A Faith Worth Sharing: Kickoff Session (Part 1)

This podcast is a ministry of Christ the King Presbyterian Church in Raleigh, North Carolina. You are listening to our Sunday school series entitled, "A Faith Worth Sharing."

I'm really excited about doing this content. So just to frame it, we're gonna go through a lot of the content I developed during my time in India, which then started virally spreading. We've realized it's useful in a lot of different places. There are about seven or eight modules we do in the area of evangelism, and we also do some renewal modules for the heart. We're gonna do one tomorrow, actually. We've found that when churches, individuals, and leaders actually apply these tools and create a culture around them, beautiful things happen.

Now I just want to give one warning before I pray. This is pretty simple stuff. It's gonna make a lot of intuitive sense as I go through it. It's gonna be deconstructing a lot of the bad stuff you've been given on evangelism the last twenty years. But you can't unsee this and you can't unhear it. It's like opening a door, and once you go through the door, you can't go back. So I'm warning you right now. We're gonna go through the door and you won't be able to go back. It's just gonna create new tensions and challenges for you.

What I've discovered about this unit in particular is it's super easy to understand, and it's actually pretty irresistible. You're like, "Wow, this is really exciting." But then most churches struggle to implement this because it means you have to change your habits, your priorities, and your missionality. That's where it gets really challenging. So that's what I meant about going through a doorway. I imagine most of you at the end of this workshop are gonna be like, "That was awesome." But implementing it is a whole other thing, and that's gonna take a while.

So, with that being said, let me pray for us, and then we'll dive right in.

Father in heaven, we're grateful for your kindness and grace to us. Thank you for bringing us here. Thank you so much for hiding us in Jesus. We don't even have words to express or ideas fully formed enough to help us understand and celebrate what we have in him. But we're grateful right now, on some level, that we understand that we are righteous and beautiful and breathtaking and safe in Jesus.

Lord Jesus, we're so glad you love us, protect us, and are gonna keep us safe and secure so you can have us whole and full with you in the new heavens and your earth. But right now, Lord Jesus, we need your Holy Spirit to give us eyes to see you on your throne and eyes to see what you've called us to do on your behalf on this planet. So, Lord, help us. We beg you by your spirit. We pray this in your glorious name, Jesus. Amen.

Evangelistic Friendships

Alright. Evangelistic friendships. Usually, when we have a seminar on evangelism anywhere in the world, everyone in the room gets somber real quick. Why do we get somber? Fear. What else? Guilt. Absolutely. Rejection. Plenty of it. What else? It's not sexy. It's very personal to us. Some of us have been loving on people where we're not going anywhere with them, so that makes us very somber. What else? It's a serious topic. Unprepared. Bad experiences.

And you put all that into a soup, and then you just live in that soup for long enough, and you're like, "I just don't wanna think about this right now. Or, ugh, I gotta feel bad again. Whatever that bad means." And so this is what we're dealing with.

What I want us to frame from the very beginning is this: our mission is just to love our friends into the kingdom of heaven. That's what evangelism is. We're literally loving our friends into the kingdom of heaven. The module we're doing doesn't line up with this perfectly, but what I'm trying to do is help you see the basic nuts and bolts of what we're trying to accomplish here. If I can use a little football analogy, this is the blocking and tackling of evangelism.

First and foremost, this is what we're gonna do the next two Sunday school sessions: we're gonna work on renewal dynamics. Evangelism doesn't happen if you're not enjoying Jesus. You're not gonna love your lost friends if you're not enjoying Jesus. You're not gonna push through all the bad stuff we just talked about—the soup that we're living in—unless you're enjoying Jesus. And actually, if you're not doing evangelism, it probably means you're not enjoying Jesus.

When you look at the scriptures, people who are all on mission for Jesus typically have a white-hot relationship with Christ. What we've discovered over time is that getting renewal dynamics working in your heart is the key to evangelism. It's the cure-all. As that happens, we need to reactivate our missional identity.

The way we look at ourselves usually doesn't line up with how Jesus looks at us. And so we can regain how we've been sent into the world and start cultivating friendships out of a hot, white-hot worship of Jesus. That then gets us into a place where we can have shared mission.

Now we're gonna talk about this later. But fellowship is not this building or it's not hanging out, eating food like that. Fellowship is having an intermission missional partnership. Fellowship is like fellowship of the ring. It's like a bunch of people on a mission together who are madly in love with each other. And so once you actually reactivate fellowship and you're doing it together, then you can build deep friendships, use your home, and eventually have great conversations with each other.

I had a great time in Christian fellowship when I was at Carolina, but a lot of us were given bad methodology that only works on campuses when it comes to evangelism. I'm not taking a swing on campus ministries right now. I'm just saying that the methodology that got popular from the eighties and nineties on most college campuses is horrible with real adults. Horrible.

So usually, when I start talking about evangelism, people are like, "Oh, no. Don't make me do contact evangelism." Yes. We are on the same page. We're not gonna do contact evangelism. But most people think evangelism and they equate it with conversations. And what I want you to think about is a whole evangelistic dynamic where you're enjoying Jesus, rediscovering who you've been sent to reach where you live, work, play, serve, get on mission together with other believers, use your homes in neutral places to build deep friendships where you eventually have conversations. This is evangelism. Got it? This is what we're gonna try to activate.

And the good news is Paul realized that, and he actually gave us a descriptive passage to help us figure that out. And so right now, for most of us, evangelism stalls out, doesn't it?

Real quick. Why does it stall out for most of us? It takes a lot of time. Yes. And what else? It wasn't effective fast enough. What else? Why else does it stall out for us? Fear of friends versus fear of God. Oh, that's good.

So this is gonna sound a little over the top, but we'll get to the gospel stuff later on. It's weird how this works, whether it's spiritual warfare, culture, all that stuff, because at some point, most of us just don't care anymore. We start defining healthy Christian and healthy church apart from this. So if you just look at the scriptures from 30,000 feet, you can't be a healthy church if you don't do evangelism. You can't be a healthy follower of Jesus and not do evangelism.

Now as I say that, everyone's like, yeah. That makes sense. But at some point, most Christians anywhere around the world can be like, "I'm a devout follower of Jesus, and I don't care about evangelism." And those two things can just live in unity together. Isn't that bizarre? And so I just wanna force us to live in the realities, these weird dichotomies in our heart right now. We're like, "Oh, I love Jesus. Do you do evangelism? Nope."

And so something's just kinda broken and wrong right now. Now we're righteous in Christ. Jesus loves us. There's no need to go to guilt and shame right now. But I just want us to deal with that reality that we just think it's okay when it's really not.

Creating an Evangelistic Culture

Alright. So we have to create an evangelistic culture. And to do that, we need to have shared values, vocabulary, practices, and motivation. If I can just take this to your workplace: if you wanna have a great workplace culture, these things are things that you focus on. So going back to a church, we have to have shared values that we're rallying around, and then a shared vocabulary. And this is why tools are so important because it gives you a new vocabulary to rally around, and that vocabulary then leads to shared practices—which we don't have yet—which then creates a shared motivation, which then creates shared experiences, and boom, you have a new culture going on here.

And so a lot of what we're about to do over the next four weeks is I'm gonna give you a bunch of tools that over time on various levels in the church, we can create these shared experiences around shared tools where we have shared values, vocabulary, practice, and motivation because it takes all that to create an evangelistic dynamic.

Alright. So this is the passage we're gonna spend this morning on. Does someone wanna read it and yell it out loud? Do we need bold readers?

Devote yourselves to prayer. Stay alert in it with thanksgiving. — Colossians 4:2-6

At the same time, pray also for us that God may open a door to us for the word, to speak the mystery of Christ for which I am in chains so that I may make it known as I should. Act wisely toward outsiders, making the most of the time. Let your speech always be gracious, seasoned with salt so that you may know how you should answer each person.

Alright. So this is the clearest, most descriptive passage in the entire Bible on how we should do evangelism. The scary thing is most of us are like, oh, wow. That's in the Bible? And then the rest of us are like, I probably should have spent more time on this. And so this is where we're gonna chew on for the rest of this morning in various phases.

The Evangelism Process

Alright. So think of this as a process, and I think this is the process this passage prescribes for us. Hang out in prayer for all your lost friends. Enjoy the gospel with great gratitude. Get gritty about the mission God's given you. Start building connections with people, which then lead to friendships. And within the context of those friendships, begin to influence them in the gospel so that eventually you can have gospel conversations.

Now, for those of you note takers, please keep taking notes, but we're gonna give you this PDF after this is over. So take notes for whatever the Spirit's teaching you versus I have to write every word down.

No one likes pyramid screams, but you can think of it as a pyramid as well. Think of us as layers of foundations. On the foundation of prayer, we're building gratitude in the gospel. On that foundation, we're gonna have grit around a unified mission. Around that foundation, we're gonna start building connections, which is we need to build friendships, which can influence the way of gospel conversations.

This is actually a very helpful way of looking at it because you're gonna be praying for way more people than you actually have conversations with. You see how that looks? You're gonna be connecting with way more people than you're actually having conversations with. And so if you look at this as layers of foundations, it's like, oh, yeah. I just gotta slowly build this up. Honestly, if you have one person right now you're having regular gospel conversations with, that's great. That's actually great. I don't think the Bible is saying you're supposed to be sharing the gospel with everyone all the time. So if you've actually built a substantive friendship where you're talking about Jesus, praise the Lord. And so what we wanna do is just fill out all these foundations in a robust way.

The Foundation of Prayer

The first foundational layer is prayer. We're gonna do this in about ten minutes. So here we go.

Devote yourselves to prayer. Stay alert in it, being watchful.

Another way you could translate that word is cling to prayer. Now why would Paul have to tell us to cling to prayer as it relates to evangelism? Because we forget to do it. It's foundational. We can't do it by ourselves.

If we were praying for our lost friends on a regular basis, what happens to us? We start to look for evidences that God is answering them. We start to be a lot more attentive. We start to trust God more to be in control of that, or at least God's at work on some level. We increase our closeness. We fall in love with them, which makes us wanna spend more time with them and pray more and be more creative in how we develop that friendship. I think Paul knew exactly what he was up to on this. We need to cling to prayer when it comes to our lost friends.

Now we're gonna make this very actionable. We also need to stay alert in it, being watchful. Now why would Paul tell us to be watchful as we're praying? What are we being watchful for? We're watching for where God's working.

See, our lost friends are just like us. Their lives are a mess. They have an in-law problem here or kids going off the rails there or someone's sick. And as you're praying for them all the time and your heart's full of them, their issues will be on your heart as well, and you will see God at work. A lot of times we miss stuff because we're just not praying, or we miss opportunities to develop a friendship because we're just not being alert in it.

God's clearly at work. If I can give you a superficial example of this. If I lived in Orlando, my son and I had the same gal who cut our hair, and she was awesome. And so she had all these great tattoos and stuff, and it was this really hip place where we got a haircut, and I felt like a fraud going there every time.

As we built that relationship with her between my son and I, we actually got to know her really well. And I remember praying for her, and I remember Jacob was like, I'm praying for her too. And I'm like, oh, this is great. But I remember at one point, she was talking about a particular family challenge. And then I remember just thinking about it, praying for her, and then the next time I saw her, I asked her about it, and that meant the world to her. It meant the world to her. She's like, oh, wow. And then she just started pouring out her heart.

It's amazing. We just love our friends, pay attention to what they say, pray for them all the time, cultivate a heart for them, and just follow up on what God's already doing in their life. It's amazing how it just opens doors for deeper friendships. So prayer is absolutely essential for evangelism, and it develops our hearts for them.

The Hashtag Exercise

Alright, so we're going to do a simple exercise. We call it the hashtag exercise. It's a very fancy tool here. You may have a thousand people in real life that don't know Jesus. You might have two. I don't know. But right now, where you live, work, and play, serve—some of you are mercy and justice oriented—home in on nine people that you could pray for on a regular basis.

Now don't write too big because there's going to be other things we're going to put in those categories a little bit later, okay? So who are nine lost people? It could be family. Some of us have a lot of family that could overpopulate this. Friends from college or high school, your neighbor, the person in the cubicle next to you, fellow grad student. See where I'm going with this? Your workout partner at the gym. Go ahead and populate it. Just any person. I do not want any Christians on this sheet of paper. For the purpose of this, you're only praying for lost people right now. For those of you who brought your journal or moleskin, it is okay to use your journal for this exercise.

I'm going to give you literally thirty more seconds. Don't overthink it. Throughout the rest of the morning, you'll find yourself filling it in more. So for those of you who are from a school standpoint and really need to get things done and be excellent at it, it's okay. Just chill. By the end of the morning, you'll have it all filled out. It's going to be awesome. We just want some theory to practice.

It's interesting to talk about praying for your lost friends. Isn't it weird to look at a sheet of paper with nine names on it or five names on it and go, "Oh. Oh, yeah. There are eternities at stake. This is a big deal."

Prayer Gatherings and Prayer Systems

So what I want to talk about is two things: how do we regularly pray for those people? And I have two concepts for you that I want you to process. One is how do we have prayer gatherings where we pray for our lost friends, and the other one's prayer systems. We'll start with prayer gatherings.

One of the things we figured out when I was church planting in Orlando is if you have people do an exercise like this and you're in community groups and you just spend some of your time in community group, what happens to your community group? It's closer. The group comes closer. And what also happens? You become more aware. You become more aware. And then as you pray for each other's names, you're like, "Hey, how's it going with your friend Joe?" "Oh, wow. You even care about my lost friends." It's amazing what happens.

Now isn't it weird that a pastor has to tell a congregation in your community groups to pray for lost people? Isn't that weird? That's what I'm saying. But what I'm doing here is really simple.

If you actually do this hashtag exercise, and at some point, people are just—this is all you do in community group. These are my nine people. Let me tell you a little bit about them. And then people are writing down their names in journals. And then every couple weeks, you're just praying for fifteen to twenty minutes for your lost friends, lives change. The kingdom advances and reigns down its grace.

You do not receive because you just don't ask.

So prayer gathering—sometimes you use community groups. Sometimes you have special prayer gatherings.

This is like when a pastor says we're going to gather people together and pray for the lost, five people show up. What if we had a room like this show up because everyone has been doing this in their community groups, and you're praying altogether for the lost? Can you think of experiences like this in the book of Acts where people were afraid, and then they prayed and the room shook? And what did God do? Open doors for the faithful witness of the gospel.

So prayer gatherings—we'll have time to figure out the strategy around this, but what if you actually did this in your community groups?

Prayer Systems

Secondly, what is your prayer system going to be? For those of you who like super organized systems that are really easy, my favorite is at the end of The Praying Life by Paul Miller. He uses index cards. It's awesome and super easy to do. If you've never read The Praying Life, it's the best book on prayer you can find, bar none. And it starts with your skepticism around prayer and evangelism. It's beautiful. I mean, when I used to work for Tim Keller, I would always have to pause and say, I know Keller has a book on prayer, but Paul Miller's is better. But I don't work with Keller anymore. So it's a great book.

For those of you who like using your iPhones, someone developed a free app designed around Paul Miller's system. You can go to the App Store and search "praying life" and the free app pops up. You can use your journal. You can use notes on your iPhone. You can stick this sheet of paper in your Bible. To me, I don't even care what system you have as long as you have a system.

In time, we're going to work this into the life and culture of our church, but I'm just giving you some big ideas right now. How are we going to regularly pray together for our lost friends, and what is your prayer system to regularly pray for them?

The thing is, it doesn't have to be fancy and it doesn't have to be sophisticated. It could be on your way to the gym every morning going, "Lord, I want to pray for Dave, I want to pray for Raj," and you just rattle off their names and pray for them for five minutes on your way to the gym. See how that works? The system doesn't mean you're in a closet on your knees recreating some Puritan experience or having an unction from heaven. No. It doesn't have to be any of those things. It could be while you're on a treadmill.

So the real question is: how are you activating prayer for your lost friends?

Moving to Gratitude

As we've laid that foundation for prayer, we need to move into gratitude.

Devote yourselves to prayer, staying alert in it with thanksgiving. — Colossians 4:2

Friends, what do we have to be thankful for? Yes, aside from all the earthly blessings he gives us, when we actually think about what we have to be thankful for in Christ, it's mind-blowing. Let's practice rehearsing that together. What do we have to be grateful for in Christ?

The Bible. How he loves us. Freedom from sin. Salvation. Eternal life with Christ. Our sins are forgiven. The Holy Spirit is sanctifying us right now. Joy. Inexpressible joy. Communion with God. And the body. Both. These are beautiful things to be thankful for. Total forgiveness. He's coming back. He's going to reveal things that are broken. He's going to come back and make all things right. He broke the power of sin. We're allowed to walk in all the stuff he's still doing. He's at work right now, and he's going to use broken us to do it.

Now imagine if your heart warmed up on this every day—if your theology didn't stay in books or classes but got expressed in your prayer life, both individually and together as you rehearse the gospel. This is what we're going to completely talk about tomorrow, so I don't need to belabor this point right now.

But we have to learn how to celebrate the gospel. We have to learn how to meditate on the gospel. We have to learn how to preach the gospel to our hearts. We need to know how to be super thankful for what Christ has done because the power of the gospel is released when it's preached. And the most important sermon that's preached is not what I do on Sunday—it's what you do every day with yourself.

Do you preach the gospel to your heart? We need to celebrate and be thankful for what Christ's done. Gratitude in the gospel is absolutely essential, and what we see from the Bible's logic is that it's the love of Christ that compels us to do evangelism and ministry.

D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones put it really well. Can we get another reader?

Have you realized that most of your unhappiness in life is due to the fact that you're listening to yourself instead of talking to yourself? The main art in the matter of spiritual living is to know how to handle yourself. You have to take yourself in hand. You have to address yourself, preach yourself, question yourself, and then you must go only to remind yourself of God—who God is, and what God is, and what God has done, and what God has pledged himself to do.

D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones was a Welsh preacher from Great Britain, kind of late 1900s, and this is where Tim Keller stole all his stuff from. No, it's true. So if this feels oddly familiar, it is.

What stands out to you from this? Separation of listening and talking. Good. Also a sense of ownership over your own faith. I like the ownership word. That's good. You have to get to the stage and focus on yourself moving towards what God says as well. Yes. You have to tell yourself the truth. Yes. Keep going. This is great, everybody. Yes, it's continual. It's not a cheap grace that lets you off the hook and pretends like God will sort everything later with no thought to how you were going to live every day.

I mean, this is a very countercultural thought nowadays, isn't it? Super countercultural. Because if you listen to what's being played, aired, read—it's pretty much you gotta listen to that voice or that message in your heart. And actually, D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones is doing what I'm gonna show you what the Bible does tomorrow. It's like, no. You gotta listen to it, and then you gotta speak to it. There's supposed to be this dialogue that's happening inside your soul.

If I can spiritualize a little bit—Galatians 5 teaches that there's a war going on inside of you. There's spirit and flesh, and they're working contrary to one another. And so then you are supposed to keep in step with the spirit and join that dialogue and conversation. This is what D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones is doing here. What's going on in your heart? What are those messages? The ones that are negative or not grounded in Scripture and reality? Are you regrounding yourself in the gospel and having that internal dialogue?

Friends, this is where evangelism is won or lost every morning when you wake up. Our ability to engage our unbelief and our fears and ambitions and our idols and remind ourselves of the gospel is the difference between us walking in the spirit that day and walking in the flesh.

So do we know how to preach the gospel to our hearts? When we are filled with unbelief—that's the most important time to preach the gospel to our hearts, to be able to look at our soul and hold it and go: You are new in Christ. You are enjoyed by him. He absorbed the wrath of God and suffered on your behalf to give you his whole life in righteousness. Right now, the Spirit is crying out, "Abba, Father" inside of me. Right now, the Father is showering his love all over me. He's counted every hair on my head and has plans and purposes for me. Right now, King Jesus is sitting on his throne looking at me, protecting me, praying for me, and all his prayers are answered yes and amen. Right now, the Holy Spirit's keeping me safe. He sealed me. He's inspiring me. He's convicting me. He's teaching me. He's training me. He's helping me to behold Jesus. One day, I'm gonna reign and rule with Jesus in a brand new world. One day, he's gonna give me everything. One day, I'm gonna be fully whole and without sin and shame, and I'm gonna enjoy him wholly. I'm gonna be with my brothers and sisters, and we're gonna be celebrating in the richest affair at the greatest banquet of all time as Jesus gives us his crown and glory, and we reign and rule with him forever. And Jesus has done all that's necessary to keep me safe for that one day because I'm his beloved.

Friends, are you preaching that to your hearts every day? The greatest skill we can learn as a follower of Jesus is learning to meditate on this gospel and then learning how to preach it to our hearts. Evangelism is won and lost in this space.

Now, because we're gonna talk about this tomorrow, I'm not gonna belabor this. So how are you activating gratitude? How are you activating gratitude?

Alright, we're gonna do one more, then we're gonna take a break. So as we lay this foundation of prayer, where we're regularly praying for our lost friends, and on that foundation, we're learning to meditate on the gospel and preach it to our hearts. What does it look like for us to have gospel-shaped grit?

Now a lot of you are probably like, what in the world is grit? It's a great question to ask. Thankfully, Angela Duckworth wrote an entire book about the subject of grit, and she has a great definition. Someone read this for me.

Grit is passion and perseverance for long term goals.

Grit is about what some researchers call an ultimate concern—a goal you care about so much that it organizes and gives meaning to almost