GO! Evangelism 2011

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GYC Southwest

Cycle of Evangelism

Gary Gibbs

Winsome Witnessing

What do you do when the meetings are over?

Hard Act to Follow

Adventist for such a Time as This!

If you would open up your Bible with me and we'll have our scripture reading for this evening.

The scripture reading tonight comes from Matthew 28, and it's in verse 18 through 20.

And it says this, And Jesus came and spake unto them, saying, All power is given unto me in heaven and in earth.

Go ye therefore and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost, teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you.

And lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world.

Let's pray together before the speaker stands.

Heavenly Father, we thank you for bringing us here tonight, that we can embark on this new journey that you have before us, that we can sit here together to learn at your feet, to train, to grow, to be strengthened.

And so we ask you, Lord, that you would send your Holy Spirit to be upon us, that in all the meetings that we sit upon, whether it's tonight or tomorrow or Sunday or Monday, we would leave this place renewed.

We would be strengthened to know that you are with us and that you will continue to guide us.

And so we ask for your presence now and that we would be ready for the message that you have for us tonight.

And we pray these things in Jesus's name, amen.

Now, you won't believe this, but I left Maryland yesterday in 66-degree temperature, sunny skies.

And today I called home and my wife rubbed it in.

She said, it's over 70 degrees today and the sun is shining.

And there was snow melting yesterday and there was probably a little left today.

And I talked to my kids, 2 little girls, and they are so excited because just last week They said, we are tired of being cooped up in the house.

Now, they would never have done that if I'd been around, or their mother had seen them.

They took their shoes off, and they were running around their bare feet in the mud that was made from the snow melting, so go figure.

But here we are in sunny, well, not sunny California, Southern California today.

Wes Peppers from Amazing Facts, I understand, had to actually drive down.

His flight was canceled because of snow up in Sacramento.

So it's global warming, I'm sure of that.

Are you glad to be here tonight, this weekend?

You know, this can be a life-changing experience for you.

At least it can be a life-enhancing experience for you, because There's nothing probably more calculated to bless and grow your life than learning how to share Jesus Christ with someone else.

I mean, it is power-packed when you learn how to do that.

Even if you don't know Jesus as your personal Savior, If you learn how to share Him, He will become your Savior.

Reminds me of a story I heard a guy tell 1 time.

He was into street evangelism in the city of Chicago, a tough area of Chicago, and he had a youth group that he was training.

And you know, a lot of these youth were there because their parents wanted them to be there, and so he had a lot of people who weren't sincerely interested, but he took them out 1 evening on the streets of Chicago and pulled off to a side street.

They parked the car and they got out, and it was actually a van full of kids.

They got out and, you know, they had prayer and everything, but as they were walking up to the main strip where everybody was gathered and all the hoodlums and people were standing around in groups.

They said, oh, by the way, I forgot to tell you.

If Jesus isn't your personal Savior, you better make that right with him before you turn this corner because These people out on the street are street smart, and they'll be able to see through you and know whether you're converted or not.

And you don't want to go out there not really knowing Jesus, because they'll be tough on you.

So, I suggest you have a little prayer while we turn the corner.

And I'm sure there were a lot of conversions that took place right there in those next few steps.

So learning how to share your faith is just a blessing in many ways, a life-enhancing experience.

And I was 17 years old when I became a Seventh-day Adventist, and we didn't have GYC in those days, but God had a little GYC prepared for me anyway.

And He taught me and trained me, put me in touch with people who were willing to take a new church member that had hair down his back.

I wish I had some of that hair nowadays, but had hair down my back and was quite rough around the edges, and they took me under their wings and they trained me how to share Jesus, and that's why I'm here today.

It all started back then with learning how to share Christ.

And you have to share Him, don't you, when you love Christ?

Well, there are a lot of things about witnessing that you can learn the easy way or the hard way.

Now the easy way is to learn it from someone else and to get it kind of figured out in your head.

The hard way is to go out and just make your own mistakes.

And the reality is, is that you really learn it by doing both.

You don't learn until you go out there and you just start doing it and you say, oops, that doesn't work, I'll never do that again.

I'm gonna do something different next time.

I wanna share with you some of my oops times, some of the times that I've made mistakes, some of the things that I have learned.

Now this weekend has been designed to be very practical, and they've asked me to even make the evening sessions very practical, focused on training and soul winning.

And they've especially asked me to talk about the cycle of evangelism, how you can set up a cycle of evangelism in your churches.

But I want to start off tonight by looking at the most overlooked secret to soul winning.

Because we can talk about all sorts of things this weekend.

We can talk about how to get Bible studies, and we're going to do that.

We can talk about health ministry, And that's going to happen as well.

And we can talk about the cycle of evangelism.

You do this at this point and that at that point, and you do this other thing at another point.

But if you miss what I'm going to share tonight, then you'll have missed what evangelism is all about.

And it's really the most overlooked secret to soul winning.

I started off as a cold Porter, then I became a Bible worker, then I became an evangelist.

You went, just graduated from AFCO, Jonathan.

I made the business plan for Life, Lay Institute for Evangelism down in Florida, and I now have an online evangelism training school at hopenetonline.org.

And I've trained a lot of evangelists, especially when I was running the evangelism program at Amazing Facts, and it was very typical that people would be just like I was when I first started in evangelism.

We'd come on, we'd get our evangelistic studies and presentations down, we'd get our PowerPoint put together, we'd get the doctrines all settled and how to best present them.

And we'd focus so much on that that we'd overlook the most important secret to soul winning.

And it's that secret that I want to share with you tonight.

I talk about this in my book, my training book, Winsome Witnessing.

And by the way, you have a handout on page 15 if you want to take notes.

Winsome witnessing, the title of my book is based on a play on words that if you are winsome, If you're friendly, if people like you and you know how to be winsome, you will win some people to Jesus Christ.

And that in a nutshell is the most overlooked secret in soul winning.

Now I'm going to tease that out some in the next 45 minutes, and we're going to talk about specifically what that really looks like.

That if you're going to win some people to Christ, then you need to learn to be winsome like Jesus.

Now this is an evangelism weekend, right?

Well here's Jack Bauer's school of evangelism.

I don't know who Jack Bauer is, but he's got this ad.

Jack Bauer's got a gun on his hip, he's got his hand around the other guy's neck, and he's saying, do it!

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Series

Cycle of Evangelism

Winsome Witnessing

Transcript

Parent Series

Parent Conference

Sponsor

Recorded

John Chung, Chelsy Jourdan, and Sebastien Braxton: Cubicles and Christ

The Word in the Workplace

1h

GYC SE 2012 Seminar: Personal Evangelism

Conviction is the Key

57m

Elijah, Jesus and End Time People

59m

Cultivating Bible Study Interest

Cultivating Interests Through Bible Studies - Part 3

1h 13m

Ignite Your Local Church for Mission

Q and A and Final Charge

1h

Emmanuel Training Sessions

23. Bible Study Reformation

54m

Ministerial

Starting Bible Studies, Building Friendships and Gaining Decisions

1h 10m

Scott Moore: Do or Die

Conviction: Recognize it or They Die, Part 1

1h

Amazing Disciples

18. Preparing for Baptism

54m

Cycle of Evangelism

Hard Act to Follow

52m

Sound Doctrine