Battle Log
Sunday, 4 October, 2020
Posted 4 October 2020, 4:10 PM by Glen Richards. Permalink
On Saturday I spent a couple of hours in the city in the morning and a couple of hours online in the afternoon.
The highlight conversation from the morning was with a young Catholic mother from India. I could tell I wouldn’t have much time with her - she wanted to stay and talk, but she had to go. So after explaining the gospel, and focused on contrasting the works based salvation of the Catholic faith, and the gift of Jesus as described in the Bible. She looked conflicted, but seemed to appreciate the conversation. She took a tract as she left.
In the afternoon, I ended up having an interesting chat with a guy who said “this conversation has changed my life”. And yet, as I was talking about the cost of following Jesus, he suddenly disconnected. At the very least, he seems to have understood the gospel. Lord save him!
On Sunday Binu and Daryl joined me in the city for a couple of hours of outreach. There were two highlight conversations for me.
The first was with a Christian - an evangelist. He was down from Auckland for some revival meetings. He said he had just talked to some people in the supermarket, and “led them to the Lord”. How wonderful! He then pulled out his phone and started showing me some video of some kids reciting a sinner's prayer. The look on the kids face was one of bemusement. I asked the guy if he thought they were really saved. I mentioned that it can be misleading to lead people in a prayer, because they might think that, now they have said the magic words, they are saved - when they really aren't. I wasn’t really surprised, but he became very defensive, and even started to rebuke me. He started saying things like: “baptism is part of it” [baptism is part of being saved]. I said, no, we are only saved because Jesus died on the cross for our sins, and we accept the gift by faith alone - baptism will come, but it’s not part of being saved. In the end, I thanked him for the rebuke. I want to be open to correction if need be, but I wanted to continue to share the gospel with people. He moved on at that point.
The other highlight was an awesome conversation with two teen guys. One of them walked right up to me and I could tell he wanted to talk about the deep things of life, but he wanted me to initiate! This often means I’m being set up. So I challenged him on it. He insisted he was genuine. And he really seemed to be. They ended up joining me on the flip chart. It was wonderful watching the penny dropping multiple times for that one guy. It was a wonderful conversation. When we got to the resurrection, he had really good and genuine questions about how we know it happened. It was a joy watching this guy processing the apologetics. They were challenged to respond to the gospel - urgently. And they received tracts with an invitation to get in touch if they had further questions.
Oh God, we are so weak, we are so fallible, we are so dependent on you. Please help us to be faithful to your word. Help us to share your gospel faithfully. Help us to be alert to deception, and open to correction. We love you, Lord, for giving us life, and saving us from our sin by paying our hell fine on our behalf. We love you Jesus!