Youtube Video

MP3 Podcast Episode

Chapters

00:00 The Structure of the Session
00:04 Understanding Deliberate Evangelism
04:31 Biblical Foundations for Evangelism
14:04 Examples of Deliberate Evangelism
20:23 Creating a Culture of Must
26:40 Practical Steps for Congregations
31:48 Conclusion and Call to Action

Transcript

Cary Gillis (00:04)
The suffering servant described in Isaiah 53 and verse three, he was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. And we hid as it were our faces from him. I’ll never forget the first time that that passage really hit me was my father was preaching a sermon.

And he went through that passage and he motioned that with his hand and I’ve never forgotten that because you have this idea of Jesus himself who when the world looks at him, they don’t want to look at him. They hide their faces from him. When you think of the idea of evangelism, it is the idea that you’re going into a world of people who do not want to look at Jesus. They do not want to look at their own guilt. They don’t want to look at reality. They don’t want to take ownership of that.

And so evangelism is the idea, if you were to kind of give an actual translation of Eugangelion, which is gospel or evangelize, if you transliterate it, it would be to gospelize. It’s the idea of evangelism is where you take the gospel and you intersect it with the life of someone who was lost.

The way you can think about it is this. Do you remember when Peter, when he rejected Jesus, he denied him, and he’s there in the courtyard of the high priest, and he denies Jesus, and he looks across, and the eyes of Jesus meet him. He’s convicted.

and he goes out and he weeps bitterly. The idea of evangelism is that we have a whole world of people who do not want to look at what they’re accountable for. They don’t want to look at Jesus. And evangelism is the idea that we’re taking them, and it’s not like we’re grabbing their head and we’re forcing, but what we’re doing is we are helping them to look at reality, to look at their guilt, to look into the eyes of Jesus and to see the guilt of his death.

and to take ownership of that because the only way that you can embrace the grace of Jesus is by first embracing your own guilt. But the gospel is the bad news with the good news. It’s that you’re lost, that the blood that you are guilty of is the blood that was shed to save you. And that’s the beauty of the gospel. And evangelism is what we’re doing. We’re intersecting someone’s life with what Peter had to intersect with, that reality of what he had done.

The expectant arc when we evangelize someone is that they do what Peter did to go from a denier to a proclaimer. The title of this lesson is, evangelism must be deliberate. That’s perfectly worded. That’s profound. And I’ll get into why that is in a minute. But if you just break it down, evangelism, evangelism is causing someone who was lost to be intersected with the truth.

One of the things I like to say on the campaigns a lot is this. I think it’s John Locke who says, it’s one thing to show somebody where they’re in an error. It’s one thing to show somebody they’re wrong. It’s a completely different thing to put them in possession of the truth. What we’re trying to do is put people in possession of the truth. That’s what evangelism is. Now, evangelism must, must, that denotes it’s an imperative. It’s something that’s not optional. So it must, and what? Be deliberate. It means it doesn’t happen by accident. It’s a result.

of an intentional plan. Now, there are lot of implications for the church from that.

Now this is where I want to give a shameless plug because I’m doing a campaign in Peru and in Panama and in Costa Rica this summer. I’d love for you to go with me. I’m gonna leave flyers on the front pew for you, all right? I’d love for you to go. What I’m trying to do with these, I met Brian on one of these campaigns. I met quite a few of you on these campaigns. And now that I’ve been given the honor of leading them, I’m trying to leverage these opportunities for a much more educational and equipping atmosphere.

And along with that, I do is admissions and evangelism camp at Backwards Christian Camps, camp I grew up going to, and I was invited to come there and be a director of a week where we focus on equipping and evangelism. Very, very practical stuff. Nuts and bolts. The goal of both of these types of things that I lead is for anyone who goes on any of my campaigns or this camp, and by the end of the week, they’re equipped and competent, confident enough to be able to go home to their congregation and start an evangelism plan.

And that’s what this lesson is about. That’s what evangelism must be deliberate is about. It’s about understanding that it doesn’t happen just by accident. So there are gonna be three main sections. I’m gonna be flying low as Clyde Wood used to say at Fried-Hardeman. There’s a lot to cover here. First, I’m gonna just look at some key passages that emphasize this principle of evangelism, the essentiality of it being deliberate.

Second, I’m just going look at some Bible characters who have exemplified that and what they did. And then the third section is just some implications from the passages and the Bible characters that first show how a Christian can be evangelistically strategic and how congregations can have a church culture with an established evangelism plan. So first, let’s let’s bounce through a few passages. I’m going to go fast, all right, because I want to cover a lot of these just and just look at the consistency of the principles here. Matthew 13,

In verse 3, behold a sower went out to sow. Of course Jesus starts the parable in this way. What are the implications of this? Well the first implication is that intrinsic to a Christian’s identity is that we’re sowers. That’s who we are. Now if I am a sower, and this is a non-negotiable of my identity in Christ, if I am a sower then what’s implied in that is the sower must be equipped with seed or the Word in order to plant it. So that’s who I am and I have to have what I need to do that which is

I need to be equipped with the seed. Also, what’s implied is that I must be in the field. I actually have to be where the hearts are. I actually have to be where you can plant the seed. I have to actually broadcast the seed. I actually have to throw the seed everywhere it goes. I have to do that. Knowing that a lot of it would be rejected, you know, we pretty good records on the campaigns that I lead. And one of the things consistently that comes up when we review all our statistics is that on these campaigns,

On average about 1%, about 1 % of the people that we meet, and we go out into the whole city and we meet a bunch of people, about 1 % of the people we meet become Christians that week.

Now how many people do you evangelize with? Maybe you’ve been working on three people for 30 years, all right? Well, I’m sorry, Jesus said many are called but few are chosen. We have to implement the many few principle here. We have to a broad net. So like if we go out and we meet a thousand people, well maybe we’ll have 10 baptisms, all right? And that’s how it works. But what’s also implied from…

A sower went out to sow is this, is that he’s confident that the seed that’s planted is going to produce fruit. If I don’t believe that the seed is going to produce anything in the hearts of anybody, I’m not going to go to the field in the first place. There are a lot of Christians that just kind of act that way. There are a lot of congregations that it seems like the culture that they have is, really think this thing’s going to work. I really don’t think this seed is going to do anything when I plant it. All those things are implied just within Jesus saying, a sower went out to sow.

You look at John chapter four and verse four, where John is recording about Jesus who’s going from the south in Judea to north of Galilee. And he records this, he needed to go through Samaria. Now we know about the friction between the Jews and the Samaritans.

And you know that actually it’s recorded that there were many Jews who would just cross over to the east side of the Jordan and go north and just bypass Samaria altogether just so they wouldn’t have to deal with it. It’s also suggested that perhaps sometimes people would go through it just if they were in a hurry and that maybe that’s what Jesus did. One of the things that Leon Morris suggests when he looks at the consistency of the usage of the word must, must in reference, you find must in this book.

in reference to Jesus’ ministry, is that it lends to the idea of, quote, a compelling divine necessity to shine the light in the darkness of Samaria. And so what does Jesus do? He goes there and what does He do? He meets this woman. He meets this Samaritan woman. And we’re going to revisit this a couple of times. He meets the Samaritan woman.

And what do we see about his evangelistic mindset? What we see is this, and this is a good word that if you kind of have it on the tip of your brain, then you’ll be mindful of doing it, and that is leveraging. We need leverage opportunities, leveraging opportunities. So Jesus comes to this ⁓ location, he leverages the location really to find what you might call the undesirables. I mean, this is a lady who is a lady and he’s a man. She’s a Samaritan, and he’s a Jew, and so the deck is stacked against her to begin with.

But he leverages this situation to find her. know, doing to others as you would have them doing to you. Who are the others? I had an elder who told me once, one of my elders, not presently, who told me, we need to go door knock into the upper middle class neighborhood over there with all the fancy houses and the rich people. And I’m like, we’ll go there too, but he’s like, no, that’s who we need. We need those people in the church. And he just said that with a straight face, all right?

Now Jesus’ example in doing this is he leverages this location to find those who really weren’t anything like him. But in doing so, he shows the value of every soul. And in leveraging this situation, in seeing this person who was classified as an other or an undesirable, Jesus chose to connect with her. What else does he do?

Well, he takes kind of an innocuous Monday situation and he leverages that towards spiritual things, towards spiritual conversations, spiritual subjects. You gotta have an intentional plan to leverage these kinds of encounters or they just fall through the cracks. These opportunities, they present themselves all the time and if I’m thinking, okay, today I need to look for opportunities and I’m gonna leverage those to be able to just engage a little bit on a spiritual level.

And all the time, if we look in retrospect, we look back, we could probably list in a week all of the opportunities that we just let fall through the cracks. Because evangelism wasn’t deliberate. It wasn’t a must. We’re following this pattern of Jesus by leveraging those opportunities. And so what did he do when he leveraged these opportunities? He showed interest in this woman’s life. He showed no fear in exposing the truth of it.

and he was able to confront her sin with grace. Within the context of hope, he confronts her sin with grace because he reveals himself to be the Savior.

And then he does this. This is brilliant. He leverages this one lady to reach a whole town. Every person that we reach with the gospel knows a whole world of people that we don’t know. Leverage those people. That’s the way we need to be thinking about this. When we’re just not mindful in an intentional way about this, then we let for probably decades most congregations let all these opportunities go to waste.

We wonder why congregations just plateau. Really, if we do this kind of an analysis of it, we will be able to see pretty clearly why most congregations just plateau at a certain number. Because they’re leaving all these opportunities on the table. They’re not leveraging them. We look at Romans chapter 10, and with Paul’s rhetoric, ⁓ really he gives rhetorical questions here, right?

And what does he say? Verses 14 and 15, how then shall they call on him in whom they have not believed? How shall they believe in him in whom they have not heard? How shall they hear without a preacher? And how shall they preach unless they are sent? And so what he says there is he show the implications really is that hearing, believing, calling on the name of the Lord, these don’t happen accidentally. What can we draw from this? Well, we’re at a preaching school right here. Well, one of the first implications is that there are people who are gonna send preachers.

Another implication is that they’re going to be men who intentionally, purposefully equip themselves to be preachers. And that they’re going to be men who actually exhibit the courage to open their mouth and preach. All these are implied in these rhetorical questions here that Paul mentions. When you look at Mark 16 and Matthew 28, you have the Great Commission.

And Jesus gives the imperatives of go make disciples, baptizing, teaching them. And in Mark 16, he says, go preach the gospel. This isn’t a suggestion. And note that he says this in Matthew 28 right after he says, hey, by the way, all authority has been given to me in heaven and on earth. Now, go do this. He’s my creator. He gets to say what my life is.

And so this stands as our marching orders, our ongoing mission. And we have to understand that it neither happens passively nor is it for the select few. It has to be an intentional, it has to be for everyone. And there’s a way that you can do that within a congregation. The last passage I want to look at is Ezekiel 3 and 33. You have this theme in Ezekiel, what’s called the watchman, who must, must go out and give the warning of God. Just like the sower, the sower is intrinsic to our identity.

Being a watchman is intrinsic to our identity. We must go give the warning of God. And if I don’t, he says, even if you know they’re not gonna believe you, even if you know they’re not gonna heed the warning, what? You’re unfaithful if you don’t. And so an un-evangelistic life is by definition a faithful life even if you think to yourself, well, no one’s gonna listen to me anyway. He says, no, that’s not up to you. Your identity is the watchman. Your identity is the sower.

Now let’s look at some examples, some examples that pattern this principle that evangelism must be deliberate.

Of course, we just looked at Jesus who leveraged location, opportunities to connect deeper. He guided conversations to reveal the reality of her life and offer salvation. When we look at Paul and his strategies and his intentional plans, what does he do in Acts 16 and Acts 17? He goes to certain places. He’s intentional about going where people are. He goes in Philippi. He goes to the river where Lydia is, knowing that there might would be people who were receptive. He goes to synagogues in a couple of places. In Athens, he goes to the Areopagus to

where he knows there are people who want to grapple with philosophical ideas. He goes where people are. Another principle of Paul in being intentional is that he wants to relate to people. When you look at 1 Corinthians chapter 9, he says that he became as a Jew to reach those who are Jews, as someone who was under the law to reach those who under the law, as someone who is not under the law to be able to reach those who aren’t under the law. He became as weak to reach the weak. That he did all these things not compromising the law of Christ in order to relate.

You might think of Paul as a chameleon. He was intentionally a chameleon. He was intentional about relating to people. So he went to where they are with the intention of relating to them. In Acts 20 verse 20 says, his goal was to go everywhere. He was in homes and in public places, publicly and house to house. And what else do we find with Paul?

Paul was reasonable. Of course we find that in Acts 17. He knew the truth was logical and he knew the truth was unafraid of scrutiny. When you go to chapter 26, course, Festus, he accuses him, he says, you’re crazy, you’re a crazy man, you’re a madman. He’s like, no, I’m not.

I speak words of truth and reason. We insult people when we do evangelism and we expect them to take our word for it. We need to be reasonable with our faith. One of the things that’s most off-putting thing that I ever see anyone do from the pulpit is just make an assertion. ⁓ okay, why? Just because you said so, I’m supposed to believe that? Don’t do that with people we’re evangelizing with.

Show them that we actually respect the truth and being able to reasonably and logically find a conclusion. And so if I’m doing evangelism, what I need to do is reason through logically and show this is why this conclusion is. Never expect anyone to take your word for it. That’s the golden rule because I wouldn’t want, I’d be really off put if someone expected me to just take their word for it.

Don’t do that to people. And that’s what he did. He was reasonable. When you look at Peter in Acts chapter 2, this was an inspired sermon. But what was the foundation of his lesson? The foundation of his lesson was Scripture.

And what did do? He had no fear in calling out the guilt of his audience, which of course did what? It led to sorrow and repentance, which leads to salvation, which follows that pattern we find in 2 Corinthians 7 and verse 10. A scriptural foundation that was confrontational, or like I said before, it helps someone intersect with reality so that they see their spiritual state. You look at Peter’s brother, Andrew. He had a really simple plan. It was find and bring. That’s what he would do.

He brought Peter to Jesus in John 1. John chapter 6, brings the boy with the bread and the fish to Jesus. You look at Philip the apostle talking to Nathaniel. Sometimes this may be effective to just tell someone, ⁓ just come and see. Come and see what it’s like. Come and see who he is. Just come and see. Just come and find out. Appeal to someone to reason for the truth themselves. That’s an appealing thing.

When you look at Philip in Acts chapter eight, a different Philip, when he’s with the Ethiopian, he asks leading questions to guide what I call a Bible study. It really was. He’s asking leading questions. He’s taking where he wants him to go and he shows that Jesus is the central character of the Old Testament and he shows that Jesus is worthy of surrender, which of course initiates with baptism, a death with Christ, death to self, being united in baptism in his death.

We look at probably the most influential ⁓ married couple in the New Testament, Aquila and Priscilla. In Acts chapter 18, what we find from their interactions with people is, number one, that they loved people, and they loved the Lord, or more specifically, they loved the truth. They had an allegiance to sound doctrine, but they loved people. And so what did they do with Apollos? They took him aside privately. And then what did they do? They didn’t just say, here’s how you’re wrong about it. No, what they did was is they equipped him

to be able to be reasonable, because it says then that he went and he was able to refute what the Jews were saying. It wasn’t just, hey, this is why you’re wrong and you need to stop. It’s, here, let’s reason through this so that you’re able to take what I’m explaining and give it to others. I mean, that’s the pattern of 2 Timothy 2, 2 that we’ll look at in just a minute.

You go to the Samaritan woman herself, the woman who’s evangelized by Jesus immediately becomes an evangelist. Notice what she did. First, she left her water pot. John 4.28, she had a shift in priorities from the physical need, spiritual need is a priority now.

And so what does she do? Just like Jesus and just like Paul, she went to where people were and what does she do? And she brought them to Jesus. You think about the paralytic who had the four friends who picked him up and brought him down through the roof. What were they doing? We can’t make someone become a Christian, but we can do whatever we can to bring someone to the presence of Jesus. And that’s what she did. She went to where people were and said, hey, you need come see what’s going on. She might have actually said, and see, but it’s just not recorded.

Look at the early church just as a corporate unit. In Jerusalem, they had corporate evangelism, Acts 542. They did in public and in private. It wasn’t sporadic, it was daily. It was everywhere and daily. You have specifically the Antioch Church. They were both supporting and sending missionaries, Acts 13, one through three. Now let’s look at some implications from these passages and from these character studies, these examples of why evangelism must be deliberate.

One of the things we find is the word must. A church culture by definition, just a simple definition is this. Your church culture, whatever church you’re a part of, just however you consistently do things at your church. Whatever that is, that’s your culture. You may not like the idea, well how do you do it? Well, you know, don’t really like it. Whatever it is you do consistently, that’s what your culture is. And so what…

type of culture can we find in these passages and in these examples that we need to have a culture of must, not a culture of should. It’s a culture of must. It’s a mindset of must. It’s not a mindset of should. If something should happen, will it happen? I mean, it should happen, right? It should. But if it must happen, then it becomes a non-negotiable. That’s a completely different mentality within the culture of a church. We need to have a culture of must.

And so evangelism must be deliberate because it will not happen passively. It’s not going to happen accidentally.

And even though we know we need to do it and it should happen, it’s not going to naturally begin to be something that happens on a consistent basis just because we know it should. And so congregations that don’t have a must, by definition, have a should culture. Evangelism should be deliberate is what they would say. Or really, that’s what they’re acting out. And so that first thing we’ve to do is shift from should to must in our mentality. The culture of Christianity is all

has always been a culture of imperatives.

For better or worse, every congregation has a culture. Now, let’s let these previous two sections inform what that culture looks like. Most Christians that you meet have heard an evangelism lesson, and I would tell you this, I have been the recipient of it myself, and I’ve been the one who is preaching the sermons myself, all right? Most Christians know they need to evangelize. Does everybody in here know you need to evangelize? Okay, so I don’t need to tell you you need to evangelize, right?

Because if you’re not evangelizing and I say, hey, you need to be doing the, right? boy, that’s a great, that’s an easy lesson, right? But a lot of times what it amounts to is just browbeating because in the leadership in the church, there’s been a lot who have fallen down on the job because all day long they’ll say, hey, you need to be evangelizing. But there’s no collective cultural plan in place by which every individual or congregation can look within the plan and say, hey, that’s my place right there.

And so we say, you need to be getting to work. And there’s not even an organized culture of evangelism and a plan that they can take part in, that they can plug into.

Most Christians just don’t know where to start. And so I’m talking to those who are in leadership positions, to elders, preachers. You need to be initiating this. They need an evangelism plan within which they can take ownership of a job. I speak in lot of congregations about mission work and things like that, and I like to ask this question every church I go to. Hey, what’s your job? What is your job here? Every one of you, what’s your job? For every one of you here in your home congregation, what’s your job in the church?

And specifically, what’s your job connected to evangelism? Every single member of a congregation must have a job connected to evangelism. Now we think, well, can they? Well, they must. Which means, of course, that they can. Which means that we need to use creativity, planning, and it’s some…

just doing it, making it happen. You know, it’s not something that you just say, well, I’m just going to flip a switch and it happens. Sometimes it’s trial and error and it’s difficult and it takes some work. It takes some time of figuring out because each congregation is just a little bit different. The demographic of each community is just a little bit different. The talents of each congregation are just a little bit different. What’s your job in the church? When someone can answer, this is my job. You know, last week I was in Peru. The week before that I was in Costa Rica and I asked them that question.

I asked him in Peru last week, I said, what’s your job? You don’t know? Okay, can anyone in here sit there and not say anything? And they all just sat there silent. I was like, good, you did it, you did your job. But I told him, I said, you know how significant a silent partner in a Bible study is? You just found your job right there. It just takes a little bit of creativity of what are the things we need to do to accomplish the goal of evangelizing, and then to see, okay, what are the different places that we need people to do things and where can we plug them in?

It’s the five minute alarm right there.

What’s your job? When someone can actually answer that job, most congregations have people in the pews that feel totally useless and they felt like they’ve never mattered to the church. You imagine someone who actually has a job for the first time, they feel like they’re bringing some sort of value because they have ownership in the work specifically tied to evangelism. How do individual Christians in congregations, how do they get to this point? Well, they gotta pray for opportunities, they gotta pray for open hearts and pray for courage.

They’ve to get in the habit of seeing souls, not people. Looking at everyone in their life and saying, well, that’s a contact right there. That’s a mentality within a church culture. It’s about embracing your sower, watchman identity. There has to be a dedication to being useful. You see, in Ephesians 4, God gave the church to equip us. If we’re not letting the church equip us, then what are we even doing here? That’s what God gave the church for.

And so congregations should be training in how to have spiritual conversations, how to use a guided Bible study, how to navigate different doctrinal matters, even practicing Bible studies. I have a whole hour every day in my missions in evangelism camp where we just practice Bible studies. Is your congregation doing that? Does every one of your congregation know how to do a Bible study? You can train them pretty easily. It’s not that hard. It’s just a matter of intending, intentionally doing it. Say, this is the culture that we’re going to have. What about role playing in certain situations?

You see, because confidence and competence grow with equipping. In a must culture, everyone in a congregation will know that something is expected out of them. Everyone is, something is expected out of them. Everything is leveraged in every part of the church. You do an inventory of every work of your congregation and ask, is…

Am I leveraging this towards evangelism in some way? And if you’re not, if there’s a work in your congregation that’s not being leveraged towards evangelism in some way, then shelve that thing until you can figure out how. All right? It takes a little bit of creativity and understanding. We’re leaving opportunities on the table. ⁓ Just simple things about having this type of a must culture. Does your congregation have evangelistic material or specifically,

⁓ guided Bible study material available to every member? Does your congregation have an extensive visitor protocol from the time they walk through the door to following up with them? Do you have detailed record keeping of your members and visitors and contacts and everyone who comes through the door so that there’s information about everyone so that if I handed it to anybody they would be able to follow up with that person?

Is there a process in place by which new Christians can be paired up with older Christians to be mentored? You see, a must culture is a culture that’s built to safeguard against people falling through the cracks. When a church culture has structured plans for everything, then a congregation has a mentality of certainty, not uncertainty. They’re confident now. They know what they’re about. Most congregations, they kind of don’t know what they’re about if you just ask their average member.

I just kind of show up, that’s what my job is. That’s not your job in the church. Your job in the church is not to show up and live a good life. That’s not your job. Your job is something else. And so culture, culture, this is challenge. Culture has to be top down, elders down. It has to trickle down. ⁓ Very rarely will members rise above their elders in elevating a church culture above their elders. I’ve seen it maybe once or twice, but it’s very rare. It needs to be motivated by the perpetual discipling method of 2nd Timothy 2.2.

And this is a difficult thing, in order to avoid a plateau in a congregation, as your congregation is growing, the leadership of the church needs to be cultivating and coming up with different avenues by which people can plug in their talents and take ownership of jobs. So as the number’s growing, the different works that they can take ownership of growing. You see, you can grow to a certain point. You’re only gonna grow, but when you reach a certain point of works, then you kinda start to plateau a little bit.

And that’s a leadership problem. It takes a little bit of creativity and intentionality to keep from plateauing. What about the practical things, just like Priscilla and Aquila? Make your home ready for Bible studies. There are more discipling that can be done in a kitchen table than in a room like this. ⁓ Work evangelism into your schedules and your calendars. Even a church, when it plans its calendar, say, how can we do things in our calendar that make it better for visitors to come, make it more hospitable? You know, just asking.

questions of people, you’re random person, hey, do you go to church anywhere every Sunday? They don’t want to lie to you. If they go somewhere once a month, they’ll say, well, I go there once a month. And you’ve gauged first where they go and how faithful they are. But sometimes you say, do you go anywhere? They’ll be like, yeah, I go over there. They go like two times a year, right? And so be very intentional about the questions that you ask and lead. A simple rule is that whoever is asking the questions is leading the study.

No one owes you a Bible study. You have to earn it, build relationships, go to where people are and bring them to all your activities. You have to be intentional and creative. One of the best ways, I’ll end with this, one of the best ways that a congregation can transform their evangelistic ⁓ mindset and their culture is by having a boots on the ground ownership in foreign missions. Because one thing it builds excitement,

and it renews a sense of usefulness in the kingdom, it’s the quickest way for an American congregation to get excited about evangelism because they’re going to a place where hearts are often more receptive. And so one of the best ways for congregation to take an inventory and see where they’re lacking in their own evangelism plan is by becoming a mentor of a less mature congregation. Missions is a powerful way to jumpstart.

your church culture. Ultimately, the healthiest churches are the ones that are taking every opportunity to extend the light of Christ to the lost. This is, of course, a principle articulated through scripture, many passages, and exemplified by the faithful. Our goal is to evangelize, to make the lives of the lost intersect with the life of the Savior. And when we think about our churches and our church cultures, may we settle for no less of a church culture than one

that makes this an absolute imperative. Thank you for your time.