You Responsibility to Unbelievers

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Welcome to The Rap Report. I'm your host Andrew Rapaport, the Executive Director of Striving for Eternity and the
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Christian Podcast Community of which this podcast is a proud member. We are going through the series, giving you the talks that both
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Aaron Brewster and myself did at the Rise Up Conference up by northern
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New York, Watertown, New York area. The topics of the conference was,
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Your Responsibility in This World. This one will be my message that I provided on your responsibility to unbelievers and we're basically looking to help people overcome their fears in evangelism.
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If you've ever had fear in evangelism, if you've ever wanted to evangelize or maybe you do evangelize, this message will hopefully be an encouragement to you.
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I hope you enjoy this. We have two more in our series, What's Your Responsibility to Church and What's Your Responsibility to Culture Dealing with Social Justice, and those will be in the next couple of weeks.
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The reality is we want you to learn that each of us have a responsibility to the world.
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I hope you enjoy this sermon and also remember that this podcast is put on by Squirrelly Joe's Coffee.
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We are supported by them. Just go to strivingforeternity .org slash coffee to get your good cup of Joe from a
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Now on to the sermon of Our Responsibility to Unbelievers.
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Enjoy. Welcome to The Rap Report with your host, Andrew Rapoport, where we provide biblical interpretation and application.
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This is a ministry of Striving for Eternity and the Christian podcast community. For more content or to request a speaker for your church, go to strivingforeternity .org.
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Essentially he just said that I'm the only thing keeping you from lunch. Oh, the pressure.
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Oh, you know, things are hard enough, but you have to go there.
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So, you know, I just want to really quickly, Aaron mentioned, but just for those who did sign up for you, if you got any of the bundles and you didn't sign up for Aaron's courses, go in the back.
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There is a beautiful Chinese woman in the back, happens to be my bride, so, but she's probably the only
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Chinese woman here, so it's probably safe. The only one at least behind the table, but her name is Yim, so if you see her, she'll sign you up for the courses.
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If you want to just take those courses, they're there, too. So where are we?
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So we started off with what is our responsibility to God, right? We started looking at that and realizing that our responsibility to God is to glorify
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Him. We actually have that responsibility, and we should have that responsibility because He created us.
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It's kind of a weird thing that people think, like, well, we should be able to tell God how things work.
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We're going to talk a little bit about evangelism in this session, but I remember in New York City, I was at Union Square Park, if any of you've been there.
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If not, probably a good thing, but I was talking to this guy, and he told me he's an atheist.
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I said, what is your best argument for atheism? You know, I've been asking that question for about two decades now.
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I have yet to hear a good argument for atheism, because every time
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I ask that question, all I get is bad arguments against Christianity. I've always kind of wondered that, but this guy said that his argument for atheism is that when he was a child, he prayed and God didn't answer his prayer.
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Who does he think is God? He thinks God should listen to him and submit to him, not he submit to God.
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We are here and have a responsibility to glorify God. Next, last night, what we talked about is our responsibility as Scripture.
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Now, some people, I think, from the questions that came up afterwards, may not have understood as clearly as I wanted to explain.
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We have a responsibility as Scripture to submit to it and study it. It does not mean when we...
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There is an aspect of God's nature called God's providence. God works through things, and He sets things up.
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And so there are times where, yes, someone can just have someone come to mind. Maybe some of you had that experience where someone comes to mind, and you just start praying for that person.
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You call the person next day and find out they were in a car accident at the same time that you started praying for them.
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Is that a direct revelation? No. That is what we call
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God's providence. God works through His providence. He can bring things to our minds. But the issue that I was trying to address last night, our responsibility as Scripture, is that we do not receive direct revelation from God.
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We go to the Word of God. We have all the revelation we need. But the big problem in our culture is that our responsibility as Scripture is we kind of like, the same as we looked at before, where we want to be
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God. Well, we want to be God's Word. We want to be the ones to say, well,
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I think this, and therefore let's see if we can make God's Word say that. And so we see that we have this responsibility to God to glorify
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Him. We have a responsibility as Scripture to submit and study. We have a responsibility to the world, as we just heard.
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Huh. I wonder what that responsibility could be. Kind of funny.
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Anyone guess? Anyone want to take a guess? We should do what? Oh, make disciples of all nations.
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Well, I don't know how you guys guessed that one. Kind of a reminder, right?
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So we have this responsibility to the world to proclaim the truth. Are you glad that somebody shared the truth with you?
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How will they know unless someone goes? Unless there's a preacher. Now, it doesn't mean you have to be like me.
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Someone asked me, when you say you go on the street, what do you mean? Do you actually just stand on the street? Yes. I go to Union Square a lot.
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I'll go to the Jersey Boardwalk. I will have a little box. It's a Stanley tool chest because it fits all my
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Bibles and my amplifier and all kinds of things in there. You just got to be careful because one side has wheels, so if you lean to...but
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what ends up happening is I just get up and I start to proclaim the truth. I'll read
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Scripture. I'll engage with people. Why do I do that?
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Because I love it? No. I don't. I do it because, well, unfortunately,
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I have a voice that carries. We were talking this morning with folks that, you know, if you really want to empty a church, have me up here and sing.
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I have the worst combination, a loud voice that carries and I can't carry a tune.
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It's not good for church services. My daughter once said to me, she's like, Dad, why do you have to sing so loud?
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You're throwing the whole church off. Thank you, dear. Such a sweetheart.
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But what is the first step if we're going to make disciples? We just heard...and
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by the way, as we look at Matthew 28, why don't we turn there briefly? Wasn't going to go there originally, but it's important because of this.
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When you hear this spoken, if you go to any missions conference, you are going to hear
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Matthew 28, 19 and 20. I remember I was preaching at a conference.
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The opening conference was world missions, and I was going to be closing the conference with local missions.
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And I could not be there the first Sunday, but I knew the pastor that started it, and his text was
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Matthew 28, 19 and 20. And during the week, I realized I was going to have a problem because my text was going to be
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Matthew 28, 19 and 20. Now, it's not that we had the same text that caused the problem.
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It's how I anticipated he used the text for his title. And sure enough, without listening to his message...by
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the way, this is before the time of...okay, this is in the days of cassette tapes. So, if you don't know what it is, ask your parent.
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But I didn't hear his message, but the thing is that I knew how he was using it, and his whole emphasis was on, go therefore.
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Because it says, go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the
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Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all things that I command you, and lo,
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I am with you always, even to the end of the age. And so many people focus on the going.
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Is it important to go? Well, we're not going to be able to make disciples unless we go. But here's a little thing.
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This is something where I brought up in that conference, and I mentioned that if you actually look at the
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Greek in that word go, it is an adverb. It should properly be translated going, make disciples, or as you go, make disciples.
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The command there, the verb is make, and the subject's disciples. We are to make disciples.
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That's what we're to do. The Great Commission is not to go. It's to make disciples.
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Now, you know why we prefer to say go? Because then we can fund missionaries and sit at home and avoid the fear of evangelism, right?
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The missionary gets paid to do that. Our pastor gets paid to do that. That's easy. I'm too scared.
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But we are all to make disciples. How many of you go to a coffee shop sometimes during...
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What do you go to a coffee shop for? Coffee? Okay. How many of you guys go to the library?
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Yeah? What do you go to libraries for? He's a one -man.
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Coffee all the time. What do you go for library for? Books? Okay. Any of you guys go grocery shopping?
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I'm not allowed to. My wife gives me a list, and I always get everything on her list.
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I just seem to get extras that she thinks I shouldn't be getting. Those things that she never gets when I see nods of head like, yeah, you have a husband like that too.
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Okay, yeah. Why do you go grocery shopping? You know why
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I go to the coffee shop and the library and the grocery store when I'm allowed? To share the gospel.
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And sometimes I actually get coffee. I say that because I actually went to a Dunkin' Donuts once, and I walked in, and there's a nice long line.
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I always start from the front of the line so no one thinks I'm cutting the line. I hand out tracts, and I hand out tracts.
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And so a guy that was in the front of the line had time to read the tract. He got his coffee. I'm in the back of the line. He comes to the back and starts asking me about what it says in the gospel tract.
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I start telling him. I step out of the line so I'm not holding up the line. And now what ends up happening is as we're sitting there, we walked outside.
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We continue the conversation. We're talking inside for about 20 minutes. We go outside for 20 minutes, hopped in my car, drove down the road.
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You know what I realized? What didn't I get? But that's okay because I actually didn't go there for the coffee.
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I went there to hand out gospel tracts and share the gospel. As we go, make disciples.
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Well, how do we make disciples? Well, the first thing in making a disciple, if we're going to make a disciple, the first stage of making a disciple is going to be evangelism because you can't make a disciple.
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You cannot...what is a disciple? A disciple is something that you reproduce yourself, as the text says, teaching them all things
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Christ has taught you. Now, for some of us, we go, whew, that's easy.
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All I know is believe in Jesus. I'm not much of a disciple after that, right? Teach all things that Christ taught you to someone else.
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Well, we can't do that until what? They first know Christ.
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So, let me ask a question. How many here love to evangelize the lost?
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One person, two people. Now, I am known for my evangelism.
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I have been doing open -air evangelism. That's what I called it before.
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I knew of Ray Comfort and he calls it open -air preaching. I prefer open -air evangelism. As far as I could date back to 1994,
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I've been doing it longer than that, but that's as far back as I can date. So, I started when I was one.
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Thank you. The thing is,
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I get nervous every time when I evangelize. Now, I'm going to do some...it's
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a conference, but I want to have some interaction with this. I would like to know who is the hardest person to evangelize.
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So, just shout out, who do you think would be the most difficult person to evangelize? Family? Okay, so we got family.
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Anyone have someone else? Religious people?
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Coworkers, how about them? They easy? That could be hard. You could lose your job. Complete strangers?
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Some people don't mind meeting new people, some do. You know who the hardest person to evangelize actually is?
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The first person you witness to that day. The second one actually gets easier.
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One of the things that we used to do is we would take people out and evangelize and say, okay, we're going to keep you out here for like three hours.
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You have to talk to at least six people because by six people, you get into a rhythm and then they just stay for hours after that because it's like, oh, hey,
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I'm answering the same question over and over again. And you know what happens the next week when you come out again? We have this fear.
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Why do we fear evangelism? Now, what I'm going to do in this session is go over about six hours of notes.
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Well, it is. Obviously, I'm going to have to skip some, but it's one of our weekend seminars we do where we come into churches and train people to evangelize because what we try to do is help people overcome the fear in evangelism because the thing is we have a responsibility to the lost.
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So, we started with our responsibility to God, our responsibility to Scripture, that leads us to our responsibility to the world to make disciples.
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But in order to do that, the first step is we have a responsibility to the unbeliever, which is to evangelize.
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And if you're anything like me, you are afraid. In fact, let me tell you how, even though I've been doing this for more years than I want to admit, right, for over 30 years,
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I still get nervous evangelizing. So, several years ago, this is back, well, it's how we count everything, right,
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BC, before COVID. So, this is probably about seven years ago,
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I had started up a new team that we'd go to on the boardwalk to evangelize, and they always made me start, so I'd get up on this box to share the gospel.
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What I did not know for an entire summer is that my team wanted me to go first because it gave them great joy to watch me get on a box, get off the box, open my
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Bible, get on the box, open my Bible, get off the box, get on the box, just stand there like this.
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And they told me my record was seven times getting on and off the box and about six minutes before I opened my mouth because I'm afraid.
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And I would do it every week. But as soon as I got started, it's not so bad.
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And even knowing that I knew it wouldn't be so bad, I still got nervous. So, why do we fear?
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What I want to do is talk about why we do evangelism.
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This is something that we...why we evangelize. And part of the thing is, you know, the church lacks this.
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This is a major issue in the American church, for sure, where there is a lack.
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There's a need for evangelism. And I want to give you what we call ambassador evangelism, okay?
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There's going to be three steps to it. And so, as we dig into this, why should we evangelize?
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Well, let's give the Sunday school answer. Jesus, right?
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Jesus did it. Jesus evangelized. He also commanded it.
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Matthew 28, 19, and 20, we just looked at that. Part of making disciples is first to evangelize because you cannot make a disciple until they know
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Christ, which means any believer in Christ, by the way, can make a disciple.
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If you are a newborn babe in Christ, you know how you got saved, you can share that with others.
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Then what happens is they get saved and they start asking you questions, then your learning really grows. Then you actually become a blessing to your pastors because what happens is you start getting asked questions you don't know the answer to, so you ask them, and they help you in the
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Scriptures, and you start learning, and then you pass that on. That's how we should be grown.
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The disciples practiced it. We see it throughout the Scriptures. We see the disciples going through and practicing that.
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And kind of a personal reason, somebody did it for you. Are you glad someone did that for you?
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Someone might be glad that you do it for someone else. And the last reason
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I'd give you is life is short. We do not have a guarantee for the next day, right?
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The reality is, is when we think about evangelism, we have to recognize the fact that this is something that we are not just commanded to do, but this is something we have a privilege to do.
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So, let me ask you the question, and I want you to give me some answers. Why are you afraid to evangelize?
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Okay, let me change that because I know you're not afraid, it's just me. Why are other people afraid to evangelize?
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A lack of knowledge. Okay, that's very common. What else? Huh?
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Not having all the answers. I might look foolish. Someone might ask me a question
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I don't know the answer to. I'm going to give you a great example that embarrasses me so you all get to laugh at my expense with that.
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Yeah, we might feel like someone isn't responding to us and makes us feel bad, like maybe we weren't effective, maybe we didn't say it the right way.
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I remember over in the UK, we were evangelizing at the Olympics, and I remember seeing a guy that had that problem.
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He was evangelizing, but he was afraid he wasn't saying it the right way, and he was actually chasing this poor couple down.
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They were walking this way, and then he'd follow them. They would walk this way. They were literally, I'm watching them pace back and forth, and he's trying to convince them into the kingdom.
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I'm like, it's okay. God actually created the whole world out of nothing. He could save a person. He could take what you said, and they could walk away.
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You don't have to convince them right then and there. What else? What are some other reasons we're afraid? Yeah. Yeah, they know our weaknesses, people we know personally.
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That's why family is usually the number one reason that people give me the hardest person to evangelize, because our family knows us, don't they?
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Especially if we got saved later in life. If you got saved out of, in my case, I got saved from a non -Christian home, and so, you know, we weren't expected to live like Christians.
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So it's like, oh, we remember you when you were a kid. It's amazing because, you know, you could be 50, well, next week 57, and yet my siblings still act like they think
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I'm still a teenager sometimes. We've all grown up, you know. But yeah, people we know.
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What else? Anyone have anything else? How about the fear, and it's sort of what you had said, the fear of being rejected.
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My pastor said something, my first pastor said something that has stuck with me ever since, and he wasn't even saying it to me.
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We would go out, do open, we'd go door -to -door evangelism every Saturday morning, and we'd have a leadership training in the morning, and then we'd go evangelize, and one of the guys really didn't want to go.
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And the pastor's talking to this guy, and says, well, why don't you want to go? And he says, well, I'm really kind of afraid that, you know, someone's gonna reject me.
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And my pastor said, so let me get this straight. You're concerned that someone you don't know, and will probably never meet again, will reject you.
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And the guy says, you know, pastor, when you say it that way, it sounds kind of silly. And I'm thinking in my head, that was gonna be my excuse, right?
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Let's put it in context. How long will we be alive?
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If we keep ourselves really healthy, if I was to completely follow my wife's diet and everything she has for me,
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I should be a hundred. But I don't. I'm bad. But the reality is, we have to realize that even if it's a hundred years, even if someone, if you're embarrassed by someone for a hundred years, compare that to eternity.
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In 10 ,000 years from now, will you be concerned that you didn't have all the answers?
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Will you be concerned that you got embarrassed, that you were rejected, that they knew your faults, you didn't have all the answers, you didn't have the knowledge on something?
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No. So actually, let me give you a clue for yours on you might not have all the answers.
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If you're here last night, I actually gave it to you. I stand up in New York, and I will stand up, and I'll start.
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I can answer any question you have about God and the Bible. Someone asks me a really hard question.
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I go, I don't know. You said you have the answers for anything about God and the
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Bible. I do. I just gave you the answer. I don't know. That's my answer.
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It's a perfectly good answer. And people go, yeah, they're stuck, because it actually is an answer, isn't it?
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I didn't say I can give the answer. I just said I can give a answer. And then what
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I'll usually do is tell them, well, I'll research it and see if I can get you an answer. Give me your email. I'll contact you.
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Oh, no, I'm not interested. Yeah, you weren't interested in the answer either. Okay, thank you. We don't have to have all the answers.
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In fact, there's one guy in New York that respected me, because when he asked me a question that I guess was his
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Trump question to ask every Christian that came to Union Square, I go, I don't know.
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And he told me, he says, you're the first one of you Christians to answer honestly, because the rest of you guys try to make up answers.
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The reality is that we don't have to have all the knowledge. We just know someone who does.
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So we look to His Word to see what it says. And so what
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I want to do is just briefly go through the number one thing that can happen in discussions.
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And so I'm going to go through three points of our ambassador evangelism, okay? You want to disarm someone else's defenses, you want to disarm your own defenses, and you want to avoid being called judgmental.
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I'm going to give you ways to do all those, because a lot of things, especially in our culture, people say you're judging.
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Well, why avoid someone's defenses? When you're talking to someone, people can get defensive.
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They start a debate. Who here loves debates? Okay, so I'm the only one that was raised
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Jewish. Okay, so two of you like debates. Okay, sorry for your spouses. See, growing up Jewish, we would sit over dinner, and debate is something you just practice.
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It's a way of actually sharpening the skill set. So what is the only profession you can get paid to debate?
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Lawyers. Now you know why so many Jewish people are lawyers. All right, but we don't enjoy a debate, because most times when you have a debate, the person you're talking to is not listening to you.
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They're only listening for how they can find a crack or a hole in your argument and poke at it.
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So we need an effective way to be able to communicate. Now, one of the things we learn about people is the reason people can get defensive is people like to be right.
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There's a great title of a book. I'm just going to tell you up front. Don't get the book. I met the author.
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It's probably not a good counseling book. Aaron kind of, without even knowing it, alluded to the title of it, but as a counselor,
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I'm not surprised. The title of the book, it's a marriage book, and it's titled, I'm Perfect, I Just Want My Spouse to Be Also.
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You know, that's a lot of the problem in marriage counseling that I find. Like, one of the spouses think they're perfect, and they want the other one to just be like them.
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The problem is they're both doing that, right? People like to be right, and they always think they...a
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lot of times they think they are. And there are just personal issues that people will have.
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They can get defensive. You could say something that triggers someone, right? People that get into debates, well, they like to win a debate.
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I have heard people say the dumbest things trying to win an argument, to the point where once on the boardwalk, this guy was making an argument, and I asked him,
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I said, do you really believe that? He goes, no, man, I'm just making it up because I can't handle you winning a debate.
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I'm like, well, that's good because I'm not debating you. I'm having a discussion. Why don't we do that, right?
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People want to appear more knowledgeable, okay? There's actually a term for this, the
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Dunning -Kruger effect, where people pretend to be more knowledgeable on things that they are actually completely ignorant of.
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And so, I want to be able to give you some ways to avoid that, all right?
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The first way is humor. To disarm someone's defense is humor.
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Why? How does it help? Well, what humor does is humor ends up affecting us where we're less defensive.
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Now, I have an advantage none of you have, okay? I can make fun of myself because I do the dumbest things.
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So, I have lots of material to work with, but I've discovered that when I make fun of myself, it just disarms a person and just gets them to where they're laughing with me at me.
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And so, I've learned that doing that just helps. But, you know, one of the other things humor does, it not just disarms them, but it gets them to enjoy the conversation, okay?
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So, how do you use humor? Well, one way to use humor is the fact...it's not try to be a comedian, but it's also not to be so, like, thinking highly of yourself.
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Because the reality is a lot of times we won't use humor because of the simple fact that, you know, someone is saying something and it might make us look bad.
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Are you okay with looking foolish in someone's eyes so that they hear the gospel? I am.
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There's actually a video out on the Internet, you can look for it, I think it's called UConn Professor Goes Ape.
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I think we have one of the videos on our channel, but the one we have, I actually put some words in there to explain what's happening, but we had a bunch of...and
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I didn't actually notice until I saw the video, but myself and a UConn professor were having this discussion back and forth about evolution and the
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Bible. Of course, it wasn't much of a discussion, he was trying to be a steamroller and just talk over me.
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And at one point, I pointed that out and I kind of shamed him, and what happened was that there was a
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Jewish guy in the audience that said, is there anyone else Jewish here? And I didn't hear this. But they started to do a
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Jewish dance around me. Okay, so it's a Russian dance. Typically, what you do is you sing
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Hagame Gileva and you circle a person, and if you're doing it in the Russian way, you have two people that will hold hands, go down, and they kick out their legs.
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Well, I actually know how to do that dance. And so I grabbed the ringleader without knowing it and just started to dance.
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I grabbed him from the circle and I started making him dance with me and get down, and he couldn't do it, so I just did it alone.
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The entire crowd that he's trying to get on his side started to laugh with me, and I was able to get to sharing the gospel.
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Little things you could do. When I share the gospel, one of the things I'll always do is I'll ask, have you ever lied?
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People say yes. What does that make you? It makes you a liar. I'll say, have you ever stolen something? They say yes.
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What does that make you? They say a stealer. My common response, though they may have heard it only once,
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I say this thousands of times, no, that's a football team in Pittsburgh, which they laugh at.
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Now, have I ever watched the Pittsburgh Steelers play a game? No, I don't do team sports.
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I do, as Aaron said, mixed martial arts and tennis. I must only like individual sports.
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So, the first way to disarm someone's defenses is the use of humor. Second is being polite.
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The use of humor and being polite. How does being polite help? Especially in our culture where people are not polite, just referring to someone in a respectful way.
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Now, I used to say you say sir or ma 'am, but that could get you in trouble these days. Don't worry, I have a solution to that.
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In New York City, where you were fined a quarter of a million dollars if you misuse someone's wrong pronoun,
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I had someone, just picture the scene in your mind, I don't have a picture unfortunately, but I think he was probably between 6 '4", 6 '5", big beard, polka dot dress, and so much makeup
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I thought he was a clown. And he said, you have to refer to me as her, and if you don't,
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I'm calling the police. I said, is that your pronoun? He said, yes, it is. I said, okay, my pronoun is your majesty and you have to bow when you say it.
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I'm not doing that. Well, if you don't respect my pronoun, I'm not respecting yours. And I called him he because I had it on recording on my video camera.
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But we want to be polite, so we used to go to the courthouse every, you know, the beautiful thing about our courthouses is it's public property, and Ray Comfort from Living Waters used to have a track designed for courthouses, tells you what to expect in the courthouse, explains justice, our justice before God, it was a great gospel track.
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And we'd go to the courthouse, and the nice thing about courthouses, every week they bring in, depending on your town, lots of people.
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We in our town would have between 300 to 600 people every week that would come in for jury duty. It was beautiful.
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Every week we got a whole new group of people to hand tracks to. There were three people that worked at the courthouse. Friends of mine who had been there for years before me said, that person will never take a gospel track.
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Those three people took gospel tracks from me. You know why? First one, walking past me, and she's like, no,
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I don't want it. And I said, well, have a nice day, ma 'am. Literally, that is all
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I said. She turned around, came up to me, thank you, I'll take one. One gentleman,
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I just said, I hope you have a nice weekend. It looks like it's going to be beautiful weather, because it was on a Friday. He turned around and took one.
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Is that so hard? Actually, not that hard, especially in a culture nowadays where everyone thinks that they're entitled to everything.
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So we disarm their defenses by using humor and being polite. And these are things you could practice everywhere.
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Now, I'm not saying to be a comedian, but it's just the idea of lightening up the conversation. Let the gospel be the offense and not ourselves.
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The gospel is offensive, but we want to let the gospel be the offense and not us.
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Okay, so the second thing is that we could be defensive. So we have to disarm our own defenses.
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Not only does the person we're talking to have pride, but guess who else has a pride problem? We do, right?
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Do people want to listen to arrogant people? Uh -uh. Pastor George was telling us, and last night
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Aaron referenced it, that the guys in, I guess, Watertown with the sandwich boards, have any of you seen those people?
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They're just so wonderful to talk to, aren't they? No, because they're typically the most arrogant people.
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A lot of them that do that, they believe in what's called sinless perfection, so they don't believe that they sin. I've always told them, a friend of mine,
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Matt Slick, has said this, and I've stole it from him, but give me 10 minutes, I bet I can make you sin. I can irritate you enough that you get angry.
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I haven't actually done that with these sinless perfectionists, but they sit there and just judge everybody like they think they're the
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Holy Spirit. Right? We have to be careful of it.
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So I told you, I promised you I'd give you an embarrassing story. Does anyone know how many chromosomes there are in a human being?
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Okay, 46 is the answer. Someone was going to say it, I know they were going to. All right, so this happened when
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I'm in Freehold, New Jersey. I'm standing on this ledge preaching the gospel.
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A guy walks up to me, comes up from my right side, and he says, Christians are stupid!
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I said, really? Can you prove that? I said, what makes
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Christians stupid? He goes, I'll prove it. How many chromosomes are in the human being? I said, 46.
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He goes, how many from the mother? 23. How many from the father? 23. He goes, see, that's how stupid
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Christians are. You can't divide 23 by 2. Remember what
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I said earlier about people that make really bad arguments because they don't want to seem like they lost? And in my brilliance, or not,
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I looked at him and said, you're an idiot! You don't divide 23 by 2, you divide 46 by 2.
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And he just walked off. And, okay, so I got
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ADD, I do multiple things at once. So as I continue preaching, I'm sitting there thinking, like, what just happened there? And I realized, what he did was, in him making me look arrogant and calling him out and calling him names, he felt justified in his pride to walk away from that conversation feeling justified and not listening to the message.
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So I did what every one of you would have done. I know this, I'm sure. I prayed and asked
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God for forgiveness. And I said, Lord, can I get a second chance with the guy? And sure enough, here he comes from my left side.
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He's walking by, and as he's walking by, and I turn and I look, and as soon as I see him, he goes, are you still stupid?
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And without hesitation, I looked at him and said, are you still an idiot? Okay, so like I said earlier,
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I got more to work with with doing stupid things than you guys because you guys would have learned on the first try.
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So literally, this is true, I looked up, I'm like, Lord, please, three times?
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And so sure enough, half an hour later, here he comes, and he walks in, and fortunately
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I saw him and I realized, okay, I jumped off the ledge, I walked over to him, I said, sir, the way I spoke to you was wrong.
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I need to ask your forgiveness. And he goes, well, you're still stupid. And he walked off. But I learned a really valuable lesson that day.
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That I have a defensiveness as well. I said,
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I gotta figure out a way around that. So what I started to learn is that I needed to learn how to ask good questions.
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Good questions, you see Jesus do this all the time. As he would share the gospel, he's asking questions.
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Go look at the story, the accounts, right, and that's not a story, it's an actual historical account. The woman at the well, right, what's he doing?
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He's just asking her a bunch of questions. Questions are great, because you know what? You can actually completely control a conversation with questions and never have to feel like I don't have the answer for things.
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Someone throws you a challenge, if they make a statement, you ask a question, there's no pressure on you.
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Put them on the hot seat, they made the claim. Union Square, I'm sitting there, this guy, Jason Cross.
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Kind of good last name, but only if he actually would have repented. He has heckled me for about 13 years.
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But when I first met him, he was sitting there, he's shouting out at me, there is no God because there's evil in the world, there is no
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God because there's evil in the world. I looked at him, I said, sir, can you tell me how you can have evil without God?
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See, I asked a question. He never thought about that. He just knew he always challenged the
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Christians that there can't be God because there's this thing, evil. He goes, well you tell me what evil is.
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I said, I didn't say it exists, you did. What did he do? He tried to put the pressure back on me, what did
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I do? Put it back on him. You made the statement, you defined it.
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He's like, well you tell me what evil is. I said, sir, I didn't say that it exists, you did. I'm not saying it doesn't exist.
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But you're the one that said that you can't have God because there's evil, then you should be able to define it.
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He says, no, you tell me. I said, okay, evil is the absence of good and good is defined by the nature of God.
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How can you have evil without God? He threw up his hands and walked out of the crowd. And every other street evangelist that I knew that was at that park that would go there regularly was like, what did you say to that guy?
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We've never seen him walk out of the crowd. I asked him a question. He never had to actually answer.
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So what questions do in our mind, whether you realize this or not, this is why the Socratic model was
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Socrates taught this, is that a question is different in our minds because of the very pride that we were just talking about.
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We don't want to be wrong. So what happens?
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When we're asked a question, we think about the answer differently because we start thinking about what the other person may say to knock our argument down.
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So questions were very effective in controlling a conversation, very effective in exposing problems that people have in their argumentation.
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Questions are also very good at getting you off the hot seat so you don't have to worry about I may not have all the answers.
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I may look foolish by not knowing something. You can have entire conversations and not have to answer anything.
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I had two Jehovah Witnesses, husband and wife, that came to my house for nine months and all
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I did was ask questions. It infuriated them because they kept trying to come up with answers and I just asked more questions, but they could not get the answers because the
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Scriptures spoke different to them because I'd just read the Scriptures and say, but I don't understand. You're saying this, but this is what the
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Scripture says. Help me understand. I just keep asking questions. You can control the conversation.
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You can expose the problems in their argumentation. These two principles you could practice anywhere.
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Disarm their defenses by using humor and being polite. Disarm your own defenses by learning to ask good questions.
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A great book if you want to learn more about how to ask good questions is a book called
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Tactics by Greg Koko. He'll walk you through that. I see some have read it because I saw some thumbs up and head nods.
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Let's see. Let's get to ...
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I want to start the last part is how do we avoid being judgmental, but I want to start with this.
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What is the problem with the modern gospel message that we have today? This is most known as God has a wonderful plan for your life.
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It comes from a gospel tract. I know the author of that tract from the four spiritual laws is the tract, and she calls it the four spiritual flaws because she's realized that the message it actually teaches is not good.
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The problem is it teaches that God has a plan for you that's wonderful. How do you say that to an unbeliever?
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What is the wonderful plan for them? Eternity in a lake of fire?
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It doesn't sound wonderful, but I want you to think about something.
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When we're saying God has a wonderful plan for your life, what is that really putting as the focus, the center?
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Us, right? This actually shifts the focus when we're sharing the gospel from God to us.
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See, the gospel is not about us. It's about God. It's what God did. But when we're sharing the gospel, so often people want to, because as we said earlier, we don't want to be rejected, so what do we do?
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We're going to come up with a way of watering down the gospel so that it's more palatable to people.
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Well, I have news for you. People do not water down the gospel because they care about people's souls.
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People water down the gospel because they want to be liked, and quite frankly, we have to get over ourselves.
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We come up with the gospel of God loves you. You're the center of the universe for God.
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We completely shift the focus. We teach a message of life enhancement.
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Well, your marriage is rocky, but if you come to Christ, everything will get better. Has anyone actually experienced that?
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When you came to Christ, did life get better? I don't know how many Christians that had come to Christ and life on earth got better, but our perspective changed, right?
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And so we have a totally different outlook on life. Easy believism, or also sometimes free grace, this idea of just,
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I just believe. I just want to believe because it's just easy. It's called fire insurance, that people just want to get out of hell free card.
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So they'll believe anything, right? So what we have to do is we have to realize there is a way of sharing the gospel that avoids us being called judgmental.
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It's called using the law. God gave us commandments that are universal for all people.
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Now some people, you can get into debates with Presbyterians versus Baptists whether there's 10 commandments and there's only nine for us today.
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People seem to debate over the Sabbath. But no one seems to debate over the other nine.
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So you've got nine that you could always use that are universal for people. Are we to glorify God?
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Is that what we were created for? We heard that last night, right? The first commandment is to put
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God first and foremost in everything, right? We're not to have idols. We're not to lie.
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We're not to murder. We're not to covet. And what you could easily do with a person is walk through the commandments and just ask them.
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The way that I share the gospel, and I want this session to be a little bit practical, not just lecturing.
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And we don't have time to go through the whole six hours unless you guys invite me back and we can do that. But the thing is, how do
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I share the gospel? Is anyone here familiar with a ministry called Way of the Master or really it's
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Living Waters? Maybe you know a little Kiwi. He talks kind of funny named Ray Comfort.
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Okay, and so if you know that, you're going to recognize what it is. But what Ray does, and I'm making fun of him.
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Ray's a personal friend, so don't. Some people forget that. Sometimes people will be like, oh, you shouldn't make fun of him.
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But we're friends. So, but like what Ray does is everything I teach.
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Now, you may see his clips and you just see him sharing the law, but you don't see the whole thing.
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He may have a 30 -minute conversation that he cuts down to three minutes and he puts that on YouTube. Okay, and so what you have is there is a, you know, what he does, he's very polite with people.
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He is, well, he's just naturally a very funny guy. Everything, he will turn everything into a joke, right?
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He uses the humor. He's always asking questions. If someone challenges him, he does not take the bait.
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He asks questions. But, so those are things that I came up with.
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I've stolen his outline for how to evangelize because I realized that his outline was better than the way I used to do it. I used to use the law before I knew
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Ray, but I didn't have it as well of an outline. It's an outline. It's not something you do verbatim.
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Remember that when you're having a conversation, it's a conversation. Let it go wherever it goes, okay? But the way
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I will do it is I'll ask someone, do you think you're good enough to go to heaven? 90 % of the people will tell me yes.
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2 % of the people are honest and say no. And the rest of them are delusional and say they're awesome.
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I had a guy, I'm talking to him. Do you think you're good enough to go to heaven? Definitely.
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I am an awesome guy. We were in a mall, and I'm like, okay.
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I said, can I test that? Sure. Okay. Have you ever told a lie?
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Of course. Who hasn't? I said, okay. What would that make you? The number one answer I get is human.
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The number two answer is sinner. So I say, if I lied to you, what would you call me?
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Notice I asked a question. You know what the most common answer I get is? Liar. Why is it so easy for us to call other people liars, but it's hard for us to call ourselves one?
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Oh, it's that pride issue again, isn't it? We're just part of humanity. That's easier to say. We're a sinner like everyone else, but a liar?
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We make excuses. That's just a little white lie. So I asked this gentleman.
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I said, all right. Have you ever murdered anyone? He said, yes.
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Now, there's a difference between murder and killing. I'm not sure if maybe he's a police officer or military.
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So I said, sir, are you military or police? He goes, there weren't legal killings.
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Anyone pick up something with that word? That was plural. I will admit,
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I had a personal feeling of going, let's just take a couple steps back from you right now.
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And so what did I do? I overcame my own fear of just wanting to step back, and I just said, can
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I ask you a question for that first question I asked? I asked you if you're good enough to go to heaven. You said you were awesome.
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And he goes, yeah, now that I'm thinking about it, maybe that's not so right. I'm good.
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I'm with you now. Like, I wasn't thinking so either, but hey. And I just kept going through it.
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Have you ever committed adultery? Now, I don't ask that of women. Just as a man asking a woman if they've committed adultery, probably not a good thing to go.
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I'll ask them if they were murdered. Because if they say they've never murdered, typically I'll say, have you ever been angry with someone?
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And in Jersey, if you tell me you've never been angry, you clearly have never driven a car before in Jersey.
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And some of you have driven in Jersey, and you're going, yeah. It's basically put it in drive, get the anger on, right?
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So if you're, Jesus said if you've ever been angry with someone, that's murder of the heart. If you have ever lusted after someone, it's adultery of the heart.
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See, what God does, and I explain this to people, is God doesn't just judge our actions. He judges our heart.
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That's even worse. And so you can walk through the commandments.
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And I have done this countless times in the open air. And I'll have someone just walking by and say, you're judgmental.
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And I can always appeal to the crowd and say, have I judged any of you? And they'll say, no, why?
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Because I just gave them the standard of judgment, God's nature. Why is lying wrong? Because God's not a liar.
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Why is murder wrong? Because God's not a murderer. You see, that's where we get that standard from.
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And so all I do is provide the standard. In fact, when I'm going through the commandments with people, what
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I typically do is I apply them all to myself. I'm a liar too. I'm a thief too.
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I've been angry with people. Like I can go through all 10 of them and say, yeah,
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I've broken all 10 of them. I'm never going to put myself above them, because that's what they anticipate as a
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Christian, what the media tells them. We think we're above them. And usually I'm standing on a box. So, okay, literally
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I am above them. I used to have a box for them, but then I found out that someone had done that once and someone fell off the box and sued the street preacher.
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So I was like, yeah, okay, I don't feel like being sued. So I stopped doing that. So when people say that I'm on a box, get your own.
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You can get one. But I don't want them to, I don't want to give in to their preconceived ideas of what
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Christians are because of what media tells them. Now my responsibility to that lost world is to share the gospel.
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But how we do it is just as important. That's why we call it Ambassador Evangelism, because we are representing
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Jesus Christ when we're up there proclaiming the gospel. So if we're up there acting arrogantly, what do they think
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Jesus is? Arrogant. If we're up there and they're making fun of us and it doesn't seem to bother us, we seem humble, what do they think
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Jesus is? Humble. You see, the reason that I focus so much on the beginning is because most people focus on the message of the gospel, but how we conduct ourselves is just as important.
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So I have a saying, I say if you get the book Sharing the Good News with Mormons, my chapter in that book was on doing open air evangelism.
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The reason I don't like publishers is because publishers try to weaken things for a general audience.
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So I'll tell you how I do say this, and I'll tell you how they make, once they give up the rights, they control things, and so I couldn't overrule them.
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But I tell people I have two reasons why I do open air. One, to preach the gospel unadulterated.
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Not watering it down so that the clear gospel presentation is made. A second reason I do it in the open air is to get one professing atheist to tell another professing atheist to shut up.
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In other words, I want to conduct myself in such a way that, and I have this happen often, that a guy who hates the gospel will tell another guy who hates the gospel to shut up because he's being rude to someone who's being polite.
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In fact, I almost had a fight break out with me. In front of me, I had a professor at NYU that was getting in my face, and we just called him
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Cowboy Man because he wouldn't tell us his name. Shirtless guy, seriously built, with a cowboy hat, got in the professor's face because the guy was treating me so wrongly.
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And he goes, I fought for this country for his freedom to speak. So you be quiet.
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The professor pokes the guy in the chest, and the guy goes, touch me again, you're going to have a problem with me.
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He just marched the guy out. I'm sitting there like, I'm just watching this thing, and this friend of mine, Mike, is in the back of this crowd of like 200 people going, preach the gospel.
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I'm like, oh yeah, that's what I'm supposed to be doing. Got distracted by a fight in front of me. Right, how we conduct ourselves matters just as much as what we say.
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In fact, if you were paying attention to what Aaron said in the last session, right, the message, if you have someone that's not living out that message, the message falls flat, right?
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If we're going to present the gospel, we have to present it in a way that represents Christ well. So disarm their defenses by using humor, being polite.
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Disarm our defenses by asking good questions. Avoid being called judgmental by using the law.
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Just give them God's standard. You know what that does? It takes all of the pressure off of us.
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You could start to enjoy evangelism. In fact, you could play dumb like I do. I told you,
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I do this naturally. I know you can't, you guys are too smart. But you could play dumb and just ask questions over and over again.
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Really quick, I know I'm a little over, but this will give you a fun story. Evangelizing at Montclair State University, I have a guy who tells me that the
59:04
Bible has been changed. The Bible was taken by the Roman Catholic Church in the 1500s, and they took all the
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Bibles all over the world, and they replaced them with an edited version. Now, I'm sitting there, there's a lot of things in my mind
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I could have said, like, are you serious, do you really want me to take you serious with this? But no, I just played dumb. If you read
59:26
Greg Kokel's Tactics, you'll know he talks about the Columbo tactic, right? Where he just plays dumb.
59:33
Well, I figured, let's play with this. I said, here's a school newspaper. Do you know how many copies come out?
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He actually was a photographer for a paper. He's like, yeah, there's 1 ,500 come out once a week. I said, okay,
59:44
I'm gonna take what you just said with the school paper, but I'm not gonna give it 1 ,500 years, I wanna do it today.
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Where would I find these? Where would I find the papers? Well, there's a stack there, they're in people's cars and people's dorms and in the garbage, right?
59:59
So I said, okay, so I'd have to go to all those places and replace it, but if this is something that people are saying is the difference between eternal life and death, don't you think they memorize some of it?
01:00:07
So if I memorize the paper, and you give me a new one, don't you think I might notice that it changed?
01:00:14
He starts thinking about it. And we go through this for a while, and I'm just like going, I'm just, maybe I'm not as smart as you,
01:00:21
I don't understand. I'm just trying to figure it out, but I need a simple example for my brain to get.
01:00:27
How would you do this? And at the end of the conversation, he goes, you know, this is not making much sense to me.
01:00:32
I said, I'm so glad you said that, because it wasn't making sense to me either. Because if you can't do it with a paper that just came out today, how would you do it with a book that is around the world, translated into 70 languages that is in all these different countries 1 ,500 years later?
01:00:49
And oh, by the way, we still find copies of that in the trash. So who's gonna edit a version of the
01:00:56
Bible that they scrape the lettering off and then reuse that parchment? Because that's how we're finding a lot of Bibles today, underneath other texts.
01:01:05
And guess what? It didn't change. So, I want this session to be an encouragement to you.
01:01:17
You know, as Aaron just mentioned in his closing is the fact that your pastors are not the professional
01:01:26
Christians to do all the evangelism for the church. It is all of our jobs. Do I enjoy evangelizing?
01:01:34
No. I don't. Why do I do it? Because God saved me.
01:01:43
That's why. And tomorrow, we will go through 2
01:01:48
Corinthians chapter five. And as we go through that, we're going to see where I get the idea of an ambassador of evangelism, but the fact that God saved us.
01:02:04
The love of Christ should compel us to go out and tell others. All right, and with that,
01:02:12
I know lunch is... Nah, we should keep going.
01:02:19
Abel doesn't look hungry. He doesn't look like he needs another meal. I'm going to get myself in trouble.
01:02:28
I'm glad that Aaron mentioned that we have a background in martial arts. But just some things we have on the back table for you is we have some quick reference cards for you.
01:02:42
I mentioned last night, this is my prayer list, literally. This is just all the attributes of God with some
01:02:48
Scripture verses to meditate on who God is. It's a very, very healthy thing to do to meditate on who
01:02:54
God is on a regular basis, and that's why we do that. This is a process of reconciliation, or this is really how you should behave yourself on social media.
01:03:05
Because most people... Aaron referred to Matthew 18. You know what? A lot of people... Is it me?
01:03:11
Any of you guys also have conflicts with other human beings? Am I alone in that? Okay, good.
01:03:18
A lot of people just jump to that person's in sin. And so what this does... Can anyone figure out that I'm an engineer by trade?
01:03:26
Yeah, flow charts. But basically, it's like there's some questions to ask yourself before you go to the other person.
01:03:34
So the backside, that's Matthew 18. This is everything you should do before you decide to go to a person with Matthew 18.
01:03:42
Why do I put it in this form? Well, for a very simple reason. I find that when we're emotional, we act emotionally.
01:03:48
Going through this and just forcing ourselves to go through a process of asking ourselves questions, it gets us to start thinking, am
01:03:55
I the one that's in sin? Is what they're doing really an issue, or is it just me? So those are $2 .50
01:04:05
for one, or we have three of them back there. You can get any three for $5. We also have my two books
01:04:12
I mentioned. One's on world religions, one's on Christian systematic theology. Both of those are available in the back.
01:04:19
For conferences, what we do is either one is for $15, but you can get two for 25.
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And then some we have not done before, so this is the first time we're doing it, is to put bundle packages together.
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So you can get all of our coursework. We have free courses on YouTube. The courses are free, but the syllabuses are not.
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So those are available in the bundles, along with some of the DVDs and CDs from our previous conferences that we used to do.
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And so with that, I know with some of this stuff, if you do get the bundle work, there are some things that we ran out of products, and we'll be shipping it to you.
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But we're headed to the Philippines for three weeks to do missions over there, and so we will not be able to ship it for a month.
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Just know that. So we're sorry, but because of that, I kind of threw some extra things that weren't supposed to be in the bundle in there for you.
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And so you're gonna pray for lunch? Because I know you're in a rush to... No? Okay.
01:05:16
Okay. Let's close it over to prayer. Lord, we're grateful for the fact that we could have your
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Word, because we need it when it comes to evangelism. We need to know that it is something you command us to do.
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We need the encouragement, because quite frankly, Lord, we need the boldness. It is not something that comes naturally for us, and we ask,
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Lord, that you would just give us a boldness to reach out to this community.
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It is something, Lord, where we can complain much about the society we're in, and yet you give us a means of doing something about it, because if more people got saved, the culture would be different.
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Even the politicians would pretend to be Christians for the votes, but the reality, Lord, is a lot of times they're not getting saved because we're not talking about it.
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So help us to get out of our comfort zone, to share the gospel with those, because that is our responsibility to the lost.