RUN LIKE A CHAMPION

Evangelism – 3
Sammy Tippit: I want to welcome you back to this session where we’re sharing about how to share your faith in Christ, how to share Jesus with other people, and how to share what he has done for you. I’m with Wayne Jenkins. We’re both Louisiana guys. We grew up in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. We’ve been friends for many years. Wayne has been training people for many, many years on how to share Christ with other people. Wayne, thank you so much for being a part of this.
Wayne Jenkins: Thank you for asking me.
Sammy: We stopped, last time, talking about praying not for people who need Christ but for ourselves.
Wayne: Laborers. That’s right.
Sammy: For laborers, people who need to go in and share. There is a harvest. People are ready. People are hungry. I believe God has people ready. We just need to be ready. But there was one thing we didn’t talk about. Just quickly before we get into this other… That is the way we live. The way we live is going to make a great impact on how we share.
Wayne: That’s exactly right.
Sammy: We need to be praying for our lifestyles or changes that need to be made in the way we live our own lives.
Wayne: Well, back to that Colossians, chapter 4, passage when Paul talks about praying, our speech, and praying for opportunities and clarity in our speech… He goes on to talk about our lifestyle and living before that person as well. If what we live is not in sync with what we say, we will take and destroy everything we’ve said, so how we treat that person, how we live our lives, is vitally important to sharing the gospel.
In fact, the only place in the Scripture where it talks about sharing the gospel without a word is the place where it talks about the wife living a life before that husband who is lost. So it’s a significant part of the whole laborer’s…
Sammy: So is that sort of the platform from which we are able to share?
Wayne: Yeah. That’s exactly right.
Sammy: If the platform is torn down…
Wayne: We’re in bad shape.
Sammy: Yeah, so we need to have a platform, and the platform is really the way we live, the way we treat people. They need to see our good works and glorify the Father.
Wayne: Yeah.
Sammy: Okay, we build this platform. How do we share? How do we pray for the people? We’re going to be talking to people who may be really opposed to us. Some may be very open to us. There can be a variety of types. How do we pray for those people?
Wayne: I think the first thing we need to do is pray with the understanding that it’s not God’s will that any man be lost.
Sammy: That any man would perish.
Wayne: Yeah, that any man would perish. But then we need to pray in light of their condition. I think most of us (and the people we’re talking to) have been saved long enough that we’ve forgotten what it’s like to be lost. So we have to go back to the Scripture. What does the Scripture say is the condition of an unbeliever?
Sammy: Yeah. So we who know Christ need to remember what it was like before we came to Christ.
Wayne: That’s right.
Sammy: So that’s the first thing: to pray for their condition.
Wayne: You pray in light of their condition.
Sammy: In light of their condition.
Wayne: The Bible talks about their being blinded by Satan. They can’t see. They have to have their eyes opened, so we’re going to pray that God will open their eyes. I can’t open their eyes. I can share the gospel, but he’s the one who has to open their eyes.
Sammy: See, I think this is a critically important thing. We need to remember we’re not being salesmen. This is a spiritual thing we’re doing. Their eyes are blinded, so we need to pray that way. Okay, go ahead.
Wayne: There are several passages that tell us the man is bound. He is in the kingdom of darkness, and what has to happen? He has to be translated or transferred into the kingdom of God’s dear Son, according to the Scriptures, so he has to be set free. I can’t set him free. I can give him the message that sets him free, but again, it’s the power of God (which we’re going to talk about a little bit later) that really sets him free.
Sammy: So pray for them to be set free. You know my brother. You’ve met my brother.
Wayne: Yeah.
Sammy: He tells a story about this. I prayed for him for years and years and years, and after 25 years… He was an alcoholic, and he called me and said, “Sammy, I have to tell you what happened. A policeman pulled up behind me. I was driving home drunk. He pulled up behind me, and I thought, ‘Oh no.’ He arrested me, so they put me in jail.”
He said, “I was in the cell with a guy there for first degree murder. You know what I did?” I said, “What?” He said, “I called on the name of Jesus. Jesus set me free. The judge wanted to send me to therapy and all of this, and I told him, ‘You can do it, but Jesus has set me free.'” From that day to this day, he has been free. That’s what you’re talking about.
Wayne: That’s right.
Sammy: Only God could have done that. I shared Christ with my brother, but only God could do that. So we need to pray that they’d be set free.
Wayne: That bondage is just a symptom of the real bondage.
Sammy: Yeah.
Wayne: We have all kinds of bondage out there, but that bondage is just a symptom of the bondage he’s in within the kingdom of darkness.
Sammy: Then everyone has that bondage. It’s just expressed in different ways.
Wayne: Yeah.
Sammy: What else?
Wayne: The Bible says not that they will be condemned but that they’re already condemned. We need to understand that man is condemned as he stands right now. That’s his condition. He is hell bound. I think that if somehow we lose sight of that, we’re going to lose sight of really that person who’s next door, that person who may be a brother, may be a mother, or may be a father. That person is going to end up eternally separated from God in a place called hell.
Sammy: Yeah. You know, I think we’ve lost the sense that there is even an eternity.
Wayne: That’s right.
Sammy: This life is not the whole. This is just a short little portion, and we will step into eternity with God or without God, and it’s a dreadful thing to step into eternity without God.
Wayne: That’s exactly right.
Sammy: What else?
Wayne: According to Ephesians and some other passages in Colossians, we’re spiritually dead, which is a picture of where we are. I can stand over a casket of a man at a funeral. That man can’t resurrect himself. He has no power to resurrect himself. Now that’s the way a man who’s an unbeliever is. He cannot save himself.
But he has to come to the place of realizing the only one who can bring him to life is Christ. The message we share is that message that Christ can give him a life and bring him new life, but the way he is right now, he’s spiritually dead. The Bible goes on to talk about his being hopeless. There’s no hope in this world or the world to come. It’s terrible to live without hope.
One of the top three needs of Americans today… I think it’s worldwide. It depends on where you are as to how far that bar is raised, but I think it’s the word hope. It’s the main thing. It’s the hopelessness people face. It doesn’t matter what you have. You can be wealthy or you can be poor, but you live with an utter hopelessness in your life.
Sammy: I don’t want to get into a medical thing because I know there are some medical things with this, but a lot of depression comes from when people feel hopeless.
Wayne: That’s right.
Sammy: A lot of suicide comes from when people feel, “I don’t have any more hope.” You find a great rise in depression, not only in American culture, but… I’ve found that all over the world, there’s this rise. I think it’s because the darkness is getting darker.
Wayne: Let me just tell you. When I was there in college, Sammy, a young man lived next door to us when we got married. He committed suicide. I went in and found the suicide note, and the latter part of the suicide note… I remember all of it as if I just read it for the first time. The latter part of it says, “But I’ve lost hope in everyone and everything.” That’s where he was. He was just hopeless.
Sammy: Yes. So we need to be praying that they would see the hope is in Christ.
Wayne: Yeah. That’s right.
Sammy: We need to pray that they would see hope in Jesus. Okay, go ahead.
Wayne: Then they’re helpless. They can’t help themselves any more than with what we talked about before when we said they’re spiritually dead. No matter how hard they may try… A man is not justified or saved by his works, so he’s helpless.
Sammy: Okay. I think this is probably one of the most difficult things because everybody thinks, “Oh, I can do it. I don’t need any help. I can do it myself.” The truth is you can’t do it. We need to be praying for people. We need to pray for them in light of all of these things and this condition because we cannot raise them from the dead.
We cannot give them hope. We cannot do it for them, give them help. Only Christ can do that. Only Christ can remove the blinders, so you need to begin to pray in light of the condition of the people you know, realizing it’s deeply, deeply spiritual. You’re not a salesman, but you pray for the people who you know need Christ.