Saturday, July 13, 2024

Best Way to Evangelize?

We'll praise Jesus today everyone. I wanted to make a short message here on what the best way to evangelize is. Because there are some Christians that debate this and they talk about ways that we should be evangelizing and they say that if you're not evangelizing like how they are then you're not really doing your job as a Christian. I remember there was a few guys in particular that were part of a street evangelism group, and they tried to make me feel really guilty as they did try to make a lot of other people feel guilty for not doing street evangelism like how they do, because they thought open air preaching and using megaphones and going out with their bibles was the way to do it. But as it ends up that's a huge turnoff to me and to many people and doesn't bring the fruit of righteousness that God requires. However there are times and there are spaces that open air evangelism works well that you can go in a public place and preach Jesus and the Lord blesses that. But it depends what the Holy Spirit is leading you to do and it depends where you are. One of the best ways to evangelize that I have found to spread the love of Jesus around and to preach his message is just with simple t-shirts like the one I'm wearing here. You can read this one, but it just asks a simple question and then asks if you're a friend or a foe. So wearing t-shirts is a really good way to evangelize because you can go into a grocery market, you can go into any store you can continue to buy your food and people will ask you about your shirt, but no one's going to kick you out of the mall for wearing a t-shirt. But if you were to go into the mall or into some kind of a restaurant holding a big flag or banner or you know holding up some kind of steak with a message on it, you'd get the police called on you really quick. So it would not be effective and you wouldn't be able to bring the gospel there. So we have to use different methods for different places, but we cannot condemn people for not doing it our way.

Right now there is a lot of condemnation going around by Christians thinking that if they are not preaching Jesus on the internet on youtube or on Facebook, then they must have fallen away from Jesus, especially if they were at one point on the internet and that's simply just not true. If the Lord leads you to go and evangelize on YouTube or Facebook or Twitter or something like that or X, then go and do that, but don't let the devil condemn you that you're not being the Christian that you should be because you're not posting on the internet. And this is a huge deception guys for Christians that have been on the internet. They start thinking that other Christians have fallen away from God because they're not posting Christian messages on youtube or on Facebook. And it just is not the truth.

 The Lord leads different people different ways. He hasn't called everyone to post on the internet. In fact, some people he calls to go far away from the internet so they don't stumble into pornography or just the social aspect that leads people away from God. The Lord has blessed me with many years of preaching on the internet, and i've found that to truly be a blessing. In some ways, I have stepped back away from the internet. For example, I took comments off of my youtube after about 10 years. People still will ask me why I did that. I was led to take the comments down off of youtube because I had a lot of people that were trying to use my page for their place to disrupt, and they were trolls. They would constantly try to cause problems, constantly pestering, and distracting other brothers and sisters that really did want to find the truth. And I found that it was such a blessing to just completely take down comments after 10 years and not have to deal with that.

You know, 10 years ago or so, when I only had a few videos, I could go back through my videos and I could answer people's questions, and I did a pretty decent job, I thought, keeping up with comments. But then after I had a thousand videos and several thousand videos, it wasn't practical for me to anymore go back to videos that I'd made 10 years ago and try to argue with people. It just wasn't fruitful. So I just ended up taking down all of the comments, and that has been a blessing for me. Now, if you have a youtube or if you have a space where you're preaching the internet and you feel led to engage people on your channel, that may be right for you. That may be a great way to evangelize. During those 10 years that I did have comments, I probably spoke to thousands of people and likely left thousands, if not a million comments on the internet during that time on my own page. And there was a lot of good in it. I believe people were encouraged. But after an extended amount of time, it became too much for me to handle. And there was a lot of drama in the comments and a lot of people just cursing and saying things that are not of the spirit of God.

In each of these ways to evangelize, we have to just be led by the Holy Spirit and ask him, what is the best way to evangelize and to reach people for you, Lord? And each of our situations will be different. The Lord is not going to call everyone to go on the internet. He is not going to call everyone to be a street preacher. He's not going to call everyone to Africa. But he may call you just to your own children. You know what? A big portion of ministry that people look over is their own family. There are a lot of pastors who have mistakenly thinking that a bigger ministry or a bigger way to evangelize is their church. And they spend all this money, all this time, and all these resources on trying to evangelize the lost. And their own children are lost. And their own children see the pastor's hypocrisy. And then their own children are committing suicide. They're on drugs. They're overdosing. They're not living the Christian life. And if the parent, that pastor or that leader in the church, was to just look at their own life and realize the people that God had put in their own life, their own children, they would realize these are the most important people in my life. Your children are in your own household for a minimum of like 18 years. And what are you going to do when you stand before God and he says, you know, your own children didn't even follow me because of you. You were spending so much time thinking you were evangelizing in the church or evangelizing on the street that you lost your own children. That's not going to fly with God.

And a lot of people have made evangelism into something that they think they can appease God with, or they can get bonus points in the heaven, brownie points, or somehow earn their salvation. And that is not how God has created this life. Jesus has created us to love the Lord our God with all of our heart, but to love our neighbor as ourself. And your closest neighbor in proximity to you is going to be likely your wife, your children, your grandma, your grandfather, whoever those people God put in your life. And they should be the first people that you are witnessing to. Evangelizing, loving, telling about God. As the body of Christ, we should have these people first and not think that we're doing God's work by going far out, doing all these things that seem showy to the world, yet not taking care of the things right around us.

Jesus spoke about this when he rebuked the Pharisees. He talked about how the Pharisees would tithe and they would fast. And how they would give alms to the poor and they would do all these things to the extent that they wouldn't even take care of their own parents. In fact, they would say to their own parents, I can't give you any money. I can't help you because what I might have been able to help you with, I have to give to my tithes and my offering and do my church. And so by doing that, they basically made all the commands of God completely worthless. Their religion is totally worthless. We don't want our belief in God to become worthless or just rituals that we go through or thinking that we're buying our way into heaven by doing ministry or doing evangelism. And it seems a lot of people here now, Christians I mean, are led by guilt and not led by love. So they feel guilty because they don't look like the street evangelist, the open air preacher. And they watch these videos on the internet that seem really showy, they go, man, I'm not doing enough for God. If only I could get out there on the street. And so they leave their family, the ministry God has given them. And now they're flying all across the country to go do evangelism. Yet they have left the genuine and real evangelism and outreach of their own family raising their own children, which is so sad.

 Are we as Christians rooted in reality, the reality of Jesus? Or have we traded that reality and the people that are genuine in our life for false realities, for things that seem good and have an outward show? Or are we truly doing the work, the ministry of the Holy Spirit? Are we taking care of our marriage? Are we working on our marriage? Are we teaching our children every day to grow in the love of the Lord? Are we abiding in God's love so that when we wake up in the morning, we can share the love of Jesus? And minister to our own family members? Are we doing that? Or are we just trying to appease a guilty conscience or even a false guilt because we've seen other Christians do things that seem showy and we want to be like them? It's a big problem to be following people, to be following or trying to look like a preacher on the internet, to try to look like somebody else.

God has created you unique. And if you will listen to him and not be like the other Christians who follow after false guilt or someone else's conviction, then the Holy Spirit can lead you specifically in what you need to do. So to answer the question, what is the right way to evangelize? It would be however the Lord leads you. There's no right or wrong way. It's however Jesus leads you. But you can do it wrong if you're falling into this false guilt or being manipulated by people. There's a lot of ministries that are very manipulative guys. One of those are deliverance ministries. They try to get you involved and they prophesy over you. They claim to cast out demons and they do all these things that seem so showy and they will manipulate Christians to no end. I would stay far away from that. Unless God has specifically called you to do a deliverance ministry and to pray for people and to cast out demons, don't be wrapped up in that stuff that seems showy. Otherwise, you're bound for disaster. It would be better that you stayed separate, like John the Baptist was separate, how the disciples had to separate from the crowd, so that then you could be filled with the Holy Spirit and go out with the power of God instead of being manipulated by all of these so-called Christian ministries.

So evangelize, but make sure that you're being led by the Holy Spirit, not some other man, and make sure that you're not trying to just emulate another person who may or may not be filled with the Spirit of God. I hope this message makes sense to someone. I hope that you do evangelize because we want the lost world to come to know Jesus. We want people, people in our family, our friends, our relatives, people on the internet, wherever they are, we want people to come into the kingdom of God and we don't want God's house to be empty. So there is a right place to go out and to preach Jesus. So don't be discouraged from, what kind of evangelism the Lord leads you to, do that. But make sure that it's really led by the Holy Spirit and that Jesus is with you and that you're not doing it out of some false conviction or feeling guilty because you don't look like the street preacher down the road. I hope that makes sense to those of you who are listening and I hope that you go out led by the Holy Spirit to evangelize a lost world.

So “Lord Jesus, I pray for my fellow brothers and sisters that they will be filled with your Holy Spirit. That they will go out and be a light to the dark world, that they would be an encouragement to family members and friends. And whether it's by good report or bad report, that they would continue to stand in the light of the truth with you, whether they are mocked or hated or shamefully spoken of. We pray that we continue to stand in the light of the truth and that we don't worry what people think about us, but that we concern ourselves with doing, just doing what's right before God. I pray this in your name, Lord Jesus. Amen.”