Loving the Lost

     I had a great learning experience recently, it was painful yet much was learned. The long and the short of it was this… I sat through a 2 hour class about evangelism, not exactly by choice. The class started as the international teacher/evangelist handed out the script on how to evangelize. Then for 2 hours he and his wife talked about how to read the steps off the page to get people to pray the sinners prayer. God bless them and their service this is not aimed at them, and you will never know who it is or the ministry anyways. This is aimed at mindsets that are void of being Spirit led while trying to get people to pray the sinners prayer.

     At one point some students actually spoke up disagreeing with what he was teaching, and these students gave solid biblical reasoning as to why they disagreed. His response was, "just follow the formula, it works." My heart hurt, I literally felt like I was going to get sick listening to this sales pitch approach to treating people like projects and trying to them to submit to religion.

     We are called to be a walking encounter with heaven, people are supposed to encounter the love and power of Jesus through our lives. Galatians 2:20 My old self has been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me. So I live in this earthly body by trusting in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. (NLT) This is the reality of the Gospel, it's not a theory, it is the Truth of Christ living in us.

     Yes their absolutely is a time for salvation, obviously, but if your intention from the very beginning is to try and get them to agree with your doctrine, then that actually seems more like trying to make someone conform to your idea of Jesus and not who He really is. When that is our driving motive from the beginning, they think they have to conform to another persons idea of how to have a relationship with Jesus. Instead of Holy Spirit showing them how to personnally have a relationship with Jesus through the written word and the intimacy of His presence and voice.

     If you ever had someone share religion with you and it sounded like a sales pitch, as a faithful lover and follower of Jesus, I apologize to you. Jesus would never talk to you in a way that would make you feel stupid. Their is a huge difference between lovingly explaining and showing the Gospel too someone that doesn’t know it, and speaking to them like you are better than them because you just happened to open the free gift of grace before they did.

     Jesus would not talk to you in a way that would create fear. Asking someone, "if you died tonight, do you know if you’d go to heaven of hell," is pure fear and slides the plan of God for their life aside only to replace it with fear. If fear is the motive that moves you to share Jesus understand this... fear is the currency that moves hell, love is the currency that moves heaven. I am not talking about the fear of God here (the fear of God is extremely healthy for us, but that is another topic for another day), I am talking about trying to force peoples hand in choosing Jesus because the devil might kill them tonight. If fear is the driving force that pulls someone into the kingdom, then they will have to stay in a mindset of fear to think they can stay in the kingdom.

     Evangelist simply means this… Evangelist in the Greek is ‘euaggelistés’ - a bringer of good news, a messenger and bearer of good tidings. The Gospel is the greatest news on earth. What better news is their than this… everything you have done wrong in your life you will not have to pay for, by simply saying yes to Jesus and what He did on the cross. God paid for your sin and sickness and you get to go to heaven by just receiving this gift named Jesus Christ. That would actually be amazing if it stopped there, but it doesn’t. The Truth is even better than that! Not only does your rightful punishment get removed from you, but you get the life that the King should have rightfully lived. He died for you so we could live in His freedom. You get to experience heaven now, and live in the presence and grace of God right here and now! That is really good news folks!

     Are people sinners without Jesus? Yes, but we have the ministry of reconciliation, not the ministry of condemnation. 2 Corinthians 5: 16 From this time on we do not think of anyone as the world does. In the past we thought of Christ as the world thinks, but we no longer think of him in that way. 17 If anyone belongs to Christ, there is a new creation. The old things have gone; everything is made new! 18 All this is from God. Through Christ, God made peace between us and himself, and God gave us the work of telling everyone about the peace we can have with him. 19 God was in Christ, making peace between the world and himself. In Christ, God did not hold the world guilty of its sins. And he gave us this message of peace. 20 So we have been sent to speak for Christ. It is as if God is calling to you through us. We speak for Christ when we beg you to be at peace with God. 21 Christ had no sin, but God made him become sin so that in Christ we could become right with God. (NCV)

     Jesus would not be pushy and in your face upon meeting you while trying to tell you why He is right and you are wrong. Here is a really good study for anyone wanting to share Jesus more. Study the Gospels and pay close attention to how Jesus interacted with unbelievers that He was meeting for the first time, or just developing relationship with. Then see how He dealt with people that should have known better and claimed to have known God and His ways for some time. You will see a drastic difference. Jesus never once condemned sinners the first time he met them. Yet He passionately unloaded the wrath of God on those that claimed to know God, but refused to love people and get to know and receive Him.

     Jesus would not talk to you in a way that feels like He is trying to sell you something. Bill Johnson said something brilliant recently, and this may or may not be verbatim but close enough, "For too long now the church has been trying to answer questions the world is not asking." Why should we interrupt people’s days to try and answer a question that they are not even asking? When we are led by the Spirit, we show up with the answers to the questions most prevalent in their life. When we show up answering the questions that are in the forefront of their life (through supernatural insight), that drives them to ask the questions that they should be asking.

     Some people think that it is not the Gospel to heal the sick, unless you get them to pray the sinners prayer after and then explain to them the entire death and resurrection. Many feel the same about giving people a super encouraging prophetic word that reveals God’s love and reality to them, unless you then tell them that they are a sinner. The healing on the spot and upon first meeting was what Jesus did everywhere He went. He showed up and answered and solved the pressing question or problem (pain, oppression, brokenness, disease, etc..) so it would open up the mindset for them to ask the correct question. His free gift was not dependent on whether they would surrender their life to Him on the spot. Jesus was the ‘exact representation on the Father’ (Heb. 1:3) so if that’s what He did, than it should be good enough for us. His free healing was the revealing that God loves them and He wants them to come to Him, because He is good and His actions towards them revealed that.

     The pockets of bad teaching on grace, that say or suggest that grace is license to live and act however we want whenever we want, has some people now thinking that being extremely loving is leaning towards being deceived as well. We are called to lay down our lives in love for the world, their response has nothing to do with our call to love. If we are worried about how we are perceived, or if we get accepted by the world, than we aren’t clearly perceiving God and his perfect love and the fact that we already are accepted by Him. Worrying about how the world sees us, reveals we don’t really know how God sees us.

     Showing up in love with the healing, prophetic insight, and presence of love reveals that their is a God that knows that person and He loves them. You will literally watch their heart shift on the spot and all the sudden the right questions (the questions they should be asking) begin to roll of their tongue.

     Jesus (on first meeting with you) would absolutely not debate with you. Again, a way to get clear and effective revelation on how to interact with unbelievers is to see how Jesus did it in the Gospels. Now, did Jesus debate with people? Yes, but rarely and only the Pharisees because they were putting people in the bondage He came to remove, and they were doing it in the name of God. Also, the only times Jesus did debate with them, He almost always ended each debate with a quick response that stumped them in their unloving methods to control people.

     John 3:16 "For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life." It does not say, "For God so loved the church…" Yes He does love the church, passionately, but His Son was sent for the entire world and how Jesus interacted with the world is how we should interact with the world. He loved sinners, He got accused of being all sorts of wrong things simply because He loved the lost so much. Honestly most people in America have heard the Gospel, they have, they may not understand it perfectly but they have heard the general theme of it. What the majority of the world has not seen, is the walking out of the Gospel, and it is far easier than we think! So let’s do it, let’s love the hell out of the world the way the King did!