Latest / The Speak Life Podcast / Evangelism in a Post-Christian Age || SLP528

Transcript

Evangelism in a Post-Christian Age || SLP528 · The Speak Life Podcast

0:06
SPEAKER_06: Well, hello, and thank you so much for downloading this episode of the Speak Life Podcast.
0:11
SPEAKER_06: My name is Thomas Thoroughgood, media producer at Speak Life, and in this episode, we are delighted to bring you a two-part seminar on evangelism in a post-Christian age.
0:23
SPEAKER_06: Glenn gave this seminar, Glenn Scrivener, our CEO, he gave this seminar at the Keswick Convention, and he gave the first part on the 25th of July, and the second part on the following day, uh, on the 26th of July.
0:38
SPEAKER_06: And it was well attended, some great audience participation, which you will hear in this recording.
0:45
SPEAKER_06: And a huge thank you to Kesick Ministries for allowing us uh to use this recording on our podcast.
0:53
SPEAKER_06: Do go and check out their website, Kesick Ministries.org, to find out details about the convention next year.
1:01
SPEAKER_06: It will be the 150th anniversary, Keswick 2025.
1:06
SPEAKER_06: So that will be very exciting.
1:08
SPEAKER_06: The content of this seminar does dovetail very nicely with 321.
1:13
SPEAKER_06: If you're new to Speak Life, 321 is our evangelistic course, introducing people to Jesus.
1:19
SPEAKER_06: It's eight videos, each about 12 minutes, and you can run it as a church, you can do it one-to-one with a friend, uh, people can do it on their own online or on any device as an app.
1:31
SPEAKER_06: Just go to 321course.com to check it out.
1:35
SPEAKER_06: Glenn has also written a book that complements the course called How to See Life: A Guide in 321.
1:41
SPEAKER_06: And you can find that on the ten of those websites.
1:44
SPEAKER_06: Uh, ten of those published the book.
1:46
SPEAKER_06: And that's kind of the course in written form.
1:49
SPEAKER_06: You can you can give it to a non-Christian friend and it will introduce them to Jesus.
1:53
SPEAKER_06: And it has lots of QR codes linking to the online material as well.
1:57
SPEAKER_06: There's also a brand new book which Glenn references in these seminars called How to Speak Life: Sharing Your Faith in 321.
2:06
SPEAKER_06: And that has more of a kind of, I want to say turquoisey cover avocado.
2:13
SPEAKER_06: Like the interior of an avocado but slightly bluer.
2:17
SPEAKER_06: That's kind of the colour.
2:18
SPEAKER_06: That's especially for Christians who are thinking about sharing their faith.
2:22
SPEAKER_06: Uh, how do the truths of 321 help us in our evangelism?
2:27
SPEAKER_06: You know, what does the Trinity mean for evangelism?
2:30
SPEAKER_06: What does Adam and Christ mean for evangelism?
2:33
SPEAKER_06: What does our union with Christ mean for our evangelism?
2:36
SPEAKER_06: So feel free to check out the course and the two books if you haven't done so already.
2:42
SPEAKER_06: But for now, I will hand over to Glenn and part one Evangelism in a Post-Christian Age.
2:50
SPEAKER_06: Enjoy.
2:57
SPEAKER_11: Hello everybody.
3:00
SPEAKER_12: Hi, I'm Glenn from Speak Life.
3:04
SPEAKER_12: I'm Emma's husband.
3:05
SPEAKER_12: I'm Ruby and JJ's dad.
3:07
SPEAKER_12: I'm from Australia.
3:08
SPEAKER_12: I live in the UK and have lived in the UK for more than half my life now.
3:13
SPEAKER_12: So I'm I'm a real half and half.
3:15
SPEAKER_12: Mark Ellis yesterday said, you'll be able to tell as soon as Glenn opens his mouth that he's Australian.
3:20
SPEAKER_12: That's not always the case.
3:21
SPEAKER_12: People kind of guess Canadian or New Zealand or South African or who knows.
3:25
SPEAKER_12: Uh I sound like a pom to all the Australians, I sound like a convict to all the English.
3:30
SPEAKER_12: It's the worst of all worlds, actually.
3:32
SPEAKER_12: Um so I'm part of uh Speak Life, as you can tell.
3:36
SPEAKER_12: I'm wearing our subtle merchandise here.
3:38
SPEAKER_12: And uh and we are the proud uh producers of the 321 course, which uh I'll speak about a little bit during the course of today and tomorrow.
3:48
SPEAKER_12: It's just a little evangelistic tool that you can use.
3:51
SPEAKER_12: It's totally free if you go to 321course.com and uh it will really help you to share the gospel without shame and without cost and without delay.
4:04
SPEAKER_12: Uh I'll I'll tell you a story yesterday.
4:08
SPEAKER_12: Uh I was uh referring to my next door neighbor.
4:11
SPEAKER_12: Some people were here for the lecture yesterday, and I talked about my my next door neighbor who has come to faith in the last couple of years, and I was thinking back the other day to my conversations with him, and we actually share a bedroom wall, and yet probably the most amount of gospel conversations we've had is via WhatsApp.
4:34
SPEAKER_12: And via sharing, oh, you've got to listen to this podcast, or you've got to read this article, or you've got to fall down this YouTube hole, or here's a playlist, or and isn't it interesting that face-to-face evangelism and digital evangelism end up being kind of the same nowadays because we spend so much of our lives online, and that's not just a millennial or Gen Z thing.
5:00
SPEAKER_12: Uh my mother turns 80 this year, and she is a WhatsApp queen.
5:05
SPEAKER_12: Uh, she will make sure I've seen something on Twitter that I hadn't seen, right?
5:09
SPEAKER_12: And so she WhatsApps it to me and gets me engaged in all the social media rage, right?
5:15
SPEAKER_12: And that's all of us, actually.
5:17
SPEAKER_12: So I I have shared the gospel with my neighbor over the fence, I've shared the gospel with my neighbor in our front porch.
5:23
SPEAKER_12: We've done a lot of face-to-face stuff, he's come along to church, but I've also shared the gospel a lot via, well, digital means.
5:31
SPEAKER_12: And one of them is to go and do 321course.com.
5:35
SPEAKER_12: And uh you're very welcome to get out your phones and and uh get into it right now.
5:39
SPEAKER_12: But here is one way that you can share the gospel in 321.
5:46
SPEAKER_12: So, how do you see life?
5:48
SPEAKER_12: We want to give you a chance to slow down, get your bearings, and look again.
5:54
SPEAKER_12: Welcome to 321.
5:58
SPEAKER_12: This is life according to deep.
6:24
SPEAKER_12: So you can do it in eight kind of 10 or 12 minute sessions, or you can binge it in uh a couple of hours.
6:29
SPEAKER_12: And we we're about to have our 10,000th sign-up to 321 since September of last year.
6:34
SPEAKER_12: Uh, hundreds of churches are running it in person, so if you're involved in evangelism in your local church, this is totally free for you to run.
6:41
SPEAKER_12: You can run it in four sessions or even in three sessions if you like as well.
6:45
SPEAKER_12: And so it's just a free resource because at Speak Life we want you to be able to share your faith without shame, without delay, and without cost.
6:53
SPEAKER_12: Uh when I was sharing the gospel with my my nextdoor neighbor, um, his wife has been sort of slowly leaning into the Christian thing.
7:02
SPEAKER_12: And one of the things that my next door neighbor has done since becoming a Christian is uh he's written now 80 songs to Jesus.
7:11
SPEAKER_12: Uh he's very dyslexic.
7:14
SPEAKER_12: He'd never written a song before in his life.
7:16
SPEAKER_12: Uh, within a couple of weeks of becoming a Christian, he showed me something on his phone, and I was like, Oh, what's that?
7:22
SPEAKER_12: It was on his notes app.
7:24
SPEAKER_12: And I looked at it and I was like, is that a poem?
7:26
SPEAKER_12: And he said, I think it's a song.
7:29
SPEAKER_12: He said, Are you musical?
7:30
SPEAKER_12: I was like, Well, I know I know all three chords, so I th I think we've got this one covered.
7:36
SPEAKER_12: And so we go back in, I strum the three chords, we start, we start coming up with tunes to the first song, second song, third song.
7:44
SPEAKER_12: You know, we're we're now up to the 80th song.
7:47
SPEAKER_12: The other day was around Easter, and uh we were working on a song about Mary Magdalene coming to the tomb.
7:55
SPEAKER_12: And uh the the line in the song was uh that she feared there were grave robbers.
8:02
SPEAKER_12: And his wife is on the porch, she's smoking a cigarette, same as he is.
8:07
SPEAKER_12: We're discussing this line about grave robbers.
8:09
SPEAKER_12: She says, Grave robbers, what are you talking about, grave robbers, thorough?
8:12
SPEAKER_12: I thought you were Christians.
8:13
SPEAKER_12: We're like, oh, you don't know the story.
8:16
SPEAKER_12: And so Dev starts telling her the story of Mary Magdalene comes to the tomb and it's an empty tomb, and she thinks it's a grave robber, and she bumps into Jesus and she starts yelling at Jesus, what have you done with the body?
8:30
SPEAKER_12: And she says, I gotta read this story now, don't I?
8:33
SPEAKER_12: We're like, Yeah, you totally gotta read this story.
8:35
SPEAKER_12: So what do we do?
8:36
SPEAKER_12: We just we we WhatsApp's her.
8:38
SPEAKER_12: We were right there, all three of us, we just WhatsApped her 321course.com.
8:42
SPEAKER_12: You go in there, and there's a Bible reading plan, and it takes you through the Gospel of John.
8:48
SPEAKER_12: And so she starts reading, and then she puts a cigarette out, and she goes inside, and then she comes back outside and she knocks on my door 45 minutes later, like, and she thrusts her phone in my face, and she says, Why is he calling his mother woman?
9:13
SPEAKER_12: That's a good question.
9:15
SPEAKER_12: So I'm having to think on my feet, and I come up with some kind of it wasn't a very good answer, but I was like, she was like, oh, okay, okay.
9:21
SPEAKER_12: And then she goes back inside and continues to read, right?
9:25
SPEAKER_12: And this is how evangelism happens, right?
9:27
SPEAKER_12: Even when it's face-to-face, it's digital.
9:30
SPEAKER_12: And even when it's digital, it's face-to-face.
9:33
SPEAKER_12: So please, can we not have any of this?
9:35
SPEAKER_12: Oh, there's digital evangelism over here, and there's in-person evangelism here.
9:40
SPEAKER_12: No, no.
9:41
SPEAKER_12: Have you have you shared a podcast with somebody this week?
9:46
SPEAKER_12: Have you have you recommended an article to somebody this week?
9:49
SPEAKER_12: Have you texted a friend this week?
9:51
SPEAKER_12: Then guess what?
9:52
SPEAKER_12: You're a digital evangelist as well, okay?
9:54
SPEAKER_12: And we're just trying to resource you in these kinds of ways with uh 321course.com.
10:00
SPEAKER_12: Uh here's a good exercise.
10:03
SPEAKER_12: We're thinking about evangelism in a post-Christian age.
10:08
SPEAKER_12: So, what is an evangelist?
10:10
SPEAKER_12: How would you picture an evangelist?
10:13
SPEAKER_12: I wonder what thoughts spring to mind.
10:16
SPEAKER_12: Are there any kind of picture, any uh adjectives describing words that you would use when you picture an evangelist?
10:25
SPEAKER_12: Anyone want to shout something something out?
10:28
SPEAKER_12: Billy Graham, yes.
10:31
SPEAKER_12: Chapeau.
10:32
SPEAKER_12: Oh, very good.
10:33
SPEAKER_12: Chapeau, Billy Graham, yep.
10:36
SPEAKER_12: What was that one?
10:37
unknown: Richard Dawkins.
10:38
SPEAKER_12: Richard Dawkins is an evangelist, absolutely.
10:40
SPEAKER_12: The the gospel of enlightenment, scientific rationalism, yes.
10:44
SPEAKER_12: And he very he very much wants to get his good news out there, right?
10:48
SPEAKER_12: That's all evangelists means, right?
10:50
SPEAKER_12: A herald of good news.
10:52
SPEAKER_12: His good news is that there is no God, and we're all DNA replicators.
10:56
SPEAKER_12: Hallelujah.
10:57
SPEAKER_12: Uh and and he's he very loudly and proudly owns his gospel.
11:03
SPEAKER_12: He's quite a good evangelist for his gospel, right?
11:05
SPEAKER_12: He gets that message far and wide.
11:07
SPEAKER_12: What else do you think of when you picture an evangelist?
11:11
SPEAKER_12: Graham Daniels, or yeah, we're we're all naming individuals.
11:17
SPEAKER_12: Your friend Sally.
11:20
SPEAKER_12: I've got a friend called Sally.
11:21
SPEAKER_12: I spoke about Sally yesterday.
11:23
SPEAKER_12: Yeah.
11:24
SPEAKER_12: I love this.
11:25
SPEAKER_12: I picture my friend Sally.
11:27
SPEAKER_12: What I love about that on so many levels is we all pictured a single individual, usually with a platform, and all those other guesses and all those other pictures were of men, weren't they?
11:40
SPEAKER_12: If you if you were narrowing it down to an evangelist, what was the gender of the evangelist that you had in your head?
11:49
SPEAKER_12: Female, well done.
11:51
SPEAKER_12: Two of you, three of you, that's good.
11:54
SPEAKER_12: But there's whenever I do this, there's always a massive gender imbalance.
11:59
SPEAKER_12: When we think of an evangelist, we think usually of an alpha male with the gift of the gab.
12:05
SPEAKER_12: They could probably sell insurance door to door, but instead they're selling fire insurance, eternal fire insurance, door to door.
12:13
SPEAKER_12: And they've got the patter, right?
12:17
SPEAKER_12: And they're not usually the most attractive individual.
12:21
SPEAKER_12: They're not usually the most warm sort of a person.
12:23
SPEAKER_12: When you imagine, you know, fire in their belly, thick skin, placard, megaphone.
12:29
SPEAKER_12: A lot of people think of that when they think of an evangelist.
12:32
SPEAKER_12: I've got an exercise for you all to do.
12:34
SPEAKER_12: Um, did you know that you'd be doing work in this seminar?
12:37
SPEAKER_12: Okay, it's not a lecture, it's a seminar.
12:40
SPEAKER_12: Okay.
12:40
SPEAKER_12: We're gonna workshop some of these ideas.
12:42
SPEAKER_12: I'd love you to turn to a neighbor.
12:44
SPEAKER_12: In twos or threes, think of somebody who helped you be the Christian you are today.
12:50
SPEAKER_12: Who has there there might be dozens of people.
12:52
SPEAKER_12: There probably are dozens of people in your story.
12:55
SPEAKER_12: That's okay.
12:56
SPEAKER_12: Pick one and describe that person to your neighbor.
13:01
SPEAKER_12: Take 60 seconds to do it, and then your neighbor can tell you for 60 seconds a person who's helped you trust in Jesus.
13:07
SPEAKER_12: Let's go.
14:17
SPEAKER_12: Hopefully, we've generated a couple of different sets of adjectives describing words.
14:23
SPEAKER_12: Maybe some of the same, but maybe some different ones as well.
14:25
SPEAKER_12: We've got some roving mics here and here.
14:27
SPEAKER_12: So, does somebody want to volunteer some of the ways they describe one of their friends or family members or church members who helped you be the Christian you are today?
14:36
SPEAKER_12: Anyone want to raise a hand and then we'll get a mic to them?
14:39
SPEAKER_12: Dan, thank you.
14:44
SPEAKER_07: Mine was a guy called Ken Weber, who was I described as a passionate man.
14:49
SPEAKER_07: He was a godly man in an ungodly world.
14:55
SPEAKER_12: A passionate man, a godly man in an ungodly world.
14:59
SPEAKER_12: And that distinctiveness really spoke to me.
15:01
SPEAKER_07: Yeah, it mirrored that and that mirrored to me, and has always sat in my head.
15:07
SPEAKER_07: This was when I was 15, 14, 15, 16.
15:11
SPEAKER_12: Wow.
15:11
SPEAKER_12: Evident godliness.
15:13
SPEAKER_12: Yeah.
15:14
SPEAKER_12: Live such good lives among the pagans that though they may accuse you of doing wrong, they may see your good deeds and glorify God on the day he visits us.
15:22
SPEAKER_12: So one 1 Peter 2, verse 12.
15:24
SPEAKER_12: I I love that.
15:26
SPEAKER_12: Or it's just, isn't it?
15:28
SPEAKER_12: You know, you are the light of the world.
15:31
SPEAKER_12: A city on a hill cannot be hidden.
15:33
SPEAKER_12: No one lights a lamp and puts it under a bushel.
15:37
SPEAKER_12: Just be the Christian that you are, shine distinctively.
15:39
SPEAKER_12: And in in that setting, it's all about the salt and the light and the city on the hill.
15:43
SPEAKER_12: There's a distinctive difference, actually, to somebody that communicates.
15:48
SPEAKER_12: And what I love about when Jesus says that in a Sermon on the Mount, he's basically saying the your biggest problem in evangelism, my biggest problem in evangelism, is what I get in the way, what I put in the way.
16:02
SPEAKER_12: Right?
16:02
SPEAKER_12: I am a light, but just don't put a bucket over your light, right?
16:07
SPEAKER_12: You are a light, just just be who you are.
16:10
SPEAKER_12: It doesn't say shine brighter, just be who you are.
16:12
SPEAKER_12: If you're distinctive, that's a good thing.
16:16
SPEAKER_12: The other day I was in a conversation and um it was it was interesting actually.
16:23
SPEAKER_12: Um a friend of my daughter's, um, her mother uh said, or who who did you vote for?
16:31
SPEAKER_12: She was so impertinent as to ask, who did you vote for?
16:35
SPEAKER_12: And we've actually got a very pro-life um uh member standing in our seat.
16:43
SPEAKER_12: And I could have said, Well, you know what, I know everyone else is voting for this other person, but I voted for this person because they're very pro-life.
16:52
SPEAKER_12: And I just thought, you know, I don't want to get into that conversation right now on the on the road home from school.
16:59
SPEAKER_12: And so I just kind of I just put a bucket over that little distinctiveness in that moment.
17:04
SPEAKER_12: And ever since that point, I just thought, you know what, that's it might have been awkward, but the awkward might have led to something distinctive.
17:12
SPEAKER_12: Wouldn't that have been interesting?
17:14
SPEAKER_12: Um anyway, great.
17:17
SPEAKER_12: Distinctive godliness.
17:18
SPEAKER_12: Yes, over here.
17:19
SPEAKER_02: Yes, mine was a befled 19-year-old uh woman called Liz Joy, and she was just that.
17:27
SPEAKER_02: I'd been to church all my life before then, and I really knew the gospel.
17:32
SPEAKER_02: But Liz and her cronies at the Christian Union showed me a quality of life, a dynamism, a joyfulness that I really wanted to have for myself.
17:44
SPEAKER_02: And she is still living out the gospel gloriously, and I'm very grateful to her example.
17:50
SPEAKER_12: Praise God, praise God.
17:53
SPEAKER_12: Isn't that wonderful to hear?
18:22
SPEAKER_03: I am a new Christian, I'm just learning, and with Tony, who's a uh my friend.
18:30
SPEAKER_03: But we met on a holiday in Greece and he brought me along and said, Come on to this Christian camp, and I thought, oh go on then, I'll go and have a see.
18:39
SPEAKER_03: And so I I started um learning about Christ, what it means to be involved in Christianity.
18:45
SPEAKER_03: Studying, we do a Bible study every two weeks, in which I I'm learning there, and it's absolutely amazing.
18:52
SPEAKER_03: But when I was at work, there's a gentleman there who became a Christian.
18:58
SPEAKER_03: And there's a different people in our office.
19:00
SPEAKER_03: We have Muslim and there's lots of Muslims in the area that I work with, and we have to respect each other as they do to us, which is great.
19:10
SPEAKER_03: But I've learned so much from other people, people of different faiths, but also so much from my Christian friends and from my friend, especially who's here, Tony.
19:28
SPEAKER_12: Amazing.
19:29
SPEAKER_12: And well done, Tony.
19:30
SPEAKER_12: Well done, Tony.
19:31
SPEAKER_12: Um I love that.
19:33
SPEAKER_12: I'm I'm not going to ask for anyone else because I don't think anyone can top that.
19:36
SPEAKER_11: So sorry.
19:40
SPEAKER_12: Isn't that amazing?
19:41
SPEAKER_12: And doesn't that enfranchise everybody in the tent?
19:44
SPEAKER_12: Because when the model is Billy Graham, or Chapo, um who can compare?
19:51
SPEAKER_12: Who can who can be Billy Graham?
19:53
SPEAKER_12: We we can't.
19:54
SPEAKER_12: I can't, you can't.
19:55
SPEAKER_12: Um but we can be like Tony, can't we?
19:57
SPEAKER_12: We we can be like somebody with with eviden evident godliness.
20:01
SPEAKER_12: We can be like Sally, can't we?
20:03
SPEAKER_12: We can't be like the 19-year-old freckled woman who is still going on with Jesus today.
20:09
SPEAKER_12: I want I want to enfranchise you all and say that you might not be a capital E evangelist, uh, but we can all be involved in the work of witness.
20:21
SPEAKER_12: I think of dozens of people in my story.
20:23
SPEAKER_12: I I I think of, you know, the shortest way of telling my story is two decades of a praying mother.
20:29
SPEAKER_12: Why am I a Christian?
20:31
SPEAKER_12: Two decades of a praying mother.
20:33
SPEAKER_12: You know, and from some of the nods in the room I can see uh mothers have had a massive role to play, family members have had a massive role to play, Sunday school has had a massive role to play.
20:42
SPEAKER_12: What does an evangelist look like?
20:44
SPEAKER_12: It looks like you guys, okay?
20:47
SPEAKER_12: I hope that's I hope that's enfranchising for you.
20:50
SPEAKER_12: Um but really when you think of an evangelist, one of the things we should think of are the four evangelists that kick off the New Testament.
21:00
SPEAKER_12: That's interesting, isn't it?
21:01
SPEAKER_12: That Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are called evangelists because they are heralds of the good news.
21:08
SPEAKER_12: And what do they do?
21:09
SPEAKER_12: They just tell story after story after story after story of Jesus.
21:14
SPEAKER_12: They keep on pointing to the light of the world, Christ.
21:18
SPEAKER_12: Let's think about what the evangelist John says.
21:24
SPEAKER_12: In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
21:28
SPEAKER_12: He was with God in the beginning.
21:30
SPEAKER_12: Through him all things were made.
21:32
SPEAKER_12: Without him, nothing was made that has been made.
21:35
SPEAKER_12: In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind.
21:39
SPEAKER_12: The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.
21:43
SPEAKER_12: And then in verse 14, the word became flesh and made his dwelling among us.
21:48
SPEAKER_12: We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father full of grace and truth.
21:54
SPEAKER_12: And then verse 18 No one has ever seen God but the one and only Son who is at the Father's side.
22:00
SPEAKER_12: He has made him known.
22:04
SPEAKER_12: This puts Jesus front and center, doesn't it?
22:08
SPEAKER_12: All the evangelists put Jesus front and center.
22:12
SPEAKER_12: When the evangelists, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, tell their stories, they just tell story after story of Jesus.
22:19
SPEAKER_12: Why do they focus so much on Christ?
22:22
SPEAKER_12: Well, he is the word of God.
22:24
SPEAKER_12: What does that mean?
22:26
SPEAKER_12: Well, he is the explanation of God.
22:28
SPEAKER_12: He's the communication of God.
22:30
SPEAKER_12: Everything God wants to say is wrapped up in the person of Jesus.
22:34
SPEAKER_12: If you were to do a cartoon of John chapter 1, you might imagine a throne to represent the control, the presence, the authority of God, but you can't see who's on the throne.
22:45
SPEAKER_12: No one has ever seen God.
22:46
SPEAKER_12: But instead, you might imagine in the cartoon a massive speech bubble coming out from the throne, obscuring everything, filling the whole frame, this massive speech bubble.
22:57
SPEAKER_12: And what is in the speech bubble?
23:00
SPEAKER_12: Jesus.
23:09
SPEAKER_12: Everything God wants to say to the world is wrapped up in the person of Jesus.
23:14
SPEAKER_12: And when he came in the flesh, he was filled with grace and truth.
23:19
SPEAKER_12: That's an attractive combination, isn't it?
23:21
SPEAKER_12: Grace and truth.
23:24
SPEAKER_12: And it finishes by saying no one has ever seen God, but the one and only Son at the Father's side has made him known.
23:31
SPEAKER_12: That flips on its head what we naturally assume about God and Jesus.
23:38
SPEAKER_12: If you ask your average Brit, do you believe in God?
23:49
SPEAKER_12: But if you ask them, do you think Jesus is the Son of God?
23:53
SPEAKER_12: A much smaller proportion of the world thinks of Jesus as the one and only Son of the Father.
24:01
SPEAKER_12: We tend to be much more sure about God and much less sure about Jesus.
24:07
SPEAKER_12: Right?
24:08
SPEAKER_12: And even people who don't believe in God, they think they know what you mean when you say God.
24:15
SPEAKER_12: Even if they don't believe in God, they think God is perfectly obvious, right?
24:21
SPEAKER_12: What does this verse say?
24:22
SPEAKER_12: Verse 18, well, no one has ever seen God.
24:26
SPEAKER_12: Only Jesus makes him known.
24:28
SPEAKER_12: Do you see how it flips it on its head?
24:30
SPEAKER_12: It's not that God is obvious and Jesus is obscure, it's that God is hidden.
24:37
SPEAKER_12: And Jesus is the one who makes him known.
24:41
SPEAKER_12: Which I think is really helpful in evangelism because it just means that you can continue to do what the evangelists do, which is appoint to Jesus, I point to Jesus, I point to Jesus, I point to Jesus.
24:54
SPEAKER_12: I'm going to show you some ways of doing that over the course of this seminar and tomorrow's seminar.
25:00
SPEAKER_12: I'm going to give you some seeds to sow into your conversations.
25:04
SPEAKER_12: They're not silver bullets that you fire off into your conversations.
25:07
SPEAKER_12: I don't think such things exist, but they're just little seeds, little words of life that you can scatter into your conversations that in the fullness of time might bear fruit by the power of the Holy Spirit.
25:20
SPEAKER_12: But when we focus on Jesus, everything else starts to fall into place.
25:26
SPEAKER_12: When we see life according to Jesus, he shows us three different things.
25:31
SPEAKER_12: He shows us what God is like, he shows us what the world is like, he shows us what we are like.
25:38
SPEAKER_12: And that's all in three, two, one.
25:41
SPEAKER_12: Let's have a look at this video.
25:42
SPEAKER_12: It'll explain more.
25:48
SPEAKER_12: What do you make of Jesus?
25:50
SPEAKER_12: He spoke as the King of heaven, but served like the lowest slave.
25:55
SPEAKER_12: He claimed to be the hope of the world, yet gave up his life on the cross.
26:00
SPEAKER_12: Have you ever wondered how Jesus saw the big issues?
26:03
SPEAKER_12: God, the world, and you?
26:05
SPEAKER_12: He is life according to Jesus in three, two, one.
26:11
SPEAKER_12: Three.
26:13
SPEAKER_12: God is a loving union of three.
26:15
SPEAKER_12: I don't know how you picture God, but according to the Bible, Jesus is our picture of God.
26:20
SPEAKER_12: He's called the image of God, the Word of God, the exact representation of God.
26:25
SPEAKER_12: To know God, we should look at Him.
26:27
SPEAKER_12: And what do we see?
26:29
SPEAKER_12: A loving union of three.
26:32
SPEAKER_12: Here's one picture of it from Matthew chapter 3.
26:35
SPEAKER_12: Jesus was standing one day in the Jordan River.
26:38
SPEAKER_12: The Holy Spirit hovered over him like a dove, and the Father called from heaven, You are my Son who I love, with you I am well pleased.
26:46
SPEAKER_10: According to the Bible, this family of love predated and produced the world.
26:52
SPEAKER_10: And there's good news.
26:54
SPEAKER_10: The Son of God has come to invite us in.
27:00
SPEAKER_12: 2.
27:01
SPEAKER_12: The world is shaped by two representatives.
27:04
SPEAKER_12: The Bible begins with the story of Adam.
27:07
SPEAKER_12: Adam is a name that means humanity.
27:10
SPEAKER_12: He's a representative.
27:11
SPEAKER_10: In the beginning, he turned from God, turned in on himself, and plunged the world down into death and curse.
27:17
SPEAKER_12: This is the life we know, the life of selfishness and death.
27:23
SPEAKER_12: Jesus, though, is the second Adam.
27:25
SPEAKER_12: Where Adam and all of us fail, the Son of God took charge.
27:30
SPEAKER_12: He lived the life that we should live.
27:32
SPEAKER_12: Then on the cross, he died the death that we should die.
27:37
SPEAKER_10: On Easter Sunday, he rose again to new life.
27:40
SPEAKER_10: And this life is ours if we are one with him.
27:46
SPEAKER_10: One.
27:47
SPEAKER_10: You are one with Adam, be one with Jesus.
27:52
SPEAKER_12: We're all a part of the selfishness of Adam, and we all feel the curse of his broken world.
27:58
SPEAKER_12: But Jesus offers us new life.
28:00
SPEAKER_12: If we trust in Jesus, we become one with him.
28:03
SPEAKER_10: We can give him our selfishness and sin, and he deals with it on the cross.
28:07
SPEAKER_10: In return, he gives us himself forever.
28:10
SPEAKER_10: Connected to him, we enter the family of God, and now, together, we can know his Father as our Father, His Spirit as our Spirit, and His future as our future.
28:21
SPEAKER_10: You see, Jesus will come again to raise up this world the way he was raised to eternal life and peace.
28:28
SPEAKER_10: On that day, God will judge the world, confirming his no to Adam and his yes to Jesus.
28:34
SPEAKER_12: That's life according to Jesus.
28:36
SPEAKER_12: What's our response?
28:39
SPEAKER_12: Right now, the Son of God offers you life, hope, forgiveness, and eternal love in the family of God.
28:45
SPEAKER_12: Call out to him.
28:47
SPEAKER_12: For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only son that whoever believes in him shall not perish, but have eternal life.
29:09
SPEAKER_12: In Matthew 12, verse 34, Jesus says, From the overflow of the heart, the mouth speaks.
29:16
SPEAKER_12: If the words aren't coming, maybe that's a heart issue.
29:20
SPEAKER_12: Maybe our hearts have not been sufficiently filled by the goodness of the good news.
29:26
SPEAKER_12: And so so much of what we try to do at Speak Life is just evangelize the church so that the church might evangelize the world.
29:34
SPEAKER_12: Because I need the good news, you need the good news.
29:36
SPEAKER_12: We need to be convinced of the goodness and power of the good news if we're going to speak it to others.
29:43
SPEAKER_12: If the words aren't coming, maybe the heart isn't full.
29:48
SPEAKER_12: I sometimes do these seminars about evangelism training, and people come to me and they say, Glenn, it's okay for you.
29:54
SPEAKER_12: You have a gift with words.
29:56
SPEAKER_12: I don't have a gift with words, I can't be an evangelist.
30:00
SPEAKER_12: And it always shocks me because we've usually had a conversation for the last five minutes, and we've talked about the weather and the football and the crickets and the holidays and the grandkids and the latest gadget and the latest car.
30:12
SPEAKER_12: But we don't have a gift with words.
30:14
SPEAKER_12: Well, some people are better with words than others, that's true, but we all talk about what's important to us, don't we?
30:23
SPEAKER_12: What grabs your heart wags your tongue, that's what my mother says.
30:28
SPEAKER_12: And if the tongue's not wagging, maybe the heart needs a bit more grabbing.
30:32
SPEAKER_12: You need to be grabbed by the gospel again, and hear the good news again.
30:38
SPEAKER_12: And the good news in 321 is that Jesus has come.
30:41
SPEAKER_12: He is the word of God.
30:43
SPEAKER_12: He is exactly what God is like.
30:44
SPEAKER_12: Hallelujah.
30:45
SPEAKER_12: What is God like?
30:46
SPEAKER_12: It's like Jesus.
30:48
SPEAKER_12: And he shows us that, well, God is a loving union of three: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
30:54
SPEAKER_12: That's good news.
30:55
SPEAKER_12: That means that before the world began, there was love.
30:58
SPEAKER_12: Love is one thing God never had to create.
31:00
SPEAKER_12: God is love.
31:02
SPEAKER_12: A Father loving his son in the joy of the Spirit.
31:05
SPEAKER_12: And he's made a world that has walked away from love, and we happen to be in darkness and death and disconnection.
31:11
SPEAKER_12: This is the world of Adam that we live in.
31:14
SPEAKER_12: But the world is shaped by two representatives.
31:17
SPEAKER_12: Adam represents the way the world is.
31:20
SPEAKER_12: Jesus represents the world as it ought to be, as God intends.
31:26
SPEAKER_12: And he comes as the second Adam to sum us up, to take us through the death that we deserve and out into the life that we don't deserve.
31:36
SPEAKER_12: The world is shaped by those two representatives, Adam and Jesus.
31:40
SPEAKER_12: You're born one with Adam.
31:43
SPEAKER_12: Be one with Jesus.
31:45
SPEAKER_12: The best news in the world is when you're one with Jesus, you get his father as your father, you get his spirit as your spirit, you get his future as your future, it's for free and it's forever.
31:56
SPEAKER_12: Is that good news?
31:59
SPEAKER_12: Tell it to your heart.
32:01
SPEAKER_12: And then you'll tell it to your friend.
32:04
SPEAKER_12: Here's the first seed, though, I want us to think about.
32:08
SPEAKER_12: I've got an upcoming book called How to Speak Life.
32:12
SPEAKER_12: It's coming out in October.
32:13
SPEAKER_12: It's a companion piece to the book that just came out in January.
32:18
SPEAKER_12: And it looks like this.
32:19
SPEAKER_12: The book, the book, How to See Life, Looks Like I Look.
32:22
SPEAKER_12: Okay, I've dressed up like the book.
32:25
SPEAKER_12: And that just takes you through the gospel in 3-2-1.
32:29
SPEAKER_12: And then the book that's coming out in October is based on this 3-2-1 outline.
32:33
SPEAKER_12: And it will give you actually eight seeds that you can sow into personal conversations.
32:38
SPEAKER_12: And you can uh scatter the seed of the gospel to your friends in how to speak life.
32:45
SPEAKER_12: Here's one of those seeds.
32:47
SPEAKER_12: It's related to the truth about Jesus.
32:50
SPEAKER_12: And it's simple, isn't it?
32:53
SPEAKER_12: That's what I love about Jesus.
32:56
SPEAKER_12: It's the sort of thing you sow into a conversation when you've just had a general election, right?
33:01
SPEAKER_12: And people start saying, Oh, politicians, you can't trust any of them, can you?
33:05
SPEAKER_12: Right?
33:05
SPEAKER_12: It's dreadful.
33:07
SPEAKER_12: And at some point, somebody will use that quote, won't they?
33:12
SPEAKER_12: Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
33:17
SPEAKER_12: Conversations about politics don't get very far without somebody quoting that.
33:22
SPEAKER_12: And then you say, Well, but there was this one guy.
33:26
SPEAKER_12: Apparently, that's not true.
33:28
SPEAKER_12: Apparently, absolute power, when it shows up, looks like love.
33:32
SPEAKER_12: It looks like service.
33:34
SPEAKER_12: It looks like sacrifice.
33:35
SPEAKER_12: It looks like spreading your arms to the world and praying, Father, forgive.
33:39
SPEAKER_08: Apparently.
33:40
SPEAKER_12: That's what I love about Jesus.
33:41
SPEAKER_12: He gives us such a different picture of God.
33:44
SPEAKER_12: Such a different picture of sovereignty and reign and rule and authority.
33:49
SPEAKER_12: Such a different picture of power.
33:52
SPEAKER_12: The one who stooped to wash his disciples' feet.
33:55
SPEAKER_12: That's what I love about Jesus.
33:57
SPEAKER_12: Dot, dot, dot.
33:59
SPEAKER_12: What do you love about Jesus?
34:01
SPEAKER_12: We're gonna break into groups in just a second.
34:03
SPEAKER_12: Why don't you break into the same groups now that you've got to know your neighbor?
34:07
SPEAKER_12: I'd love you to think about what you love about Jesus.
34:11
SPEAKER_12: If it's attached to a Bible verse, you get extra points, ten extra brownie points.
34:16
SPEAKER_12: If it's, especially if it's linked to a story from the gospels, that would be great.
34:20
SPEAKER_12: I love the thing when Jesus did X, that's quite good.
34:24
SPEAKER_12: But it could be, I love the way Jesus saw me through lockdown.
34:28
SPEAKER_12: Or I love the or whatever it is.
34:30
SPEAKER_12: It could be something from the scriptures, it could be something from your personal life.
34:34
SPEAKER_12: But let's talk to one another about what we love about Jesus.
34:38
SPEAKER_12: Let's evangelize one another.
34:39
SPEAKER_12: Should we do that?
34:40
SPEAKER_12: All right, take a couple of minutes with your neighbor.
34:42
SPEAKER_12: Your neighbor can take a couple of minutes with you, and then we'll feed back.
34:45
SPEAKER_12: Let's go.
35:45
SPEAKER_12: Isn't evangelism fun?
35:48
SPEAKER_12: Really is, isn't it?
35:49
SPEAKER_12: Um, so Dan and Steve are poised, waiting, waiting for people to feed back.
35:54
SPEAKER_12: What do you love about Jesus?
35:56
SPEAKER_12: Big hand in the air there, thank you.
36:00
SPEAKER_13: I love the way that Jesus is so appropriate with each person he comes across.
36:05
SPEAKER_13: So with after Lazarus dies, both Mary and Martha both say to Jesus, if you had been here, our brother would not have died.
36:12
SPEAKER_13: And with Mary, he weeps, and with Martha, he tells her that he is a resurrection of life.
36:18
SPEAKER_13: Each woman gets exactly what they need, and it's different.
36:21
SPEAKER_12: Ah, I love that.
36:22
SPEAKER_12: John 11, they both ask exactly the same question with exactly the same words.
36:27
SPEAKER_12: If you had been here, my brother would not have died.
36:29
SPEAKER_12: And so, unlike you or I, if you're asked the question, you just crank out the same answer.
36:35
SPEAKER_12: He gives Mary what she wants, what she needs, and Martha what she needs.
36:39
SPEAKER_12: So appropriate, so personal, so bespoke.
36:44
SPEAKER_12: Yeah.
36:44
SPEAKER_12: What else?
36:45
SPEAKER_12: Who who's got a hand in the air?
36:48
SPEAKER_08: We covered quite a bit of ground.
36:50
SPEAKER_08: Um and we talked about God, Jesus being fully God, fully man, um, the power of forgiveness from the cross to say Father, forgive them, and also the contrast of cooking the fish on the beach, feeding the five thousand, really understanding our failed, flawed humanity, building the church on Peter who let him down, and what a consolation that is to us.
37:16
SPEAKER_08: And really the countercultural power of deep, profound forgiveness, that when we see a film in which forgiveness is demonstrated, that has a massive impact on us because so many people find it hard to forgive.
37:30
unknown: Yeah.
37:30
SPEAKER_08: And he's forgiven me, and he's forgiven all of us.
37:35
SPEAKER_08: That's everything, isn't it?
37:36
SPEAKER_12: You talked about everything.
37:37
SPEAKER_12: But yeah, forgiveness.
37:39
SPEAKER_12: How?
37:39
SPEAKER_12: Oh, it's like cool water in a desert place, isn't it?
37:43
SPEAKER_12: Forgiveness, especially in a cancel culture.
37:46
SPEAKER_12: Goodness me.
37:47
SPEAKER_12: Yeah, talk about forgiveness.
37:49
SPEAKER_12: What else?
37:50
SPEAKER_00: I love the way how the gospel writers describe Jesus' journey towards Jerusalem.
37:57
SPEAKER_00: Um, he knew what was going to happen there, uh, but he went there resolutely.
38:02
SPEAKER_00: And then that picture that Mark presents to us uh in the Garden of Gethsemane, where the text tells us that he he he sweated and he and he oh he was just overwhelmed with sorrow, uh knowing what was going to happen the next day.
38:15
SPEAKER_00: And he says these words, not my will, but your will be done, Father.
38:21
SPEAKER_00: I mean, there's the Paul writes a wonderful, wonderful verse.
38:25
SPEAKER_00: He says, He who had no sin became sin for us to bring us to God.
38:33
SPEAKER_00: That picture, Glenn, that you showed yesterday, or that image you showed yesterday of the Roman soldier with this, yeah, man, that was just that was just so amazing.
38:42
SPEAKER_00: That shows that shows how Jesus' obedience to his father's will, uh, he went all in.
38:50
SPEAKER_00: And that is what I love about Jesus.
38:52
SPEAKER_00: There was no one else that could have done it for me and for us.
38:55
SPEAKER_00: Preach it, preach it, brother.
38:56
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
38:57
SPEAKER_12: The resolve, I don't you love the resolve of Jesus.
39:00
SPEAKER_12: We we did an anime an animation one Easter at Speak Life about um uh it was called Cannonball.
39:09
SPEAKER_12: And we sort of pictured, in fact, Alex Webb Peplo um did the um did the animation for us, the illustrations.
39:17
SPEAKER_12: He's he's actually here in Keswick.
39:19
SPEAKER_12: And uh it's it's about people in a pit, they're kind of falling down, falling down, falling down.
39:23
SPEAKER_12: And then and they're crying out for a rescue rope.
39:26
SPEAKER_12: But blasted out of heaven is this human cannonball called Jesus, and he sort of blasts past them into the pit and blasts a hole through the pit out the other side and says, Come this way.
39:38
SPEAKER_12: And it's that, and and we we got a little bit of feedback because he he's got such a determined face on him, like that Jesus, the human cannonball, has this really determined, heroic cartoon sort of face on as he blasts down into death.
39:52
SPEAKER_12: But I stand, I stand by determined Jesus because he would absolutely set his face with grim determination for Jerusalem to blast a hole through death and come out the other side.
40:02
SPEAKER_12: That's what I love about Jesus.
40:04
SPEAKER_12: Amazing.
40:05
SPEAKER_12: We probably oh, I I want to do this for the rest of our time.
40:08
SPEAKER_12: We might have time for one more.
40:09
SPEAKER_12: Do we have one more?
40:10
SPEAKER_12: Thank you.
40:12
SPEAKER_12: Jesus wept.
40:13
SPEAKER_12: Says it all for me.
40:15
SPEAKER_12: Jesus wept.
40:16
SPEAKER_03: We've all cried.
40:18
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
40:18
SPEAKER_03: Jesus wept.
40:20
SPEAKER_12: John 11.
40:21
SPEAKER_12: I you're right, I I come back to John 11 a lot, actually, in personal evangelism.
40:26
SPEAKER_12: Because just like for people who haven't heard the story before, you just set up the story, you say, okay, God showed up late to a funeral.
40:40
SPEAKER_12: Then he outcried all the other Middle Eastern mourners, and then he raised the guy.
40:49
SPEAKER_12: Cool story, right?
40:51
SPEAKER_12: Right?
40:52
SPEAKER_12: What if God is like this?
40:54
SPEAKER_12: What if God is like this?
40:56
SPEAKER_12: Okay?
40:56
SPEAKER_12: Such a and even the bit where he shows up late to the funeral, that really communicates with people because you're like, yeah, I I I know you feel like God has shown up late in your life.
41:08
SPEAKER_12: I I know you feel like if you had been here, my brother would not have died.
41:12
SPEAKER_12: I I know you've been Martha, I know you've been Mary.
41:16
SPEAKER_12: But can you still trust this one who shows up and he outcries every other Middle Eastern mourner?
41:22
SPEAKER_12: Do you know how much you've got to cry to out out mourn Middle Eastern mourners?
41:26
SPEAKER_12: There would have been professional mourners there, right?
41:30
SPEAKER_12: But when they see Jesus, they were like, oh, look, look at the way he loved Lazarus.
41:35
SPEAKER_12: Forget all the other weepers.
41:38
SPEAKER_12: Look at how he wept.
41:40
SPEAKER_12: And then with a tear-stained face, says Lazarus, come out, and the dead man came out.
41:46
SPEAKER_12: Don't you just love Jesus?
41:48
SPEAKER_12: And constantly in evangelism, I'm just saying, what if God is like him?
41:54
SPEAKER_12: I grew up with a vision of God that was pretty much identical to my view of electricity.
42:00
SPEAKER_12: Right?
42:00
SPEAKER_12: Electricity is invisible, God's invisible.
42:04
SPEAKER_12: It's powerful, God's powerful.
42:06
SPEAKER_12: I don't understand it.
42:08
SPEAKER_12: Don't understand God, don't understand electricity.
42:10
SPEAKER_12: If you can harness electricity, it can be good for your life.
42:14
SPEAKER_12: And if you get on the wrong side of it, zap.
42:17
SPEAKER_12: Ditto God, right?
42:19
SPEAKER_12: That was that was my vision of God.
42:21
SPEAKER_12: And then I remember a friend, you know, I've got two decades of a praying mother behind me, so don't forget that.
42:27
SPEAKER_12: But I remember a friend challenging me to read through the gospels, and somebody mentioned Gethsemane.
42:32
SPEAKER_12: Um I just remember getting to the Garden of Gethsemane, and there, and there is Jesus, who is a laughing, crying, shouting, weeping prophet on his face before God to bring life to the whole world.
42:51
SPEAKER_12: And I remember like reading through Luke's gospel and just thinking, if God's like him, I'm in.
42:59
SPEAKER_12: And at that stage, that's that that is what it is to become a Christian.
43:03
SPEAKER_12: You look at him and you think, he's numero uno, head honcho, big cheese, number one, he's it, he's Lord.
43:12
SPEAKER_12: And like I said yesterday, as soon as you say he's Lord, bad luck, you're a Christian.
43:17
SPEAKER_12: It it does sneak up on you like that.
43:19
SPEAKER_12: Jesus is Lord.
43:21
SPEAKER_12: And when you see him come late to the funeral, outcry all the other mourners, and raise the guy, you you figure, if God's like this, I'm in.
43:30
SPEAKER_12: How can you complete that sentence?
43:32
SPEAKER_12: That's what I love about Jesus.
43:35
SPEAKER_12: When you're doing that, you're doing evangelism, whether the other person is Christian or not.
43:42
SPEAKER_12: Now I wonder what your experience was as you evangelized one another.
43:48
SPEAKER_12: Some people, when I when I asked this question, did you did you find yourself loving Jesus more when you heard about Jesus?
43:56
SPEAKER_12: Or did you find yourself loving Jesus more when you spoke?
44:00
SPEAKER_12: About Jesus.
44:02
SPEAKER_12: And some people, it's a dead heat.
44:05
SPEAKER_12: Some people they love it more when they speak about Jesus.
44:09
SPEAKER_12: Some people love it more when they hear about Jesus.
44:12
SPEAKER_12: But we need to speak it.
44:14
SPEAKER_12: We need to hear it.
44:15
SPEAKER_12: It needs to be on our lips.
44:20
SPEAKER_12: That's kind of a point of church.
44:22
SPEAKER_12: Did you know that?
44:23
SPEAKER_12: The point of church is that we might evangelize one another.
44:27
SPEAKER_12: Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote a lovely little book called Life Together.
44:32
SPEAKER_12: It was all about why we do church.
44:35
SPEAKER_12: And the big reason, he writes early on in the book, the big reason why we need church, he says, the Christ in the word of a brother or sister is stronger than the Christ of my own heart.
44:49
SPEAKER_12: The Christ in the word of a brother or sister is stronger than the Christ of my own heart.
44:56
SPEAKER_12: He didn't mean that the Holy Spirit within is weak or anything like that, but he did mean when I try to nurse a feeling of affection for Jesus in my own heart, that can be good, and we should try to encourage ourselves in Jesus.
45:08
SPEAKER_12: But when you eyeball me and you say, Glenn, the Son of God, loves you and gave himself for you, when you say Jesus wept and this is who our Lord is, you know, when you preach to me about the the resolution of Jesus to go to the cross for me, when you talk about forgiveness, because it comes to me from the outside.
45:32
SPEAKER_12: I constantly need to hear of Jesus from the outside.
45:35
SPEAKER_12: And you think this is a strange thing to be talking about in an evangelism seminar.
45:39
SPEAKER_12: I thought we were talking about evangelism.
45:41
SPEAKER_12: We are.
45:43
SPEAKER_12: You need to be evangelized, and you need to evangelize one another constantly.
45:52
SPEAKER_12: And if you only berate yourself because you don't tell your non-Christian brother-in-law the gospel, but actually you haven't told any other Christians the gospel recently.
46:03
SPEAKER_12: You've got it backwards.
46:05
SPEAKER_12: The reason you're not telling your non-Christian friend about Jesus is because you don't tell your Christian friends about Jesus either.
46:14
SPEAKER_12: That's the reason I don't.
46:17
SPEAKER_12: You know, I'm a professional evangelist.
46:19
SPEAKER_12: It's written on my business card, right?
46:22
SPEAKER_12: But it's such a rebuke to me to think I can go out and tell a whole bunch of strangers about Jesus and then stay quiet on the school run with a personal friend.
46:36
SPEAKER_12: Right?
46:37
SPEAKER_12: And then I can be even more quiet in church on a Sunday.
46:44
SPEAKER_12: And I can tell the world about Jesus, but with other fellow believers, I just talk about the weather and the football and the cricket.
46:53
SPEAKER_12: What's my big problem?
46:54
SPEAKER_12: Is my big problem that I'm not a great evangelist?
46:57
SPEAKER_12: No, no.
46:58
SPEAKER_12: My big problem is a heart problem.
47:00
SPEAKER_12: My heart is not overflowing with words about Jesus to other believers.
47:05
SPEAKER_12: And if if we were better at evangelizing one another, we'd be so much better at evangelizing the world.
47:12
SPEAKER_12: So much better.
47:14
SPEAKER_12: So, can I challenge you this coffee time?
47:17
SPEAKER_12: There's lots to talk about over coffee.
47:20
SPEAKER_12: Lots to talk about in the wonderful setting of Keswick.
47:24
SPEAKER_12: But let's make sure we talk about Jesus.
47:27
SPEAKER_12: It's not just about evangelizing the non-Christians out there.
47:29
SPEAKER_12: Let's evangelize one another with seed number one.
47:32
SPEAKER_12: That's what I love about Jesus.
47:33
SPEAKER_12: And then seed number two, I'll give you two more tomorrow.
47:38
SPEAKER_12: But seed number two is a God seed.
47:42
SPEAKER_12: Remember, we're thinking about Jesus' vision of God, the world, and you.
47:47
SPEAKER_12: So Jesus is our guide.
47:49
SPEAKER_12: He is the word of God.
47:50
SPEAKER_12: And he shows us what God is like.
47:52
SPEAKER_12: And remember, God is a loving union of three: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.
47:57
SPEAKER_12: How do we talk about God in evangelism?
48:01
SPEAKER_12: Well, we need to begin with Jesus.
48:05
SPEAKER_12: When I tell people to be Trinitarian in their evangelism, I don't mean you need to get the Athanasian Creed from out of the back pocket and teach people the meaning of the word homoousius, right?
48:18
SPEAKER_12: I don't mean that.
48:19
SPEAKER_12: I do mean that you need to be obsessed by the Jesus God.
48:25
SPEAKER_12: Whatever God you're talking about, when you talk to your friends, make sure you're talking about the Jesus God.
48:30
SPEAKER_12: I get that phrase, the Jesus God, from an Iranian friend of mine.
48:34
SPEAKER_12: I first met her when I was speaking in Exeter University, and she was a postgrad student doing some law.
48:41
SPEAKER_12: But the real reason why she was in England from Iran is that she'd converted to Christianity and she wanted to learn as much as she could.
48:50
SPEAKER_12: And so she came to all my talks and she was taking copious notes.
48:54
SPEAKER_12: On the Tuesday, I got to know her a little bit and asked, What's your story?
48:58
SPEAKER_12: And she said, Well, I grew up in Iran, it was a devout Muslim home.
49:02
SPEAKER_12: I would say all the prayers in Arabic.
49:04
SPEAKER_12: I don't speak Arabic, but I would say them.
49:07
SPEAKER_12: I was that kind of a Muslim.
49:09
SPEAKER_12: And then in my teenage years, I was at a wedding and an uncle sidled up to me and he smuggled me a copy of the Gospels.
49:19
SPEAKER_12: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, the Injil, as it's known in the Quran.
49:24
SPEAKER_12: And he just said, read this.
49:26
SPEAKER_12: Her uncle had become a Christian.
49:29
SPEAKER_12: And so she, because she's a teenager, thought, here's some rebellion.
49:33
SPEAKER_12: I'm going to read the gospels, right?
49:36
SPEAKER_12: And under her covers late at night, she would read through Matthew and Mark and Luke, and she got halfway through John's gospel.
49:42
SPEAKER_12: And she said this to me.
49:44
SPEAKER_12: She said, I came to see that God cannot be the God of the ayatollahs.
49:49
SPEAKER_12: You know, the Muslim authorities in Iran.
49:51
SPEAKER_12: God cannot be the God of the ayatollahs.
49:54
SPEAKER_12: He must be the Jesus God.
49:56
SPEAKER_12: And I thought, that's it, the Jesus God.
49:59
SPEAKER_12: I'm going to steal that.
50:01
SPEAKER_12: That's who we're on about.
50:03
SPEAKER_12: The God who is revealed in Jesus.
50:06
SPEAKER_12: Tom Wright, author of 70 books, and once Bishop of Durham, and a great academic as well.
50:14
SPEAKER_12: He was once a chaplain at Worcester College, Oxford.
50:17
SPEAKER_12: And in Freshers Week at Worcester College, I don't know if it's still the same, but back in the 1900s, students would come, and one of the things they had to do in Freshers Week is meet the chaplain.
50:30
SPEAKER_12: And so he would have a whole bunch of 18 and 19-year-olds who were agnostic or atheist, and they would sheepishly confess to the chaplain, I'm afraid I don't actually believe in God.
50:42
SPEAKER_12: And Tom Wright had a great comeback.
50:45
SPEAKER_12: He just said, Well, which God don't you believe in?
50:48
SPEAKER_12: And the student would look puzzled and say, Well, just just you know, just the big guy, just God, you know.
50:54
SPEAKER_12: And Tom Wright would press them.
50:55
SPEAKER_12: He'd say, Describe to me the God in whom you don't believe.
51:00
SPEAKER_12: And you know what they'd end up describing?
51:02
SPEAKER_12: Electricity.
51:05
SPEAKER_12: They'd end up describing Zeus, you know, some kind of bearded figure on a throne, thunderbolt ready to hurl.
51:12
SPEAKER_12: And what did Tom Wright say?
51:15
SPEAKER_12: I don't believe in that God either.
51:18
SPEAKER_12: Can I tell you about Jesus, please?
51:22
SPEAKER_12: Do you know why Jesus is introduced as the Son of God?
51:25
SPEAKER_12: Right?
51:26
SPEAKER_12: The Son is just like the Father.
51:29
SPEAKER_12: The Son is a chip off the old block.
51:32
SPEAKER_12: The Son is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation, as Colossians chapter 1, verse 15 says.
51:40
SPEAKER_12: Jesus is what God is like.
51:43
SPEAKER_12: Have you ever had long evangelistic conversations about God late into the night?
51:49
SPEAKER_12: And at some point you look at your watch and you think, how have we got so far?
51:53
SPEAKER_12: Because it seems like I'm saying God and my friend is saying God, and we're describing totally different things.
52:01
SPEAKER_12: Well, of course you are.
52:03
SPEAKER_12: No one has ever seen God.
52:06
SPEAKER_12: But God the one and only, who is at the Father's side, He has made him known.
52:13
SPEAKER_12: Let's talk about the Jesus God in all our evangelism.
52:17
SPEAKER_12: And as we start talking about the Jesus God, it starts to become a gospel that is rich, that is deep, that is filled with love.
52:29
SPEAKER_12: Because as soon as you're talking about Jesus, the Son, he can introduce you to a Father.
52:36
SPEAKER_12: He can introduce you to His Spirit.
52:38
SPEAKER_12: You can be invited into a God who has been loved from before the foundation of the world.
52:45
SPEAKER_12: The night before Jesus dies, he prays.
52:49
SPEAKER_12: And in John 17, verse 24, he says, Father, you loved me before the foundation of the world.
52:59
SPEAKER_12: We heard about it yesterday as Andrew was talking from John chapter 17.
53:05
SPEAKER_12: He said, Father, I want them to be with me and to see my glory, the glory you've given me because you loved me before the foundation of the world.
53:20
SPEAKER_12: Jesus asks us to picture what eternity was like.
53:24
SPEAKER_12: And he can tell us because he was there.
53:27
SPEAKER_12: He did not just invent a religion, he invented the universe.
53:34
SPEAKER_12: He was there in on a Niagara falls of love and blessing.
53:38
SPEAKER_12: The Father loving him in the joy of the Holy Spirit, and he says, Father, I want those you've given me to be with me where I am and to see my glory, the glory you've given me because you loved me before the foundation of the world.
53:52
SPEAKER_12: Isn't that good news?
53:54
SPEAKER_12: That before and behind this world, there is such love.
53:58
SPEAKER_12: There is a Niagara falls of blessing.
54:01
SPEAKER_12: And Jesus has come to say, Come on in.
54:05
SPEAKER_12: The waters are fine.
54:08
SPEAKER_12: When we just talk about God in the abstract, your friend will think of electricity, your friend will think of Zeus or Thor or Osiris or who knows.
54:17
SPEAKER_12: Who knows what your friend will think of?
54:18
SPEAKER_12: A thousand different things.
54:20
SPEAKER_12: No one has ever seen God.
54:22
SPEAKER_12: But God the one and only, Jesus, who is at the Father's side, He has made him known.
54:27
SPEAKER_12: Let us obsess about Jesus.
54:30
SPEAKER_12: Now, tomorrow I will give you a number of other seeds that you can sow.
54:35
SPEAKER_12: You can think about the world and how you can talk to your friend about Christ coming into a broken world.
54:41
SPEAKER_12: We'll talk about you and how you can be one with Jesus.
54:45
SPEAKER_12: We'll give you different seeds that you can sow for tomorrow, but hopefully that's given you enough to go on for now.
54:50
SPEAKER_12: Why don't I pray for us?
54:52
SPEAKER_12: And then I'll hand back to Mike.
54:53
SPEAKER_12: Let me pray.
55:03
SPEAKER_11: Our Father, we praise you for the Lord Jesus, who shows us your heart, your passion, your glory.
55:15
SPEAKER_12: Father, you are the kind of God who stoops and serves.
55:19
SPEAKER_12: You are the kind of God who spreads his arms wide open.
55:24
SPEAKER_11: You are the God who invites us and says, Come.
55:28
SPEAKER_11: Father, show us Jesus again.
55:31
SPEAKER_12: Fill us with his spirit, that our hearts may overflow with words.
55:38
SPEAKER_12: And we pray that even today, even with fellow believers, we would have opportunity to say that's what I love about Jesus.
55:49
SPEAKER_12: We would have opportunity to speak of the Lord we love so much.
55:55
SPEAKER_12: May our hearts, may our lips, may our lives overflow with witness.
56:03
SPEAKER_12: To the glory of your name.
56:05
unknown: Amen.
56:24
SPEAKER_06: We will now be moving into part two, which was streamed from the Keset Convention the day after part one, so on the 26th of July.
56:34
SPEAKER_06: Just a reminder if you haven't done so already, subscribing to the Speak Life Podcast on your podcatcher of choice will ensure that you will be among the first to know whenever we release a new episode.
56:46
SPEAKER_06: And do leave us a rating and review.
56:49
SPEAKER_06: That really helps us get seen and heard by more people.
56:52
SPEAKER_06: Thank you very much.
56:53
SPEAKER_06: Over to Glenn for part two.
57:19
SPEAKER_12: Yesterday we tried to fill your hearts a little bit more with the good news of Jesus, because as Jesus says in Matthew 12, verse 34, from the overflow of the heart, the mouth speaks.
57:32
SPEAKER_12: So what grabs your heart, wags your tongue, and if we're struggling with words, and we all struggle with words, then what do we need to do?
57:41
SPEAKER_12: We need our hearts refreshed again by the goodness of Jesus.
57:45
SPEAKER_12: Yesterday I told you about 321course.com.
57:49
SPEAKER_12: We might even reach our 10,000th sign-up this week if you guys can help us out.
57:55
SPEAKER_12: Wouldn't that be fun?
57:57
SPEAKER_12: Go to 321course.com, enter your email, come up with a password, and you're in.
58:01
SPEAKER_12: It's completely free.
58:02
SPEAKER_12: We won't spam you, but it's just a way of saving your progress, because once you're on 321course.com, you can go through the good news of Jesus in eight sessions.
58:12
SPEAKER_12: You can binge it all in under two hours, or you can take your time over the eight videos.
58:17
SPEAKER_12: There's plenty of other bonus materials.
58:19
SPEAKER_12: There's a chat community, some FAQs, and ways of getting involved more and more in Speak Life.
58:25
SPEAKER_12: So why don't you go to 321Course.com, sign up, and we could smash through the 10,000 barrier even this week.
58:31
SPEAKER_12: That would be great to have you.
58:33
SPEAKER_12: Now, yesterday uh we were thinking about this presentation of the Gospel 321.
58:40
SPEAKER_12: Other presentations are available, but here is a way of understanding the good news.
58:45
SPEAKER_12: And uh I've been banging on about this since about 2010, and I've written a couple of books about it.
58:51
SPEAKER_12: One of them looks kind of like this.
58:53
SPEAKER_12: It's yellow, it's in the bookstall neck next to us.
58:57
SPEAKER_12: And if you want to go deeper into 321, then I recommend having a look at How to See Life, uh, which is uh my latest book that was out in January.
59:06
SPEAKER_12: There's another book that's coming out in October called How to Speak Life.
59:11
SPEAKER_12: And based on the 321 outline, it gives you eight seeds that you can scatter into various conversations.
59:18
SPEAKER_12: And they correspond to the 321 outline.
59:22
SPEAKER_12: Uh, I'm gonna take you through four different seeds that you can scatter over these two sessions.
59:27
SPEAKER_12: We had a look at two of them yesterday.
59:30
SPEAKER_12: Uh, if you were here, we thought about that's what I love about Jesus.
59:34
SPEAKER_12: Dot dot dot.
59:36
SPEAKER_12: How do you complete that sentence?
59:39
SPEAKER_12: And how do you complete that sentence in a way that's fresh, in a way that's different today than it was last month?
59:47
SPEAKER_12: Because there's new things that you love about Jesus.
59:50
SPEAKER_12: Perhaps at Keswick this week, you've discovered new things that you love about Jesus, been reminded about old truths that you love about Jesus, and they're fresh for you.
1:00:00
SPEAKER_12: And actually, evangelism, the very heartbeat of evangelism, is just finishing that sentence.
1:00:06
SPEAKER_12: Whether you're speaking to a Christian or a non-Christian, you're evangelizing them.
1:00:12
SPEAKER_12: We talk about that's what I love about Jesus.
1:00:15
SPEAKER_12: The second seed that we thought about is which God don't you believe in?
1:00:20
SPEAKER_12: Or which God do you believe in?
1:00:22
SPEAKER_12: Uh, wherever I go in evangelism, one of those two questions is usually relevant.
1:00:28
SPEAKER_12: I live in Eastbourne, uh, sort of the retirement capital of the UK.
1:00:32
SPEAKER_12: It's the sort of place where all the shopfront windows are bifocal, just to help things.
1:00:37
SPEAKER_12: It's God's waiting room, really, Eastbourne.
1:00:41
SPEAKER_12: And uh I do a lot of evangelism there, but then I spend a lot of my time on university campuses talking to the young people, right?
1:00:49
SPEAKER_12: And it's very interesting.
1:00:51
SPEAKER_12: I'll I'll go to Eastbourne and quite often I'll I'll meet people who say, Oh, don't worry about me, I'm a Christian already, and I don't believe them.
1:01:01
SPEAKER_12: Uh I'm not rude about it, and I don't poke them in the chest and say, Sing Shine, Jesus, shine.
1:01:06
SPEAKER_12: Prove it, prove you're a Christian.
1:01:07
SPEAKER_12: Um, I'm not rude about it.
1:01:09
SPEAKER_12: It's just somewhere in the back of my head, if they're over a certain age, I think to myself, they probably grew up at a time when it was very easy to go to a shelf of identities and pick the Christian label and put the Christian label on the chest and go out into the day.
1:01:30
SPEAKER_12: And being a Christian helped you navigate life more frictionlessly.
1:01:35
SPEAKER_12: That was true 60 years ago?
1:01:38
SPEAKER_12: That was that was much more true than it is today.
1:01:41
SPEAKER_12: And so there's such a thing as nominal Christianity.
1:01:43
SPEAKER_12: We know that, don't we?
1:01:45
SPEAKER_12: Nominal Christianity is just a phrase that means Christian in name only.
1:01:49
SPEAKER_12: So if I'm in Eastbourne and somebody tells me they're a Christian, I don't believe them.
1:01:53
SPEAKER_12: I don't believe them.
1:01:54
SPEAKER_12: But then if I'm talking to somebody under 25 and they tell me they're an atheist, I don't believe them.
1:02:02
SPEAKER_12: For exactly the same reason.
1:02:05
SPEAKER_12: Because nowadays there's a different shelf of identities, and you can pick out the atheist label really easily, and you can slap it on your chest, and you walk out into the world, and you're asked what you believe.
1:02:17
SPEAKER_12: Oh, I'm an atheist.
1:02:18
SPEAKER_12: Why are you an atheist?
1:02:21
SPEAKER_12: Have you read Bertrand Russell?
1:02:23
SPEAKER_12: Have you thought very deeply about metaphysics?
1:02:26
SPEAKER_12: You haven't, have you?
1:02:27
SPEAKER_12: It's just a label that helps you navigate life a little bit more frictionlessly in the year 2024.
1:02:34
SPEAKER_12: There's such a thing as nominal atheism, isn't there?
1:02:38
SPEAKER_12: Atheism in name only.
1:02:41
SPEAKER_12: And you should call people if they say they're an atheist.
1:02:43
SPEAKER_12: I often say, what are you praying for at the moment?
1:02:46
SPEAKER_12: And quite often people say, oh, my mother's going in for an operation, so well.
1:02:51
SPEAKER_12: And actually, those who do surveys, they've learnt this.
1:02:54
SPEAKER_12: When you ask someone, do you believe in God or not?
1:02:56
SPEAKER_12: The conversation is not over.
1:02:58
SPEAKER_12: Because lots of people who say, I don't believe in God, they pray, they believe in the afterlife, they believe in the supernatural, right?
1:03:09
SPEAKER_12: These are strange kinds of atheists.
1:03:11
SPEAKER_12: How do you understand their atheism?
1:03:13
SPEAKER_12: Well, it's a nominal atheism, isn't it?
1:03:16
SPEAKER_12: So many of my friends, they're atheists in name only, and it's not the end of the conversation.
1:03:22
SPEAKER_12: If they believe in God, you ask them, which God do you believe in?
1:03:28
SPEAKER_12: Let's get particular.
1:03:30
SPEAKER_12: And as we said yesterday, we want to talk about the Jesus God constantly, the Jesus God.
1:03:35
SPEAKER_12: And if they don't believe in God, again, the conversation is not over.
1:03:39
SPEAKER_12: The conversation is, which God don't you believe in?
1:03:42
SPEAKER_12: And at that point, you'll get a lot of agreement because you don't believe in the God they don't believe in either.
1:03:49
SPEAKER_12: As soon as they describe the God they don't believe in, you can stand shoulder to shoulder with them in their atheism.
1:03:56
SPEAKER_12: And you can say, I too am an atheist, as regards that God.
1:04:00
SPEAKER_12: But let me tell you about Jesus.
1:04:02
SPEAKER_12: So those were two seeds that you can scatter into your uh conversations based on, well, the first point of life according to Jesus, Jesus is the ultimate guide to life.
1:04:12
SPEAKER_12: Okay?
1:04:13
SPEAKER_12: Let's focus the conversation on him and what we love about him.
1:04:18
SPEAKER_12: But Jesus shows us that God is a loving union of three Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
1:04:26
SPEAKER_12: Often it's Christians who aren't really that specific about who God is.
1:04:31
SPEAKER_12: Who is God to you?
1:04:33
SPEAKER_12: Actually, rarely do Christians say, well, God is a father loving his son in the joy of the Holy Spirit.
1:04:40
SPEAKER_12: The Holy Trinity.
1:04:41
SPEAKER_12: Actually, even Christians don't get as specific as the creeds get.
1:04:47
SPEAKER_12: But as we'll see, when we dive down into the beauty of the threeness of God, you'll have a much richer, more profound, more attractive gospel to share with people.
1:04:59
SPEAKER_12: So Jesus shows us that God is a loving union of three, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
1:05:04
SPEAKER_12: And then today we're going to focus on the last two points of 3-2-1.
1:05:08
SPEAKER_12: Jesus shows us that the world is shaped by two representatives.
1:05:14
SPEAKER_12: Adam representing life as it is in all its frustration and death and perishing and curse.
1:05:25
SPEAKER_12: But Jesus represents life as it's meant to be.
1:05:28
SPEAKER_12: The life of heaven anchored to earth.
1:05:31
SPEAKER_12: So the world is shaped by two representatives, Adam and Jesus.
1:05:35
SPEAKER_12: And then the final point of 3-2-1 is you.
1:05:38
SPEAKER_12: You are born one with Adam.
1:05:41
SPEAKER_12: And the call of the gospel is be one with Jesus.
1:05:46
SPEAKER_12: And when you're one with Jesus, you get his father as your father.
1:05:49
SPEAKER_12: You get his future as your future, his spirit as your spirit.
1:05:54
SPEAKER_12: That's good news.
1:05:55
SPEAKER_12: Let's see it in 90 seconds.
1:06:01
SPEAKER_10: In the beginning, there was light and life and love.
1:06:04
SPEAKER_10: A father loving his son in the joy of the Holy Spirit.
1:06:07
SPEAKER_10: And everything has come from light and life and love.
1:06:11
SPEAKER_10: But we look today at the world and we see it's not like that.
1:06:14
SPEAKER_10: We see a world full of darkness and death and disconnection.
1:06:18
SPEAKER_10: Where's that come from?
1:06:19
SPEAKER_10: Well, we've turned from the light, and when you turn from light, where else do you go but darkness?
1:06:24
SPEAKER_10: When you turn from love, where else do you go but disconnection?
1:06:27
SPEAKER_10: When you turn from life, where else do you go but death?
1:06:31
SPEAKER_10: But then what does love do when love sees the beloved in trouble?
1:06:35
SPEAKER_10: Love says, your pit will be my pit.
1:06:38
SPEAKER_10: Your deaths will be my depth.
1:06:40
SPEAKER_10: Your darkness will be my darkness.
1:06:42
SPEAKER_10: Your death will be my death.
1:06:45
SPEAKER_10: So who is Jesus?
1:06:46
SPEAKER_10: He's the son of the Father who came at our brother to be with us in the darkness.
1:06:52
SPEAKER_10: To take that darkness on himself, that death, that disconnection that we all deserve.
1:06:57
SPEAKER_10: Eternity from God.
1:06:58
SPEAKER_10: He took it on himself on the cross.
1:07:01
SPEAKER_10: He plunged it down to the hell that it deserves.
1:07:04
SPEAKER_10: And then he rose up again to light and life and love.
1:07:07
SPEAKER_10: And he said, You in the darkness, do you want my life?
1:07:11
SPEAKER_10: You in death, do you want my life?
1:07:14
SPEAKER_10: You in disconnection, do you want my love?
1:07:17
SPEAKER_10: And anyone who turns and says yes to Jesus, we now belong to him.
1:07:22
SPEAKER_10: We get his father as our father.
1:07:24
SPEAKER_10: We get his spirit as our spirit.
1:07:25
SPEAKER_10: We get his future as our future.
1:07:27
SPEAKER_10: It's for free and it's forever.
1:07:30
SPEAKER_10: So do you want Jesus?
1:07:37
SPEAKER_12: It's good news, isn't it?
1:07:39
SPEAKER_12: It is good news.
1:07:41
SPEAKER_12: Need to remind ourselves of this good news from uh from the overflow of the heart, the mouth speaks.
1:07:47
SPEAKER_12: Uh we're gonna press into the last two points of the 3-2-1 outline.
1:07:53
SPEAKER_12: Uh, that the world is shaped by two representatives, Adam and Jesus.
1:07:57
SPEAKER_12: You're born one with Adam, be one with Jesus.
1:08:01
SPEAKER_12: And a key scripture that uh this teaching is based on is from 1 Corinthians 15 that Andrew Wilson preached on the other night.
1:08:09
SPEAKER_12: 1 Corinthians 15, for death, for since death came through a man, that's Adam, the resurrection of the dead comes also through a man.
1:08:18
SPEAKER_12: For as in Adam all die, so in Christ all will be made alive, but each in turn, Christ the first fruits, then when he comes, those who belong to him.
1:08:30
SPEAKER_12: So the world is shaped by these two representatives, Adam and Christ.
1:08:36
SPEAKER_12: How should we think about this?
1:08:38
SPEAKER_12: Uh do you know that old uh show on BBC?
1:08:42
SPEAKER_12: It started out on BBC Two, it went to BBC One, Who Do You Think You Are?
1:08:46
SPEAKER_12: Do you remember that?
1:08:47
SPEAKER_12: Who do you think you are?
1:08:50
SPEAKER_12: And it answered the question, who do you think you are, in a surprising way.
1:08:55
SPEAKER_12: Modern people tend to think of who they are in terms of their own choices, their own decisions, their own preferences, what they like.
1:09:03
SPEAKER_12: But this show was a lot more traditional because to answer the question, who do you think you are, you did a family tree.
1:09:10
SPEAKER_12: So they would take a celebrity and they would inquire into the celebrity's genealogy.
1:09:17
SPEAKER_12: And it turned out that there were some skeletons in the closet, but also it turned out that they might be distantly related to royalty, or they were from Huguenot stock and they had to get out of France quick, or they ran away with a scullery maid some, you know, at some point.
1:09:33
SPEAKER_12: And there's usually this sort of this story of who you think you are, and guess who you are?
1:09:41
SPEAKER_12: You are actually your family, which is not the modern answer to who we are.
1:09:47
SPEAKER_12: Uh, modern Westerners think of themselves as individuals.
1:09:50
SPEAKER_12: We're atomized, we stand on our own two feet, and we don't care about our family.
1:09:56
SPEAKER_12: We don't care about even what has been assigned to us at birth.
1:10:01
SPEAKER_12: We don't care about that.
1:10:03
SPEAKER_12: We choose who we are, and it's our preferences, it's our choices, it's our decisions that make us who we are.
1:10:10
SPEAKER_12: I think the program Who Do You Think You Are got it right, though.
1:10:15
SPEAKER_12: We are our families, aren't we?
1:10:18
SPEAKER_12: Which is a scary thought, isn't it?
1:10:20
SPEAKER_12: That we are our families.
1:10:23
SPEAKER_12: I was in a restaurant the other day, and uh, as the waitress was leaving the table, I made a joke, and as soon as I made the joke, I thought to myself, that's a dad joke.
1:10:34
SPEAKER_12: In fact, that's my dad's joke.
1:10:37
SPEAKER_12: And I thought to myself, it's happening.
1:10:39
SPEAKER_12: You know, you open your mouth and your father comes out.
1:10:42
SPEAKER_12: You're like, what's happening to me?
1:10:44
SPEAKER_12: It's awful.
1:10:46
SPEAKER_12: But it happens to all of us.
1:10:48
SPEAKER_12: We we we think that our lives are determined by the choices that we make.
1:10:53
SPEAKER_12: And if we meet in a social situation, I'll tell you, you know, I chose to study this subject, I chose to move to this town, I chose this job, I choose to like this music, I choose to watch these programs on Netflix.
1:11:07
SPEAKER_12: That's who I am.
1:11:09
SPEAKER_12: Is that who I am, though?
1:11:12
SPEAKER_12: I mean, if you took me and transplanted me to 13th century France, would I be the same person?
1:11:19
SPEAKER_12: Even if I had the same DNA and genetic makeup.
1:11:23
SPEAKER_12: I mean, the the person who I am today is shaped by my choices a tiny little bit.
1:11:31
SPEAKER_12: But I had no say in my family, I had no say in my genetic makeup, I had no say in where I was born or when I was born or the kind of upbringing I had.
1:11:43
SPEAKER_12: 96% of who Glenn Scrivener is is completely out of Glenn Scrivener's hands.
1:11:50
SPEAKER_12: And we obsess about the 4%, don't we?
1:11:53
SPEAKER_12: Absolutely obsess about the little decorations that we do.
1:11:59
SPEAKER_12: It would be like if my nine-year-old daughter thought that she owned the house because she decorated her room, right?
1:12:07
SPEAKER_12: That's what we're like, modern Westerners.
1:12:10
SPEAKER_12: We think we have defined who we are because of the choices that we make, and it is a nonsense.
1:12:16
SPEAKER_12: You are your family.
1:12:19
SPEAKER_12: And 1 Corinthians 15 traces the family tree back to Adam.
1:12:26
SPEAKER_12: Now, if I was to trace my family tree back, uh one person I'd love to investigate in my genealogy would be Anne Forbes.
1:12:35
SPEAKER_12: Uh, in 1787, Anne Forbes stole 10 yards of printed cotton from a London market.
1:12:42
SPEAKER_12: And she was sentenced to be hanged by the neck until dead for that heinous crime.
1:12:49
SPEAKER_12: Uh, but then actually the judge in Southwark decided to have mercy on her.
1:12:54
SPEAKER_12: Not a lot of mercy, but he's he spared her the hangman's noose.
1:12:58
SPEAKER_12: One of the factors in why he spared her from being hung is uh they were about to transport the convicts to Australia, and they recognized they had about 1,700 men about to colonize Australia and only about 300 women.
1:13:15
SPEAKER_12: Do you see a problem?
1:13:18
SPEAKER_12: And Anne and a lot of women were shipped off to Australia for crimes like stealing 10 yards of printed cotton.
1:13:28
SPEAKER_12: Now, I'm not telling you that as a sob story.
1:13:31
SPEAKER_12: Actually, I think she did quite well out of the whole crime caper.
1:13:35
SPEAKER_12: Uh, she started life on the set of Oliver Twist, she wound up on the set of Home and Away.
1:13:41
SPEAKER_12: Uh who says crime didn't pay?
1:13:44
SPEAKER_12: She met and married George Huxley.
1:13:46
SPEAKER_12: Um, his crime was riding his master's horse without his permission.
1:13:51
SPEAKER_12: So joy riding.
1:13:52
SPEAKER_12: Uh and he was transported to Australia and had to serve seven years of transpos uh seven years hard labor in the penal colony in Sydney.
1:14:02
SPEAKER_12: And then they they met and married and they became quite prosperous farmers just north of Sydney.
1:14:08
SPEAKER_12: And uh I think they did quite well out of the whole thing.
1:14:12
SPEAKER_12: But I often think about Anne Forbes' story.
1:14:16
SPEAKER_12: Uh, when her life was saved from the hangman's noose, my life was saved too, wasn't it?
1:14:24
SPEAKER_12: It's a funny way of thinking about it, isn't it?
1:14:26
SPEAKER_12: We don't think in those terms, do we?
1:14:28
SPEAKER_12: But that moment that the judge did not just save her life, he saved the lives of about 6,000 of us that are descended from Anne Forbes.
1:14:36
SPEAKER_12: We never think like that, do we?
1:14:38
SPEAKER_12: Because we're such Western individualists.
1:14:41
SPEAKER_12: But you think your life is about the choices that you make.
1:14:45
SPEAKER_12: Actually, your life is determined by the choices that happened long ago, and you had no say about them whatsoever.
1:14:52
SPEAKER_12: You just find yourself thrown into the world.
1:14:57
SPEAKER_12: You had no say in when you were born, where you were born, who you were raised by, you're thrown into this world as a perishing sinner.
1:15:07
SPEAKER_12: That's just life.
1:15:09
SPEAKER_12: And the Bible is realistic enough to say that at the top of all our family trees, there's an Anne Forbes figure.
1:15:17
SPEAKER_12: His name is Adam.
1:15:19
SPEAKER_12: And there was one crime, and there was one exile, and we've all been thrown into the world east of Eden.
1:15:28
SPEAKER_12: And we're perishing, and we're sinners.
1:15:31
SPEAKER_12: And you say, I had no choice in it.
1:15:34
SPEAKER_12: Of course, you had no choice in it.
1:15:36
SPEAKER_12: You have no choice in basically anything, it's not just the Bible telling you you have no choice, right?
1:15:42
SPEAKER_12: It's reality.
1:15:44
SPEAKER_12: You are born into this world, and if I were to map your genome, I would discover all kinds of ticking time bombs, health-wise.
1:15:53
SPEAKER_12: That's why I never want to map my genome.
1:15:55
SPEAKER_12: I never want to know all the gene deletions and all the ticking time bombs that are there waiting to go off at some point.
1:16:01
SPEAKER_12: I don't want to know that stuff.
1:16:04
SPEAKER_12: There's a whole bunch of junk in me, there's a whole bunch of junk in you.
1:16:07
SPEAKER_12: And we're born into this world perishing and imperfect and sick and dying, and we have no say in any of that, and that's just life.
1:16:22
SPEAKER_12: That's not a horrible teaching from the Bible, it's life.
1:16:28
SPEAKER_12: And Christians are just holistic enough to say, just as I'm born into the world with a whole bunch of junk DNA, I'm also born into the world with a whole bunch of junk morality, right?
1:16:41
SPEAKER_12: There's a whole bunch of imperfections to me.
1:16:46
SPEAKER_12: There's a whole bunch of proclivities towards certain sins.
1:16:50
SPEAKER_12: Just as I might be born with a uh a tendency towards kidney failure, and you might be born with a tendency towards liver failure, or whatever it is.
1:16:59
SPEAKER_12: I might be born with a tendency towards lust, and you're born with a tendency towards greed, but we're all perishing.
1:17:06
SPEAKER_12: We're all full of junk, we're all dying, and we had no say in the matter whatsoever.
1:17:14
SPEAKER_12: And Westerners hate that.
1:17:17
SPEAKER_12: Because we're individuals, and our choices count for everything.
1:17:21
SPEAKER_12: No, they don't.
1:17:23
SPEAKER_12: You're born into this world dying.
1:17:26
SPEAKER_12: It's the doctrine of original sin.
1:17:30
SPEAKER_12: Now, original sin gets a really bad press nowadays.
1:17:35
SPEAKER_12: Uh in fact, I was up in York in a restaurant giving a talk, and uh I was explaining the gospel, kind of according to 321.
1:17:43
SPEAKER_12: I didn't call it that, but it was sort of the the sort of gospel that you saw on the video with that 90-second animation.
1:17:51
SPEAKER_12: And at the end of it, a guy came up to me and he said, I like what you said, but at points you came dangerously close to that medieval doctrine called original sin.
1:18:06
SPEAKER_12: Now, I'm a cricketer.
1:18:09
SPEAKER_12: Do you do you know this, do you know this phrase, you let you let it go through to the keeper?
1:18:13
SPEAKER_12: Do you know that phrase?
1:18:14
SPEAKER_12: Okay, if you're an opening batsman, and if the ball is not coming, if it's not on target, if it's not gonna hit the stumps, you can just let it go through to the keeper, right?
1:18:23
SPEAKER_12: It's good it's good, bad, if you're in if you're an opening batter, right?
1:18:26
SPEAKER_12: Not if if you're in a 20-20, you probably need to try and hit every ball for six, but if you're an opening batter in a test match, you just let the ball go through to the keeper.
1:18:34
SPEAKER_12: You don't have to play at everything.
1:18:35
SPEAKER_12: And in evangelism, you don't have to play at every delivery that comes your way, okay?
1:18:40
SPEAKER_12: Because sometimes it's a trap, sometimes it's bait.
1:18:44
SPEAKER_12: So he said, You came dangerously close to that medieval doctrine called original sin.
1:18:49
SPEAKER_12: And I just shouldered arms, just let it go through to the keeper.
1:18:53
SPEAKER_12: And I said, Well, tell me your story.
1:18:54
SPEAKER_12: What brings you here?
1:18:56
SPEAKER_12: And he said, Well, actually, I've been uh in this rehab community for the last 18 months, and uh, for the last 12 months I've been clean and sober uh from a heroin addiction.
1:19:08
SPEAKER_12: And my sponsor, uh, he's a Christian, and he brought me along to hear you.
1:19:14
SPEAKER_12: And I thought, that's that's fascinating.
1:19:17
SPEAKER_12: Well done.
1:19:18
SPEAKER_12: Like 12 months clean and sober.
1:19:20
SPEAKER_12: This that's a brilliant job.
1:19:22
SPEAKER_12: And he said, Yeah, I mean, I've got my battle.
1:19:25
SPEAKER_12: But then he said to me, But you've got your battle, and everyone in this restaurant's got their own battles.
1:19:31
SPEAKER_12: He said, I've got a theory.
1:19:32
SPEAKER_12: I said, What's your theory?
1:19:33
SPEAKER_12: He said, He said, I reckon everybody is an addict.
1:19:39
SPEAKER_12: I said, tell me more.
1:19:43
SPEAKER_12: He said, Well, you know, my drug of choice is heroin, but for some people it's fame, and for other people it's workaholism, and for some people they just need to be loved by everybody.
1:19:52
SPEAKER_12: And he just went through that, you know, he was basically teaching me about idolatry, right?
1:19:58
SPEAKER_12: We all cling to these things that we think are gonna give us life and they fail us, and so we double down on it and we go to our problem as though it's our solution, and we get addicted and addicted.
1:20:07
SPEAKER_12: It's not just heroin, everybody.
1:20:09
SPEAKER_12: It's it's we're all addicted.
1:20:11
SPEAKER_12: I said, I love that theory.
1:20:13
SPEAKER_12: Shall we give it a name?
1:20:18
SPEAKER_12: He said, What do you suggest?
1:20:19
SPEAKER_12: I said, Well, let's just call it universal addiction.
1:20:24
SPEAKER_12: He said, Yeah, that's it.
1:20:25
SPEAKER_12: It's universal addiction.
1:20:27
SPEAKER_12: I said, I'm a believer in universal addiction too, otherwise known as original sin.
1:20:37
SPEAKER_12: It's true, we're all addicted, we all the things we love kill us, right?
1:20:43
SPEAKER_12: And when they start killing us, we double down and we want more of the thing that's killing us.
1:20:49
SPEAKER_12: And we've all got it, whether it's heroin or whatever it is.
1:20:52
SPEAKER_12: We're all addicted to these things.
1:20:54
SPEAKER_12: We all have this bent to go after the thing.
1:20:56
SPEAKER_12: We look for love in all the wrong places, and we're perishing, and we're dying, and we can't just choose our way out of it.
1:21:04
SPEAKER_12: You know, an alcoholic can choose between wine and beer and spirits, but they can't just choose their way out of their alcoholism.
1:21:13
SPEAKER_12: Okay, we're addicted, we're trapped, and we're born into this condition.
1:21:19
SPEAKER_12: It's actually a very holistic doctrine, isn't it?
1:21:21
SPEAKER_12: This doctrine of original sin.
1:21:24
SPEAKER_12: That we're all stuck.
1:21:26
SPEAKER_12: It's very authentic, it's very honest.
1:21:28
SPEAKER_12: There are things about original sin that really do preach to a secular age.
1:21:32
SPEAKER_12: It's authentic, it's honest, it's a real leveler.
1:21:37
SPEAKER_12: Because it's not like there are the horrible people over there who are wicked, but I am pure.
1:21:43
SPEAKER_12: No, the the line dividing good and evil runs down the middle of every human heart, as Alexander Solzhenitsyn said.
1:21:49
SPEAKER_12: It's not like there's the good people over there or the bad people over there and the good people over here with me.
1:21:54
SPEAKER_12: The line between good and evil runs down my heart, and there's good and evil, and I was born into this state, and so were you.
1:22:01
SPEAKER_12: It's so equalizing.
1:22:03
SPEAKER_12: There are things that are really great about the doctrine of original sin that really connect with a modern age.
1:22:08
SPEAKER_12: There are also things that are outrageous to the modern Western mind, because I'm an individual and it's my choices that turn that that determine everything, don't they?
1:22:19
SPEAKER_12: And I think we can just encourage our friends to get honest about the life that we all share.
1:22:26
SPEAKER_12: The life that we all share is universal addiction thrown into this world with no choice in the matter, perishing, sick, dying.
1:22:38
SPEAKER_12: But you know, people misunderstand original sin as well.
1:22:43
SPEAKER_12: People might imagine original sin to be imagine that Anne Forbes was exiled to Australia, and then she had to earn her way back to the mother country.
1:22:54
SPEAKER_12: Imagine it was that.
1:22:56
SPEAKER_12: Imagine she committed the crime, she does the time, and then she has to earn her passage back to the mother country.
1:23:06
SPEAKER_12: That's what a lot of people think original sin is.
1:23:08
SPEAKER_12: A lot of people think original sin is, well, I'm born in sin, now I just try to do good.
1:23:16
SPEAKER_12: That would not be an Adam and Christ story.
1:23:19
SPEAKER_12: That would be an Adam and Moses story, right?
1:23:23
SPEAKER_12: An Adam and Moses story would be: I'm born into this world, I'm perishing, I'm East of Eden, but if I obey the Ten Commandments and all the 613 other commands of Moses, then maybe I might get back into God's good books.
1:23:38
SPEAKER_12: That's how a lot of people characterize original sin, but it's it's total nonsense.
1:23:43
SPEAKER_12: Uh Christopher Hitchens, one of the new atheists, he thought that the doctrine of original sin was we're born sick and commanded to be healthy.
1:23:53
SPEAKER_12: What a horrendous doctrine that would be.
1:23:56
SPEAKER_12: Born sick, commanded to be healthy.
1:23:59
SPEAKER_12: Oh, that's that's awful.
1:24:01
SPEAKER_12: That's not the story of Adam and Christ.
1:24:05
SPEAKER_12: It would be a lot more like imagine, imagine the king is the one who decides that Anne Forbes must go to Australia, and the gavel falls, and the king himself says, You are banished to Australia, to the great southern land.
1:24:19
SPEAKER_12: And then he takes off the wig and he says, and I will emigrate there.
1:24:26
SPEAKER_12: And I will make Australia into my homeland, and I will turn that prison into my palace.
1:24:36
SPEAKER_12: See, that's the Adam and Christ story.
1:24:40
SPEAKER_12: The Adam and Christ story is that God exiles Adam and then joins him.
1:24:48
SPEAKER_12: We've been doing it in Ezekiel, haven't we?
1:24:52
SPEAKER_12: The people are in exile, and the glory of the Lord has left the temple.
1:24:56
SPEAKER_12: Why has the glory of the Lord left the temple?
1:24:59
SPEAKER_12: Well, because of the sin of the people, but also in order to go and meet the people where they are and bring them back.
1:25:08
SPEAKER_12: Christ is the one who exiles his people into the far country, into the very place where he will join them.
1:25:18
SPEAKER_12: So Christopher Hitchens was wrong.
1:25:20
SPEAKER_12: It's not born sick and commanded to be healthy.
1:25:24
SPEAKER_12: It's actually we're born sick and then the doctor comes.
1:25:30
SPEAKER_12: Right?
1:25:32
SPEAKER_12: We're born sick and offered the doctor.
1:25:36
SPEAKER_12: We're born hungry and offered bread.
1:25:38
SPEAKER_12: We're born thirsty and offered the living waters.
1:25:44
SPEAKER_12: It's actually a beautiful doctrine.
1:25:46
SPEAKER_12: Because the one thing that qualifies you for Jesus, the Savior, what is the one thing that qualifies you for Jesus, the Savior?
1:25:54
SPEAKER_12: Sin.
1:25:55
SPEAKER_12: What else do you bring to the equation?
1:25:56
SPEAKER_12: What do you bring to the equation of the equation when you come to Jesus?
1:26:00
SPEAKER_12: Do you bring him your righteousness?
1:26:02
SPEAKER_12: No.
1:26:03
SPEAKER_12: What do you bring him?
1:26:04
SPEAKER_12: Your sin.
1:26:04
SPEAKER_12: Good news, you got that for free! Right at the outset.
1:26:09
SPEAKER_12: Hallelujah.
1:26:10
SPEAKER_12: You got the golden ticket from the beginning.
1:26:14
SPEAKER_12: Sin is the one thing you need to qualify you for the Savior.
1:26:17
SPEAKER_12: But sin's what you've got.
1:26:20
SPEAKER_12: You don't need to qualify for the doctor.
1:26:23
SPEAKER_12: Your sickness will do.
1:26:24
SPEAKER_12: In fact, your sickness qualifies you for the doctor.
1:26:28
SPEAKER_12: And your sin qualifies you for Jesus.
1:26:30
SPEAKER_12: You've got that in spades.
1:26:31
SPEAKER_12: Good news.
1:26:32
SPEAKER_12: It's actually good news.
1:26:34
SPEAKER_12: For since death came through a man, Adam, the resurrection of the dead comes also through a man.
1:26:40
SPEAKER_12: For as in Adam all die, so in Christ all will be made alive.
1:26:44
SPEAKER_12: But each in turn, Christ the first fruits, then when he comes, those who belong to him.
1:26:48
SPEAKER_12: Here is the king who sees the sinner in the pit, and he dives down into that pit to be with the sinner, to hoist that sinner onto his shoulders and to lift him out.
1:27:01
SPEAKER_12: That is what Jesus does for all of us.
1:27:03
SPEAKER_12: Let me show you another video all about that.
1:28:00
SPEAKER_12: A man falls down a deep hole.
1:28:02
SPEAKER_12: Try as he might, he can't climb out.
1:28:05
SPEAKER_12: A mystic comes to the top of the hole and says, There is no hole.
1:28:09
SPEAKER_12: The hole is an illusion.
1:28:11
SPEAKER_12: And then leaves.
1:28:13
SPEAKER_12: A religious leader says, You should have listened to me.
1:28:16
SPEAKER_12: And then leaves.
1:28:18
SPEAKER_12: A social media influencer says, thoughts and prayers, and then leaves.
1:28:23
SPEAKER_12: A politician looks down and says, This hole was the other party's fault.
1:28:28
SPEAKER_12: A pragmatist says, just climb up.
1:28:30
SPEAKER_12: A cynic says, you're probably better off down there.
1:28:34
SPEAKER_12: An idealist says, look on the bright side.
1:28:37
SPEAKER_12: But they all leave.
1:28:38
SPEAKER_12: And our guy is left with a bunch of good advice and no way out.
1:28:44
SPEAKER_12: Finally, a friend comes.
1:28:46
SPEAKER_12: What does a friend do?
1:28:47
SPEAKER_12: You know what a friend does.
1:28:49
SPEAKER_10: He draws near, he dives in, he gets hurt, he gets dirty.
1:28:54
SPEAKER_10: But he hoists the man onto his shoulders and lifts him out.
1:29:02
SPEAKER_12: Jesus is that friend.
1:29:05
SPEAKER_12: That's the truth we're learning today.
1:29:07
SPEAKER_12: We are in a pit, but Jesus joins us.
1:29:11
SPEAKER_12: And that's different.
1:29:15
SPEAKER_12: I love that story.
1:29:16
SPEAKER_12: It's such a simple story, isn't it?
1:29:18
SPEAKER_12: Man falls down into a pit, and it's not advice that gets him out.
1:29:22
SPEAKER_12: It's not people shouting down all the religions of the world.
1:29:26
SPEAKER_12: Shout good advice at you, and it can be very good advice.
1:29:30
SPEAKER_12: But no other religion even dreams of having.
1:29:32
SPEAKER_12: God come and join us in that pit.
1:29:37
SPEAKER_12: Share in our suffering, share in our pain, share in our curse, share in our hell, and raise us up again.
1:29:44
SPEAKER_12: No, no other religion even pretends to offer you that.
1:29:48
SPEAKER_12: And in Jesus, this is the good news.
1:29:50
SPEAKER_12: The good news of the two.
1:29:52
SPEAKER_12: The world is shaped by two representatives.
1:29:54
SPEAKER_12: Adam, we all know the life of Adam, life as it is.
1:29:57
SPEAKER_12: But then Jesus, Jesus who comes into the pit to be with us and to be for us.
1:30:03
SPEAKER_12: So that leaves us to this uh seed about the world.
1:30:08
SPEAKER_12: And this is gold dust in evangelism.
1:30:11
SPEAKER_12: I couldn't have gotten through X without Jesus.
1:30:16
SPEAKER_12: I don't know what X is for you.
1:30:20
SPEAKER_12: Could have been redundancy or COVID or a long series of health scares and operations.
1:30:29
SPEAKER_12: Could have been family breakdown, could be depression.
1:30:33
SPEAKER_12: I don't know what it is for you.
1:30:36
SPEAKER_12: What is X?
1:30:36
SPEAKER_12: I could not have gotten through X without Jesus.
1:30:40
SPEAKER_12: My goodness, that preaches to your friends.
1:30:43
SPEAKER_12: It preaches to your friends and it enfranchises every Christian in this room because this is your testimony, and it's a brilliant testimony whether you grew up in a Christian home or not.
1:30:58
SPEAKER_12: You know, sometimes we think about our testimony in terms of can you narrate a hero's journey in which you made it out of the darkness and into the light?
1:31:10
SPEAKER_12: So often we think that's the frame that we ought to put around our testimony.
1:31:15
SPEAKER_12: Can you narrate a hero's journey in which once you were lost and now you are found?
1:31:21
SPEAKER_12: That's really tough on people who can't remember a time when they didn't love Jesus.
1:31:28
SPEAKER_12: And you know what?
1:31:29
SPEAKER_12: That's a brilliant testimony, too.
1:31:32
SPEAKER_12: It's the testimony we pray that our children have.
1:31:35
SPEAKER_12: I don't want my children to have a testimony of like drug abuse and addiction and car chases and and then aged four, they turn to Jesus.
1:31:44
SPEAKER_12: Like, like we don't.
1:31:47
SPEAKER_12: I want my children to have the most boring testimony in the world, uh, if that is what a testimony is.
1:31:53
SPEAKER_12: Can you narrate a hero's journey in which you were once lost and you found your way into the light?
1:31:59
SPEAKER_12: That is not your testimony, okay?
1:32:02
SPEAKER_12: Your testimony is how Jesus has joined you in the darkness.
1:32:06
SPEAKER_12: And you might never have known a time when you haven't loved Jesus, but he was the only one who got you through lockdown.
1:32:12
SPEAKER_12: He was the only one who got you through that breakup.
1:32:15
SPEAKER_12: He was the only one who got you through redundancy.
1:32:19
SPEAKER_12: And that will preach to your friend if they're going through redundancy or they have to navigate health scares or whatever it is, that will really preach to them.
1:32:27
SPEAKER_12: If Jesus got you through that, they are all ears.
1:32:31
SPEAKER_12: And at that moment, they don't care whether you grew up going to a Christian, going to a church or not, right?
1:32:38
SPEAKER_12: It enfranchises every believer.
1:32:41
SPEAKER_12: And it's pastoral evangelism.
1:32:44
SPEAKER_12: I really believe in pastoral evangelism.
1:32:48
SPEAKER_12: We we tend to split apart in our thinking.
1:32:51
SPEAKER_12: There's evangelism on the one hand, and there's pastoral care on the other.
1:32:56
SPEAKER_12: And yesterday I asked you to describe an evangelist, right?
1:33:00
SPEAKER_12: And you all described kind of alpha male, kind of.
1:33:03
SPEAKER_12: And we all know the type, okay?
1:33:06
SPEAKER_12: The thick skin, the fire in the belly, the Bible thumping, right?
1:33:10
SPEAKER_12: Picture an evangelist, you think that.
1:33:12
SPEAKER_12: Now picture a pastor, someone who's really, really, really pastoral.
1:33:16
SPEAKER_12: What are you imagining now?
1:33:17
SPEAKER_12: Someone very different, aren't you?
1:33:19
SPEAKER_12: Someone with their head cocked at almost 90 degrees the whole time.
1:33:23
SPEAKER_12: And how did that make you feel?
1:33:24
SPEAKER_12: And how did that make you feel?
1:33:25
SPEAKER_12: They've always got the kettle on, just ready for you, dressed in lavender, mainly, very pastoral.
1:33:32
SPEAKER_12: Totally different from this guy.
1:33:34
SPEAKER_12: This guy is like a rhinoceros, okay?
1:33:39
SPEAKER_12: And this one is just full of loveliness and just to take a seat and how, you know.
1:33:44
SPEAKER_12: But when you think about it in the Bible, an evangelist is just a herald of good news, okay?
1:33:50
SPEAKER_12: That's literally what evangelist means.
1:33:52
SPEAKER_12: And a pastor is a shepherd.
1:33:54
SPEAKER_12: I was reading my Bible this morning.
1:33:56
SPEAKER_12: You know, David boasted about being a shepherd because he could beat up lions and bears, okay?
1:34:01
SPEAKER_12: Tough as nails, shepherds are.
1:34:04
SPEAKER_12: Pastors are tough, and evangelists are joy-filled heralds.
1:34:09
SPEAKER_12: Why are we falling into these caricatures?
1:34:12
SPEAKER_12: That actually, pastoral care is just evangelizing Christians.
1:34:17
SPEAKER_12: Okay?
1:34:18
SPEAKER_12: That's what pastoral care is.
1:34:20
SPEAKER_12: You say, that's what I love about Jesus to a Christian.
1:34:24
SPEAKER_12: What do you call that?
1:34:25
SPEAKER_12: You could call it evangelism?
1:34:27
SPEAKER_12: You could call it pastoral care.
1:34:28
SPEAKER_12: It's kind of the same.
1:34:30
SPEAKER_12: What is evangelism?
1:34:32
SPEAKER_12: Evangelism is pastoring non-Christians.
1:34:35
SPEAKER_12: Okay?
1:34:37
SPEAKER_12: Pastoral care is evangelizing Christians.
1:34:41
SPEAKER_12: Evangelism is pastoring non-Christians.
1:34:43
SPEAKER_12: And you just do it by saying, I couldn't have gotten through X without Jesus.
1:34:49
SPEAKER_12: And the Jesus you preach at that point is powerful.
1:34:54
SPEAKER_12: I remember I was involved in Christians in Cricket, and um, there was a group uh where I was in Australia called Christians in Cricket, not at all associated with Christians in sport over over here, a different kind of a body, but with the same idea.
1:35:11
SPEAKER_12: We wanted to evangelize our cricket teams.
1:35:14
SPEAKER_12: And I got the idea from this group that really, in order to be a Christian in the cricket team, I needed to score a hundred runs, I needed to take five wickets, I needed to be the life and soul of the dressing room, and I'm a Christian, right?
1:35:30
SPEAKER_12: Needed to be an incredibly impressive human being, so that if anyone asks, hey Glenn, what's the secret of your success?
1:35:38
SPEAKER_12: I could say, at that point, well, it's not all up to me.
1:35:41
SPEAKER_12: Why don't you come along to church and find out how to be a great guy like me, right?
1:35:47
SPEAKER_12: Nuts, isn't it?
1:35:48
SPEAKER_12: What a ridiculous idea that that was.
1:35:51
SPEAKER_12: But I think we we recognize that.
1:35:53
SPEAKER_12: You you think that in the workplace, to be a great Christian means to be just a very, very, very impressive human being who is also a Christian.
1:36:02
SPEAKER_12: And that might be the secret of your success.
1:36:04
SPEAKER_12: And I once met a brilliant Christian in cricket called Henry Alonga, and he taught me the real way.
1:36:11
SPEAKER_12: Okay, Henry Alonga was a Zimbabwean cricket, he played internationally, he was a very fast bowler.
1:36:16
SPEAKER_12: He was as fast as Shoaibakar and Brett Lee back in the 90s.
1:36:20
SPEAKER_12: Very fast bowler, incredibly good looking, wonderfully athletic, obviously.
1:36:25
SPEAKER_12: Also operatically trained as a singer.
1:36:28
SPEAKER_12: He had a number one in Zimbabwe, like a as a pop star, right?
1:36:33
SPEAKER_12: Like he would be the poster boy for Christians in cricket, the most impressive person you could ever meet.
1:36:40
SPEAKER_12: And I got to meet him about 15 years ago and I and I asked, what was it like being a Christian in your cricket, you know, in your mission field?
1:36:49
SPEAKER_12: He said, Oh, they hated me.
1:36:52
SPEAKER_12: Really?
1:36:54
SPEAKER_12: Like my my whole mythology was being torn apart at this stage.
1:36:58
SPEAKER_12: I said, why?
1:36:59
SPEAKER_12: He said, Well, you know, I wore a black armband at the World Cup to protest the death of democracy under Robert Mugabe.
1:37:08
SPEAKER_12: We were getting death threats.
1:37:09
SPEAKER_12: Everybody hated me.
1:37:11
SPEAKER_12: Like, oh.
1:37:13
SPEAKER_12: And and how did it go when you shared your faith?
1:37:15
SPEAKER_12: He said, Oh, I handed out tracts and books to ever anyone who'd listen.
1:37:19
SPEAKER_12: They would scrump them up and put them in the bin in front of me.
1:37:22
SPEAKER_12: I was like, oh.
1:37:25
SPEAKER_12: But he said, when they got an injury, or when their form dipped and they were about to get cut from the team, or their dad died, or their girlfriend dumped them, I was the person they sidled up to and said, Henry, can we have a drink?
1:37:42
SPEAKER_12: And in those situations, I had the most amazing gospel opportunities.
1:37:48
SPEAKER_12: And in that moment I kind of figured out, it's pastoral evangelism, isn't it?
1:37:53
SPEAKER_12: The goal is not to be the most impressive person in the room.
1:37:57
SPEAKER_12: Because when life gets hard, do you want to open up to that person?
1:38:03
SPEAKER_12: You never open up to that person when life is hard, do you?
1:38:07
SPEAKER_12: So be the sort of person your friends will come to when their girlfriend dumps them, when they lose their job, when their father gets ill, right?
1:38:17
SPEAKER_12: Be the sort of person that your friends turn to in hard times.
1:38:22
SPEAKER_12: Because people never look up until they're flat on their backs.
1:38:26
SPEAKER_12: So be the person who's ready to talk to your friends in that moment.
1:38:31
SPEAKER_12: There's the world seed.
1:38:33
SPEAKER_12: I couldn't have gotten through X without Jesus, but time is flying.
1:38:36
SPEAKER_12: So let's go to the final seed, and we can we can buzz together and then you can ask your questions.
1:38:44
SPEAKER_12: The final point of the 3-2-1 outline is you are born one with Adam.
1:38:50
SPEAKER_12: Be one with Jesus.
1:38:52
SPEAKER_12: Okay.
1:38:53
SPEAKER_12: I I love being able to preach about union with Christ in evangelism.
1:38:59
SPEAKER_12: Because the New Testament does it.
1:39:02
SPEAKER_12: What is the number one way the Bible describes Christians in the New Testament?
1:39:10
SPEAKER_12: Number one way is Paul says you are in Christ.
1:39:14
SPEAKER_12: 150 times the Bible says you are in Christ.
1:39:18
SPEAKER_12: Think of all the different prepositions it could use to describe your relationship to Jesus.
1:39:23
SPEAKER_12: It could say you are under Christ, which is true.
1:39:26
SPEAKER_12: He is Lord and you are not.
1:39:28
SPEAKER_12: You're a slave of Christ Jesus in that sense.
1:39:31
SPEAKER_12: You belong to Him entirely, body and soul.
1:39:34
SPEAKER_12: And when you see Him and when the world sees Him, every knee will bow and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord.
1:39:39
SPEAKER_12: You will bow.
1:39:40
SPEAKER_12: We are under Christ.
1:39:43
SPEAKER_12: But the Bible only very occasionally talks about being under Christ.
1:39:48
SPEAKER_12: You could have a with Christ gospel, shoulder to shoulder with your Savior.
1:39:52
SPEAKER_12: So, you know, you go back into the school with Jesus beside you.
1:39:58
SPEAKER_12: You go back into the workplace with Jesus beside you.
1:40:00
SPEAKER_12: You go back into your neighborhood with and you take Jesus with you.
1:40:03
SPEAKER_12: And some people preach a with Christ gospel.
1:40:06
SPEAKER_12: That's a precious thing.
1:40:08
SPEAKER_12: And that's a true thing.
1:40:09
SPEAKER_12: And the Bible sometimes speaks in that language.
1:40:13
SPEAKER_12: Some people preach a through Christ gospel, right?
1:40:17
SPEAKER_12: A through Christ.
1:40:18
SPEAKER_12: So through Jesus, you can get to heaven.
1:40:23
SPEAKER_12: Which is a precious truth, isn't it?
1:40:26
SPEAKER_12: Through Jesus, I get to heaven.
1:40:27
SPEAKER_12: So think of the bridge diagram, which is great.
1:40:29
SPEAKER_12: I sometimes use it in evangelism.
1:40:31
SPEAKER_12: It it demonstrates one precious truth of the gospel.
1:40:36
SPEAKER_12: But only one.
1:40:38
SPEAKER_12: Here I am, there is God, there's a vast chasm between us.
1:40:42
SPEAKER_12: Nothing I do will bridge the chasm.
1:40:46
SPEAKER_12: But then Jesus comes and he dies on that cross.
1:40:49
SPEAKER_12: And now what do I do?
1:40:51
SPEAKER_12: I through Jesus come to God.
1:40:55
SPEAKER_12: I come to heaven.
1:40:56
SPEAKER_12: I come to eternal life, and I get what I really want.
1:41:00
SPEAKER_12: And that communicates something that is true and good and precious and biblical.
1:41:05
SPEAKER_12: But it also conveys the idea that I come through Jesus and then say, thanks, Jesus.
1:41:10
SPEAKER_12: See you later.
1:41:12
SPEAKER_12: I'm off to the eternal life that you promised.
1:41:16
SPEAKER_12: It's a through Jesus gospel.
1:41:18
SPEAKER_12: And sometimes the Bible speaks of coming to God through Jesus.
1:41:24
SPEAKER_12: But far more often, far, far, far more often, the Bible says we are in Christ.
1:41:32
SPEAKER_12: That here I am in a pit.
1:41:34
SPEAKER_12: And actually, I don't really leap towards God in my efforts.
1:41:38
SPEAKER_12: Most of the time I run away from him into the pit.
1:41:42
SPEAKER_12: That's the gospel, isn't it?
1:41:44
SPEAKER_12: Gospel is not that everyone's trying ever so hard to do their best.
1:41:49
SPEAKER_12: Dib, dip, dib, dob, dob, dob, and oh, I just fall short.
1:41:53
SPEAKER_12: Right?
1:41:53
SPEAKER_12: That's not the gospel, is it?
1:41:55
SPEAKER_12: We all know the gospel is really I'm running away from God.
1:41:57
SPEAKER_12: I fall into a pit of my own making.
1:41:59
SPEAKER_12: And God should leave me there to perish.
1:42:03
SPEAKER_12: Christ comes into the pit and hoists me onto his shoulders.
1:42:08
SPEAKER_12: And he takes the curse and the sin and the judgment and the hell on himself, and he bursts a hole through the grave and comes out the other side, hoisting me on his shoulders, and he carries me into the Father's presence.
1:42:20
SPEAKER_12: And now I am in Christ, filled by his spirit, loved by his father, and I belong to Jesus forevermore.
1:42:28
SPEAKER_12: And I never say thanks, Jesus, see you later.
1:42:31
SPEAKER_12: Never.
1:42:32
SPEAKER_12: It's not just through Christ, it's in Christ.
1:42:35
SPEAKER_12: To be one with Jesus is the most precious truth.
1:42:39
SPEAKER_12: It's the very beating heart of the gospel.
1:42:42
SPEAKER_12: And one thing in our gospel presentations it allows us to do is to preach to people the importance of going on with Jesus, walking with Christ, discipleship.
1:42:54
SPEAKER_12: There are some gospels where once you come to Jesus, you've got the golden ticket, and then you try to tell the non-Christian, oh, now that you've got Jesus, I should have said, there's some fine print.
1:43:05
SPEAKER_12: Now you've got to live this kind of way.
1:43:08
SPEAKER_12: And you've got to forgive other people, and you've got to give your money, right?
1:43:11
SPEAKER_12: And you've got to get your relationship sorted out, and you've got to X, Y, and Z, and you've got to go to church and all this other stuff.
1:43:18
SPEAKER_12: And the non-Christians is like, I thought I got the golden ticket.
1:43:23
SPEAKER_12: There is no golden ticket, there's only Jesus.
1:43:26
SPEAKER_12: You offer Jesus Himself to people.
1:43:30
SPEAKER_12: That's why it all revolves around him.
1:43:32
SPEAKER_12: That's what I love about Jesus.
1:43:33
SPEAKER_12: Do you want him?
1:43:35
SPEAKER_12: And if you want him, then of course you're going to want to go his way, right?
1:43:39
SPEAKER_12: Eternal life is Jesus.
1:43:42
SPEAKER_12: That's what John 17, verse 3 says.
1:43:44
SPEAKER_12: Andrew Satch was bringing us.
1:43:46
SPEAKER_12: John 17, 3, the last couple of days.
1:43:48
SPEAKER_12: This is eternal life that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent.
1:43:53
SPEAKER_12: Knowing Jesus, being in Jesus, enjoying oneness with Jesus.
1:43:58
SPEAKER_12: That is eternal life.
1:44:00
SPEAKER_12: That's what we're offering to people.
1:44:02
SPEAKER_12: And it means I can say, I can say to my friends in personal evangelism, and I can say to a room, if I'm preaching, hey, if Jesus came in that back door and said, Come with me, would you go with him?
1:44:21
SPEAKER_12: And you'd want to ask, Well, where are you going?
1:44:23
SPEAKER_12: And Jesus says, You'll see.
1:44:26
SPEAKER_12: And you say to Jesus, what should I bring?
1:44:29
SPEAKER_12: And Jesus says, Just yourself.
1:44:32
SPEAKER_12: Would you go?
1:44:35
SPEAKER_12: Would you want him?
1:44:36
SPEAKER_12: I'm not offering you anything else.
1:44:39
SPEAKER_12: He might lead you into utter poverty.
1:44:42
SPEAKER_12: Or he might lead you into riches and generosity.
1:44:44
SPEAKER_12: I don't know.
1:44:46
SPEAKER_12: But do you want him?
1:44:49
SPEAKER_12: Jesus is the gospel.
1:44:51
SPEAKER_12: He is the offer.
1:44:53
SPEAKER_12: God so loved the world that he gave, not a package deal of blessings.
1:44:58
SPEAKER_12: God so loved the world that he gave his one and only son, that whoever receives him, believes in him, right?
1:45:03
SPEAKER_12: Now you've got eternal life.
1:45:05
SPEAKER_12: In him.
1:45:05
SPEAKER_12: It's all about him.
1:45:08
SPEAKER_12: But now that we're one with Jesus, we are also one with all the other people who are one with Jesus.
1:45:14
SPEAKER_12: Okay?
1:45:15
SPEAKER_12: So that also means that church is organically related to your gospel message.
1:45:23
SPEAKER_12: Too much evangelism is divorced from the life of the church.
1:45:27
SPEAKER_12: You can only divorce evangelism from the life of the church if you don't have a doctrine of oneness.
1:45:34
SPEAKER_12: You can only have evangelism divorced from the life of the church if your gospel is say this prayer, take this golden ticket, and then waltz off into the world as a lone ranger.
1:45:47
SPEAKER_12: But that's not the gospel.
1:45:48
SPEAKER_12: Be one with Jesus.
1:45:50
SPEAKER_12: Once you're one with Jesus, you're then one with everybody else who is one with Jesus.
1:45:56
SPEAKER_12: And the supreme place that you enjoy that oneness is together in the body of Christ, in church.
1:46:03
SPEAKER_12: And so in evangelism, I'm not only bigging up Jesus a lot, I'm also bigging up church a lot.
1:46:11
SPEAKER_12: And saying, that's what I love about my church.
1:46:15
SPEAKER_12: And looking at the time, I think time is flying.
1:46:17
SPEAKER_12: So we might not we might not do this together in buzz groups, but I'd love you over coffee to either say to your friend as you're sipping coffee, that's what I love about Jesus, or to say, that's what I love about my church.
1:46:31
SPEAKER_12: Because I think as you start to put words to it, you'll start to recognize what an amazing blessing church life is.
1:46:39
SPEAKER_12: We have all the generations together and different ethnicities and different languages and nations all united together in Jesus.
1:46:47
SPEAKER_12: Where else does that happen?
1:46:50
SPEAKER_12: Only Jesus can make that kind of unity happen.
1:46:53
SPEAKER_12: All one in Christ Jesus.
1:46:57
SPEAKER_12: Isn't that a beautiful thing to be able to proclaim to the world?
1:47:00
SPEAKER_12: So do think about that's what I love about my church.
1:47:06
SPEAKER_12: Let me, there's nine minutes left.
1:47:08
SPEAKER_12: So I've spoken for far too long.
1:47:11
SPEAKER_12: Do we have um roving mics?
1:47:15
SPEAKER_12: Or maybe maybe we don't.
1:47:18
SPEAKER_12: I've just caused a flurry behind me, I'm sure.
1:47:20
SPEAKER_12: Um I can hear them, I can hear them.
1:47:23
SPEAKER_12: Does anyone does anyone have any any questions?
1:47:26
SPEAKER_12: Let's let's um give it over.
1:47:28
SPEAKER_12: Oh, well done, Daniel.
1:47:29
SPEAKER_12: Uh we've got a hand there.
1:47:32
SPEAKER_12: Thank you, Steve.
1:47:40
SPEAKER_05: Um, thanks for all your really great advice.
1:47:43
SPEAKER_05: Um, are there any Bible passages or any books you might take?
1:47:47
SPEAKER_05: Someone to actually be they Christian or non-Christian who's going through a real perhaps existential crisis and it's not coming from a place of confrontation.
1:47:58
SPEAKER_05: They're genuinely wondering why did God create a material world?
1:48:04
SPEAKER_05: Why did He create um seemingly free will?
1:48:08
SPEAKER_05: But then there's also the doctrine of predestination.
1:48:11
SPEAKER_05: Um, what's the purpose of this whole material world?
1:48:15
SPEAKER_05: Um, what's the purpose of a new creation?
1:48:18
SPEAKER_05: Just some very deep, profound questions that are coming from a genuine place of um curiosity and and wonder and maybe confusion.
1:48:28
SPEAKER_12: Okay.
1:48:29
SPEAKER_12: Uh does it count to say um how to see life by Glenn Scrivener?
1:48:33
SPEAKER_12: There's there's there's um you walked into that though.
1:48:37
SPEAKER_12: Um and and so so what you're after is a book that's really uniting pastoral and evangelistic together, isn't it?
1:48:47
SPEAKER_12: That that's that they're asking the the big questions.
1:48:51
SPEAKER_12: Um if they're a more thoughtful um person, Gavin Ortland um has written a great book.
1:48:57
SPEAKER_12: Uh I think I've got this right, Making Sense of God.
1:49:01
SPEAKER_12: Um engages with a lot of those uh questions about you know why would God set up the world in the way that he set it up, and he engages with a lot of um philosophical uh ideas like that.
1:49:14
SPEAKER_12: Um Nate Wilson has written a great book called Notes on a Tilter World.
1:49:19
SPEAKER_12: Uh funny name, Notes on a Tilt Our World, T-I-L-T-A-W-H-I-R-L, where he does it in a more narrative way.
1:49:30
SPEAKER_12: We're thrown into this world and it doesn't seem to make sense, but think of it like a story.
1:49:34
SPEAKER_12: All the stories are like this.
1:49:36
SPEAKER_12: The stories are not, there was a kingdom of light and love, and they all lived happily ever after.
1:49:42
SPEAKER_12: The dragon comes and and steals somebody away, and then a brave knight has to go and rescue, and they snatch victory from the jaws of defeat, etc.
1:49:50
SPEAKER_12: etc.
1:49:51
SPEAKER_12: etc.
1:49:51
SPEAKER_12: And let's let's think about life as a story.
1:49:53
SPEAKER_12: Does that help to make sense of life in those sorts of terms?
1:49:57
SPEAKER_12: So um, but also, I mean, 321.
1:50:06
SPEAKER_12: And yeah, I I hope those those three options might help you.
1:50:13
SPEAKER_12: Anyone else?
1:50:16
SPEAKER_12: Oh, here we go.
1:50:20
SPEAKER_01: And yes, Steve, up there and then down here.
1:50:25
SPEAKER_01: I can end.
1:50:27
SPEAKER_01: Thanks for all these seeds.
1:50:28
SPEAKER_01: I think definitely would prompt conversations with my friends, but I think they'd respond by saying, Well, I can find these things outside the church, whether it's a football club to support, you can see that kind of picture of diversity coming together for one thing.
1:50:45
SPEAKER_01: So I guess my question is, how would you push them to say actually this really matters?
1:50:51
SPEAKER_01: Kind of in view of God's judgment, but also Jesus coming into this world.
1:50:56
SPEAKER_01: Because responses to those seeds might just be, well, I've got this here and here and here.
1:51:02
SPEAKER_01: I don't need Jesus.
1:51:05
SPEAKER_12: Yeah, no good one.
1:51:06
SPEAKER_12: Um, partly you've got to take a deep breath and and sometimes push them on it.
1:51:11
SPEAKER_12: Um, I tell the story about uh a guy uh whose funeral I was doing, and um his wife was a believer and she had died, and I I was visiting him, getting ready for this this funeral, and I was like, you know, how how are you bearing up?
1:51:29
SPEAKER_12: And and he just said, Well, it's just wonderful the support that comes your way when you're bereaved, and we've had 200 cards from all over the place, and he and he told me about this the sort of you know support that everybody could receive.
1:51:43
SPEAKER_12: Um I couldn't have gotten through X without the support that everybody has around me.
1:51:49
SPEAKER_12: And and I was, you know, I'd known him um for a while by that stage to just say, yeah, but that's not enough, is it?
1:51:55
SPEAKER_12: And he absolutely, you know, broke down in in tears, and and he actually came to the Lord through seeing the the paucity of the help that is there in the world.
1:52:08
SPEAKER_12: Um, but you raise an excellent point about at what point do you say, whether you feel it or not, Jesus has come into the world, he is the judge of the world, and you are not ready, and you are going to face him one day, and you are not ready, what are you going to do with this person called Jesus?
1:52:25
SPEAKER_12: Um I think there's there's definitely time and space for that to happen in your in your personal evangelism.
1:52:32
SPEAKER_12: I just guess I think those sort of things happen off the back of these kinds of conversations.
1:52:38
SPEAKER_12: Where you've just said, that's what I love about Jesus, or that's what I love about my church, or I couldn't have gotten through X without Jesus.
1:52:44
SPEAKER_12: Um you have the opportunity to take a deep breath at those points and and say, um, I do think we will all meet this Jesus guy.
1:52:52
SPEAKER_12: And and I do think you need to be ready, and I don't think you're ready, do you?
1:52:57
SPEAKER_12: Um there does need to come that that point with people.
1:53:01
SPEAKER_12: Um but I think the way into having those kinds of God conversations is by having good conversations first.
1:53:08
SPEAKER_12: And off the back of those good conversations, and in the context of a lot of pastoral care, people become ready to hear that in that setting.
1:53:20
SPEAKER_12: Did you have just to hear Steve if that's right?
1:53:22
SPEAKER_12: Yeah.
1:53:24
SPEAKER_03: It's similar to that question, actually.
1:53:28
SPEAKER_03: But I'm a bit confused about this.
1:53:31
SPEAKER_03: I've been studying.
1:53:41
SPEAKER_03: You were talking about the vicar, the doctor, and the law.
1:53:46
SPEAKER_03: And it's which one that you worship.
1:53:51
SPEAKER_03: So I do get confused about church because we need we need the priest, vicar, whatever you want to call them, because they speak and you follow them.
1:54:04
SPEAKER_03: But you need other people around the actual priest.
1:54:09
SPEAKER_03: You know, you need the other people to encourage you to point you in the direct right direction.
1:54:19
SPEAKER_03: So the the the priest seems more powerful, they've got more um authority, but it does it confuses me that other people alongside uh or working alongside can tell you more.
1:54:33
SPEAKER_03: Does that make sense?
1:54:34
SPEAKER_12: Yeah, I think so I think so.
1:54:35
SPEAKER_12: So what is what is church?
1:54:37
SPEAKER_12: Is church just following the leader, following the vicar, following the priest?
1:54:43
SPEAKER_12: That is very individualistic in lots of ways, isn't it?
1:54:47
SPEAKER_12: Um whereas I think what we're saying is church is family together, united in Jesus.
1:54:55
SPEAKER_12: And so church, uh church is really what I said Dietrich Bonhoeffer said it was.
1:55:01
SPEAKER_12: Church is where the Christ in my own heart is weak.
1:55:07
SPEAKER_12: But the Christ who is preached to me, not just by the preacher, but by my brothers and sisters, that feeds my heart and and strengthens my soul immeasurably.
1:55:19
SPEAKER_12: Um so I think we do need preachers as well, but we absolutely need the family of God to be family together.
1:55:31
SPEAKER_12: One more, quick one.
1:55:33
SPEAKER_04: Hi, yeah, thank you.
1:55:34
SPEAKER_04: Um something that a specific situation I've come up against several times is talking to a friend that I meet with regularly, and they are quite open to the gospel, but their parents have died recently, and both of them were not Christians, and my friend knows they're not Christians, and it's quite difficult to have the conversation about Jesus and heaven, and because at the same time, I what's hanging in the air is and your parents didn't believe this, and they've gone to hell.
1:56:06
SPEAKER_04: And my friend knows that, she sort of thinks it, but how would you navigate that conversation?
1:56:12
SPEAKER_12: Um, I've navigated that in in different ways at different times.
1:56:15
SPEAKER_12: Um sometimes I'll just say it is not my job to say who goes up and who goes down.
1:56:21
SPEAKER_12: It is Jesus, and I trust him with judgment.
1:56:24
SPEAKER_12: And if you see him as trustworthy in all things, then you can entrust to him the judgment of your family and friends, and and try and bring it back to, you know, do you find Jesus to be trustworthy?
1:56:34
SPEAKER_12: Um a more bold approach is to say in Luke chapter 16, there is an example in a story where Jesus says, there is a guy who we know has gone to hell.
1:56:45
SPEAKER_12: We don't know about other other people's destiny, but in the story Jesus tells, there is a guy, uh, the rich man who goes to hell.
1:56:53
SPEAKER_12: He does not want his family members with him, actually.
1:56:57
SPEAKER_12: He explicitly says, I want my family members to go and be in the bosom of Abraham in in paradise.
1:57:03
SPEAKER_12: Um and so if if it gets to that, you can sort of say, well, in Luke chapter 16, um, we have it on good authority that even if our family members are in hell, they want us in heaven.
1:57:15
SPEAKER_12: Um if it gets to that, it can get to that.
1:57:17
SPEAKER_12: But my my my bottom line is I don't say who goes up and down, Jesus does, and I totally trust him.
1:57:25
SPEAKER_12: I've seen him trustworthy in all things, and I trust him with that judgment.
1:57:28
SPEAKER_12: Can you trust him yourself?
1:57:31
SPEAKER_12: Brilliant.
1:57:32
SPEAKER_12: I think that's all we've got time for.
1:57:34
SPEAKER_12: Um shall I pray and then Mike, you can close.
1:57:38
SPEAKER_12: Yeah.
1:57:40
SPEAKER_12: Father, I long to see hundreds and hundreds of seeds scattered from here.
1:57:46
SPEAKER_12: Um, where my brothers and sisters can just say, that's what I love about my church.
1:57:51
SPEAKER_12: I couldn't have gotten through that part of life without Jesus.
1:57:54
SPEAKER_12: And I pray that those seeds would bear fruit, that they would find good soil, that they would be welcomed, and that people would trust in Jesus through this.
1:58:01
SPEAKER_12: Help us to evangelize one another today, that we might be pastored and shown the good shepherd Jesus.
1:58:07
SPEAKER_12: In His name we pray.
1:58:08
SPEAKER_12: Amen.