Three Circles Evangelism - Session 4

Okay, so each week I'll give you the guide, the study guide for the evening.

I'll give you the guide for the evening.

Just for you to keep, for you to take home, for you to practice as you go through it. So hold on to that one. The ones that I'm passing out tonight, we might have some extra.

So stick it in your Bible or, you know, on a daily basis if you can, pull it out and go over it. Practice with yourself. Practice with somebody else. Yes. Anybody, raise your hand if you don't have either of those handouts yet.

Okay, I think we're good. All right, I want to start by asking you a question. And I'll answer it first. I'll get us going. And then maybe we had a couple volunteers. That would be good. Tell me what is one of your greatest fears.

One of your greatest fears. One of my greatest fears was public speaking. But, you know, when you're a pastor, you do enough public speaking, you get to the point where you kind of, even though you get nervous, I mean, it's not as terrifying as it once was.

But for me, I'm really terrified of the ocean. I love the ocean. I think it's beautiful. I swim in the ocean. But the real deep parts of the ocean, you know, because that's not the human element.

You know what I'm saying? We can't breathe underwater. There are creatures in the water who can eat you, and you're completely defenseless. And so I've always had this kind of this fear of being deep in the water.

I don't think I'd ever go scuba diving too far. We did on our cruise, but it was in shallow water. I mean, you could stand up, and it would be right here on your thighs. And, you know, Danny wanted to venture out a little bit further, and I kind of felt that, I don't know.

The land is getting further away, and the fish are getting bigger. And I'm pretty good with where I'm at. So tell me, somebody else, one of your greatest fears.

Falling out without a parachute? Falling out of a plane with a parachute? Yeah, that would be terrifying. Mike? Heights?

Yeah. Yeah. Sure. I know what you mean. Yep. Okay. Claustrophobic.

A little bit. Okay. Wes has his hand up. Okay. Yeah, you've got to be careful. Okay.

Jerry? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Those are all pretty common fears. So I think that you would probably agree, too, that one of the fears that Christians have is sharing their faith, or witnessing, sharing their testimony, sharing the gospel with an unbeliever.

And if we're all honest, I mean, yeah, there are definitely some who are just gifted in that way. They're evangelists. That's their gifting. We're all called to be evangelists, but you know what I'm saying?

There are some who they just, it comes more naturally to them. So that may not be as big of a fear for them, but I'd say for the most part in the church, if you took a survey, people would say that that's one of their greatest fears as a Christian that they know that they're called to do, but are terrified of it.

So again, that's why we're doing this. That's why the training is here, so that we can practice, so that we can, you know, be less afraid and more confident in our ability to share the good news of Jesus Christ.

And so if you have your training guide, training manual, grab that, and we're going to watch our first video. This is about 10 to 15 minutes.

The pastor here is the one who started the three circles, a Southern Baptist guy down in Florida. He'll introduce himself, kind of explain how it got started, and then take you through the three circles.

And so every, for the next six weeks, we'll go three weeks, and then we'll have a break for, on March 4th when we have our missions, special missions day, our missions banquet.

And Nathan Gunner will be speaking in the morning and evening. So we'll have the next three weeks of training. We'll take a break, and then we'll have three more weeks of training, which will lead us right into Engage.

So full speed ahead. Okay. So, in Matthew 10, if you remember, Jesus had called his disciples.

He had walked with his disciples. He had discipled them for quite a while, and then it came a time where he said, okay, now you guys go out. You remember that? And then he came back with all the reports.

So this is a biblical thing that, you know, we are to train. We are to learn before we go out.

And so, it also made me think of spring training for baseball players. It's going to be here in a couple weeks. And these guys know how to play baseball, right?

I mean, they get paid millions of dollars to do it, so they ought to know how to play. But why do they have spring training? Because they need those reps. They don't just start the season. They need to get their bodies in physical condition.

They need those reps. Those reps, so they get down their hand-eye coordination and all those things so that they're ready to go. And so, here's the thing. If we come in here Sunday after Sunday, and all we do is watch videos, and you hear me talk, that's fine.

But it's not going to get you really the training that you need. Because here's the deal. So, if we can't do this with the people that we know in our church, then when it comes time for us to do it with people that we don't know, you're going to freeze up.

And so, we ought to be able to do this with the people that we know. And the better and the more we get comfortable with it, the more we'll be able to do it with the nonbelievers or the unchurched people that we're trying to reach.

So, you can get in groups of two or three or bigger groups. It doesn't matter to me. You've got the little square booklet, and you can go through that.

And let's have fun, okay? Don't act like you've got to be, I don't know, like Billy Graham right off the bat or somebody like that. This is the opportunity for you to kind of make mistakes or stumble through it.

Nobody's going to judge you. Nobody's going to be like, wow, we're really going to, we're not going to do so good at Engage if, you know, Jesse's the one who's having all the conversations. Sorry, I'm just sorry I get to pick on you.

But you know what I'm saying? So, let's get together. Groups are two to three. Do it yourself. Get with people who you feel comfortable with, right? You go through the presentation and then have other people go through it.

And then we'll get back together and we'll go through our assignments. And yeah, use the whole, we've got plenty of space. So, you know, you don't have to stay where you're at.

You don't necessarily have to do it with the person right next to you. Just do it with somebody, okay? This is practice time. Now let's get those reps. Yeah. Okay, Mr. West is going to come forward and he's going to be our example for tonight.

He is going to share the three circles with the class and show you just how easy it is and how it's done too, I guess, right?

I want to say one thing real quick before I do. The whole reason doing this thing and the reps, right, doing it over and over and over because you're going to get better and better at it.

But what I was telling Frank, I think I told you, in a sales thing, they might give you a script to read that you're going to sell somebody on your product. It's the best thing since sliced bread and all that kind of stuff. But what you do in sales is you actually stand in front of the mirror and you read your script over and over to yourself.

And what happens is it starts becoming, you're going to start changing some of the words the way you talk. It's going to become more natural. So like I was telling Frank, you might use the words, you should have done this and we could have done that and you ought to do this.

But your script might say, you should have, you could have, you ought to have. But that's not the way I talk, right? It's not Wes. So I would have, should have, would have, could have kind of thing. By saying it over and over and over, you're going to start, it's going to start becoming you.

It's going to take on some of your personality. And so by doing these reps, what's going to happen is when you're sharing it with somebody, it's not going to be like, and then you should have, God's design.

And then it leads to, it's all going to come naturally because you've done it so many times. It's going to be you and your friends aren't going to be turned off. Like what is he's doing something different? It's going to really sound like it's coming from your heart.

And that's the whole idea behind all that stuff. So I'm going to have this with a mic. But so, hey, Dan, I want to show you something I learned at church just the other day, if you don't mind. So anyway, a long time ago, you ever heard of the Garden of Eden?

Okay, well, God's design in the Garden of Eden was for perfection. He was commuting with Adam and Eve and everything was great.

You could pet a lion. He wasn't going to eat you, you know, stuff like that. You could pick food. They had no really worries. You just picked from any fruit in the garden except for one. But anyway, so that was God's original design.

But along came a problem. It's called sin. So, you know, Adam and Eve, they ate the forbidden fruit and okay, all that stuff. But what happens, that sin causes this next thing over here.

It's called brokenness. Right in the past. And so this part I don't have perfect. But anyway, when brokenness leads to people trying other ways to kind of fix it.

So they might use maybe sex, maybe alcohol or drugs, right? Maybe it's earning a whole lot of money. So anyway, that's kind of what happens through this brokenness.

Well, the good news is there's something called the gospel, which actually that means good news. And what the good news is, the gospel is that God sent his son Jesus to pay the price for our sins.

And what happened was he took our sins onto him and his righteousness came over to us. So it's kind of like a transaction where he switched the whole thing over. Well, once he took on our sins, Christ died on a cross.

He paid the punishment that we should have paid. He died and was buried. But he rose again. And three days later, he rose and he's alive now. He has ascended to God in heaven. Well, in order to get here to the gospel, what you need to do is to repent and believe.

Now, repent is not just I did something wrong and I'm sorry I did it and keep on heading down that same way. Repent means to 180 degrees. Turn around, stop what you're doing and go back the other direction. That's repentance, okay?

So we need to repent. Like, stop doing this thing and turn back towards what God's plan is for us. And believe that Christ died for us. That allows us to be with God forever in heaven. What that's going to happen is going to recover what was lost.

So God's original plan to recover that and then pursue God. That might mean you're reading your Bible and seeking more and more about what he wants for us to do in our lives and that kind of thing.

So that's what that is. Now, what's going to happen is sin is going to come back again. But the whole idea is you're going to turn around and come back again. But it's going to be less and less and less until finally we are really following God's design in our lives and finally get to heaven.

And it is going to be back to God's perfect plan. And it's going to be wonderful. So do you have any reason why you couldn't accept Christ right now? No, not really. Well, fantastic. Good job.

Thank you, Wes. It asked for one volunteer. Maybe we'll do Cameron next Sunday maybe. She got a B. I want to go over those fill in the blanks because they weren't on the screen.

And I know if you're like me, it's frustrating whenever you have a blank left unfilled. So the first thing is we want every resident of your community to have repeated opportunities to hear and respond to the gospel.

Resident, repeated, respond are the three R's for that first fill in. We want every resident of your community to have repeated opportunities to hear and respond to the gospel.

So here's the thing is you might know somebody who goes to church, but just because they go to church doesn't mean that they're a believer. And, you know, in fact, there's a lot of churches that are so shallow in their presentation of the gospel and their preaching of God's word that we have a lot of unsaved people within the churches who have been told that they're saved, but they're really not.

Okay, the second one, we have to get serious about reaching people who are far from God, who are far from God.

The third one, we have to get serious about prayer and the power of the Holy Spirit. We have to get serious about prayer and the power of the Holy Spirit.

Fourth, we have to get serious about having more gospel conversations. We have to get serious about having more gospel conversations.

Number five, we're going to train you to use the three circles to turn everyday conversations into gospel conversations. Everyday conversations into gospel conversations.

And the last one, we're going to train you and help you get reps. Okay, so you have a couple assignments for the week. First of all, practice the three circles with someone three times this week.

Practice with a family member or a friend. They can be a Christian or a non-Christian. A great way to start conversations is to say, I'm taking a class at church and I wonder if I could practice what I'm learning with you.

So, you know, for us, we'll practice at home. You know, Jack is curious about it. So that will be something for us to do at the dinner table, right? Yes.

But this is what, so for example, this is what I plan on doing. Because I've told you about my neighbor, that I want to share the gospel with him. He knows that I'm a pastor. So it's been cold. I haven't seen him out much. But, you know, my plan is to just go over to him and be like, hey, do you have a minute?

You know, I'm doing something at my church. And I'm challenging them to go and to, you know, to do this presentation with somebody they know. And so do you mind if I do it with you just to see afterwards, you know, if you understand what I'm saying.

And they go through it. And, you know, you have the phone app too. If you go, if you have a smartphone into your app thing there where you can search and download an app, just type in three circles and you can pull that up and it'll swipe right through it.

Or you've got your little booklet. Or you can just take a piece of paper and write it out any way you want to do it. It's a good way. Okay? So that's assignment number one is to practice.

Practice. Practice makes perfect. Assignment number two is focused prayer. Focused prayer is a key component in your training. God is reconciling the world to himself.

2 Corinthians 5.19 Jesus said people only come to him if the Father draws them. John 6.44 He says that we can ask for anything in his name and he will do it. John 14.14 We know that praying for people's salvation is in his will because the Bible says that he doesn't want any to perish.

2 Peter 3.9 It's his work and we have to trust him to do it. Prayer aligns our hearts with God's heart for the lost. It reminds us that we must do God's work in God's way.

So if you haven't already, I know that I've asked you this, but be thinking of three people that you know who you want to do this with, who you want to share the gospel with.

And again, like Wes said, this is just a tool. You know, as long as you are opening your mouth and sharing the gospel, it doesn't have to be exactly.

You know what I'm saying? Exactly like Jimmy Scroggins does it or exactly like Wes does it. It's how you talk. You know, use your voice to communicate God's truth to them.

So be praying for those people and be praying for the opportunity. And now here's the deal. Once you pray for the opportunity and you see that opportunity, don't pass it by.

Don't pass it by. And you'll know because you'll have, you know, the Holy Spirit, you know, you get, you know, the feeling where you feel, you know, start to get hot and sweaty. Like, okay, this is, this is it.

I've got to do it. I've got to seize my opportunity here because if I don't, I know I'm going to go home and I'm going to be kicking myself. Why didn't I say something? Why didn't I do it? So don't do that. Just, just, just, yeah, obey the prompting of the Holy Spirit in those moments and open your mouth and you'll be amazed by the results of what God will do.

And anyhow, again, so practice and pray. Practice and pray. Got it? Okay. Now here's again, here's the thing. We want our church to grow and we want it to grow God's way, which means that we're not trying to steal sheep from other flocks.

But even though we live in Oklahoma, we live in a community where, you know, thankfully there's a lot of church people. We know that it's not 100%.

And I believe that there are still people who God has here who have not heard or maybe they've heard it. And maybe they've gone to church, but they are, they're, they're out for whatever reason.

And, and it's, it's, we want God to send us. You know, we want God to be the ones whom he, he sends to those people to share the gospel with them and then to bring them hopefully into our, our church family here into, to disciple them, to help them grow, to equip them so that they go out.

They are equipped to share the gospel. And, and as a result of us being the type of church that God calls us to be in his word, you know, I think the, the results will be astounding and amazing to all of us.

Thank you.