Well, we had a great time visiting family in Illinois and getting up at 3AM on Friday to witness to the Black Friday shoppers.  There were incredible crowds in the hundreds at each store we went to.  Some people had been camping out in front of Best Buy for 3 days before the doors opened for Black Friday, so we had tons of opportunities to hand out tracts and preach the gospel. 

Our first stop was Kohls at 3:30am.  We handed out tracts and I preached.  The springboard used was a Christmas Quiz and I handed out $1 bills to the winners and a stuffed animal that I had bought last year after Christmas for 80% off and used it for the grand prize.  Then I asked if Santa Claus were to determine if you were “naughty or nice” based on the 10 commandments, how do you think you would do?  Everyone said..not very good.  From there the gospel was preached.  One of the employees confronted me about soliciting, and I told here that I as not selling anything, but was actually giving out money.  Then towards the end of the presentation, the store manager came as asked me to move down to the other store, so we finished up in a few more minutes and moved on.  There were some people that came up to us when we were done and thanked us for doing what we were doing.

We then moved to other stores as the morning progressed.  I did preach in front of Gordmans until my amplification pooped out.  Another place we went was Best Buy.  There were huge crowds there and tons of police, so we just handed out tracts.  The picture below was in the next morning paper and shows Connie handing out tracts to people in line at Best Buy.  Looks like many are reading the tracts too!

Ok, I listened to Paris Reidhead again last night and was floored by this message.  It has to be one of the most powerful sermons in this last century.  The link to the sermon is HERE.  The story behind the sermon is as follows.

In over fifty years of Bible teaching and preaching “Ten Shekels and a Shirt” is the only message that I feel constrained to explain how it came to be preached.

During a Bethany Fellowship Summer Conference in the mid sixties I was preparing to speak at the Tuesday morning Bible hour. Upon returning to my room after breakfast to meditate and pray about the message for that morning hour, I felt strangely impressed that I could not deliver the message that had been prepared for the session. Instead, I felt that there was some other message that was needed which I was to bring.

After prayer, the message that came to mind was one which I had begun preparation for the ministry at the church in New York City of which I was pastor at that time. My notes were not with me, but were in a file folder in my study. An empty envelope was on the desk in my room, on the back of which I wrote the scripture texts to be used and one or two ideas that came to mind. With the envelope in my Bible marking Judges, Chapter 17, and my self utterly cast upon the Lord, I went to the auditorium where between four and five hundred people waited to hear from the Lord through me.

I remember praying, “This morning I am utterly cast upon You because I am not really prepared.” In my heart I seemed to hear His response, “Well is that so bad, already” (being from New York City it was given in a idiom I would understand.)

I delivered the message and gave an invitation. Shortly the altar across the front of the auditorium was filled with broken people seeking God.

The summer conference was soon over and I returned to New York City and the ministry there.

About ten years later, one of the Bethany Fellowship staff was in Washington, D.C., where we had moved and from where we still minister. His word was, “Paris, I want to tell you that God has repeatedly used your messages, but the exact message itself was preached only that once.

A week or two later Harry Conn from Rockford, Illinois was in Washington. He invited me to have dinner with him. In the course of the meal he said, “I buy that message of yours ‘Ten Shekels and a Shirt’ by the dozen to give people. God is really using it in lives.” My response was that if you have a copy, I would like to have it sent to me so that I can find out what it is I have said. In a few days the cassette arrived.

Since I don’t have a tape player in my office, I put the tape into the Sony dictating machine on my desk and listened through the little playback on the hand-held microphone. The element of distance in terms of time, and the distorted sound through the miniature speaker, let me listen to the message with no real awareness of who was speaking. From time to time I felt like exclaiming, “That’s right! I wish I had said that!”

Then it dawned on me that it was my voice, but God was speaking through me. I realized that on a Tuesday morning during a summer conference, God had been able to get His message across because of my utter and complete helplessness. Here it is, just as the Lord gave it.

Paris Reidhead

 

We have an extention of the University of Colorado here in town called UCCS.  It is getting to be a big campus with many students.  Anyway, me and a group of local seed sowers went there today to hand out Ray Comfort’s new book on Darwin.  The front of the book refutes Darwin(and has a gospel message) and the back of the book is the unabridged “Origin of the Species” book.  It did not take us long to hand out all the books and talk to the students.  We only got a few hostile responses and did get to share the gospel with a few of the book recievers.  All in all a great day to glorify God! 

By the way, did you know the original title of the Darwin book published in 1859 was…   On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life.   Wow…..

During a witness encounter, one is regularly confronted with skeptical questions, facts and arguments.  Most of these precede any opportunity to share the gospel, so they are important to address.  The biblical admonition for this can be found in passages like 1 Peter 3:15, where we are told to always be ready to give an answer (from Greek “apologia”) for our faith.  Jude 1:3 tells us to “contend for the faith”. But, how can we do this in an effective and biblical way? 

Once a faithful Christian begins a witness encounter, it will be evident that the unbeliever is filtering every interpretation of the world around him through a framework, called their worldview. This is true of Christians and pagans, but it is important to understand in giving a defense for your faith, because a pagan can always dispute your facts with facts of their own.  And when it comes to the Christian faith, the bible says of the things of God, unbelievers are; enemies of God(James 4:4), their minds are hostile to God(Romans 8:7), Satan has “blinded their minds”(2 Corinthians 4:4), and they just generally “suppress the truth in unrighteousness”(Romans 1:18).  

So what do you do when an unbeliever says that the bible is just a “book written by men”, or “all religions are the same”?   Do you wear them out with facts of the historicity and accuracy of bible prophecy?  Do you discuss all the other world religions and the characteristics of them, including Christianity?  Well, you could, but it will be met almost all the time with laughter, mocking, or just a retort of many other facts that refute your argument. 

So what is the correct way to confront an unbeliever in giving a defense for your faith?

There is a bible verse that is very appropriate for this discussion.  Proverbs 26:4-5 says, “Do not answer a fool according to his folly, Or you will also be like him.  Answer a fool as his folly deserves, That he not be wise in his own eyes”.  So the idea of going back and forth with facts, with an unbeliever, will make you look foolish, and an unbeliever will see himself as “wise in his own eyes”.  But answering them “as his folly deserves” will make him look foolish.  And this is what they are…..foolish.  They just don’t know it.  For only a fool says there is no God(Psalm 53:1). 

So why is this important?  To show the unbeliever the foolishness of their worldview and how it taints all the beliefs they have.  The basis of how they come to interpreting facts that determine their worldview is what is important in a witness encounter.   For we all know the helpless and losing proposition it is in arguing politics or religion.  You will get NOWHERE! 

So when you are witnessing to an unbeliever, give a REASON for the hope within you.  If they say something like, “there is no such thing as absolute truth”, ask them if they are absolutely sure?  If they want proof of God’s existence before they can believe, ask them if they have seen their own brains and whether they doubt their brains exist.  Get to the reason they believe what they do.  

Anyway, this article could be VERY much longer than this.  There is a great You Tube recording of Timothy Keller at a Google meeting that addresses this issue.  Check it out below.

We love the chance to witness to the lost on Halloween.  Instead of going to the neighbors houses, they come to us!  In fact, this year, we had a bonfire going and invited all the immediate neighbors over to the house.  So everyone got to hear the gospel and get tracts.  We probably had 50-60 kids up here with their folks….awesome!

Halloween witnessing 2009 from Stephen Johnson on Vimeo.