What is the one factor that makes all the difference in evangelism? Jesus? The Holy Spirit? Love? Sure, good theoretical answers, but you need to know the one unmistakeable element that lets people know you have these.

<p>What is the one factor that makes all the difference in evangelism? Jesus? The Holy Spirit? Love? Sure, good theoretical answers, but you need to know the one unmistakeable element that lets people know you have these.</p>

<p>Free sharing permitted under the Creative Commons <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/">BY-NC-ND 3.0 (US)</a> license.</p>

Freedom Health Ministries

Gabriel Arruda

The Most Essential Element of Evangelism

Father in heaven, we're about to hear a message from your word, and we know not by might, not by power, but by my spirit, sayeth the Lord of hosts.

And so we simply ask that you would come in response to that promise and to fulfill it in full here this morning, and that you would, of course, use me as an instrument of your message and your love, and that you would be with each and every person here.

Give them ears to hear, give them a heart to understand, and Lord, I just pray that you would tremendously bless this church and the things that we're trying to do here and that souls would be in heaven for what is done this coming week and what has been done over the past many, many months.

So the title of the message is, The Most Important Elements of Evangelism.

And so I'd just like to take a quick poll.

What do you think is the most important part of evangelism?

The most important elements of evangelism.

We could say, you know, all these things.

I don't think any of those are wrong answers, those are all very much the right answers.

How do people know the Holy Spirit is among you?

And here's the problem with, that I often run into with 7th Avenue, and it's in myself as well.

We know what the right answers are, but how does that translate into behavior?

I want to share some research that to me depicts the point I wanna make in this message.

What is the most important element of evangelism?

How do people even know that Jesus is among us?

How do people know you have the Holy Spirit?

And I wanna share with you some research by a guy by the name of Dr.

Bruce Alexander, who did a series of experiments that became famous.

It was done in the 1970s and it's known as the Rat Park experiments.

And what happened is they did studies and they were studying addiction, the topic of addiction.

And so they put a rat in a cage, and they had 2 water bottles.

And the other water bottle, it was water laced with cocaine or heroin.

They're like, let's see what the rat's going to do.

The rats that they put in the cage, each rat per 1 cage, always preferred the drug-laced water.

To the point where these rats would often kill themselves.

They would drink that water so much they would die.

And the researchers were like, yep, that's what we thought.

Alexander, he stopped and he looked at that, he goes, but it's an empty cage.

Let's design a cage and let's make the cage really cool.

So they developed a cage that they called Rat Park, like a Disneyland for rats.

So it was all kinds of interesting things to look at, to smell, there's other rats there to socialize with, and it was just an interesting, fun, little rat cage.

In Rat Park the rats don't like the drug water.

They don't drink the drug water in Rat Park.

It went from almost a hundred percent preference to the drug water in the empty, boring cage to almost, no, that actually went to 0 percent drinking of the drug water in Rat Park.

And it blew the retracers mind and it made them think maybe we've got addiction wrong.

Maybe we have a wrong perspective on addiction.

You know, we've always thought that the opposite of addiction is sobriety.

But you know what the conclusion they came to?

What if the opposite of addiction is connection?

The opposite of addiction isn't sobriety, the opposite of addiction is connection.

Because in Rat Park they had lots of connections, they had social behavior, They had things to do.

You know, this theory translates to the same with humans.

We find this true also in the human level.

Humans have a natural, innate urge to bond.

And what we find is if you're not bonding with humans, or God, you're going to bond with something that makes you feel good.

Because who likes to live in an existence where you don't feel good every day?

We don't like to stay there very long, do we?

And if you're not bonding with humans, if you're not bonding with God, you're gonna bond with something else that makes you feel good, that helps you deal with the reality of life.

Now, this is, We're living in an unusual age.

I want to share some statistics with you that shows that this is getting worse.

Well, first of all Again to capitalize on how important connection is the World Health Organization just recently released a very interesting statistic They designated loneliness recently as a global public health concern, as research has recently shown that loneliness is as bad for people's health as smoking 15 cigarettes a day.

Just being lonely is as bad for your health as smoking 15 cigarettes a day.

We don't often think about loneliness on that scale, but that's how much it shortens your lifespan, just to be lonely.

We have this built-in innate need to connect, to connect with people.

And we've entered into an era that authorities are calling an epidemic of loneliness, an epidemic of loneliness.

Early this year, the Americans Psychiatric Association did a poll and they found that 30% of adults have experienced feelings of loneliness at least once a week.

Back to Menu

The Most Essential Element of Evangelism

Transcript

Description

Sponsor

Recorded

Sound Doctrine