Hello, the following recording is from a Sunday School class taught at Crossroads Bible Church in the fall of 2022. We are using for this class a study guide book called Reaching the Lost Evangelism that's put out by Crossway Books and Nine Marks Ministry. And so I'd highly encourage you to check out both crossway.org and 9marks.org, that's the number 9marks.org, for other helpful resources as well as this study guide. As always with the Sunday school class, when we record it, we won't always pick up all the discussion that happens among the students, but we hope this will be for the benefit of the members of our church who are not able to attend the Sunday school class, but still want to get the content, and others, friends and distant people. that we want to try to serve. So may God bless you and I hope you benefit and are edified from this conversation. We're only going to do about half of each discussion each week. Some weeks we might blow through the whole thing, but I anticipate this taking us more like 12 weeks instead of six weeks, just to have plenty of time to actually discuss and read and be thoughtful. So just a little review, last week we tried to define what is evangelism, and at the basic level it is telling people the good news of Jesus Christ and calling them to respond. So there's telling and calling. Those are sort of the two breakdowns that we're going to use. And we also discussed what the gospel is. And this is on page 13. He gives these essential bullet points, and I put the label on those. God, man, Christ, response. That's the categories we'll use a lot. God, man, Christ, response. That's what we wanna communicate to people. Who is God? Who are we and what's our relationship to God? Which obviously, that's where sin comes in, because it's a broken relationship. What has God done to solve the problem? That's what we find in Christ. And then how do we respond to this? We wanna actually be calling people to repentance and faith. So we tell and we call. That's what we covered last time. Today, we're going to talk about the role that all of us play in evangelism. So I have a discussion question to begin with. and I'd love to hear all of your responses, so we'll keep them brief and do as best you can. There's no right answer. But when you hear the word evangelist or the title evangelist, who is somebody that you think of when you hear the title evangelist? Billy Graham. That's the easiest one, right? Definitely defined a generation of evangelism. Paul. Good. Jesus, that was his first message, right? Repent, believe the good news, Mark chapter one. Who else do you think of, evangelists? So we got Jesus, Paul, and Billy Graham. I don't think any of us are gonna measure up, so. Morning, Eric. Here's this. What's that? Oh, they're in there. So we're discussing this question a little bit. So we're discussing the question, who do you think of when you hear the title evangelist? And we've already got Paul and Jesus. So the Bible answers are out. Well, there's lots of others we could talk about from the Bible. And then Billy Graham. So what else? Who else do you guys think of when you hear the word evangelist? Charles Sturgeon. Charles Spurgeon, yeah, he was an evangelistic preacher, for sure. Pastors in general, or at least they should be. They should be, Paul tells Timothy, do the work of an evangelist. Yeah. I think it's really all of us, it's all of our job to share our faith. Yeah, that's true, isn't it? I think that it's interesting that we often think of people with special skills, not necessarily people with ordinary skills. So we should praise God for people like Billy Graham and the Billy Graham Crusades. That's a very unique sliver of church history. Even famous evangelists like Charles Spurgeon or George Whitfield or John Wesley or, you know, the list could go on. These are people who ministered in a very special way during a very special time. But, you know, we don't usually think of, even if we think like in local church relationships. So, you know, I've known people who are just gifted evangelists. I have a friend of mine who's a pastor in West Bridgeland and he's just, I think he's just a gifted evangelist. People just seem to walk up to him and say, what must I do to be saved? And that's just not normal life for most of us. And then there's a gentleman I used to work with when we worked at the Bible camp named Jerry Larson, who's just an evangelist, just walks into a room and tends to find people who happen to be searching for the Lord. So you guys know some people like that? You met people like that who They're just magnetic. There's something about them that they tend to find people who are lost and who know it and who want to hear the good news. And we should praise God for those people. I think that is one of the gifts of the Spirit, certainly, and the Holy Spirit works in a unique way in certain people. But, as Scott said, this is the responsibility of all of us. When we think of evangelist, we should think, well, I'm an evangelist. You're an evangelist, we're all evangelists. So that's what we're going to focus on today. So if you've got your little booklet, we're on page 14, and you can turn in your Bibles to Acts chapter 8, but it's also reprinted here in the booklet, so you don't have to juggle two books if you don't want to. So we're gonna read in Acts chapter 8. And recall, this is right after the stoning of Stephen. Stephen's arrested, preaches a great sermon. He accuses the Jews of putting Christ to death. They put him to death in a rage. And so we pick it up in Acts chapter one, or sorry, Acts chapter eight, verses one through four. Would somebody read that, please? And Saul approved of his execution. And there arose on that day a great persecution against the church in Jerusalem. And they were all scattered throughout the regions of Judea and Samaria, except the apostles. Devout men buried Stephen and made great lamentation over him. But Saul was ravaging the church and entering house after house. He dragged off men and women and committed them to prison. Now those who were scattered went about preaching the word. Excellent. So we've got a couple of questions we can answer from the text. So who was scattered by the persecution in Jerusalem? Saul did the scattering. It says they were all scattered except the apostles. Yeah, so clearly some core group, probably the disciples, but everybody else that were Christians. And if you remember, back a couple chapters in Acts, in Acts chapter two and Acts chapter four, thousands of people have come to Christ. So you've got these, probably a good Christian core of... You know, anywhere from four to 10,000 people in Jerusalem who realized we gotta get out. And if you remember in Acts chapter two, those people had come from all over the world. They had come for Pentecost. And that's why Peter, when he spoke the first sermon, didn't just preach in Hebrew or Aramaic. The Holy Spirit empowered him to speak in languages that everybody could understand. And so there's, everybody's hearing Peter speaking in their own language. So you've got people from probably all over the Roman Empire gathered in Jerusalem for Pentecost. Now the persecution arises and they scatter. And so, notice on verse four, again, those who were scattered went about preaching the word. So who preached the word? Well, they all did. And these were new Christians. They were a month, maybe two, into their faith. These were not the old experienced people. These were the brand new Christians. They went about preaching the word. And so what does this tell us about the early Christians' understanding of who should evangelize? It was all of them. They didn't say, well, the apostles didn't go with us, so we'll have to wait until when the apostles comes to town. Everywhere they went, they were preaching the good news about Jesus. So we see just right off the bat, this is the first response of all Christians. We are all called to be evangelists, to be people who are telling the good news about Jesus. They went about preaching, preaching the word. And this, of course, should make perfect sense because this is exactly what Jesus commanded of us. So we've got the Great Commission passage in here. And we could, you know, we'll read out of Matthew 28 here, and it's in the booklet. And it's on page 15 now. But you could also read at the end of Luke, or you could read at the end of John, or at the end of Mark, or at the beginning of Acts, and you'll see very clearly that when Jesus left Earth, he gave a commission to his disciples. And it's got all sorts of facets on how he says it in different, how it's recorded in different places, but the basics of it is go and tell. So people will say sometimes that the worship of Israel in the Old Testament was very much a come and see worship. This is what God did. He built a temple in Jerusalem. He made a people that were supposed to be special to himself and to live lives of holiness. And the nations were to stream to Israel and see the work of God. They were to come and that's how they would meet Yahweh, is they would come to Israel. So it's a come and see. Jesus takes the New Testament church and says, we're shifting gears. We're not gonna be a nation gathered in a place with a temple. You are now all little temples of the Holy Spirit, and I'm going to send you out, so you need to go and tell. Those are our marching orders. So would somebody read Matthew 28, 18 through 20? All authority in heaven and earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always to the end of the age. Excellent. So Jesus' command is to make disciples. What does that mean? What does it mean to make a disciple? Go ahead, Eric. It means to convert a pagan. What's that? Yeah, I mean it means conversion. There's somebody that was not a disciple of Jesus that now is. That's great. What else? Add more to that. You don't have to, anybody can if you want. Yeah, but there's a way in which people are converted by preaching. Yeah, I mean, there's, Jesus lays this out pretty clear. People are converted, they're baptized, baptizing them in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. So there's an inner conversion, there's something that happens to the person. Then there's baptism, this is how the Christian community marks the people who are genuine believers, marks disciples. And then Jesus says in verse 20, teaching them, this is, I guess we're answering question seven now, teaching them to observe all that I've commanded you. These are people who follow Jesus. And not just like in the sense that they say, oh yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm a Christian. They can check that off on their, you know, little box that says what religion do you belong to? These are people who are serious about following Christ. Yeah, Eric? So you got A is salvation, B would be baptism, C would be what? Teaching. Teaching. Teaching. D would be fruit of the spirit. I think that that falls under the teaching. And this is where we're all at. Hopefully as followers of Christ, we're all being taught everything that's commanded. And I don't even know, you know, I'm hesitant to say like, oh, this is a step one, step two, step three. Although it's kind of, this is in a way God's laying out for us a pattern that we follow. I was reading a book this week, and he mentioned that he thought that this teaching aspect was one of the biggest things that's missing from the church. I think the book was written in probably the 90s or so, but he was just mentioning he thought that that teaching aspect is what is often missing from our discipleship. We get you converted, follow Christ, baptize you, and you get all excited, and then we kind of say, all right, man, you're on your own. Do your best, and when we think of evangelism, we have to be careful not to think that way, right? That is the criticism of the Billy Grahams of the world, is where are all the converts? Did they get taught? And the answer is, well, it's probably better than some people say, and probably worse than others, but the criticism can often be is that when we evangelize people, we just wanna see them come to Christ, and then we kinda say, well, I guess you'll figure it out as you go, and we don't wanna do that, we wanna be faithful to teach. So let's think about who, so we all know, according to Acts 1, this is what all Christians do, we're all to be about the business of making disciples. Which means telling people the good news, this is evangelism, telling people the good news, calling them to respond, right? Which is how we make disciples, we baptize them, we teach them. So who's our target audience? All nations. That doesn't exclude anybody? Eric? Only people like us. What's that? What do you mean? Yeah. I mean, there's really no, so when we think of just like, okay, we're just going after the atheist, we'd be wrong. We should be going after everybody, whether they're Muslim or Hindu or atheist, or they don't know, they say they don't have any religion. That's the big category today. 60%, right, depending on where you look, I think of the Tri-Cities at one point was considered nuns. They have no religious affiliation, yeah. It's not so much that they're easier to convert because they've already got faith, but maybe it's more of a challenge or less of a challenge depending on the person. But if they already have faith, they already have a belief system. If they already have a belief system, they've already got morals and they have an understanding of spiritual awareness. Yeah, I think it helps when somebody has a belief system because they understand that it's not all thought, it's not all rational thinking, and it's not all experience, right? Any faith is sort of a bull fan. They have some categories for a God and how we relate to him. So all nations, we're to make disciples of all nations. And again, this is another pitfall that we can fall into. as Christians talking about evangelism, is we can start to say, well, here's who we're going to go after. I was part of a church in college, and I was part of the leadership team, student leadership team, and we had this retreat at the beginning of the year, and one of the pastors was telling us, hey, here's who we're going to go after. We're going to go for, I don't want to go after the low-hanging fruit, I want to go after the high, And the illustration being like, let's go after the people at this university who are the hardest to reach. Let's go after the, you know, the angry militant LGBTQ person. Let's go after the angry atheist. Let's go after, you know, the star of the football team who just loves the fame. And my pushback was, okay, yes. But why not go after all the fruit? Right? If we're sent to make disciples of all nations, I'm all for it, let's go after the hardest. But let's not neglect the people who do seem a little easier to reach. The broken, the downcast. After all, that's who Jesus often went to. And so we need to make sure that we don't get categories in our mind, and we don't exclude people. I think if you read this little red book, and if you didn't, we still have a copy or two left, you'd be welcome to. He always points that out, like one of the things, don't neglect the person that you think is beyond reach. They aren't. They aren't beyond reach. And somebody pointed that out to me years ago in a sermon. I heard him, it's always stuck with me. is that there's probably somebody praying for everybody. So that neighbor of yours who's old and drunk and angry, you don't even get to talk to, that doesn't mean that they're beyond the reach of the gospel. Somebody's probably praying for them to be reached with the gospel. And so don't exclude anybody. Good, we make disciples of all nations. What are the things that making disciples evolve? We're gonna talk about that. Conversion, baptism, and teaching. And so the natural question, then, is to whom does this Great Commission apply? Who's responsible to carry it out? Well, when it was first given, it was given to the apostles, but it's meant to be for everyone, for all people, for all believers. Okay, so I don't know. Add any of that? Anything to that? If Jesus is with us, as he is in the spirit, just as he was with the apostles, then certainly this commission applies to us. Peter says in his second letter, second Peter, it's in like the first verse or two, he says, to those of a faith with equal standing as us. Peter's saying, I'm writing to Christians because you're on the same plane as all the apostles. And so, again, this helps us to get rid of this divide that there's sort of the evangelist class of Christians and then everybody else, and we don't necessarily attain to. So why should you be comforted by the fact that Jesus says he's with us in our evangelistic endeavors? Yeah, it's question nine, I don't know if you have a book, but why is Jesus' presence with us especially comforting as we go and make disciples of all nations? It makes it easier. A lot of people have a hard time, and I have a hard time with this myself, a lot of people have a hard time with the Great Commission because they feel like, well, I have spiritual gift, but I don't have the gift to gab, or I'm not a salesman, or I can't make a good pitch. lead by example, there's many different ways you can do the commission. And because there's many different ways, you can choose to do it in thousands of different ways, actually. I don't know, there's more ways to be a Christian than there are not. Well, and then know that Christ is with you. Like I said, it gives you courage, it gives you comfort. I think it should comfort us that we always have everything we need. We're going to spend time as a church training and learning to not just share the gospel, but to think like evangelists, to get this ingrained into our DNA. But at the same time, because you have Christ, you have everything you need. He's with you. He is the good news. I can do all things through Christ. Yeah, yeah, right? He gives us power. So, yeah, and I, so I said on Wednesday night, you know, we're covering the same thing on Wednesday night at our Bible study, and I said I needed to pick up a few things at the store. Teresa said, can you stop at the store? And I stopped at the store before I got home, and my bill was $56.66. and the cashier, and this happens from time to time, the cashier goes, oh no, I don't like that, 666, oh no, it's bad luck or whatever, and I said, what? And I said, what do you mean? He said, oh, I don't like it, it makes me sound superstitious. And I said, oh, I'm not worried about it. And then I thought in my mind, okay, and this is like, you know, in a whole split second, I thought in my mind, you know, this is something of spiritual significance, right? She may not even know anything. She might not know that this is biblical or that it comes from Revelation or any, like I probably have more book knowledge on this than she does. at this point, on 666, but it stuck out to her enough to say something, which to me is, I'm like, I have an opportunity to say something in response, to say, here's why I'm not worried about it. Like, I am not scared of the devil, because I have Christ, right? That's at the heart of it. So in my mind, I realized I have an opportunity. And I kind of initially said, oh yeah, yeah, I'm not worried about it. No, I should respond. I should say something more. And so I said, you know, you have nothing to fear if you have Jesus Christ as your Lord. That's all I said to her. And she kind of went, oh. And she said, and then she kind of rang a couple things, and she goes, you're right, you're right. She said, and I do, I do. And then that was kind of the end of our conversation. And so I shared that on Wednesday night, and our dear sister, Amanda, said to me, well, that's easy for you extroverted people. And I said, yeah, you're right, you're right, Amanda. But you know, sometimes you think, And I am, I'm bubbly, I like to talk to the cashier. But at the same time, I had a moment of fear and I had just a brief second to pray for some courage. And there's a wonderful comfort knowing I'm not going into this alone. Jesus wasn't standing outside a Safeway saying, hey, good luck, pal. You'll see when you get out. He's with me the whole way, right? And I can pray in that moment, God, give me a little courage to say one thing. I get like a whole whopping sentence with my cashier, but she gave me, she threw me the soft, slow pitch. Like it's my responsibility to swing at it. And so don't forget that. I think one of the things we need to train in our minds is that since Christ is with us, I can always share the gospel. I have nothing to fear. I have everything I need. brings up a point. I think that was a good opportunity for you to share something. But we have those people who write about evangelism that says, the next day you should stop there and go in that store and see if she's there and kind of take this person under your wing. And that's where I start having a problem with all of this. That would be difficult. But you have people that say that you have just broken the ice. Now I have a responsibility. Now finish and walk her through making sure that she is a born again. And there's plenty of examples of that out there. Yeah. That's an interesting point, Tim. You know, in a situation like that, and we'll talk about this actually a little bit more, I think, next week, you know, some of that is gonna be affected by the amount of relationship that we can have. Like, if I'm going to be a Christian who's faithfully speaking about Christ, telling people about Christ, calling them to response, in all of life, in normal life, I could never manage to follow up with everybody. It depends on the relationship, right? You know, I don't, I go to Safeway like a couple times a year. If I went every week, that might be different. It might be that the next time I go in, I'm gonna make sure I pick her line. I'm not sure I could pick her out of a crowd now, right? It was just such a short exchange. But I will say, but if I did go there every week, yeah, I think I would have the responsibility to say, you know what, we just, we had a conversation. She probably remembers me better than I remember her. I'm gonna go up and, say hi to her and continue to kind of build that relationship. So I don't think we should say you're obligated to. We'll talk about next week, like the, I call these your concentric circles or like, you know, your radar. There are people in my life that I am obligated to follow up with, right? When I have gospel conversations with, especially people I see regularly, I interact with regularly. And then there's people probably that I'll bump into from time to time. I can be content saying, I've shared something with her. I'll be one of, hopefully, dozens of people who sow seeds into this woman's life. And who knows? Who knows what the Lord will do with it? Yeah, it might be an opportunity to tell her to get her through the door so we can all evangelize. Yeah. Come to a crossroads. Yeah. We love people. We love to tell them. Maybe if I was really thinking on my feet, I would have handed her a little Crossroads Bible Church invite card and said, here, come to a place where we are not scared of Satan. Yeah, Edna. she was going to become a full-time pastor. Oh, wow. Yeah. And I looked at him, and he looked at me, and we both, now what do we say? And I really didn't want to start a big, long discussion, because there's a whole line of people waiting up there, you know, that needed to get in and get registered. And I just, I still feel like there should have been something. And I sat there and prayed. Lord, what can I say? Like, nothing would come. What do you do in a situation like that? Oh, boy. What do I do in a situation like that? I'm not sure, Edna. I don't know. I think, you know, you did the right thing by praying. And, you know, I don't know. In situations like that where you get a sentence or two, it's probably not the time to bring up a theological debate about female pastors. Well, that's exactly the way I am. This isn't the time of the day. She's at work. Her employer's paying her to do a job and not sit there and pray. I'll give you something that I've been trying to train my mind in, just trying to, I don't know how you guys think about yourselves, but I think of, because I like sports, what I love about athletes is they train really hard so that when the moment comes, they know what to do. They don't have to think about it. It's baseball season. It's almost playoff time, so we're all excited about it. Some of us are really excited about it. I love watching players when they make these plays that are acrobatic. The beauty is that they didn't see that and think, you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to get on camera today. They just have been training so hard for so long that their bodies know what to do. So that's how I think of my own mind and heart. and what it means to really be a follower of Christ. I wanna be so ingrained in what it means to follow Christ that I can just react. So one thing I've been trying to train myself in is I want to be able to say true things about the gospel in one sentence. So even with someone like that, you might say, I'm going off, it's my last day of work, I'm gonna go be a full-time pastor. And I might even say the most important thing is that people know that Jesus died on the cross and rose from the dead for them. Now, I might say just a sentence like that, just to throw that out there, hey, you're gonna be a full-time pastor, go preach this. Now, we could debate about the role of female pastors, again, not the time, not the place, but what I can do is I can have the words of the gospel on my lips. So that, you know, I'll do this like in prayer. I've been asked at times to pray in hospital rooms or something for somebody who's not a Christian. And I'll just pray the gospel. I'll just pray words about Jesus's death and resurrection and faith and repentance and eternal life. So that's just, that's, I don't know how I would respond. I probably would respond like you did. I would kind of say, okay, okay. Let's move on, which I've done that a thousand times. So, but yeah, I'm trying to train myself to have the words of the gospel on my lips. So even like with my cashier, like, you know, I can't, how can I condense God, man, Christ response all into a sentence? I probably can't, but I can speak of the Lord Jesus Christ. I can name his name. I can tell of his death. I can tell of his resurrection. I can tell of his lordship. So little things like that, I think are great ways to start training yourself. to be these people, and I think this falls into the category of sharing the gospel with all nations. Yeah, there's a, as it says in Ecclesiastes, there's a time and place for everything. Yeah. And I think that we are partnered whenever we evangelize with the Holy Spirit, and that we can plant a seed and tell somebody, maybe something, but prayer is one of the most important things. go to prayer about this person, and pray that the Holy Spirit would come into their life and would open their eyes and hearts to the Gospel. And that's huge to me, because sometimes more than maybe what you say, Yeah, it's a both and, right? You're right, the Spirit is with us. The Spirit empowers us. Being able to pray, Lord, give me one sentence here that I can say to this random stranger, and then knowing that you'll never get another sentence with them, being able to pray. God can use his word. I think I talked about this last week. Colossians 1, verse 17, the Lord Jesus didn't send me to baptize, but to preach the gospel. Right, that's his phrase. And then verse 18, he says that, you know, the gospel is a stumbling block to the Jews. It's folly to the Gentiles, but to us who are being saved, it is the power of God. And I'm butchering these verses, I'm paraphrasing, but he says, he says the word of the gospel, like the words of Christ's death and resurrection for sinners, for salvation, just the words have power. And that's something I try to remind myself of, is I don't need to necessarily be eloquent. That's Paul's whole argument in 1 Corinthians 1 and 2. I need to speak, just speak what's true. And trust that the Holy Spirit uses the word of God. Faith comes by hearing, hearing by the word of Christ. We know that this is how God works. So let me ask one question here as we kind of roll towards the end. We've got a good five minutes left, but I'm gonna condense the next couple questions in our book to this. give me reasons why you might be off the hook for evangelism. If everybody's called to be an evangelist, if we're all called to tell the gospel, give me some reasons why you might be off the hook, if that makes sense, why you might not be obligated to. Well, I think everybody has their different medium. Like, you know, a music artist could do it through music, an artist could do it through their artwork, but often through their books, their registrations or whatever. But I think on some level, they still have a personal level with people directly around them. Yeah. So sometimes we can excuse ourselves, because like, no, I got my thing. I make paintings about Christ, which could be a very good way to communicate the gospel, but I don't talk to my neighbor. We'd say, no, you're not off the hook. So when you're off the hook. Yeah, like what, and you don't have to say this about you personally, but like when, what kind of excuses might we be tempted to make to not share the gospel? Well, I'm bashful and I'm afraid that I might offend a family member and they may not talk to me again. I don't know enough to be able to answer their questions correctly. Yeah, not trained enough. Be like a language barrier. Yeah. That's a tough one. Or just making the excuse like, oh, I don't think they would understand because they don't speak English, so I'm not going to bother to say anything. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Sometimes we just, we make that excuse of, too, like somebody's just not interested. I know they're not interested. I think we can make excuses based on our season of life. You can say, you know, kids might say I'm too young. Some of you might say, I'm too old. That's a young person's game. You might say, oh, I'm busy in school, or I'm busy raising kids, or I've got 40, 50, 60, 70 hours worth of work to do every week. Every season of life brings its excuses. Somebody said to me once, excuses are like armpits. We all have them, and they all stink. And so, that one's just stuck with me. And in my mind, I think, no, we have two and they all stink. We have more than one and they all stink. It is a true thing that we can sometimes convince ourselves that we don't, we're not part of that group that's called to evangelize. And sometimes it's in excuses and sometimes it's, if we're honest, it's because there's fear that's inside of us. There's hesitancy. And that's part of what, one of my big hopes of taking a whole you know, school year, September through May, to really study together evangelism and different facets of it, is to help us to get over some of those internal fears and to ask God to really change our hearts, change our minds, change our words. Not so, you know, I would be thrilled if what God does is he makes us a bunch of street preachers and people that are passing out tracts. Like, that'd be great. But I'd also be thrilled if God just makes us people who have the words of the gospel on our lips. and we're regularly speaking those words. When we get opportunities and we go, Lord, what am I supposed to say? We actually sometimes will have something to say and to share that will bless others. And so the real point of lesson one, which we covered over two weeks, and so we'll do this most time, we'll spend two weeks covering the lessons, because there's a lot in there, I don't want to rush this, there's no point in rushing it, is that to evangelize is to tell people the good news of Christ, and to call them to belief. So it's telling and calling. We wanna do both of those. And this is something that we're all commanded to do and not just commanded, but empowered. Like this is, Christ is with us. God has given us his word and his spirit. And so it's for all of us. So I hope that in some way over the next six to nine months, we all take some steps of growth and we can say, okay, I'm growing as an evangelist. And that'll be all sorts of different ways. So I'm gonna pray for us. And then if you're welcome to just visit, if there's more quiet discussion, we can always do that. And then I'm gonna slip into the office. And if anybody wants to join me for a few minutes of prayer before the service, you're welcome to. So let's pray. God, thank you for this sweet group of saints. People that you have called to yourself, you've made us your disciples. Somebody, one of your servants came along, probably lots of somebodies for a lot of us, came alongside of us, told us the good news, taught us the words of Christ, and so God, you've blessed us in bringing us into your family, and now, God, you've called us to go do the same. So please do put the words of the gospel on our lips that we would be eager to speak them. And whether we get opportunities in the line at the hospital or the grocery store, or we get hours with dear friends, God, please remind us that Christ is with us and empower us and strengthen us to be tellers of the good news. We ask this in Christ's name. Amen.