I’ve been thinking about evangelism. I think three things are key to effective evangelism: loving Jesus, loving people and living life. Perhaps ‘delight’ or ‘relish’ would be better words: relish Jesus, relish people, relish life....
...Enthusiasm for evangelism doesn’t begin with evangelism at all. Exhortations to evangelize just leave us feeling useless. Driven by guilt we try ‘turning’ the conversation at work round to spiritual things with horrible crunching gear changes or we knock on a few doors to little effect. And so we give up. Again. And feel guilty. Again.
Enthusiasm for evangelism begins with an enthusiasm for Jesus. My willingness to speak of Jesus arises from my delight in Jesus. People love talking about the thing they’re into. Man United. Knitting. Vintage cars. A new boyfriend. Whatever it is, they love talking about. It bubbles out of them with an infectious passion. When we’re ‘into’ Jesus an infectious passion for Jesus bubbles out of us. To get going on evangelism we need to rewind to some of our earlier principles - back to God and his glory, back to the God’s work of change in our lives, back to the welcome and grace of cross, back to future glory. We need to get excited all over again with Jesus. We need to excite one another with the gospel day by day.
Update: here's part 2 on Loving People. Here's part 3 on Loving Life.
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