The Gospel pt 1
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Part 1
The heart of evangelism (prayer)
heart posture
not about the result but the message
Components of evangelism
good message
the full gospel
sin
seperation
death
law
jesus
life
resurrection
ascension
Part 2
Life of evangelism
Talk about being empowered to be a witness. OR SAVE IT FOR NEXT WEEK. Do not think that your evangelism will be effective without the empowering of the Spirit. The bible doesn’t say write a good evangelism track and you will bear much fruit. The bible says abide in me and you will bear much fruit.
not an event or moment but a life
Four types of people were preaching to
burden, birthed from prayer
Depth is not the evemy of conversion
no boundaries
Compassion vs proclamation
START
the next 2 weeks we are going to talk about evangelism we are going to go over the components of the gospel . for evangelism
We are going to take the first hour on evangelism, and then the 2nd hour we are going to go through some very very practical ways you can plant a prayer room.
So in the next 4 weeks we will go through
1. How to assemble a team and delegate roles
2. How to leverage connections
3. How to create a pamplet to present
4. How to present to your church
5. How to ask for funding
6. How to sustain a prayer room
WE WILL NEVER BE BURDENED FOR WHAT WERE NOT PRAYING FOR
Its April 1st, for the next month, we are going to get so practical.
How many of you know prayer is practical. Prayer leads to something. I believe one of the things it leads to is evangelism. To being a witness.
INTRO
What would it look like for us to be an evangelistic body? We say we are a people marked by prayer, which is good. But a people marked by prayer will always be a people marked by evangelism, because in prayer we receieve the burdens on God’s heart. You will never be burdened by what youre not praying for.
Estimates suggest that over 3 billion people worldwide are considered "unreached" with the gospel, meaning they have little to no access to the message of Jesus and Christianity.
We live in a reality that most of the world is unaware of.
We are in a region where christianity is rampant. But thats not a reality for most of the world
Making 10,000 a year makes us wealthier than 84% of people on this planet. When are we going to wake up?
There is massive need out there. There is massive need in this world, we shouldn’t feel overwhelmed, but we should feel urgency. Someone once asked me, how can i just not explode
Picture someone who’s house is burning down, there is a room full of people inside a burning house. WHO is going to save them?
When i want greater urgency Sometimes I say, “God bless me with a fear of their torment”
Romans 10:14 “How then will they call on him in whom they have not believed? And how are they to believe in him of whom they have never heard? And how are they to hear without someone preaching?”
John 6:44 “No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him. And I will raise him up on the last day.”
We dont have to understand how Gods soveriengty and our duty go hand in hand, we just have to remember our duty and not forsake it,
In biblical times persecution was the greatest hinderance to the gospel. Now it is far from persecution, we don’t get persecuted. Now our warfare is not persecution but distraction
Download operation world. (central african republic)
WHO ARE YOU GLORIFYING
So Jesus said to the Jews who had believed him, “If you abide in my word, you are truly my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” They answered him, “We are offspring of Abraham and have never been enslaved to anyone. How is it that you say, ‘You will become free’?”
Jesus answered them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, everyone who practices sin is a slave to sin. The slave does not remain in the house forever; the son remains forever. So if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed. I know that you are offspring of Abraham; yet you seek to kill me because my word finds no place in you. I speak of what I have seen with my Father, and you do what you have heard from your father.”
They answered him, “Abraham is our father.” Jesus said to them, “If you were Abraham’s children, you would be doing the works Abraham did, but now you seek to kill me, a man who has told you the truth that I heard from God. This is not what Abraham did. You are doing the works your father did.” They said to him, “We were not born of sexual immorality. We have one Father—even God.” Jesus said to them, “If God were your Father, you would love me, for I came from God and I am here. I came not of my own accord, but he sent me. Why do you not understand what I say? It is because you cannot bear to hear my word. You are of your father the devil, and your will is to do your father’s desires. He was a murderer from the beginning, and does not stand in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks out of his own character, for he is a liar and the father of lies. But because I tell the truth, you do not believe me. Which one of you convicts me of sin? If I tell the truth, why do you not believe me? Whoever is of God hears the words of God. The reason why you do not hear them is that you are not of God.”
The Jews answered him, “Are we not right in saying that you are a Samaritan and have a demon?” Jesus answered, “I do not have a demon, but I honor my Father, and you dishonor me. Yet I do not seek my own glory; there is One who seeks it, and he is the judge. Truly, truly, I say to you, if anyone keeps my word, he will never see death.” The Jews said to him, “Now we know that you have a demon! Abraham died, as did the prophets, yet you say, ‘If anyone keeps my word, he will never taste death.’ Are you greater than our father Abraham, who died? And the prophets died! Who do you make yourself out to be?” Jesus answered, “If I glorify myself, my glory is nothing. It is my Father who glorifies me, of whom you say, ‘He is our God.’ But you have not known him. I know him. If I were to say that I do not know him, I would be a liar like you, but I do know him and I keep his word. Your father Abraham rejoiced that he would see my day. He saw it and was glad.” So the Jews said to him, “You are not yet fifty years old, and have you seen Abraham?” Jesus said to them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, before Abraham was, I am.” So they picked up stones to throw at him, but Jesus hid himself and went out of the temple.
Look how they made it about themselves. and look how jesus said, if i glorify myself my glory is nothing.
I don’t have a problem with what is preached, i have a problem with what is not preached.
Why don’t we preach about our affluence? Why don’t we preach about hell? Why don’t we preach about the necessity of death to follow Jesus? Why don’t we preach about sacrificial worship? Why don’t we preach about the power of prayer in regards to not just getting what we want, but seeing nations saved? Why don’t we preach about the urgency of evangelism?
Why have we restrained our preaching to comfort, safety, praying prayers to help ME, going to church to help ME, hearing sermons that benefit ME? Why are we so obsessed with ME? Why have we restrained our preaching to the topics of comfort, relationships, sexuality, happiness, ease, convenience, simplicity, luxury, and humor
Why don’t we encourage our congregations to set a cap on their affluent lifestyles to meet the needs around them? Why don’t we encourage our congregations to get out of their bubbles of safety and opulence and see those who have nothing.
Making 10,000 a year makes us wealthier than 84% of people on this planet. When are we going to wake up?
When we meet people, we often engage with them to a certain degree depending on what they can do for us. We selfishly seek out relationships. We seem invested in them, but really its for us. This is really dangerous, because when forming relationships with people, we don’t actually love them, what we actually love is us.
When evangelizing to people. I would encourage you to not say what Jesus can do for you. But say WHO HE IS.
When we present Jesus by what He can do for us we unknowingly present a Gospel motivated not by a love for God but a love for ourselves.
Often what is not preached shows where our priorities lie
in our refusal to preach about topics that do not benefit us, our motives of selfishness are exposed. Glorifying God means also preaching the parts of the Gospel that don’t just make us feel nice but also preaching the parts that give him ultimate glory.
If we don’t get past this today im okay with that. I believe God is showing us how to present the full Gospel in our evangelism in order to be ultimately God focused and never self focused.
Make sure your evangelism isn’t self focused.
Lay out the cost, lay out the price. Show people that we don’t go to Him for a gift, but that HE IS THE GIFT. Show them that he is not the means to their end, but that He is their end
THE MESSAGE, NOT THE RESULT
But I, brothers, could not address you as spiritual people, but as people of the flesh, as infants in Christ. I fed you with milk, not solid food, for you were not ready for it. And even now you are not yet ready, for you are still of the flesh. For while there is jealousy and strife among you, are you not of the flesh and behaving only in a human way? For when one says, “I follow Paul,” and another, “I follow Apollos,” are you not being merely human?
What then is Apollos? What is Paul? Servants through whom you believed, as the Lord assigned to each. I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth. So neither he who plants nor he who waters is anything, but only God who gives the growth. He who plants and he who waters are one, and each will receive his wages according to his labor. For we are God’s fellow workers. You are God’s field, God’s building.
According to the grace of God given to me, like a skilled master builder I laid a foundation, and someone else is building upon it. Let each one take care how he builds upon it. For no one can lay a foundation other than that which is laid, which is Jesus Christ. Now if anyone builds on the foundation with gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, straw— each one’s work will become manifest, for the Day will disclose it, because it will be revealed by fire, and the fire will test what sort of work each one has done. If the work that anyone has built on the foundation survives, he will receive a reward. If anyone’s work is burned up, he will suffer loss, though he himself will be saved, but only as through fire.
Do you not know that you are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit dwells in you? If anyone destroys God’s temple, God will destroy him. For God’s temple is holy, and you are that temple.
Let no one deceive himself. If anyone among you thinks that he is wise in this age, let him become a fool that he may become wise. For the wisdom of this world is folly with God. For it is written, “He catches the wise in their craftiness,” and again, “The Lord knows the thoughts of the wise, that they are futile.” So let no one boast in men. For all things are yours, whether Paul or Apollos or Cephas or the world or life or death or the present or the future—all are yours, and you are Christ’s, and Christ is God’s.
How do you know that you see yourself as more than the messenger? Your gospel is more about you than it is Him
And as he was setting out on his journey, a man ran up and knelt before him and asked him, “Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” And Jesus said to him, “Why do you call me good? No one is good except God alone. You know the commandments: ‘Do not murder, Do not commit adultery, Do not steal, Do not bear false witness, Do not defraud, Honor your father and mother.’ ” And he said to him, “Teacher, all these I have kept from my youth.” And Jesus, looking at him, loved him, and said to him, “You lack one thing: go, sell all that you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me.” Disheartened by the saying, he went away sorrowful, for he had great possessions.
And Jesus looked around and said to his disciples, “How difficult it will be for those who have wealth to enter the kingdom of God!” And the disciples were amazed at his words. But Jesus said to them again, “Children, how difficult it is to enter the kingdom of God! It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God.” And they were exceedingly astonished, and said to him, “Then who can be saved?” Jesus looked at them and said, “With man it is impossible, but not with God. For all things are possible with God.”
The rich young ruler walked away from jesus evangelizing to him unsaved. Jesus never used the benefits of following Him to entice people to love Him
“Evangelism is man’s work, but the giving of faith is God’s. It is true, indeed, that every evangelist’s aim is to convert, and that our definition perfectly expresses the ideal which he longs to see fulfilled in his own ministry; but the question whether or not one is evangelizing cannot be settled simply by asking whether one has had conversions. There have been missionaries to Muslims who labored for a lifetime and saw no converts; must we conclude from this that they were not evangelizing? There have been un-evangelical preachers through whose words (not always understood in the sense intended) individuals have been soundly converted; must we conclude from this that these preachers were evangelizing after all? The answer, surely, is no in both cases. The results of preaching depend, not on the wishes and intentions of men, but on the will of God Almighty. This consideration does not mean that we should be indifferent as to whether we see fruit from our witness to Christ “or not; if fruit is not appearing, we should seek God’s face about it to find out why. But this consideration does mean that we ought not to define evangelism in terms of achieved results. How, then, should evangelism be defined? The New Testament answer is very simple. According to the New Testament, evangelism is just preaching the gospel, the evangel. It is a work of communication in which Christians make themselves mouthpieces for God’s message of mercy to sinners. Anyone who faithfully delivers that message, under whatever circumstances, in a large meeting, in a small meeting, from a pulpit, or in a private conversation, is evangelizing. Since the divine message finds its climax in a plea from the Creator to a rebel world to turn and put faith in Christ, the delivering of it involves the summoning of one’s hearers to conversion. If you are not, in this sense, seeking to bring about conversions, you are not evangelizing; this we have seen already. But the way to tell whether in fact you are evangelizing is not to ask whether conversions are known to have resulted from your witness. It is to ask whether you are faithfully making known the gospel message.”
When we value the result above the message we will alter the message to change the result. The question remains. Is this still evangelism? Certainly it is. This type, where we alter the message to manipulate the result, is evangelism not unto life but unto death.
SO WHAT IS TRUE EVANGELISM? TRUE evangelism is concerned not just with the result but with the message
“When Paul speaks of “my preaching,” and “our preaching,” and lays it down that, after the world’s wisdom had rendered the world ignorant of God, “it pleased God by the foolishness of preaching to save them that believe” (1 Cor 1:21; 2:4; 15:14 kjv), the noun he uses is ke4rygma, meaning not the activity of announcing, but the thing announced, the proclamation itself, the message declared. Paul, in his own estimation, was not a philosopher, not a moralist, not one of the world’s wise men, but simply Christ’s herald. His royal Master had given him a message to proclaim; his whole business, therefore, was to deliver that message with exact and studious faithfulness, adding nothing, altering nothing, and omitting nothing. And he was to deliver it, not as another of man’s bright ideas, needing to be beautified with the cosmetics and high heels of fashionable learning in order to make people look at it, but as a word from God, spoken in Christ’s name, carrying Christ’s authority, and to be authenticated in the hearers by the convincing power of Christ’s Spirit. “And I, when I came to you,” Paul reminds the Corinthians, “[came] proclaiming to you the testimony of God.” I came, Paul is saying, not to give you my own ideas about anything, but simply to deliver God’s message.”
J. I. Packer
We often talk about the true Gospel or the real gospel, In speaking of the real Gospel we usually mean the part about how Christ calls us out of our sin into righteousness. Which is identifying with Him in His resurrection. It is being called righteous because He was the firstborn among many brethren. This is good. But if we forget the death and burial then we too have missed the true gospel.
We need a True Gospel and we need a full Gospel.
THE TRUE AND FULL GOSPEL
What is the full Gospel, i must not assume you know it. In a world of preachers who do not preach the true and full gospel, I must not assume you know it
In the beginning, we were made very good. The world was good,
We sinned and brought sin, which deserved eternal seperation from God, so when people say I deserve this or i deserve that. NO You deserve hell, eternity apart from God
God is holy, and we are not. That is the biggest question of the Gospel, how can we who are wicked above all else be reconciled to a perfect God. How can complete and absolute holiness have any fellowship with the utmost wickedness. There was no answer, we tried the law, there was no answer, we tried the animal sacrifices, there was no answer, we tried the ceremonial washing, there was no answer, we tried obedience on our own means. THERE WAS NO ANSWER. THERE was no possible way. We were to be damned FOREVER! We were to be eternally separated from GOD FOREVER!
So the question stands above all else. HOW can sinful people be reconciled to a just God who’s justice demands that they be punished?
Then, according to the scriptures, according to the eternal plan of God, came Christ
A man, not just any man, but the God man, God in the flesh, who lived holy perfect and just, without sin, who died in place of our sin on that cross. That there — the full measure of the wrath of God, poured out onto His head. He didn’t just take our sin, He took the punishmemt for our sin, which was the very wrath of God itself. HE TOOK IT UPON HIMSELF, went to the grave, and was raised 3 days later on our behalf to save us.
To not just partially, but TO FULLY reconcile us as wicked humanity back to God, and not to be stopped there, but that we might become the righteousness of God, that we might become the body of Christ, the righteousness of Christ, the Holiness of Christ, the purity of Christ, that we might now become that — walk in that — breathe in that — live in that.
SO THAT one day we would be raised up with Christ in His 2nd return, where there will be no more tear, pain, not temptation. But life forevermore in Christ. Where all of life becomes knowing HIM.
Evangelism isn't something that you have to do, its something, when you're filled with the spirit, that you cant help but do
We are going to talk about prayer room practical. So take a 5 minute break, and then we can get into some practicals.
You don’t need this. The disciples just waited in a room and one of the most pivotal moments in all of Church history happened. No one facilitated that. No one led that. But that doesn’t mean its bad to lead. We see them leading, facilitating, shepherding, and stewarding tons after pentecost.
We don’t have some gathering anointing, its not anything fancy that will cause people to come. If you want a production and a lot of people, go to a travis Scott concert. What makes the church distinct isn’t an ability to gather but Him in our midst.
Im going to share some practicals that will help you, and yes, if you feel led to take this back to your home town, it will help you do that. If you don’t feel led to, these will help you in every area of life. With your family, with your friends, with the spheres that God has placed you over to lead. Even for those of you who will come on staff with prayer house. Which it seems like its a lot of you, you can use these skills to steward. When you lead teams, when you lead people, these skills will be so effective for you.
How to assemble a team and delegate roles
Pray about your needs, ask God what needs you have to build the team you need. If you are set on taking a team to spain, you are going to need to have someone who speaks spanish, someone who can plan, someone who can do admin, someone who can sing, someone whos gifted in making connections, someone who can faciliate and lead a room, someone who is pastoral and cares for peoples hearts.
Then give these roles titles, titles are not to produce some bad superiority complex, titles are to enable people to feel empowered and to reallign them with their duty. God called abram abraham, which means father of many nations, so that every time he heard his name he remembered his duty.
Then once you have shoes to fill, now is the tedious work, go and fill them. Connect with people, meet people, ask them what they are passionate about, ask them what theyre good at, when they tell you what theyre good at. LISTEN. Then put people in the roles that are needed. Say your title was that you need a connections director, and someone comes to you who is so outgoing, loves to talk with people, is bubbly, and professional. BOOM. you have your connections director. You will walk in so much more grace when people are in their roles Keep the pollinating to the bees. You can spend billions of dollars on workshops, courses, etc, but if someone is outside of their role its like teaching an catepillar to pollinate a tree. catepillars werent made to pollinate trees. bees werent made to go into a caccoon, keep people in their lane.
Present it to them. ITS A PRIVILEGE TO SERVE GOD. Don’t force them to step into that role, but ask them if through prayer God would want them to fulfill that role.
If they say yes, then put them to work, we see paul do this all throughout his letters. He writes to churches and tells them to live worthy of the call that they have been called. Live up to your titles. Live up to your positions. You aren’t just some bum living at your parents anymore. Now you are meant to be a representative of God’s kingdom, now you represent Him. People are looking at you. Give them tasks and duties that go into the vision. If you dont know your vision you won’t have tasks to give people to allign into it.
Once everyone is in their roles, never stop looking for needs, never stop looking for more ways where God’s kingdom can go forth.
If you are feeling led to join prayer house, then we would love for you to take what you are learning and apply it. We want to grow more and more you as you serve, assist, and build with us.
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