If you only had one idea to share with someone to help them develop/recover a zeal for evangelism, what would you say? What would be your elevator speech?
I know, it’s a difficult question.
My answer has been,”You won’t ever have a zeal for evangelism unless you are captivated by the gospel. If you understand the greatness of God and what He has done for you, you will be compelled to share the story.“
I was glad to read this post from Ed Stetzer because it reiterated my thoughts. I would highly encourage you to read the whole thing. Here is an excerpt:
In order for the church to recover its missional passion, we must reclaim our lost sense of the awesome, overarching glory of God’s mission. Most Christians do not deny the orthodox doctrines of Scripture. We grasp the fact that God has revealed himself to us as Lord and King. But to borrow the words of author David Wells, the modern church has been “caged” by a diminishing of who God really is.
We have turned to a God we can use rather than a God we must obey; we have turned to a God who will fulfill our need rather than a God before whom we must surrender our rights to ourselves. He is a God for us, for our satisfaction– not because we have learned to think of him in this way through Christ but because we have learned to think of him this way through the marketplace. Everything is for us, for our pleasure, for our satisfaction, and we have come to assume that it must be so in the church as well.
We have shrunk God down to our size. We have limited the scope of his mission in our minds. We have unwittingly bought into the idea that progress is more important than redemption.
And this is chiefly why our zeal for evangelism and the gospel has been undermined– not because we don’t care, not because we don’t know what to do. We have simply replaced God’s purpose for the world with our own purpose for the world.
