Top Ten Mistakes Evangelists Make

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Well, good morning again. What I thought we might do this morning,
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I had a couple different ideas. One of the things I did was I had all this stuff. I know I taught about Christmas last year, but I did even more research and was even more concerned about Christmas, but I just decided to bag that whole thing.
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I will give you this one little stat though. Did you know that 95 % of Americans celebrate
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Christmas? There's a shocking statistic. 95%.
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I mean, I've known plenty of, uh, atheists and Jewish people, all kinds of people celebrate
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Christmas and there's all this worry about saying Merry Christmas. I don't get it.
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But anyway, this morning we are going to do a top 10 list. We have the top 10 mistakes that evangelists make.
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The top 10 mistakes that evangelists make. I guess I should start from number 10 and go up to number one, but I want to start at number one.
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And for some of you who are highly motivated and great saints of the faith who've been attending the
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Thursday night Bible Institute class, some of this will be familiar, but it's a little bit of a different spin on things and I hope this will be helpful to you.
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Number one mistake that evangelists make is they underestimate their opponents.
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They underestimate their opponents. What do I mean by that? Who are our opponents in evangelism, by the way?
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Unbelievers. How can we say that they're our opponents? Aren't those the people that we're trying to reach? They are, right?
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So how can they be our opponents too? Is this a game that we're playing? They're opposed to the gospel.
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They're opposed to God. And here's the question, and this is the ultimate part of number one, when we say they underestimate their opponents or we underestimate our opponents, are unbelievers neutral in this?
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No. So it's not like we're coming into a situation where we have, now there are situations where someone might say to you something along the lines of this,
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Steve, what must I do to be saved? That'll kind of make you, you know, get the kinks out of your neck and just kind of go, excuse me?
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What did you say? I don't think I heard that one. But typically, or what does the
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Bible tell us about them? It tells us that before salvation, people are neutral to God.
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It says that they are the enemies of God. Here's another example of that.
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When we appeal to someone, and it's okay to appeal to someone, we want them to believe. I think
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Spurgeon once said that we believe as Calvinists and we preach as Arminians.
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Why would he say that? We plead with men to be saved.
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Isn't that what Paul said? We beg them to be saved. Why? Why would we do that? Because it's what we want.
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Now, are we going to compromise what we do? No. We're not going to compromise what we do, but there is a sense in which we so desire somebody to be saved that we will beg and we will plead and we will urge them to see
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Christ and to flee to the cross. But when I say that we underestimate our opponents, what
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I'm saying is we believe that somehow, and this is, I just got, I think it's good as pastors or as Christians even to get some kind of magazine,
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I'm not going to say that we disagree with, but that just kind of lets us know what mainstream Christians are doing.
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Mike gets Christianity astray, or I'm sorry, Christianity Today. I get the
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Christian Research Journal, and I mostly get that because I found out that, I was talking to Dr.
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White when he was out here, James White, and he said that he writes a lot of articles for that thing, mostly because they pay a lot of money.
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But anyway, I was reading, I got a new one the other day, and it went at some length explaining how we can evangelize people, and the thrust of this whole article is that we find out what their objections to Christianity are, and then we combat all those objections.
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Well, I don't believe the Bible. Well, let me tell you why you should believe the Bible. You know, there are over 5 ,000 Greek manuscripts, and he just goes through the whole thing, you know,
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I don't believe in the resurrection. Well, you know why you should believe in the resurrection? Because, and he has all these different proofs to refute whatever the unbeliever said.
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Now, if you've been in the class, you should know the answer to this question, what is the problem with that approach? What is the problem with saying, oh, you don't believe in the
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Bible? Well, let me usher forth all my evidences to show you why you should believe the
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Bible. You're talking to a dead person, so again, we're underestimating our opponent.
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We're thinking that somehow we can appeal to their reasonableness, that we can appeal to their intellectual honesty, that we can somehow get these folks, if we build enough evidence, if we pile up enough proof, if we appeal to, like they're a jury, we're going to come into the jury room as, or to the jury as the district attorney, or as the defense attorney, as the case may be, we're going to make our case, we're going to use eloquence, which is fine, we're going to usher forth our evidence, we're going to prove to them at the end of the day that they need to become a
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Christian. And when the jury comes back, what's the verdict going to be? They're not going to do that.
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Why? Because they're not neutral, they're not examining these things in a vacuum. They are spiritually dead, as our
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Elder Lewis said. And what does it mean to be spiritually dead? They can't comprehend spiritual things.
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Where would we learn that in the Bible? I think we could say
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Romans, but I think 1 Corinthians 2 is a better way to go. Ephesians 2 would tell us that they're dead in sins, but if we look at 1
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Corinthians 2, 14, it's going to tell us that a natural man does not accept the things of the
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Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him, and he cannot understand them because they are spiritually appraised.
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He doesn't have the ability, and again it's this idea of underestimating our opponents, we want to appeal to them as if they have some innate ability or some innate spiritual nature.
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You know how many people say that they're spiritual in this country? Just about everybody.
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And what does spiritual mean? I'm not religious, I'm just spiritual. What does that mean?
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That's exactly what it means. It means, all it means is that I have a sense about me that there's something more to this life than maybe an atheist.
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But I'm not particularly focused on any God, I'm not particularly focused on sin, I just kind of have some ethereal sense that there's something more to life than what is perceptive or perceptible to the human eye.
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So I would say the number one mistake that evangelists make is they underestimate their opponents, they fail to remember who it is that they're dealing with.
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And I think it's illustrated this way. How many times, and for some of you maybe it was the first time you heard the gospel, but how many times did you hear the gospel before you said,
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I get it, I understand. I don't even know how many times I heard it, probably a lot, not as many as some people because I went to a church where they never preached the gospel, but sometimes maybe it wasn't presented in the most loving way, like those tracts that were handed to us on Mormon Night at Disneyland that said, by the way, you're going to hell.
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So I don't know if that was the best way to preach the gospel, but that's what they did. So I'd say that's the number one way, or the number one mistake that evangelists make, they underestimate their opponents.
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Secondly, they overestimate their opponents. You say, well that's a little bit of a contradiction, not really.
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You want to know exactly who your opponent is. I like to play games, and one of my kind of,
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I have a lot of maxims, which I won't bore you with all of them, but one of my rules is never overestimate your opponent.
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I play a game that kind of is technical, and it seems easy, but there are a lot of technical components to it, and sometimes
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I'll sit down and I'll map out the absolute perfect move from my opponent, and I will come up with the perfect reply to his perfect move.
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Well, what's the problem with that? He never makes the perfect move. They don't know enough to make the perfect move.
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And then I get mad at myself for violating my own rule. Never overestimate your opponent. But we want to, as evangelists, as presenters of the gospel, we want to think that somehow they're a good person, that they can figure this out, so we appeal, as I said before, this is kind of an overlap, but it's the flip side of this.
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We appeal to their reasoning, appeal to their minds. We said that they're dead, but it's worse than that, really.
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It's far worse than that, because Jeremiah 17, 9 tells us that the heart is deceitful.
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It's more deceitful than all else, and is desperately sick. Who can understand it?
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We want to think, again, this idea that they're morally neutral. Well, they're not even neutral. They're not able to understand spiritual things, but the
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Bible also tells us that they have a sick heart, that they're willing to deceive themselves, that they see the truth and they reject it.
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And we somehow figure that if we reason with them long enough, if we usher forth enough evidence that in their goodness, in their fairness, in their objectiveness, that they will come to faith, and nothing could be further from the truth.
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Jesus himself said in Mark 7, 21 to 23, for from within, out of the heart of men proceed the evil thoughts, fornications, thefts, murders, adulteries, deeds of covening and wickedness, as well as deceit, sensuality, envy, slander, pride, and foolishness.
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All these evil things proceed from within and defile the man. All those things come out of the heart of man.
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It kind of makes a mockery of the whole idea. Well, you know what? He has a really good heart. Does he?
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The Bible would tell us otherwise. So they underestimate their opponents, they overestimate them, they give them too much credit.
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They think they're going to be fair in this. Thirdly, they underestimate their ally.
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Now, you'll notice, as I, just as an aside here, I'm kind of using, up to this point anyway, war -like terminology.
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Why would I do that? It is a war. It's absolutely a spiritual war.
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And where would we learn that in the Bible? Hopefully it's in the Bible. What's that?
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That's exactly right. That's exactly right. Here's one of my favorites on that, which is 2
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Corinthians 10. We could also look at Ephesians, but we're going to look at 2
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Corinthians 10, verse 3 and following here. For though we walk in the flesh, we do not war according to the flesh.
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And by the way, you know why I like this verse? Because I've seen it on TBN so many times and they just abuse it.
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You know, they're doing all the wrong things with it. For the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh, but divinely powerful for the destruction of fortresses.
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What are fortresses? They are errors. They're wrong ideas about God.
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Verse 5, we are destroying speculations and every lofty thing raised up against the knowledge of God.
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And we are taking every thought captive to the obedience of Christ. Well, what's
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Paul saying there? He says, listen, here are all these philosophies, all these ideas, all these theories, all these scientific even theories that are raised up against the knowledge of God.
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And what are we doing? We're destroying them, we're smashing them. And how do we smash them? We smash them with the word of God.
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So when I say they underestimate, the evangelists underestimate their ally, well, as I said, they desire to talk them into the kingdom.
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But what do they sometimes forget to do? If we underestimate our ally, who is our ally while we're witnessing, while we're evangelizing?
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Who helps us? God, the spirits, right? It's the spirit who convicts and sometimes we think it's our job to convict them.
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You know, if they don't get the fact that they're sinful, I have to come up with another argument, which is good, but I can only go over this so many times.
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I mean, how long can I, in one sitting anyway, how long can I keep bringing it back to the fact that this person is sinful and needs a savior?
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Sooner or later, I'm going to run out of ammunition. I mean, if I read through the whole Bible, we could be there a while, but Isaiah 55, 11 says, so shall my word be, which goes forth from my mouth.
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It shall not return to me empty without accomplishing. Then this is the part we always hear, you know, won't return me void or empty without accomplishing what
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I desire. It's what God desires, not what we desire. And without succeeding in the matter for which
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I sent it, God has given us his word and through his word, what does he do?
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He convicts people of their sinfulness. He reveals who they really are and he lets them know or he drives them to the point, we hope, that they will see their need for a savior.
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Talking about this idea, we mentioned in 1 Corinthians 2, 14, the idea that things of a spiritual nature are spiritually appraised, that we can only understand the
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Bible by the power of the Holy Spirit. So why would we think that somehow we can convince things or somebody of things when they don't want to?
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They don't want to know these things. Why would we think that we can do it on our own? We can't.
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We have to rely on the Spirit. We present the truth. We want to give people the truth and we want to do it with zeal. Like I said before, we don't come up and just go, you know, it's my responsibility.
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The Bible says that I have to evangelize so I'm here to, I guess, kind of fulfill my obligation.
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We want to care. We want to beg people. We want to urge people to be reconciled to God.
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That's what we do. But at the end of the day, we give them the truth.
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We do it in every way we can imagine. We do it with great zeal, great energy, and then we say, you know what? I have to trust
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God. I must trust God as if that's the last resort. It's our first resort, but sometimes we think of it as the last resort.
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Jesus himself said in John 6, 44, no one can come to me unless the
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Father who sent me draws him and I will raise him up on the last day. There has to be this divine drawing, as it were.
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The Spirit must convict. The Father must draw. We are but heralds.
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We are but messengers. We proclaim the good news of Jesus Christ and we allow the
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Spirit to do his work. We must not underestimate the Spirit. We don't know what the
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Spirit's desire is. Here are a few things that I just hate to hear.
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One is, I just didn't feel led to share the gospel with that person.
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What does that mean? I didn't like that person enough. I didn't care about that person enough.
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I didn't feel obligated by virtue of the fact that I'm under a command in the
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Bible to share the gospel. I didn't feel that I should do that. We do the work and we trust the
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Holy Spirit to produce the results. So that's number three.
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Number four, and this is just an incredibly common mistake evangelists make.
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Number four, they make promises they can't keep. Can you think of any promises that people make during evangelism that they can't keep?
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If you accept Christ, you'll get everything that you need. That's right.
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Health, wealth, and prosperity. Lewis? God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life.
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Dave? Oh man, those are all my favorites right there.
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Right there. Jesus or God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life.
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Well, you know what? We can say that there is a sense in which God loves everyone, certainly, because if he didn't, the
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Bible tells us he sent his son into the world, and if he didn't love everyone to some extent, what would he do?
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He'd just ball it up and be done with it. But it's an interesting passage here.
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Let's look at Psalm 5, verses 4 and 5.
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For thou art not a God who takes pleasure in wickedness. No evil dwells with thee.
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And we say, well, that's fine. We like that. No evil dwells with God. Number five, the boastful shall not stand before thine eyes.
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Thou dost hate all who do iniquity. That's pretty strong.
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And so then we go to people and we say, God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life. And then we go to Psalm 5 and it says, thou dost hate all who do iniquity.
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So which is it? Does he love every single person, regardless of what they do, or does he hate some?
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And I think the answer is quite obvious according to the Bible. Now, does he necessarily have a wonderful plan for your life?
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God loves you. That's problematic, as we see in Psalm 5. He has a wonderful plan for your life.
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Is that true? It might not be wonderful. He has an eternal plan that's wonderful.
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But is the plan in this life necessarily wonderful? If we just travel around the globe right now, if we look at the different countries where, let's say
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China, where people get thrown into jail, where the Soviet Union for decades, where you know how they picked the pastor?
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They picked the pastor by the male who knew the most who wasn't in jail yet. That's how they picked the pastor.
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You know, your dad went to jail. Well, I guess it's your turn, son. And that was it. There are places in this world where if you come to faith in Christ, your life is in jeopardy.
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So does God love those people and have a wonderful plan for their life? Well, he loves them.
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He has a wonderful eternal plan for them. But you know what? Their lives might involve suffering. First Peter is written to a group of people who are suffering, and it's to bolster them in this suffering.
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Peter never says, don't worry about it. You're not going to suffer. He doesn't say God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life.
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He says, trouble is going to come. And this is what you need to do in that time of trouble.
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When we think about the lives of the disciples, did God love the disciples? Did he have a wonderful plan for their lives?
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Did they suffer? Did Peter suffer? Did Paul suffer? Did all of them suffer? If we look through, we don't know how all of them died according to the
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Bible, but according to church history, they didn't retire to some magnificent villa in France and live out their times in splendor and peace.
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That isn't how it happened. Now, why they'd want to go to France, I don't really know, but Mission Field, there you go.
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Pastor Dave brought up a great point. If you've prayed this prayer, congratulations, you're part of the family of God.
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We want to, in evangelism today, the movement is to give instant assurance of salvation.
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Pray this prayer, sign this card, walk this aisle. You have just joined the family of God, congratulations.
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Your name is written in the Lamb's Book of Life. Why? Because you said the right thing, you did the right thing, and that's that.
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I remember once talking to a Christian and he talked about how their church had done this evangelism project.
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And he goes, it was great. We had people going out door to door. We saw a lot of people come to faith in Christ.
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He says, it was wonderful. He says, there was a little weird thing that happened though.
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All those people that came to faith, yeah, they never came to church.
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And you know what? There was absolutely no change in our lives. I don't really understand that. Well, are you sure they came to faith?
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Oh, yeah. Oh, no doubt about it. They prayed that prayer. We have a deficient view of what the
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Holy Spirit does in people's lives. God saves people not so that they can get the evangelist off their front porch.
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He saves them for good works. We know that from Ephesians 2. He saves us on the basis of faith.
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He saves us by grace and he saves us for good works that he prepared beforehand that we should walk in them.
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And is it the evangelist's job to provide assurance anyway? Is it our job?
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Can we know, can I know that anybody's saved? I can look at their life and I can go,
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I think that's consistent with what the Bible says that Christians do. But can
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I run around going, brother, you know, last week you were doing this.
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Now you're doing, now you've said that prayer. I don't know what the rest of your life is going to be, but I can assure you this, that no matter what you do for the rest of your life, you're in the kingdom.
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Can I do that? Well, I can do it. I don't think it's very biblical. Whose job is it to give assurance of salvation?
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It's the Holy Spirit's job. Romans 8 .16 says, the Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God.
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We could read through 1 John and we see over and over tests that the
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Bible gives us by which we can see whether or not we are in fact children of God.
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But nowhere does it say that someone other than you should run around and tell you, well, you know what?
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You did this, you did that. You must be a child of the King. Mistake number five, they answer every question.
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Evangelists answer every question. Now what's wrong with that? That's an excellent one and one that I probably wouldn't expect to hear, but that's exactly right.
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Mark said they may not have the answer to every question. Sometimes we think we have to make up things because we don't want to appear like we don't know it all.
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I'd rather just say, you know, I don't know that. I think that's a good one.
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Why else would it be problematic? There's always another question.
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Listen, the other night after the Christmas party, I was, and I shared this in the class the other night,
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I was witnessing, it's kind of weird how things work, but I was witnessing to one of the people who came to the party, you know,
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I guess just for the fun or whatever, but I said to him, at some point he said, so you're originally from California.
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I asked him where he was from. He had an accent and he said, well,
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I'm from Worcester. And I'm like, yeah, okay. So it was Bela Lugosi.
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But, so I said, for you older folks, I said, well, it sounds like you're from Russia.
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And he said, well, that was where I was born, but not where I was raised. And I said, what, the Ukraine? And he said, or Ukraine.
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I didn't say the Ukraine because that's a major insult. But I said Ukraine. And he said, yes. You know, how'd you know?
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And so we started talking about where I came from. Well, how'd you get to be an associate pastor? Well, asking me how
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I got to be an associate pastor, you might as well just ask me how I became a Christian. You know, it's like, so given the gospel, you know, how did
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I get to be an associate pastor? Well, you know, it's the grace of God. And I was a sinner, you know, doing my own thing, da, da, da, da, you know, and go through the whole thing.
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But then he says, when we get through with that, he looks at me and he goes, well, he says, how would you feel about the
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United States being a theocracy? You know, in other words, how would you feel about the laws of God being the laws of the
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United States? And I said, well, I, I wouldn't be in favor of that.
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And I said, you know, I kind of thought, well, that's kind of a dopey question to ask.
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Why would you ask that? And he, he started talking about, he wanted to talk about, you know, politics and this, that and the other thing.
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And of course, I had no interest in talking about those things. So I said, you know what?
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I said, Christians really don't want to impose, I have no interest in imposing correct behavior on people.
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What did Pastor Mike say a few weeks ago? Our agenda is redemptive. We want to see people get saved.
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Whether or not they act correctly is really beyond the scope of my interest.
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I'm more interested in, in other words, if we outlaw abortion, that would be a good thing. But how many people spiritually will that save?
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Zero. I'm more concerned with the souls of men and what they do.
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And so I said that to him and gave him the gospel again. And then he said, he said, well, he said, and what about the people in Rwanda?
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Okay. And so, you know, his, his objection then was what about the people who never hear about Jesus Christ? How are they going to get saved?
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And I could have spent a long time answering that question, but I didn't. I just went right back to the Bible. Bible says that all men are without excuse.
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And you know what? I said, here's the real issue. The issue is on judgment day, is God going to look at you and say, what about those people in Rwanda?
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What am I going to do about those people? Or is he going to say, what about you? What did you do with Jesus Christ?
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Every man's responsible for his own destiny. In that sense, what's he going to do with Jesus Christ?
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So we can answer every single question, but there'll always be another question, another objection, another that's not fair, another, well, that's not what
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I believe. They're all irrelevant. The only thing that matters is that person, their eternal destiny, what
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God commands them to do, not any of these other issues.
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Number six mistake that evangelists make is they forget to pray.
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You say, well, you know what? It's like this man that you were talking to the other night, Steve. Sometimes things just come up and, you know, you don't have time to pray.
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And I say, au contraire, you do have time to pray. When? Right there when you start talking to him, in the back of your mind, even while he's answering, sure.
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But when else would you have time to pray? When you wake up in the morning and you say, well, how could you have known that you were going to talk to that guy?
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I didn't. But you know what? Every day you should just be saying, Lord, I'm so thankful for this, that, and the other thing,
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Lord, would you help me today? Would you present me today an opportunity to share the good news of Jesus Christ with one person?
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Father, would you just prepare their hearts to receive Jesus Christ? Do we pray like that?
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In the class, I mentioned this the other night, and I'm like, you know what? Here's the issue.
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And I don't care what you call yourself theologically, every single person prays like a
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Calvinist. What do I mean like that? What do I mean about that? Even if we believe in a free will, do we ever say,
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God, I know you can't change a person's heart because they have absolute free will.
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But we don't do that. Why? Because we understand that God is sovereign in salvation.
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We understand that God draws. We understand that God convicts. We say,
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God, would you soften the heart of so -and -so? Lord, would you draw so -and -so to yourself? Lord, why?
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Because we understand that it is God and God alone who saves. So why would we want to go into an evangelistic situation without having prayed like that?
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Why would we want to do that? Especially if you know ahead of time that you're going to have that opportunity.
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Yesterday morning, when Bruce and the gang went down there to evangelize, or when they go down there on a regular basis to Worcester, I'm pretty sure that they start the day, well, they could start the day one of two ways.
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They could have a cup of coffee, talk about the Patriots game that afternoon, or they could pray for the people that they're going to talk to.
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They could pray that God would open up some opportunities for them. They would pray that out of all the people in Worcester, the ones who are weary, heavy -laden, have a desire, would be the ones that they would be able to talk to.
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The ones who feel that overwhelming burden of their sin building up on them, that those would be the folks that they would be able to reach out to.
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Number seven. So we've got, they underestimate their opponents, they overestimate their opponents.
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Number three, they underestimate their ally. Number four, they make promises they can't keep. Number five, they answer every question.
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Number six, they forget to pray. Number seven, they forget their Bible. They forget their
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Bible. Now, what does that mean? Does that mean that at all times you must have a Bible with you?
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Well, that'd be ideal. Problem is I have one of those little Bibles that you can carry around and, yeah,
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I can't really read it anymore. I guess I get, you know, my reading glasses and a magnifying glass, maybe, you know.
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Well, according to the ancient scrolls, you know, zoom right in on it. So what does that mean?
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What do I mean then, we forget our Bible? Forget what the Bible says.
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When I go into an evangelistic encounter, when I have the opportunity to witness to somebody,
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I don't want to just be giving my opinion. Why? My opinion might not be correct, that's part of it.
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It's not powerful. I can't save anybody. And what's the other side of that too?
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They have their own opinion. The worst thing you can do and the reason I'm just so down on this evidential approach, this thing that was in the
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Christian Research Journal is because, you know what, I'll bring in my opinion, they'll bring in their opinion and then it's boom.
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And when we leave, they'll say, well, you know, that's your opinion, good for you. Or I bring in my evidence, they bring in their evidence.
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Well, I just disagree with your evidence and I think my evidence is better. What Dave, what
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Pastor Dave said is right on the money. We want to give them what is effective.
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The Bible says that it is effective. God's Word says that it is effective. So why would we not want to do that?
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Romans 10, 17 tells us that faith comes from hearing and hearing by the
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Word of Christ. It's hearing about the Lord Jesus Christ, which would be what? How much of the
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Bible is about Jesus Christ? All of it. All of it.
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We want to bring the Word of God to bear on their situation. And if you can't remember,
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Romans 10, 17 says this, Romans 10, 9 says you must confess with your heart and believe with your mouth and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead and you shall be saved.
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If you can't remember where everything is, what do you say? You give them what I call the old Billy Graham.
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The Bible says, the Bible says, the Bible says, the Bible says. Mistake number eight, they forget they are being watched.
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Well, obviously, this could refer to God watching you at all times. True. But that's not what
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I mean. Our witnessing opportunities, our ability to share the gospel can be preempted by what we do.
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And I wrote in here, I said, we're all hypocrites. What do I mean by that?
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What does it mean when I say we're all hypocrites? We're not perfect. And we don't live out fully what we believe.
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You know, I mean, here's one of my favorite deals. A non -Christian says to you, well, you know, I don't,
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I don't want to go to church. It's full of a bunch of hypocrites. And what's the answer? There's always room for one more.
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Well, that might not be the most polite answer, but it's true.
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We don't always live up to everything that we know, and that's what makes us hypocrites. But what we don't want to do is just be so obvious in our hypocrisy that nobody who knows us would possibly want to listen to anything that we had to say.
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It's important that we walk according to what we know. Number nine, the evangelist's mistakes.
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They try a one -size -fits -all approach, a sales pitch.
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What's the problem with that, or what are some of the problems with that? One -size -doesn't -fit -all.
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That sums it up right there. Anything else? I think that's true. One -size -doesn't -fit -all. Every situation is different.
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And so, you know, here's a, I won't go through the whole canned approach
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I learned, but they would say, well, you know, we live in very tumultuous times and, maybe not tumultuous, uncertain times,
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I think is the word they use, but it doesn't really matter. And they would start basically at the same point and get to the same point every time, and then kind of, you know, it was an effort to corner them off, almost like a sword fight or whatever, and get them to make a commitment.
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Well, that might work sometimes. It might get you to a place where you get to present the gospel, but what absolutely will work is if you're talking to somebody and you're talking to them about anything that really matters, you know,
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Red Sox and Patriots aside, if you're talking about anything that really matters, eventually you can get to spiritual issues, whether it's the capital punishment.
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There was a case here in California a week ago where they put somebody to death, whether it's capital punishment, why that's right or why that's wrong, or if it's abortion or any of the issues that are currently swirling in our country today, homosexual marriage or whatever, why is that wrong?
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Well, what are you saying to somebody? You can bring everything back to the Bible, and then the common question is, well, why would anybody believe that?
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Well, what do you want? They're just begging you to give them the gospel. They might as well hold up a sign that says, please give gospel now.
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We need to be ready for that. And it sometimes happens when we don't expect it, like when we're getting ready to leave the
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Christmas dinner, and some guy says, well, how did you get to be an associate pastor anyway? You don't know when the opportunities are going to come up, and that's not your job.
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Your job is not to calculate, sometimes you can do that, but it's not to calculate how do
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I know when, what, what, it's to just seize every opportunity to be ready to give a defense for the hope or a reason for the hope that is within you.
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But a one -size -fits -all approach, you're going to wind up with some pretty awkward moments, because the subject, or the subject of the conversation will be on one thing, and you'll say, well, that's all very interesting, but let me tell you.
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And you just launch into whatever you want to say, and you've, you've just altered the whole thing, and it may not, you may not even be able to continue the conversation.
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Besides that, another problem with a canned approach is, you might only have 30 seconds to give somebody the gospel.
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So your options, if it's a five -minute thing, is to go really fast and talk really super fast, in which case they won't understand a thing you said.
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Or, you can be ready to give them, somebody's getting on the bus, and you're not getting on the bus, and you can't get on the bus for whatever reason, you can give them the gospel in 30 seconds, if you have that kind of mindset.
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Lewis? That's right.
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And, and that, that is absolutely right.
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We had a friend in Los Angeles now, his name was Ed, and Ed was two things.
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He was the consummate usher. He, he is the reason that I coined the verb, to ush.
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Because he knew everything that was going on at, to ush. He was, he ushed.
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Man, he was serious about it. But the other thing he did was, because he'd had a, a stroke, and he, sometimes, you know, years ago, and he, sometimes he would say something, he went to our
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Bible study, and sometimes, like, questions, I mean, he kept me on your toes, because the questions would come out, we could be talking about anything, and, you know, the question would come out of some place entirely different, but when he, he would ride the bus into Los Angeles every day, and he, he would do several things while he was making transfers, and stuff like that.
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One is, he would pick up trash. You go, what in the world would he do that for? He goes, his idea was, he wanted everybody to know, anybody that saw him, not that he was a great guy, but that he was doing things to make the world a better place, and if they thought he was a little off, that was okay, because all he really wanted was an opportunity to tell them about Jesus Christ.
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And what he didn't want to be doing was the opposite, throwing things down, or whatever, so somebody would say, you know,
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I automatically don't like that guy, I don't want to listen to what he has to say. He was very conscious of the impact his actions were having on people.
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But he would give people tracks non -stop, and just talk to them about the Lord, everywhere he went. And it got to the point where people got to know him on the buses, where they would sit on other benches, and stuff like that, because they didn't want to be assaulted by the
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Gospel. But it is good to be ready, and to be prepared, and to have some other kind of thing, even to just plant a seed, even if it is just a tract.
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Number ten, they try to learn everything about every cult available.
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Right? Got to know everything that the Seventh -day Adventists believe, because otherwise, how can you witness to them?
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Got to know everything about Roman Catholicism, because how else can you witness to them? Now, I think these things are interesting, I certainly enjoy doing that, but how many religions are there in the world?
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Yeah, I don't even know, man. I think there are three new religions registered every day, or something like that.
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I mean, there are a lot of different religions. Can we know everything about every religion? No. Do we need to know?
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If somebody says to you, well, you know, I'm of the Baha 'i faith, do you have to go home and research the
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Baha 'i religion before you can give them the Gospel? No, because ultimately, we know one thing, we know that there are two religions in the world.
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There's Christianity, and then there's everything else. Everybody else is trying to be right in the eyes of God.
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Besides that, if you learn everything about every religion, you would, that's all you'd be doing.
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That's all you'd be doing. Now, there are times when you might know little odds and ends, and they might come into play. They might be helpful.
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It might be helpful to you to know, for example, if you're talking to a Mormon, they may not even know that they believe that Jesus Christ was a created being.
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They do. They may not know that their objective someday is to be a God. A lot of Mormons don't know everything about their faith.
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But do I need to know everything in order to present the Gospel? Absolutely not. I don't need to know anything. All I need to know is that person is a sinner.
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All I need to know is that person is estranged from God. All I need to know is that God is so holy, He's going to punish every single sin ever committed.
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And all I need to know, and all I need to be able to tell them, is that Jesus Christ came to save sinners, and I'm certainly one.
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And how did He do it? He came, He lived a perfect life, died a perfect death, rose on the third day, and now is on the right hand of the
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Father. And that's what I proclaim to them, and I tell them that they need to repent. That's what they need to know.
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Now, a bonus, number 11, the number 11 of the top 10 mistakes that evangelists make, they forget they're evangelists.
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You can't do that. It's your job to be an evangelist. The Great Commission applies to everyone, and even
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Peter's commission when he says in 1 Peter 3 .15 that we should be ready to make a defense of the faith to everyone who asks.
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It's not an option. You can say, well, I don't have the gift of evangelism.
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Okay, but you have the job. So what do you do with that?
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It's like, you know, I had plenty of police officers who worked for me who were not particularly gifted as police officers.
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It didn't matter. They were getting a paycheck. They would come up to me, I don't even know how many times, and say,
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I really don't know how to do this, and so what would
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I say? I'd say, well, what do you think you should do? And they'd tell me, and I'd go, okay.
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You get going on it, and if things start going wrong, I'll let you know. I can't, you know, as a middle manager,
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I couldn't be, have my fingers in every single pie. I couldn't be doing everybody's job for them.
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Otherwise, I might as well send them home and just let Steve do the whole deal. And the same thing is true here.
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Pastor Mike, Pastor Dave, Louis, Steve, Bruce, we can't be out there with you guys everywhere so that, you know, when a gospel opportunity comes up, you can't just go, okay,
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Steve, you're in. That's not the way it works. You have to be ready. You have to have that mindset.
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And I pray that we all will. Let's pray. Father, you are a great
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God and worthy to be praised. Lord, you have given us a plan for evangelism, one that sometimes would stretch us out of our comfort zone, that would challenge us, that would,
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Lord, call us to do things that, frankly, sometimes we don't know if we can do. Lord, I would pray for each one here that you would make us more bold, more ready to just have more of a mindset, not a concern for ourselves, but a concern about the lost and a desire to see your son glorified.
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Father, even as our brother Louis said, our job may not be to see that person come to faith.
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Our job may be to plant that seed. Lord, we pray that of the seeds that have been planted, that you would water them and grow them,
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Lord, that we might see the harvest. Father, would you make us faithful to do that, to plant those seeds and even to take care of those seeds if we can.
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Lord, I just pray that you would press heavily upon us the obligation that we bear as your children to preach
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Jesus Christ and him crucified among the lost. It's in his name we pray. Amen.