Welcome back to ignite. Here’s my buddy Steve Amer said. And Bill way he said, the three of us hanging out a little bit. We’ve just gotten to know each other the last few weeks for you, we go back way back, and always have more fun than we should laughing. And almost always it’s about our latest faith sharing stories that we keep saying Nordfjord Oh, no, it’s fun. It’s, it’s not nervous time. It’s just go time. It’s just fun time. But we ended that last segment on hell, which is not fun. But it shouldn’t be it ignited for us. We don’t want to go there. Nobody has to go there. And God’s saying you don’t want to go there. And he’s doing everything he can to keep us from going there. And yet, strangely enough, the world was choosing against God to go there. I mean, it’s crazy. You know, one of my tennis buddies, I play tennis several times a week and one of my tennis buddies doesn’t believe in God. And he’s made it clear that he doesn’t believe in God. And I’ve said to him, I said, Jim, you have a lot more faith than I do. But But he said, I did a couple weeks ago, we’re talking about this again, it comes up and it goes, you know, I decided when I was seven years old, that there was no God. And I’m thinking he’s going to allow a decision made by a seven year old to determine his life, the the arc of his life and, and eternity. But very, there are a lot of people that are just they’re afraid to share their faith, by the way, and we all I’m sure we know this, the the first evangelists were both women. Yes, they they saw that the tomb was empty. Yeah. And they were they were the very first time they ran, and they ran, and they didn’t have any training or any knowledge. They just said he’s, uh, he’s alive. So bury me if someone is afraid, or mean, what if? What if I don’t know the answer? What are they supposed to do? Buried? That’s the most exciting part. That is the most exciting. That’s not that’s not the reason for God. That’s the most exciting part because nobody expects you to be a Bible scholar. Nobody expects you to be the the answer to everything pegged. It probably hurts a little bit. If we were the words that had all the answers that were they get a little boring, you know, way better? And say? That’s a great question. I never thought of that question before, would you allow me the next few days to pray for you? And surgeries? God has? The answer is it’s in the book. I just got to find the answer. Would you pray for me? As I pray for you, and I’ll search the Scriptures. Let’s get back together on Thursday. Could you do that? Then we say yes, of course. They’re gonna say yes. They want to know what happens between now and Thursday. Does anybody have to tell you to be in the Word? Does anybody have to tell you to pray? No, every moment at the job, you have a break your dig. And your it’s like treasure, the word, that’s the Scripture. I’ve changed search, like treasure, and then you find it and then you find another one, you find another one? What I do, I print them out. And I print the whole scripture out. I do the whole thing for them. I do that every time. I’ve been doing that for 50 years. So when you go back, say, here’s the answer. I’m so excited. I’m praying, gotta get that and I give it to him. And there’s bombs in front of me. And I give them a copy. And I read through the scriptures. They end their demolish, they’re just, they’re just, it answers every question they had. It’s the word of God is that me is the word of God that he always has the answer. That’s the fun part when you don’t have the answer. That’s what got me going to be to begin with we really excited when he has the answer. He always has the answer and sharing his answer with them to answer their questions. What a what a privilege. I mean, that’s that’s that’s real fun. You know, various said like, you don’t have to have a lot of knowledge, just the zeal is all about See, I let a friend to the Lord. And that next day, this friend went out and witnessed the three of his friends. Oh, yeah. And he brand new Christian didn’t know even gonna do kids a new Christian that’s new Christians do and he led to with a three to the Lord, but maybe he did it the wrong way. Oh, wait a second. Point three, four. Can’t do that. Who does? He think he got to talk to you? And then we get new Christians in our churches. And what do we say to them? Oh, you have children? Oh, we should get you involved in the children’s department. Oh, you can sing we have a great music depart. Oh my goodness. We never once said, The first thing we need to do is get you to evangelism class because you have all your friends are not saved. And we’ll help you understand how easy it is to share your faith with your friends. We never say that to them. We never talked about it. And they’re the they’re the they’re the best candidates we have for growing the church growing the gospel Barry I used to work on a church staff and oftentimes we would hire musicians and sometimes those musicians were not people of faith. Yeah, all too often. How great what a great opportunity to bring people you know, so you’re gonna pay them to play for your Christmas program or something. How wonderful is is to be able to bring income with God’s people. Yeah, they’re gonna get paid. And they’re also going to hear the Word of God, how often do we pay them? We thank them and tell them how town they are and send them on their way. And everything about their souls. One time I was singing with an orchestra in Florida. And one of the songs that I sang was that it was a concert of Broadway songs. And one of the songs was the song bring him home from Les Miserables LA. Oh, yeah. And as I said that song up, I never said anything about Jesus. I never said anything about God. But I just said, You know what, this is a story about grace, a musical about grace. And all of us are looking for grace in one way or the other. All I said, following the concert, I got an email from a lady who said, what you said really struck me that we’re all looking for grace. And just by that helped her initiate her faith was just trying to settle exactly we took you away from point three. Well, actually a lack of knowledge, you know, that people think they don’t have enough. They don’t understand the severity of hell. And they really fear man rather than fearing God. Yeah, boy, God help us for that. But that’s so true. Pastors are doing I know, we’re all doing I mean, and bowing down to the government and being careful, we don’t defend edicts from from governmental churches being tolerant. They don’t want to offend any Oh, yeah. Tolerance. That’s that’s the new rule. Religious Tolerance is not compassion. No, no, that’s a different thing. Consensus, you really have a passion for people, you will share the truth with them rather than typical round. If you don’t share the truth. You’re you’re enforcing your you’re affirming their wrong behavior. Exactly. Exactly. So sharing your faith, I mean, explain this. It might cost me something. What does it cost? What does it cost? There must be something exact cost time. But if God gives it back to you, yes. You know how that works. You don’t have time, but you know, you got to see you do and then all sudden, whatever, you’re going to works out just fine. Or the meeting was canceled, or whatever you say, I was all worked out over that. And it was meaningless. And what can be more important what I do here anyway, we’ve got to put somebody in your path. Right? Yeah, it’s just it’s God’s timing. You know, Barry, you pointed out in your book about you know, people in life today are depressed, they don’t have joy in their life almost. Yeah, the key to joy is sharing the gospel. As you pointed out, you know, Paul pointed out last thing you want to the one thing they don’t want to do is share their Hey, I don’t want to do that. It’s the one thing that opens the doors to the blessings of heaven. Almost every promise comes back to having wholehearted faith, you get wholehearted faith by sharing your faith because Romans 828 says, When you live for His purpose, to those who love me, and then he defines what that means to those who live for my purpose. That’s its purpose is to seek and save the last one we live to seek and save the loss. We live in his promise. In Romans 820. He’ll make everything work together in our lives for good, even the bad stuff. Even when I was losing my business, even when I would lost my daughter, even when I was in the hospital dying. Those are and I had a bunch more of those mines talk to you about the most. But even in those times. God’s working good. We don’t see it, but we know he’s working for good. And would you agree that those bad times are when you had your spiritual growth spurts? Every every major growth spurt in my life has come through bad times. Scripture is very clear. You want to know me? You know, you want to know Jesus? It happens to the suffering. Yeah, yeah. We want to know Christ. Yeah, it happens through this. If we just were skating by every day, every happy day, what is happy day for us, in spite of the bad stuff, but if you just look at the world around you, there’s a lot of bad stuff going on. That’s why everybody’s ready. But you ought to focus on that. I mean, you could fret and fret or you could say, sometimes he gets the closer he is to come in. Exactly. And sometimes when I share my faith with someone and I pray for them, and I’ll when I’m when I’m done praying, though, they’re looking at me, and I’ll say, You know what, that cost me? Well, that’s the point. Let’s come back to that cost me nothing. Yeah, it cost me a little bit. And so that’s what we want people to understand. It costs them nothing, just sharing the oftentimes just the same amount of time. It’s just what did you do with your time with that person? Exactly. Most Christians do good things for people, but they never think you’re bringing God into the equation. And so they walk away and the person really loves them. And society loves me, and I’m being applauded. I’m a really good person, but being good doesn’t get us or anybody else to have it. It just doesn’t work. With showing kindness to people and love, you know, if you meet somebody at the grocery store or whatever that you go to daily, and you show kindness to them. After a time, now you’re there open to receive the gospel and always attach the good that we do to the Lord in some way of avoiding disappointed we talked about this, then God bless you, you do something so they know that love is for goodness, is that just from you being a good person, right? But it comes from do we give Him the glory, we can take the glory, or he gets the glory. In most cases Christians are taking the glory and feeling really good about it and thinking they’re on their way to heaven because they’re such a good person and that’s false doctrine. So theory is a car guy. A car has reflectors on it. Yeah. Yeah. What are we reflecting weird? Weird to be our encouragement to you? Oh, my guess is to be a reflector of God’s glory. Good. Could we do one more of these? I’m sorry, but can we do one more of these? I said, seeing that the best is yet to come. And I hate to lose you guys. So let’s do it. Let’s do one more. Okay. Come back and see us for one more segment of this great conversation. Love you guys. Come back
