GO! Evangelism 2011

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GYC Southwest

Cycle of Evangelism

Gary Gibbs

Winsome Witnessing

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!

What do you do when the meetings are over?

I told you last night I left 70 degree weather in Maryland.

I didn't tell you it's going to be 32 on Tuesday when I get back home.

I thought I'd get a little warmth though in, yeah, I've got, yeah, there we go.

Coming here to LA at this time of year, I know it can be a little bit cold, but I was hoping it would be a little bit warmer.

Reminds me of what Mark Twain said, He said the coldest winter he ever, coldest winter he ever spent was a summer in San Francisco.

That needs to go back to the first slide, guys.

So what we're doing tonight is I don't have my computer hooked up to that, so I'm gonna be controlling that and my computer, but I wanted to start by telling you to go to page 23 if you have your book with you.

Page 23, I wanna share with you some resources.

I'll keep plowing forward until that gets settled.

Anyway, I want to share with you some resources that are exciting.

We've been on there for over, what, about 2 years now.

You know, if God made me with 1 more hand, I'd be really good, but.

And then when I get my hands free, I'll use that.

By the way, I never got introduced other than Gary Gibbs.

I'm talking about Hope Channel because I work for Hope Channel.

Evangelism, of course, is what I love and do some TV programs as well.

But the reason I'm at Hope Channel is because we need to reach people with the gospel of Jesus Christ, with the 3 angels message specifically.

And I believe that we ought to do everything to reach people.

We ought to do the cold port of work, the Bible studies, the evangelistic meetings and all that.

And yet we still won't reach all of them, but there are ways to reach the masses, and that's using mass communication.

So we need to be on the internet, we need to be on the radio, we need to be in the TVs.

And so, DirecTV goes to 19 million homes, which represents over 50 million people here in the United States.

And if you do it on average, it's on average 1 out of every 6 homes.

And yet, people need to know out of all those channels where to find real hope.

And so what we have is an outreach resource, it's door hangers.

You go door to door, you don't even have to knock on the door, you just stick it on the door and run if you're scared of knocking on doors.

And you leave that there and it points people to Hope Channel and Direct TV.

Let me give you another statistics that I find phenomenal.

I've questioned this statistic many times, but it's absolutely true.

250, 000 people a day in the US are making decisions where they are going to get their paid TV from.

Are they going to get it from Dish, Direct TV, Comcast, some other cable network?

Where are they going to get their paid TV from?

So our task is to point them over to Direct TV to get Hope Channel.

And the way we do that is with these door hangers.

Now on these door hangers, on the bottom, you have a photocopy of 1 in your book.

On the bottom it also has a tear off card offering Bible studies.

You're offering them 24-7 message of God through Hope Channel and Direct TV, but you're also offering them Bible studies in the card.

They can tear it off, send it back in, and we can send it back to you to fulfill so that you can actually go to the home and do the Bible study, or we can send it and have it done as a correspondence course.

We have a door hanger that focuses on Bible prophecy.

We have a general 1 if you're dealing with a very secular area, just dealing with family life.

So there are different approaches that you can use.

We've got people ordering these, you know, 100 at a time for their neighborhood.

And we've got people ordering these 100, 000 at a time.

Like they'll take all their pathfinders out and put them out on the streets for 36 days, you know.

Going door to door, but no, they'll go out in masses and pass out a hundred thousand of these, and it's working.

We just had got an email this past Christmas from a lady in Texas who is a pastor.

I got a phone call, we told this story the other day, somebody called up, is she pastoring the Adventist church?

It's a woman pastoring an Adventist church.

Deal with the real general conference on that 1.

But anyway, she's a pastor of a non-Adventist church.

So, she's, She was getting discouraged by what she was watching on TV all the time.

And so she turns to the DirecTV channel listings and guess what she finds?

Hope, hope channel, oh, that's what I need.

And she tunes in and she begins watching and it changes her life and she's now baptized.

She's now a member of the Adventist Church Now her husband was baptized out She was baptized a couple months ago And then her husband was baptized on Christmas this past year on Sabbath.

And then other members, it's a little tiny church, other members of her little small church are coming over to the Adventist church as well.

And her church is really a mission to the homeless and the poor people in that city.

This is from North Louisiana, the guy named Floyd.

And in the midst of the heart attack, he dropped to his knees and he started pleading with God to save his life.

And he felt his heart relax and he was fine.

Well, after that, he said this, I'm quoting his email, I just got this yesterday.

He said, upon realizing I was so biblically illiterate, I asked God to lead me to a real church, and he capitalizes real, where the real truth, and he capitalizes truth, was being taught.

Now it's very interesting he sent this because we just met with a major television executive who's helped start some major TV networks, And he said, you guys need to be the people of the truth.

Hard Act to Follow

Last night I told you about the door hangers and I have the order form for these on my table back there.

You can pick these up and if you want to just give this to me then I will take it back and will ship the door hangers out to you.

And again, it's a non-threatening way to witness.

Your members don't have to knock on doors.

You can just leave the door hanger on the door, pass them out.

It's got a free Bible study offer card on it, as well as tells people where to get Hope Channel on DirecTV.

And as I said yesterday, quarter million of the people a day are asking themselves, where am I going to get my paid TV from?

So there's a good chance you're going to run across 1 of those people when you put this on their door.

And they're comparing DirecTV with DISH, with Comcast, and AT&T, whatever their local cable service is.

And they're checking it out all the time, 250, 000 people a day.

And so you can help influence them to go to a place where they'll find Bible truth by putting these door hangers out and they're free.

The other thing I want to again draw your attention to, obviously you like evangelism training.

Well here's a free resource called HopeNet, it's online, it's all free.

You can go over there and you can get multitudes of videos, training videos, over 250 training videos.

The presentation I did last night is on there.

Many of our videos we have divided up into little 13-minute segments, so it's easy to watch.

You don't have to bookmark and come back and try to start over again.

You can use this in your church's training.

For instance, if last night's message, if you looked at that and said, man, my church needs to hear this, or my elders, or my church leadership needs to hear this, well, that's all online.

You can go online, you can watch it there, and share it and show it to people.

And you don't even have to have them all in the same room together.

You can send them the link and say, here, watch this.

We'll discuss it at our next elders meeting or board meeting.

And you can help get the training out that way as well.

And then the other thing I want to draw your attention to, because this is a great deal, this is the Nathan Green postcards.

In your book, it has this on page, somewhere around page 20, 23, somewhere in there, the order.

Now I notice the wording there is incorrect.

It's, what the deal is, is it's $5 a set and you have to buy 100 sets.

And they don't come collated, they come in, you know, number 1 is 100 of them shrink-wrapped together, and number 2 is a hundred shrink-wrapped together.

So it's 5 dollars a set, so the minimum order is going to be 500 dollars.

I've had evangelists ordering these, you know, a thousand at a time.

But this, this is a great giveaway in evangelistic meetings.

It's a really fantastic giveaway because you can encourage people to continue coming to the meetings and to collect all 28 of these.

And as I said, it's got a Bible study on the back so it can actually form your handout as well.

And then the other 2 things I wanted to tell you about a little bit more is my Bible studies, prophecies of hope.

And this series is different than most prophecy studies.

It goes all the way through the prophecies.

This is excellent for Bible work as well as evangelistic meetings.

And there are a couple things that I've added in here that you won't find in other studies.

I started out as a Bible worker, and 1 of the key things in Bible work is you have to get them interested and keep them interested, especially through the first, like, 3 or 4 studies, if they're going to stay with you.

You'll lose a lot of studies after your first study.

And so 1 of the things I have in here, and you might, as you listen to people's training, they've picked up some of the things that I put in Winsome Witnessing.

And 1 of the little catchphrases I use in Winsome Witnessing, my training course on how to give studies in the book is you need to salt the oats.

You've heard the old adage, you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him what?

So 1 of the things I say is you can lead a horse to water, you can't make him drink, but you can salt his oats.

You can make the horse thirsty for the water.

You can't make somebody come to an evangelistic meeting.

You can't make them come to church, but you sure can make them thirsty for it.

And 1 of the ways I do this as a Bible worker in preparing for an evangelistic meeting is, For instance, in Daniel 2, my first study, we bring it up to the great climax of Jesus coming and then, you know, I make an appeal to the person in the home about, don't you want to be ready, that type of thing.

But then I say, After we've closed off the study, I'll say, you know, when Jesus comes, it's going to be a great event, but a lot of Christians have different opinions as to how that's going to happen.

Does it happen before the tribulation or after the tribulation?

And I'll say, well, you know, it's too important of an event to not be clear on what it's going to be like.

And there are some public classes coming to town, a seminar on Bible prophecy.

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Series

Cycle of Evangelism

Hard Act to Follow

Transcript

Parent Series

Parent Conference

Sponsor

Recorded

Parts

Winsome Witnessing

1h

What do you do when the meetings are over?

1h

Hard Act to Follow

52m

Adventist for such a Time as This!

52m

Sound Doctrine