Path of Evangelism III: More than Conviction | Behold Your God Podcast

Welcome to another episode of the Behold Your God podcast. I'm Matthew Robinson, director of Media Gratia, and it's good to be back this week with John Snyder, pastor of Christ Church New Albany and author of the Behold Your God study series for the third episode in our series on evangelism.

So you'll notice if you're watching that I have my laptop in my in my lap here. If you're watching, you may not know that you can actually listen to these podcasts on iTunes, on Google Play, on Stitcher, and several other audio-only formats.

If you're listening, you may not know that you can watch these each week on our YouTube channel, the Media Gratia YouTube channel, but I mentioned that because we have our notes for the podcast here that we just to make sure that we're we're following each other and someone actually got a little upset a couple of weeks ago because they felt like I wasn't really paying enough attention to you when you were talking.

You know, I was checking my Facebook while you were making these points and I promise that's not the case. We are we're just trying to stay on the.

Same track as we talk about these things. And we look better on the audio. That's.

Exactly right. I just it's it's. I appreciate you guys watching these on YouTube, but we want to direct you to iTunes from here on out for these. So this week we're picking up with where we left off in our last in our last episode talking about Samuel Walker's pattern beginning with the issue of conviction.

Wisdom in Evangelism and the Depth of Human Need

So where do we where do we go from here? Yeah, you know that the.

Wonderful statement in the Proverbs that the one that wins souls is wise. We took that kind of as an overarching basic principle. There is a wisdom involved in evangelism. It's not just boldness. It's certainly not just for type-a personalities who find it easy to connect with people.

It is for every believer to be an ambassador on behalf of the king, but there is a wisdom that he gives us. And there's a wisdom we ought to ask for and a wisdom we ought to pursue. And I think that we could sum it up in this sense.

If we want to be wise ambassadors, then we need to know two things. We need to know the depth of man's need. That's not as easy as it sounds because sin is a sin is an expert advertiser that continues to mask every aspect of its influence on us so that when we look at someone and and they're people we work with every day, people we live with every day, we love them and they have a lot of strengths.

It's hard to believe that what Paul says in Romans about every person outside of Christ is really true of that person. And so we need to know how deep the stain, the impact of sin goes. We also need to know, of course, the gospel.

What does Christ do to rectify that, to make things right, to bring us to God? But there is an aspect where we tend to forget things and that's what we've been talking about. And that is if God is the great evangelist, which he is, how does God do evangelism?

How does the Holy Spirit work in a soul to bring them to Christ? And is it possible for us to understand enough of that to, in a general way, work in harmony with him? And that's, I think, where we haven't given.

Enough thought. Yes, so we've been looking at Samuel Walker's pattern and the fact that he began with the issue of conviction because he felt that clearly the Spirit was sent to convict of sin. Because he understood that only the sick will seek out a doctor, Walker felt that it was right for him to start there.

In fact, a lot of the men in the Evangelical Revival or the Great Awakening felt that that was the right place to start in their evangelism. But I think the first question that we have to ask in order to get into this issue is, were they right?

Was it really, is it really biblical to begin there? Or were these men just following a model that they inherited from the Puritans. A.

Generation before them? Yeah, I think the simple answer to that is, yes, I think they were right. But that does need some clarification. First of all, you know, we talked last in our last session about the fact that, and we've mentioned this before, that Christ dealt with souls in different ways, you know.

You find him speaking to the rich young ruler in one way. You find him talking to Nicodemus in an entirely different way. And it seems to us as if, I mean, when Jesus says to Nicodemus, you must be born again, we say, you know, Jesus knows the gospel.

He's one of us. You got to be born again. He's an evangelical. But then when he goes to the rich young ruler and he says, well, you need to keep all the rules, we think, whoa, that's not the gospel. So there must be a reason for Christ starting at two different starting places, you know.

And there is. Seeing where they're at, he applies the right truth to that point. And those men were at very different places. So we talked about that. I do believe that these men were right to start with conviction.

And we're going to show that in a minute from Scripture. But I do think we have to give this caveat. If you're talking with a person and you see that their heart is already broken over sin, it's not that they think, I've done a few bad things, okay.

And if you got a Jesus that can patch this up, I'd be glad to have him. It's this kind of a statement. You don't understand. I appreciate you talking to me like this and telling me that there's hope in Christ, but I'm the kind of sinner that nobody could love.

I've done things that I wouldn't tell anybody, and it's too late. It's too deep. It's gone on so long. I mean, I've talked with people that have done it. I mean, one man was in his 60s, and he just, you know, he began to weep.

And he said to me, that's fine for you. You're young. I was younger back then. But he said this. He said, the people that I've hurt terribly have all passed away. I can't make it right. And so the person that's heart's already plowed up over sin, and they feel the weight of the words of Scripture.

When you share what the Scripture says about a sinner, they're already there, man. It's true. Yeah. Then you don't plow the ground again. It's like a farmer who plows the ground, and it's plowed, and the furrows are there, and you look at, you know, you drive past the field, and you know it's time to plant.

What if as soon as someone went to throw seed on there, he plows it up all again? I mean, you would never get a crop that way. So we don't just keep plowing plowed lives. With that kind of person, we would immediately want to move to the person and work of the Lord Jesus Christ to bring them the only hope that there is.

But if we're talking with the person, and as you mentioned Jesus Christ and what He did for sinners, they let it be known by body language, maybe by some very bold language, openly saying to you, look, my life is pretty much together, and I don't need your Jesus.

If I do, I'll tell you. Or, I already got Jesus. I said a prayer when I was five, or my parents baptized me into the church, or I was christened, and I got all the Jesus I want. So you can go ahead and talk to the next guy.

Then you realize that that's the kind of a person whose heart has never been broken up. Yeah. And that is the person you begin where the Spirit begins with conviction. Oh man,.

I mean, it's the pattern of the Lord's... We have the pattern of Christ, and so clearly we see that. I mean, I think of the woman at the well and the rich young ruler that you mentioned. So the rich young ruler comes and says, what do I have to do to gain eternal life?

And you can sort of hear Christ thinking, well, son of Adam, you know, just keep the moral law perfectly, and you'll attain eschatological life. You know, keep the law, keep the covenant of works perfectly, because he kind of thought that he already had.

And he answers, well, I've already done all of that. So, but then when there's a ruined life, he instantly says, look, I've got water that you can drink, and you'll never thirst.

Again. Yeah, for her, no rules. Just drink, you know. Yeah, amazing. But one thing that we've talked about, and not just for the podcast, but you know, through the years as you and I spent time together, why in our culture in particular, but it's not just the Mid-South culture, but why don't we see people being more careful with evangelism, you know?

So, I mean, you've grown up in a culture that's not as careful with evangelism as it could be or should be. So, I mean, what have you observed? Yeah, I think for the most part,.

And you mentioned this already a little bit, people don't think that the situation is as bad as it is. So, nice people all around us here in the South. Sometimes they're our own children, or our neighbors, or our family members, or our fellow church members.

Is this doctrine, you know, are we, is really every area of our humanity totally depraved? Is it every aspect of us? Do we do we really need that much of a cure, or do we just kind of need a little help?

I mean, these are pretty good people already, so they're, you know, we're kind of dealing, we're more in a culture of rich young rulers than we are women at.

The well. Yeah, I remember reading in this, in the 18th century, George Whitefield. So, he goes in his, you know, his early sermons immediately, you must be born again. Problem is, he preaches it to Anglicans, and in the Anglican Church, the view that baptism does have the effect of uniting a child.

Different Anglicans have different views, of course, but in Whitefield's day, pretty popular for the Anglican Church, according to its liturgy, to say the Holy Spirit has joined with these waters, and this child is born again.

Now, this child needs to obey. This child needs to believe. This child will need to repent, but this child actually is born again, George, and so you need to take that message to the colonies and preach it to Indians, but not Englishmen, and Whitefield said, no, you must be born again, and so, yeah, you know, even here, these are pretty good people.

You know, do we really need to drop the plow that deep, and yes. I think of another reason, you know, that we've noticed is that there is the feeling that if you don't immediately call a person to close with Christ, in a sense, if you don't invite them to, you know, in our culture, if you don't invite them to ask Jesus into their heart right now, there tends to be the situation that, you know, you're accused of not having an urgency about evangelism, which could be true, or that they're gonna get away from Jesus, like, man, you didn't seal the deal, and you didn't set the hook, right, fish got off, yeah, so, which we talked about last week, is a really bad application of fishers of men.

They threw a net, we set a hook, you know, we get a shiny thing, we get the lost person interested in the gospel with the shiny thing, and we don't let them know there's a hook, but then we get them with the hook later, so that's not our approach to evangelism, but, you know, that's a really small view of God.

We're not saying that if you only get one opportunity to talk to a person, you just say, look, I'm not allowed to tell you about the hope in Christ, I just won't tell you how bad you are. No, if this is the kind of a situation where you think, you know, I may never get to talk to this person again, bring the full gamut of truth to them, lay it out, the need, the provision, the response, okay, but if this is a chance where, like a co-worker, where you've already told them about Christ and they've made it clear they're not interested, then I do think that that's where we don't need to be afraid, we need to carefully be laying the truths before them, that God will use the law, the bigness of God, the purity of God, truths that make a man or a woman feel, you know what, I knew there was a gap between me and God, but the gap is so much bigger than I ever thought, so I've got a question for you, you know, it's almost as if you want them to interrupt you like that people did Peter at Pentecost, stop, stop the sermon, stop the witness, stop the evangelism, stop talking to me about this, I got a question, how in the world am I going to be okay with God then?

And say, well, actually, there's a.

Wonderful answer to that. Well, let's make sure that we're clear about one thing before we go any further with this talk about conviction. Our great goal is not to bring people under conviction. The great and ultimate goal is to point people to Christ and His work on their behalf and to direct them to believe on the Lord Jesus Christ.

Stripping people of false righteousness with conviction, with the law, with large views of God, those are tools that I think God gives us to use toward that goal, and sometimes they're incredibly necessary.

I mean, Christ Himself uses them, but they aren't the goal. We're not just trying to get.

Everybody under conviction. Yeah, conviction itself is not a stopping place, and that is hard to remember, especially, so you think of a young believer who may be in a culture like ours has seen that perhaps conviction has not even been considered as a part of the work of bringing the soul to Christ, so maybe it's even viewed as a negative thing, like if you focus on those things, you're gonna drive a man away from Christ, so it's easy to overreact and say, well, you know what?

Conviction is what the Holy Spirit does in beginning that wonderful drawing, so conviction is legitimate, and so I'm gonna become centered on conviction, so I think a couple things to help with that. One is what you just said.

Conviction is always a means to an end. We are wanting to drive a man away from the emptiness of sin and away from the bankruptcy of his very best deeds, his most sacrificial, most morally upright, most religiously laudable deed is trash, and that man's got to see that or he will not turn from it.

He will just hold it tighter, so that's kind of in our minds, okay, if we don't help this man to see that through Scripture, he'll never leave alone, so what we end up having is this. A man simply adds Jesus, a good thing, to a life that already has good things, so you know, if you think of the scales, you know, I know we know that God doesn't have a pair of scales, but it's tempting to think this way.

You're talking to a man about Jesus, and he's running in his mind while you're talking. He's thinking, I've been pretty good. Oh, yeah, I did blow it there. Well, okay, my first wife might have said differently.

My kids may not, but I was good here, and then he thinks, I could use a little extra good, and that Jesus you're talking about, he's good. I mean, he'll tip the scales. I'll definitely be, you know, in the good, so I'll add your Jesus to my already pretty good life, and so we end up with an unrepentant, really unbelieving man claiming now that he's a Christian, or a person that's so full of the world, and you say to them, Jesus has come to give you so many wonderful things, and they're running through their mind.

I already got a lot of nice things. I got really good friends. I got a great, great marriage. I got kids that I love. I got a job that's good, but hey, who wouldn't want more good? So I'll take your Jesus and add him like icing on top of my cake, and we have an unrepentant, unbelieving Christian, and we see this throughout our culture.

Yeah, and there are air quotes around that Christian for those of you guys who are listening.

Yeah, so conviction is necessary, but conviction in itself is not meritorious, so we never want a person to think this. You've just passed through a really miserable period in your life where God has had to strip away every false hope you've had, and it hurts, and we know as humans that when you go through hard times and things hurt, well, we naturally think, well, what have I earned from it?

What did I get from this? Okay, what's my door prize? Well, actually there's no value in that if it doesn't drive you to Christ, because the only reason you had to even go through that, and the only reason it was so painful is because you are so dead set in not believing what God says about you that he had to actually strip it away until you could see yourself as you really are.

Yeah, so important, and I know we're gonna talk about this in a little while, but so important for us to understand that conviction is not a part, like a little meritorious part of salvation that everybody has to pass through before they can actually come to Christ, but we'll talk about that some more in.

Just a little while. Well, think of it this way, and we've said this before. It's an MRI. You're passing under the Scriptures, and your life is being scanned, and then you look at the screen, and you go, man, I knew I had some chest pains, or I knew I had some stomach pain.

I didn't know this was I didn't know it went through my whole system, and then hopefully, if it's bad, and you see how bad it is, hopefully your next statement to the doctor is, I need some real help.

Yeah, tell me what to do. I'm not here to argue with you anymore.

You know, I'm done with my holistic remedies. I can eat all the cabbage I want. It's not gonna cure this one, so that's what conviction is. It shows a man or a woman. It shows a child that the need is so great that only someone the size of Jesus of Nazareth, the God-man, could in any way give us hope, and they throw everything else down and say to Jesus, what do you say?

God Empties Before He Fills

Yeah, and this.

Is the work of God, and it's not often the work of 60 seconds or one conversation or even, you know, a month or two of conversations. It's God's work, and it takes God's timing for that work to happen in a person.

The truth is, if we go much faster sometimes, it might kill the person. I mean, there's only so much that we can handle at one given time. Yeah, I mean, imagine if God.

Showed you the truth about yourself all at once. Can you bear that? Can you bear that? I mean, truth is a beautiful and terrible thing, and for Adam's fallen race, I find it hard as a believer to look in the mirror and tell myself the truth about myself, you know, and then immediately I have to return to the mercy seat and say, Christ, you knew this when you saved me, so I know you're not dumping me, but I so desperately need to be reminded, you know, that you're sufficient.

You know, we have a lady in our church that, and I think this is an example, okay, this is not everybody, but I do think this shows a principle that is a general principle, that the more good, you know, air quotes, good, the more religious, the more morally upright a person has been, sometimes the longer it takes for them to come to an end of themselves, and so we have a really wonderful lady in our church that before she was a Christian, by all earthly measures, is about as wonderful as you could hope for, and after about a year, actually was going through the Sermon on the Mount, I believe, she became convinced that all of her righteousness was just a self-righteousness, just using the works of church to make herself right with God, and she realized that that was insufficient, and so the conviction began.

It lasted six months. I had so many conversations with her. Her husband, who was a believer, had so many conversations with her. My wife had conversations with her. We gave her good books to read. We gave her books that we gave other people to read, and that book led that other person to the Lord, and it didn't lead her to the Lord, and she would become so frustrated, like, why am I not getting better?

And even one time, she said that she told her husband, I need a day where you don't need me, okay? I'm just, I'm gonna get alone, and I'm gonna pray and seek the Lord for eight hours. She cried out the Lord to save her, and at the end of the eight hours, she was madder and worse off, she said, than when she started, and I was, look, as a pastor, I was kind of at the end of my answers.

Like, I've said everything I know to say. Look to Christ. Let me say it another way. Yeah, every way I know how to say it, I've said it. We've explained the details. There's nothing lacking. I don't understand what's wrong, and then when she said, I prayed eight hours, and He still didn't save me, I realized, oh, you did an eight hours sinner's prayer, didn't you?

Like, the kind of prayer that you say, if I say this prayer, I've earned my hope, and so we talked again, and then within a few weeks, she came back to me, and she said, I believe He has heard my prayer for mercy, and she has never slowed down, man.

You know, it's been wonderful to see. Now, about a couple years later, somebody was under conviction, and they were under the conviction, let's say for three or four months, and then professed faith, and this dear lady said to me, kind of quick.

I'm not so sure about that one, and I said, well, not everybody takes six.

Months. That's right, but again, it's so important that we realize that, you know, okay, maybe you're reading the Puritans, and maybe you've, you know, you're hearing some more careful stuff, so you think, I need to pray a Puritan strength sinner's prayer, and then that will be really meritorious with God, or maybe just a little meritorious, and until you empty your hands of that, whatever it is, you're.

Never gonna lay hold of Christ. Yeah, let me give you an example of that. We had one fella in the church who came to me, and was feeling pretty bad about his life. Now, he wasn't a very religious man, and so he didn't have a lot of self-righteousness, but guess what?

He found some, and his version of self-righteousness was feeling bad about myself, so I would talk to him about the numerous times over months, and he would just never cast himself on Christ, and one time I asked him, what are you waiting on?

What is the one thing that you think, well, if I had this, then I'd go to Christ. He said, well, I don't feel bad enough for my sins, and I said, well, how bad do you have to feel? I mean, he didn't have an answer.

I said, I know the answer to that. How bad do you think you have to feel? And he didn't have an answer. I said, you know what? You're coming to Jesus, and you're saying this. I got one really big bag full of feel bad.

I know I'm bad. I feel bad about that. I feel pretty sorrowful about it, but if I had both hands full of sorrow, then would that earn me salvation? I said, you're thinking that feeling bad is earning you a right to the gospel, but it doesn't.

I said, here's how bad you have to feel. You have to feel bad enough so that you look at yourself in the mirror and say, man, there's no hope within that guy, and you run to the Savior. So, really, that's all.

Now, another illustration, quite a different one. I had a friend in seminary who was talking to the rest of us. You know, we're all preachers, so he's talking to us about an evangelistic effort he had made that week.

He was at the barbershop, and this friend is a sweet Christian. He's on the mission field now, a wonderful guy. I really admire him, but this was a long time ago, and I think that this shows a weakness in the system that we grew up in.

He said, I was talking to a guy, and he happened to be a very, he was an intellectual, wealthy businessman. He was a Jewish man, but he had no interest in God. He was Jewish, but not Orthodox. He didn't even believe in the God that his parents told him he's supposed to believe in, much less the Savior.

So, my friend started to try to, at a barbershop, struck up the conversation, and the guy just let him know, I don't believe in God. I don't believe in what you're talking about, and so my friend said, well, would you give me 60 seconds, and then, so the guy was kind of exasperated.

I mean, he's stuck in the barber's chair, so he's like, fine, 60 seconds, not a second later, longer, and so he goes on, and my friend gives 60 seconds of the gospel. Now, I think that's the right thing to do.

Yeah, so far, so good. Yeah, so far, so good. You talk to him. He told you he doesn't care. You said, well, can I have 60 seconds, and you're going to give him 60 seconds of truth, and he did that. Here's where I think the mistake happened.

At the end of the 60 seconds, that man was clearly not one bit more interested, not one bit more convinced. He's still a self-satisfied atheist. He doesn't believe a word he just said, and my friend said, would you like to ask Jesus in your heart right now?

You can be a Christian if you just do that, and that man looked at him like, are you crazy? I just told you I don't believe anything you say, and I think to myself, thank God that that guy wasn't so pestered by a preacher that he said, fine, if I pray this prayer, will you shut up?

If I pray this prayer, can I get my.

Haircut, and you go away? Or worse, okay, so maybe there's, maybe like 3 of my brain says something that you say might be true, so I can take care of that right now. I can put that little, you know, yipping dog in my brain to bed by saying, well, remember that guy prayed me through that prayer in the barbershop way back.

Then. Yeah, yeah, so he didn't do that, because if he would have done that, as an unbelieving, unrepentant man, if he'd have said his sinner's prayer, then when nothing changes, the man doesn't say to himself, you know, that young man probably didn't present the gospel carefully to me.

What he would say is, I tried that Jesus thing, doesn't work, and I knew it didn't work. I'm embarrassed I even tried.

It, you know, so. All right, this is a great place for us to stop and deal with a criticism or a question that may be forming in people's minds as we talk about this. Someone, we would understand if someone thought, look, I would just be happy if people did evangelism.

At least these people are out doing evangelism. They're talking to people about Jesus, and here you guys are, you're picking it apart and saying, well, you know, you're not doing it right, and are you doing, you're, you're, you're, are you splitting hairs over this?

Why are you making such a big deal about it? So I think it's fair to ask that question, but we need to deal with whether, are we just talking about preferences here? Does all this really matter as long as people are doing evangelism, if they're doing it in the ways that we've talked about and we've characterized as being bad, or, or should we just be happy that they're doing it at all?

I think the question is, aren't there real consequences for refusing to rethink this aspect of evangelism in.

Light of God's character? I think that's a valid question. It's one that I get sometimes from folks, and I think the answer is, there is, there is so much at stake here. You know, nothing. We just can't think of anything in script, in the Christian life that, where we would want to be more careful.

So think of the law of love. Love to the soul sitting in front of you, to the person. Would love say to them, look, I've got a cure, but I'm just going to give it to you in the shabbiest, I don't care what dose you need, I don't know how many milligrams you need, you know, I just got some medicine.

Let me just throw a bunch of medicine from the pharmacist at you. One of them is going to fix you. I mean, if it's a person you love, if it's a child, you know, that has a terrible disease and you're afraid they're not going to make it, do you, would you want a doctor that treated that?

You'd say, look, please get me a doctor that cares enough to give the right thing. So love to the soul in front of us. We know by sad experience, as well as by Scripture, that if we offer a person a type of counterfeit Christianity that requires no real belief in the facts of Christ and no real repentance, that that's not real conversion.

And if we present it to them in a way that promotes an unrepentant, foggy idea of, well, I guess I'll join the church now, I guess I'll say your prayer now, then we may be promoting a false conversion.

We may be, again, what we may have is people who are simply adding a little bit of Christ's righteousness onto a life full of their own righteousness, a little bit of Christ's benefits onto a life already stuffed full of everything the world is offering them.

And that's not a Christian. It doesn't, those decisions, the decision of a self-righteous man to add a little more righteousness to what he already has, of a full man to add a little more benefits to what he already has from sin, that has nothing in common with the command of Jesus Christ to repent and believe.

So, it may look like you're asking people to repent and believe, and you're pressing that on them immediately, and that's very biblical, but in truth, you're not. And so, on the surface, it looks good.

It's dangerous. Not only is it dangerous to the soul, but the law of love includes there's another person. There is our King, the King that rescued us, the King that we innately love now. We cannot but love Him.

And so, while our love can go up and down, we love the King. And as we're talking to the person, and we want to love that person, we also want to love the King. And I'm very happy to say that they don't conflict.

Loving the King means I say what He wants me to say in a way that's in harmony with the way He would say it, so that I don't misrepresent Him, so I don't dishonor Him. Nothing is more dishonoring than the false conversion, where we say to a person, well, look, you can just kind of have any Jesus you want, and I'll put a stamp of approval on that, and I'll lead you through a prayer, or I'll let you join the church as a pastor, and then they don't live any differently.

So, everybody they know now hears this statement, hey, I'm a Christian now, and then no change. What an amazing amount of dishonor is done to our God every day in the world from false conversion. I think the dishonor done to God through false conversion, through careless evangelism, is much greater than the dishonor done to God by open atheism.

You know, I mean, you look at the atheist, fine, you're an atheist. You're a miserable, wretched, self-puffed up, you know, man. And here's a true Christian, very different. But when it's a false Christian, when it's a false conversion that we've promoted to build our church, whatever, it's a sad thing.

You know, if you also think of the words of Christ, He said to the Jews, you travel the world to make one convert to Judaism. Well, that's good. Like you said, well, at least they're doing evangelism.

No, no, Jesus said, you've made them twice the son of perdition, twice the son of a devil than they were before. Okay, before they were lost, but now they're doubly lost. How can that be? Because you came to them.

You said you had the cure. You have the right Bible. You gave them a bunch of Bible words. You gave them an inadequate cure. And now when they're not changed, they're going to say, I already tried the Jewish God and he didn't work any more than any other God.

Yeah. Yeah. And I just, I think we just have to emphasize that we aren't saying that the biggest issue is, the biggest issue with bad evangelism is that it doesn't work, you know? And so what we're suggesting works better because it's the way that God made it.

Look, sometimes people get saved at Billy Graham rallies. They certainly do. You know what I mean? And they're changed forever and they never look back. And they then go on to, you know, to learn the gospel and live the gospel and want to share the gospel.

We're not talking about effectiveness. We're talking about the honor of the King and the way that His work and His person is presented. And that really has to be what drives our willingness to rethink this whole issue of evangelism.

Yeah. We want to never knowingly offer the person of the Son of God and His labors, His death, the mountain range of truths that surround this one great incomprehensible God-man. We never want to present Him and His work as an add-on to a man that's already righteous, as an add-on to a man who's already full of sin and pretty satisfied, you know?

One wonderful example of what we've been saying is a friend of ours, Mr. Richard Owen Roberts. And Mr. Roberts told me that there was a time where he had been preaching to a group of people near his home.

And a man, I believe that's how the man came under conviction, but a man came under conviction. So this is a grown man. This isn't a kid. And he comes to Mr. Roberts' house. Now, Mr. Roberts goes to bed pretty early and he wakes up much earlier.

And so it's about 10 o 'clock at night and Mr. Roberts is getting ready for bed and he hears a knock at the door. And so he goes to the door and he's surprised to find this man there. And the man says, basically, I need to talk to you about my soul.

I'm concerned about my soul. And Mr. Roberts says, well, it's pretty late. And I imagine this can wait till tomorrow and shuts the door on the man.

The terrible evangelist.

Yeah. What kind of evangelist is that?

He could have sealed the deal.

So he does it for a reason and not because he's tired and he's, and he's like, I don't, why are you coming at this time? He does it because he, he wants to test the guy. Second later, he hears a door and the door gets knocked on again.

And then he opens it up again. And the man says, it can't wait till tomorrow. And Mr. Roberts says, that's good news. Come in. And he leads the man to Christ, you know, but he knows that if a man is desperate, he, he won't let you tell him, well, let's try it another day.

You know, when, when we, when we look at how we do evangelism within the worship service here, we don't have an altar call, so to speak. I prefer what Charles Spurgeon said that the whole sermon becomes the net.

But there are times particularly in particularly evangelistic sermons, you know, a person is stirred and we often have this question from folks in our, in our town. It's a, it's an honest question. How do people get saved at your church?