:19:34: You know, one man's tertiary is another man's essential. So we would need to define some terms there.
01:19:40: But again, as we spoke about earlier, if you begin by assaulting a
01:19:45: Roman Catholic belief system, you're going to have a very short conversation. Now, I'm uncomfortable with words like essence.
01:19:56: I don't certainly want to read too much into the email, certainly don't want to put words in the person's mouth or email.
01:20:03: But we should be sharing not only the essence of the Gospel, but all of the
01:20:09: Gospel. And with a Roman Catholic, you want to stress the reality that salvation is by the grace of God alone, through faith alone, in Jesus Christ alone.
01:20:20: You want to stress that Jesus said on the cross with his dying breath, it is finished, to tell us thy paid and full, that he does not suffer today in any shape or form.
01:20:32: He is seated at the right hand of power. Everything that God the Father required of God the Son to perfectly fulfill the law and all righteousness, and to perfectly provide a way of escape from his wrath, was completed on the cross and through Christ's resurrection.
01:20:50: So yeah, you don't want to simply give them the essence of the Gospel, because most Roman Catholics believe the essence of the
01:20:58: Gospel, that Jesus died for sinners. Most Roman Catholics would believe that.
01:21:04: And so yeah, I would focus primarily on what the
01:21:10: Bible says, not necessarily on what the Roman Catholic Catechism says.
01:21:17: Now, it depends on the context as well. For instance, when we were out at the
01:21:22: No Hope in the Pope tour out in Philadelphia, when Pope Francis, the latest
01:21:30: Antichrist out of Rome, was there in the city and a million people were there, we were declaring, of course, scriptural truth, but we were also pointing out the falsehoods of the
01:21:44: Roman Catholic religion. One member of our team in particular, Pastor Chuck O 'Neill from Beaverton Grace Bible Church, he made it his mission during the several days that we were there, because all the priests were decked out to the nines in all of their robes and pageantry and sashes and necklaces and everything.
01:22:02: They were real easy to spot. So Pastor Chuck would walk up to them politely, respectfully, lovingly, and call them to repent of the idolatry of Rome and to stop making proselytites twice the sons and daughters of hell that they are presently and to turn to Christ and live.
01:22:23: So context is important too. Yeah, and I think what the listener was getting at with, is it unproductive to bring up eschatological predictions, perhaps, you know, to assault a
01:22:37: Catholic, especially in your first conversation with your notion of the Church of Rome's role in the end times or something like that.
01:22:45: Oh, okay. Well, look, you know, eschatology is the new cage stage of evangelicalism.
01:22:52: I mean, all you have to do is spend a little time on Twitter and Facebook and hear the lions roar, you know, whether you're pre -millennial,
01:22:58: I'm a little post -millennial. Frankly, I take to the streets to engage lost people in gospel conversations to get away from some of the
01:23:09: Christian conversations that are out there, because I don't have to worry about talking eschatology, you know, in depth with Roman Catholics and what have you, or Mormons or Muslims.
01:23:23: Not that those issues aren't important, we should study all of scripture, we should study all of theologies, whatever they may be, including eschatology.
01:23:32: But certainly in the context of an evangelistic conversation, the eschatology,
01:23:39: I think, it should be limited to the fact that Jesus Christ died on the cross, three days later he rose from the grave, and he will return at the time of the
01:23:47: Father's choosing. And while he came as the sinless Lamb of God to take away the sins of the world in his first coming, when he returns, he's going to return as the
01:23:58: Lion of the tribe of Judah to judge both the living and the dead. And you mentioned something that made me think of the danger of, what
01:24:13: I mentioned earlier, the danger of rabbit trails, of letting the conversation be derailed off of what the true and necessary and vital topics are regarding the eternal and never -dying souls of men.
01:24:36: You have people who will start baiting us with questions, like the
01:24:43: Roman Catholic typical question is, why are there 30 ,000 Protestant denominations and things like that?
01:24:51: How do you get back on track when these things are thrown at you? Well, one of the things
01:24:58: I say to objections like that is that, yes, churches are filled with hypocrites, yes, churches are filled with saved people and lost people, yes, people have a hard time agreeing on things, but when you stand before God, you will not be able to use the number of denominations as your excuse for not repenting and putting your trust in Christ.
01:25:22: You are going to stand naked and alone. You're not going to stand with the Baptists or the Presbyterians or the
01:25:28: Charismatic or the Non -Charismatic or the Lutherans or the non -denominationalists.
01:25:34: You're not going to be able to point a finger to anyone else and say, see, look what he did, look at this time in history, look at that time in history, look at slavery, look at this.
01:25:43: In fact, you'll be silent. Because what many people fail to realize,
01:25:48: Chris, many unbelievers fail to realize, and I would include false converts in that group as well, is they think the day of judgment is going to be a court trial where they're going to stand before God and make a case.
01:26:03: They are going to lay before him the evidence of their good works. They are going to call witnesses to testify to what a wonderful person they were in this life.
01:26:11: What they fail to realize is that the day of judgment is not a court trial, it's a day of sentencing. Because if they do not love the
01:26:18: Son, if they do not obey the Son, they have been judged already. They are dead men walking, we don't have to worry about the zombie apocalypse, it's here now.
01:26:28: Most of the world are dead, living dead, spiritually living people, spiritually dead people, who have already been sentenced to die, who are simply waiting for their sentence to be carried out.
01:26:39: But God, who is rich in mercy, will cause some to be born again to a living hope, extending to them the gifts of repentance and faith that only he can give and make them alive together with Christ.
01:26:54: You know, that really gets to the heart of the matter when it comes to the reason why the doctrines of grace are so important when it comes to evangelism.
01:27:07: People need not give up hope or be totally paranoid about their own lack of ability to articulate things.
01:27:21: The depression and the letdown that people may frequently have when they evangelize, they know that they're being as faithful to the scriptures as they possibly know how to do, and then they see all these people that they're evangelizing walking away, either being indifferent or mocking them.
01:27:43: But we know that God is in control of who receives the truth.
01:27:51: We know that he is the one that removes hearts of stone and replaces them with hearts of flesh, if you could comment on that.
01:27:57: Yeah, amen. And Chris, that is why Arminianism is such an insidious thing when it comes to evangelism.
01:28:06: The vast majority of Christians do not communicate the gospel with lost people because they are so afraid of failing.
01:28:16: They've been told that they have to establish relationships with people. They have been told that they have to be all things to all people.
01:28:23: They have been told that they have to be able to contextualize and that they have to be able to relate to the society around them.
01:28:29: They have been told that they need to be apologists and they need to know what's going on in the world religions. They have been told that they have to look a certain way, dress a certain way, be acceptable.
01:28:40: They've been told not to do anything like those rabbit -open -air preachers who constantly push people away from Jesus.
01:28:46: They've been told all of these things, and so they take in all of this bad information about all of their responsibility in evangelism and then they don't go out and evangelize.
01:29:00: Why? Because they don't want to fail Jesus in their mind. They don't want anyone going to hell because of something they did or something they said.
01:29:09: And Chris, people walk up to me all the time when I'm out on the street open -air preaching, Christian, professing
01:29:14: Christian, and they're always the angriest hecklers. The angriest hecklers always begin their rant with,
01:29:21: I'm a Christian too. It's not the atheist, it's not the Muslim, not the Mormon, certainly not the
01:29:26: Jehovah's Witness. It is the professing Christian who is the angriest heckler in open -air preaching.
01:29:35: And one of their quickest arguments, of course, is the hypocritical, although they can't realize it, you know, judge not lest you be judged.
01:29:45: And when I ask them, why are you judging me? You almost have to give them a bib because they start slobbering over it, trying to figure out what to say next.
01:29:54: But after that, Chris, it's you're pushing people away from Jesus. And I look at the person and I say to them calmly,
01:30:03: I look at them and I say, what a small, weak, powerless, effeminate
01:30:09: God you believe in. You think that a 51 -year -old overweight sinner saved by grace can thwart the eternal plan of God to save someone by what
01:30:22: I'm doing or saying. You don't believe in the sovereign God of the Bible. Now, I'm always quick when
01:30:29: I share this, Chris. I'm always quick to let Christians know this does not give us license to run roughshod over people.
01:30:35: This does not give us license to be a jerk. This does not give us license to be mean to people and not speak in a loving but firm way.
01:30:44: We must not bring a reproach upon Christ in our behavior. And the message should be what offends, not the messenger.
01:30:53: But once I understood the power of the doctrines of grace in evangelism,
01:31:00: Chris, I was free to evangelize. I was free to enjoy evangelism.
01:31:06: I was free to worship while evangelizing because there was no pressure on me to succeed.
01:31:13: All I had to do was fulfill the two greatest commandments at that moment to love
01:31:18: God with all of my heart, soul, mind, and strength by telling people about him and to love my neighbor as myself by telling them about him and trusting in the sovereign
01:31:29: God of all creation to do what he has already determined to do from eternity past.
01:31:35: That frees me to go out and enjoy evangelism. Amen. And it's such a shame and a tragedy what some evangelical denominations do when they yank missionaries off the field just because they don't have a good numbers report to bring back to the denomination as if they themselves, the missionaries, were somehow not only the ones who plant and water but also give the increase.
01:32:03: Yeah. Hey, they would have yanked Jesus off the field. Yes. Because he had the audacity to tell them that unless you eat my body and drink my blood, you have no part in me.
01:32:13: And close to 20 ,000 people split. Yeah. Right? And he was left with 12 guys.
01:32:20: One was going to betray him after he spent all of the church's budget on feeding 20 ,000 people for a noseprings -attached barbecue out in the woods.
01:32:31: And he got no decisions out of it. In fact, people hated him more now than they did before.
01:32:37: Modern American evangelicalism, you know what, Chris, quite frankly, modern
01:32:42: American evangelicalism, Chris, would crucify Jesus all over again. They would crucify him all over again.
01:32:51: They would stand outside the city on Palm Sunday hailing him as a king.
01:32:57: And when they didn't get what they wanted out of him, five days later, they will be standing before Pilate saying, crucify him.
01:33:06: Evangelicalism would do that today, Chris. Wow. And we're going to be going to our final break right now. If you'd like to join us on the air, we've only got about 25 minutes left.
01:33:16: Our email address is ChrisArnzen at gmail .com, C -H -R -I -S -A -R -N -Z -E -N at gmail .com.
01:33:23: Don't go away. We'll be right back with Tony Miano. Charles Haddon Spurgeon once said,
01:33:31: Give yourself unto reading. The man who never reads will never be read. He who never quotes will never be quoted.
01:33:39: He who will not use the thoughts of other men's brains proves that he has no brains of his own.
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01:34:26: Solid Ground Christian Books is honored to be a weekly sponsor of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio. Welcome back.
01:34:32: Before we return to Tony Miano, I just want to quickly announce that a week from today, that is
01:34:40: Monday, February 8th, we've got Todd Friel of Wretched Radio and Wretched Television returning to Iron Sharpens Iron, and he is going to be discussing his new book,
01:34:51: Judge Not, and the word not on the cover of the book is crossed out, and the subtitle is
01:35:00: Let the Judging Begin, and we're going to have Todd back on, so you might want to tell your family, friends, and loved ones who either love
01:35:11: Todd Friel, or if you believe they need to hear a message about the crazy, false preachers that are dominating the television and radio airwaves, and not to mention tragically becoming the best -selling
01:35:33: Christian authors very frequently, so mark your calendars for a week for today, a week from today, for Todd Friel on Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, and I also want to let you know that we're going to be just airing one more ad, and we're going to be right back after these messages, so don't go away.
01:35:58: We're going to be back with, actually, we're not going to air that commercial because we're running into a technical difficulty right now, so we're just going to continue with our conversation, and if you'd like to join us on the air, the email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com,
01:36:19: chrisarnson at gmail .com, and actually we do have a listener before I ask my own,
01:36:32: Pastor Gary from Worcester, Massachusetts. Pastor Gary asks,
01:36:39: Tony, do you use the same Arminian methodology as Ray Comfort in utilizing a
01:36:45: Billy Graham style of sinner's prayer conversion assurance, or have an altar call type approach to saving sinners, and if so, where do you see this approach in the
01:36:55: Bible, and aren't you compromising the power of the gospel? Isn't this manipulative?
01:37:00: Well, he's making a lot of assumptions that you do things, but... Wow! Hit somebody quick! Get a match! Let's set this straw man on fire!
01:37:14: Well, you want to respond to Pastor Gary? Yeah. Pastor Gary, you assume facts not entered into evidence.
01:37:23: That's probably a little calmer way to answer that. First of all, Ray Comfort has been probably the loudest and clearest clarion voice against the sinner's prayer of any evangelist in American evangelicalism over the last 30 years, so where he gets this idea of Ray leading people in a sinner's prayer, you won't see that in any of his videos.
01:37:49: He writes books against it. I encourage Pastor Gary to get
01:37:55: Ray's book, God Who Has a Wonderful Plan for Your Life, and it's basically the cream of the crop from his larger work,
01:38:08: Hell's Best Kept Secret, and The Way of the Master. Ray is not an advocate of altar call thieves.
01:38:16: To put Ray Comfort and Billy Graham in the same sentence regarding altar calls is to really live in an alternate universe, so I'm not sure where he got that information, and so I think everything else kind of breaks down at that point.
01:38:32: I don't know what else we really need to get into. Those accusations, certainly those accusations are false.
01:38:41: I get myself in a lot of trouble for making it very clear that I subscribe to the doctrines of grace, and so putting
01:38:48: Tony Miano and Arminian in the same sentence is kind of unusual, too. I'm not sure where Pastor Gary's coming from, but with all due respect,
01:38:59: I certainly hope Pastor Gary approaches the Bible with better hermeneutics than he has with his questions.
01:39:11: Well, in fairness to Pastor Gary about you, he was asking. He wasn't... I'm sorry,
01:39:18: I'm sorry. But he was connecting those things to Ray Comfort. Yeah, so that's fallacious to connect that to Ray Comfort.
01:39:27: Now, here's the thing about Ray. I mentioned I love Ray Comfort. I'm an apologist for Ray Comfort in many ways, and I can tell you from being with the man for most of my waking hours for four and a half years, that there are certain subjects that Ray just doesn't talk about, even with the people who are closest to him.
01:39:53: Things like whether or not the gifts are for today, or Calvinism and Arminianism and things like that.
01:40:02: It's not that he doesn't have an opinion. It's not that he's afraid to talk about those things. It's certainly not that he doesn't have the intellectual prowess to discuss it.
01:40:12: He just sees these conversations as taking him off point, as taking him away from his primary mission, and that is to preach the gospel of Jesus Christ and to encourage other
01:40:23: Christians to do the same. So again, Ray Comfort does not advocate the sinner's prayer.
01:40:30: He does not advocate the altar call, and the information to the contrary is simply not true.
01:40:37: I told you before the program that I definitely wanted you to address as a retired law enforcement officer and a
01:40:47: Christian simultaneously. What your response is to what we witnessed as not only a nation, but globally, people from all over the world witnessed what was happening in Ferguson, Missouri, Baltimore, Maryland, New York City, and other places in Chicago, Illinois, where there were protests, which became in some instances riots, regarding police or alleged police brutality.
01:41:24: Of course, even you as a retired police officer know that police officers who are sinners like everybody else can be involved in brutality, unwarranted brutality.
01:41:36: In fact, you were arrested yourself for evangelizing at Wimbledon, if I'm not mistaken. Yeah, good. Okay. I'm glad you connected that dot because you said that officers commit police brutality.
01:41:47: In fact, Tony, you were arrested. I want to make sure everyone knows that I was never arrested for police brutality.
01:41:55: Oh, no, I didn't mean for brutality. I meant for evangelizing. No, both.
01:42:01: London in 2013 and Scotland in 2014 was not the victim of any kind of brutality.
01:42:08: In fact, the officer in London, my arresting officer, we took a nice stroll together to the police station side by side, no handcuffs.
01:42:20: He had been on the department for four years. I asked him what he wanted to do with his career as I'm walking to jail for preaching the gospel.
01:42:28: To your point, Chris, I like to say about my law enforcement family, and they are my family, that we draw from the same fallible human race as every other profession.
01:42:41: There are bad apples in the law enforcement family. Yes, there are. Any man, any woman who sees their gun and their badge as a license to abuse people and to violate the law and to violate the trust of the people has no business whatsoever having a badge and a gun.
01:43:04: He or she should be in prison. So let me make that really, really clear. The vast majority of members of my law enforcement family, the vast majority of them, the vast majority of them lost and bound for hell without Christ, unfortunately.
01:43:21: But the vast majority of them want to do the job the right way. They are willing to leave their homes and leave their families and kiss their children goodbye, knowing that they may never see them again.
01:43:34: And I think that deserves our respect, certainly. And the scripture makes it clear that we are to respect and obey governing authorities.
01:43:45: Now, Chris, part of my personal story is the fact that as a deputy sheriff, I spent three, four days in South Central L .A.
01:43:55: during the 1992 L .A. riots after the Rodney King incident. So I saw rioting firsthand, not via Fox News or CNN, but I was there.
01:44:08: I saw it. And what I saw, Chris, was nothing more than criminal opportunists.
01:44:18: The communities that were ravaged, destroyed, decimated, burnt to the ground were not white communities.
01:44:28: They were black communities. And I remember one of the mornings watching a six - to eight -year -old little
01:44:38: African -American girl in a beautiful Sunday -type dress carrying electronic equipment out of the broken plate glass window of a looted store.
01:44:51: And I had to ask myself, Chris, what's she mad about? What injustice is that little girl mad about?
01:45:00: These riots were opportunities for criminals to be criminals. That's what rioting is, an opportunity for people to victimize their neighbor, love themselves, and to hate their neighbors.
01:45:14: That's what we saw. And, Chris, what bothered me the most,
01:45:20: I mean, rioting bothers me, that kind of sinful, outrageous behavior bothers me, but I expect fallen men to act like fallen men.
01:45:31: I knew that the rioting was going to happen, not because I'm a prophet or I play one on TV, but simply having that experience in law enforcement, what happened in Ferguson was going to be an excuse for riots, and that's what it was, exactly what it was.
01:45:46: But what troubled me most, Chris, what angered me most, Chris, were the
01:45:53: Christian pastors looking for their 15 minutes of fame to appease the
01:46:00: African American community, would ignore the facts, ignore the evidence, and be used by the enemy to incite violence, to be used by the enemy to incite hatred for law enforcement.
01:46:16: I could name some names I'm tempted to, but I won't, but there are pastors, and there are some well -known pastors, who
01:46:24: I think aided and abetted in the rioting, all under the guise of trying to make themselves look like they understood and were supporting the cause of black people in America.
01:46:40: Now, look, I don't deny for a second that racism still exists. It does. It exists everywhere.
01:46:48: It exists in the white community, the Hispanic community, the Asian community, the black community, because there are sinners bound for hell in every community.
01:46:57: What people need to get an understanding of, and what they need to have a biblical worldview about, is that there's only one race.
01:47:05: It's the human race, made up of many different people groups, but we're all one race.
01:47:13: And the evidence bore out that the officer involved in the shooting death of Michael Brown did his job correctly, was attacked.
01:47:24: Michael Brown was not a victim. He was not merely a high school graduate with his whole life before him.
01:47:31: He was a criminal opportunist who decided to attack a police officer, and tragically, he met the result of someone coming against a governing authority who does not bear the sword for nothing.
01:47:47: And in some of the other instances, the police officers involved in killing suspects and criminals and so on, they themselves were black police officers.
01:47:59: Exactly. Right. Right. And unfortunately, for some of those officers, they're immediately dubbed an
01:48:04: Uncle Tom. For no other reason that they are a man or woman of integrity and courage trying to do their job well behind the badge.
01:48:14: And that's disgusting. Now, let's give a scenario. Let's say that you're still active as a police officer, or you just happen by providence to be in the street when something like that is happening.
01:48:28: Obviously, we're not going to encourage people to unnecessarily put their lives at risk by running to a scene such as that to pass out tracks.
01:48:39: Perhaps some people are better suited than others to physically be able to take care of themselves and so on in a situation like that.
01:48:48: But what would be your approach in evangelizing people who are really accusing whites of racism and being the cause for all of the horrible ills in mankind, basically, and being across the board supportive of innocent black lives being taken?
01:49:19: Yeah. Well, for one, I would follow the lead of Pastor Jeff Kirkland from Christ Fellowship Bible Church in St.
01:49:26: Louis. The church is not far from Ferguson, and he and the men of the church went into Ferguson.
01:49:33: Now, Christ Fellowship Bible Church, while it is a multi -ethnic church, it is a predominantly white church in a nice suburb area of St.
01:49:42: Louis. And they went into Ferguson, the men of the church, to proclaim the gospel, to pass out water, to preach the gospel in the open air, to distribute gospel tracks.
01:49:53: And I would follow that lead. And I would proclaim the gospel as not simply the cure of social ills, but the cure of every person's ultimate fatal condition, and that is sin.
01:50:09: And I would stress, as I mentioned before, I would stress that, look, when you die and stand before God, you are not going to be able to use racism, either perceived or real, either experienced by others or experienced by yourself.
01:50:24: You are not going to be able to use racism as your defense for violating God's law.
01:50:30: Every human being is going to stand to give an account on their own. You won't have any of your friends with you.
01:50:36: You won't have any of your relatives with you. Naked you came into this world. Naked you will go out. And if you are only clothed in the garments of your filthy sin, your sin, not the sin of anyone else, your sin, you will perish in those garments in flames.
01:50:51: But if you are covered in the precious, pure garments of the righteousness of Jesus Christ, your sins will be forgiven.
01:50:59: He will take your heart of stone that is filled with so much hatred and animosity towards all men because of the actions of a few, and he will give you a heart of flesh.
01:51:09: You will be able to love the things that God loves, hate the things that God hates, and you will even be able to begin to love your enemies, because God saved you, who prior to salvation was an enemy of Christ.
01:51:20: Amen. And I know that those who listen regularly to my show have heard me repeat this a number of times, but my dear friend who is now with the
01:51:30: Lord for eternity, Dr. Robert J. Cameron, who was a black Orthodox Presbyterian pastor, he wrote a book called
01:51:40: The Last Pew on the Left, America's Lost Potential, and it was a book targeting the sin of racism in the church, but as a black man,
01:51:52: Pastor Cameron, or Dr. Cameron, had the courage to also point out that racism is not a skin problem, it's a sin problem, and he was very even -handed about the sin of racism in the black church, and because of that, a very major Christian publisher, whose name you would immediately recognize, turned down his manuscript, and they said to him, this is the finest unsolicited manuscript we have ever received, but we do not feel comfortable criticizing the black church at this time.
01:52:26: You know, speaking about racism and discrimination, you know, I know we only have a couple of minutes, so I'll be quick.
01:52:32: Let's talk about the church. Let's talk about the racism and discrimination in the church, in the
01:52:38: American Evangelical Church. You know where we most see it, Chris? Where? Friendship evangelism.
01:52:44: Hmm. Because who are Christians going to go out and make friends with? I guarantee you, they're not going to go out and make friends with the guy who's got pus coming out of the crease in his arm because he just shot up heroin, and he smells as bad as anyone has ever smelled in their life in raggedy clothes down in Pershing Square in downtown
01:53:04: LA. I guarantee you that the upper -white middle -class friendship evangelist isn't going to go down to Skid Row and bring that guy into his house for a no -strings -attached meal.
01:53:15: Guarantee it. I guarantee you that the American upper -middle -class evangelical isn't going to bring some person who's half out of their mind because they've just been dumped out of a psych ward.
01:53:27: They're not going to bring them in the front row of the church so that they can boast to everybody that they brought someone to hear their pastors feel good message.
01:53:33: Guaranteed, that's not going to happen, Chris. You want to find racism, you want to find discrimination in American evangelicalism, you look at the way they do evangelism.
01:53:42: You look at friendship evangelism, and you'll see a microcosm of racism and discrimination there. And maybe if you could very briefly define exactly what you mean by friendship evangelism, because obviously making friends with people is a very good thing.
01:53:55: Jesus was a friend of sinners. Yeah, it is a very good thing. But again, the friendship evangelism that I'm speaking of, the way it is most commonly practiced, is you go out and you pick someone you like, someone you're comfortable with, someone who's no threat to you, someone whose friendship might not cost you anything, and you develop a no -strings -attached relationship with them.
01:54:15: You let your little light shine because you believe the lie that people can actually see Jesus in you when they're dead and they're thin and blind.
01:54:24: And you develop relationships with them, and maybe someday you bring them to church. Hopefully the pastor's preaching the gospel that day.
01:54:31: That's the kind of friendship evangelism I'm talking about. Biblical friendship evangelism is what Jesus preached, is what
01:54:37: Jesus practiced with the woman at the well, and with the harlot, and with the tax collectors, and with Zachariah, or Zacchaeus, rather, and others.
01:54:50: Friendship evangelism is what we see Paul practicing in the prison cell with the
01:54:55: Philippian jailer. That's biblical friendship evangelism. But what's going on in American evangelicalism today is neither friendship nor evangelism.
01:55:05: It's discrimination by picking friends that are most like you to come to your religious club.
01:55:12: Amen. And obviously, we are not to be word -only evangelists when we seek to reach the lost with the gospel.
01:55:25: We are to follow the principles set forth in the Epistle of James, and also good works should follow in what we do.
01:55:34: We shouldn't just be telling people, be warmed and filled. No, absolutely. But unfortunately,
01:55:39: Chris, what most of the American church is doing is they are warming and filling people. They are providing the water, the food, the shelter, the clothing, and they're not giving the gospel.
01:55:50: So they're just making lost people more comfortable on their way to hell. Just like the mainline liberals succumb to.
01:55:55: Exactly. Yes, we should feed the—if the American evangelical church really put its money where its mouth is, we wouldn't have to worry about Obamacare.
01:56:04: We wouldn't have to worry about liberal social agendas. We wouldn't have to worry about welfare or anything like that, because the church would actually be caring for people.
01:56:13: We have so much money we don't know what to do with it. Pastor Gary from Worcester, Massachusetts, has another question.
01:56:20: Oh, I'm in trouble, aren't I? Sorry, Pastor Gary. It might be a good way to conclude the program.
01:56:27: Okay. Yes. Well, how do you finalize your witnessing to people? Do you ask them to pray, pray with them, etc.?
01:56:35: Okay, great question, Pastor Gary. No, I don't ask anyone to pray. I will pray for them, but I will not ask anyone to pray with me.
01:56:44: We see no example whatsoever in the Word of God of anyone praying a sinner's prayer or being led in a sinner's prayer.
01:56:52: It's nowhere to be found. I simply do what Jesus and the apostles did, and that is to call people to repent and believe the gospel.
01:57:00: They may very well cry out to the Lord in prayer. They may certainly do that, but it will be like the prayer of the tax collector who was standing next to the
01:57:10: Pharisee who said, Lord, forgive me a sinner. He didn't have to—one of the apostles didn't have to come up alongside him and say, repeat after me.
01:57:17: And so I don't want anyone to have any false assurance in anything they have done for their salvation.
01:57:23: I don't want them looking back to the day they prayed. I want them always looking to the cross of Jesus Christ. Amen. Well, it's interesting.
01:57:30: I encountered a small group of young Mormon missionaries, elders as they call themselves, in the streets of Carlisle, Pennsylvania recently.
01:57:42: And after discussing the gospel with them and hearing what they had to say and then myself evangelizing them,
01:57:53: I closed with a prayer. I said, do you mind if I pray for you? They said no. They bowed their heads and I said, Lord, I ask of you to open their blind eyes, unstop their deaf ears, remove their hearts of stone, replace them with parts of flesh that they may see and follow and fall in love with the true
01:58:10: Christ of Scripture and receive eternal life. I pray this in Jesus' name.
01:58:15: Amen. And they all said amen, but they were still Mormons when I finished. Yeah, and Chris, I've done that too.
01:58:24: I've asked people if I can pray for them, and I ask the Lord to save them, but I give them no assurance whatsoever of that salvation because if their assurance comes from my words or the words that they speak, if their assurance comes from anywhere other than the cross of Jesus Christ and Him resurrected, then their assurance is in vain.
01:58:52: Amen. Well, I want to thank you so much, Tony, for being a guest on the program today.
01:58:59: Thank you for having me, brother. I look forward to having you back, and please, if you could repeat all of the contact information you care to share with our listeners before we go.
01:59:09: Sure. First, I want to apologize to Pastor Gary for getting a little snippy with this. No, I'm serious,
01:59:14: I'm serious. I said at least one thing I shouldn't have said, and so, Pastor Gary, I hope you'll accept my apologies.
01:59:21: But if you want more information about my ministry, simply go to crossencountersmin .com.
01:59:31: You will find all the information you need about what I'm doing out on the street. You can sign up for our weekly newsletter and sign up for notification when
01:59:40: I'm posting something on the blog, a notification about new audios, videos, books, what have you.
01:59:46: You can find everything there. Great, and don't forget about Tony's book that should be in print very soon,
01:59:54: Cross Encounters, 10 Years of Gospel Conversations, and you can get that through Solid Ground Christian Books at solid -ground -books .com,
02:00:05: solid -ground -books .com, and we thank Solid Ground Christian Books for their sponsorship of Iron Sharpens Iron.
02:00:13: Well, thank you so much, Tony, and we'll definitely have to speak about the women preaching issue, and I want to thank everybody who listened, especially those who wrote questions in, and perhaps even especially
02:00:26: Pastor Gary from Worcester, Massachusetts, and I want everybody to always remember for the rest of their lives that Jesus Christ is a far greater
02:00:34: Savior than you are a sinner. God bless, and we look forward to hearing from you tomorrow with your own questions on Iron Sharpens Iron Radio.