How to Preach Evangelistically (with Garrett Kell)

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0:00:00 – (Garrett Kell): God seems to delight in answering prayers that are oriented around lost people coming to know him. He loves saving sinners. I mean, look who’s at the table, right? Like, this is what he does. And I think the more we can lean into that and trust him for that, it’s a joy to watch him work.

0:00:21 – (Matt Smethurst): Welcome back, friends, to the Everyday Pastor, a podcast from the Gospel Coalition on the nuts and bolts of ministry. I’m Matt Smethurst.

0:00:28 – (Lig Duncan): And I’m Lig Duncan.

0:00:29 – (Matt Smethurst): And we’re joined again by our friend Garrett Kell. He’s the pastor, one of the pastors at Delray Baptist Church in Alexandria, Virginia. He’s written helpful books. He hosts a podcast called Counseling Talk. And we’re going to be thinking together about the topic of evangelistic preaching, preaching to lost people among us, those who know they’re lost, and also those who don’t yet know they’re lost.

0:00:55 – (Matt Smethurst): But let’s start with just acknowledging the fact that Sunday mornings are not meant to be an evangelistic pep rally. Who are Sunday mornings primarily for God. Amen. Yeah, I think Michael Lawrence said that in one of our episodes. The primary audience on Sunday mornings is actually not unbelievers or believers.

0:01:17 – (Lig Duncan): It’s God and Paul in a very evangelistic setting in First Corinthians, you know, if you’re looking at 10 to 12 in 1 Corinthians, as he’s addressed, he’s clearly got edification on his mind as one of the top. So as a minister. Yeah, we want to point everybody’s focus on God. We want them to be seeking a word mediated encounter with a living God. And then we want to make sure that we’re delivering his word so that they can have that word mediated encounter.

0:01:44 – (Lig Duncan): But we’re looking to edify his people. But we’re never ever to forget there are going to be unbelievers under our noses all the time. And I’m prone to forget that. So I’ve been helped by brothers like Mark De or Tim Keller who have just always said to me, l don’t forget you’ve got unbelievers under your nose and you’ve got to bring to bear the word on.

0:02:07 – (Matt Smethurst): And Paul seems to assume it in 1 Corinthians 14. And it’s interesting to me, he still calls them outsiders. So it’s not like he’s trying to remove the distinction between the church and the world and saying, you can belong before you believe. No, they’re outsiders, but. But they’re there and preach as if they are.

0:02:25 – (Garrett Kell): Sure, yeah. Yeah. So Glorification and edification. That’s the point of our gathering. But like you said, I’m assuming and hoping there’s non believers there. Right. So one of the things that’s happening on Sunday mornings while we’re preaching is we are hoping that our members have been inviting non believing friends. So I think one of the things, you know, that’s important in this conversation is preaching for your members so that they can feel encouraged to bring non believers like you want them hearing every Sunday. Oh, I wish Bob was here. I wish, because this is what I’ve been trying to tell them about the Lord.

0:03:08 – (Garrett Kell): So if you preach in that way, it will encourage people to bring lost people. It will equip them. So we should be preaching in such a way that when I’m talking so during a sermon, I’ll say, if you’re here and you don’t know Jesus yet, first of all, we’re really thankful that you’re here once you know it. Everybody in this room started that way. Nobody’s born a Christian. That’s why Jesus says you have to be born again.

0:03:30 – (Garrett Kell): So we think God’s doing something in your life. But if you’re here today, I want you to hear this or think about this or here’s a question that you might want to wrestle with or if somebody brought you, talk to them about this. So I’ll talk to them. And that does so many things. It makes them feel welcome and seen.

0:03:43 – (Lig Duncan): You’re honoring them by. By saying you’re important enough for me to pay attention to. Yeah.

0:03:48 – (Garrett Kell): And I’m also training the church of how this is how you talk to a non believer, you know, because. So it’s. Those things are all happening in those moments. And I think that’s part of our responsibility as gospel preachers.

0:03:59 – (Matt Smethurst): Yeah. So it’s a false dichotomy that we’re. We’re only edifying or only evangelizing. You know, we edify as we evangelize. We evangelize as we edify or as I’ve thought about it, you know, yes, we gather for worship and scatter for witness, but the worship is witness and the witness is worship. And so when we think about evangelistic preaching. Preaching with a view to lost folks. Garrett, I love what you’ve already said.

0:04:27 – (Matt Smethurst): What are some other things you’re thinking about in the process of sermon preparation that help you in this regard?

0:04:34 – (Garrett Kell): I think the most important thing is that you as a pastor develop an evangelistic lifestyle. You can tell when somebody loves lost people and when they’re they know they should love lost people, and they’re trying. You know, I think there’s, there’s just a. There’s a difference. So one of the biggest things I want to encourage pastors to do is to not forget that you should be prayerfully seeking opportunities to engage with lost people. So there’s praise and there’s prayers that I pray regularly, and I share this with the congregation. I tell them to pray the same sorts of things. Lord, give us eyes to see lost people like you do. Help us to see that the people we’re around are spending an eternity either with Christ or apart from him in hell.

0:05:18 – (Garrett Kell): Show me that we don’t think naturally. We think naturally, not supernaturally. Give us open our eyes. Secondly, open doors. This, by the way, is one of it seems to be like the Lord’s favorite prayer request to answer is, lord, would you open doors for the gospel this week? Do it for me, do it for us. And I mean, I remember I did that a few months ago, and sure enough, I got a flat tire. And the person who stopped by to help me was a Muslim gentleman who had been around some other Christians and started reading the Bible and he had some questions, and I was just like, well, isn’t it just like the Lord to answer, you know, flat tire, Praise the Lord. So open doors however you want to do that, Lord.

0:06:01 – (Garrett Kell): Thirdly, open my mouth. Give me courage. So if I see him rightly, I’m going to have compassion. But I need courage because I’m a fearful coward, right? God, help me to have courage to speak and then open hearts. Lord, would you save people? Like, we want to see lost people. Come to know the Lord. And so our church, we have a week of prayer and fasting twice a. Twice a year. And those are some things that we tell people to be praying. Pray those things for yourselves, for our church, God, do this.

0:06:28 – (Garrett Kell): It begins to create a culture of evangelism in the church. Because this is. You want the congregation realizing that this is, this is what you’re about. We are disciples who make disciples. And so we want to be evangelistic. That’s the first part of the disciple making process. Who are the people that God’s put around you who don’t know the Lord yet, tell them about Jesus, like that’s the normal thing. This is what Christians do.

0:06:49 – (Garrett Kell): And then once they come to know him, you know, help. Help them follow more deeply. So if that’s, if we’re creating that culture through prayer, through talking about changes, just the whole environment that that happens in in a congregation. So I think, first of all, you want to be living an evangelistic lifestyle. I think, secondly, you want to be praying that God would help you to. To even be courageous in your preaching.

0:07:12 – (Garrett Kell): Because sometimes the seeker sensitive churches. Seeker sensitive churches sometimes will water down some theological truths in a way to try to make the meeting more palatable. And that just does a disservice for everybody. It just dishonors the Lord. It doesn’t help your members figure out how do you talk about hard things, and then it doesn’t help people wrestle with real things. So, for instance, there’s somebody who visits our church pretty fairly regularly who’s wrestling with some gender identity confusion.

0:07:43 – (Garrett Kell): And I don’t regularly teach about that. If the text provides an opportunity and it seems like the right application, I would. And I had it as part of my application for this particular Sunday. And I looked up about 30 seconds before I’m about to get into it, and I saw this person there. I preached thousands of sermons. I’ve done all this kind of stuff. And I felt the. Oh, my goodness, do I. Do I not talk about this right now?

0:08:08 – (Garrett Kell): Because they’re here and I don’t wanna. And I was like, no, I just gotta trust this is God’s providence. So I went ahead, tried to handle it carefully, thought about it. But it helped me to know that somebody who was wrestling with that was there because they don’t become some kind of straw man that I’m bashing or that kind of stuff. I’m talking in a way that I hope they hear. Compassion and truth.

0:08:28 – (Lig Duncan): Yeah.

0:08:29 – (Garrett Kell): And I’ll tell you what, after the service, that person caught up with me and they said, hey, I want to let you know I heard what you said today, and I appreciate it. I needed to hear it. And you just never know what God’s doing in somebody’s life. And so your job is, like you said, please the Lord by proclaiming his word faithfully, clearly, compassionately, tenderly, and trust in him to do the work.

0:08:51 – (Matt Smethurst): We should speak in a way that makes it clear we remember what it was like to be lost, too. There is a kind of evangelism which says, I’m right, you’re wrong, and I would love to tell you about it.

0:09:03 – (Garrett Kell): Yep.

0:09:04 – (Matt Smethurst): But that’s. That’s. That’s not the aroma of. Of Christ.

0:09:07 – (Lig Duncan): Yeah.

0:09:08 – (Garrett Kell): Yeah, I think so. The way we talk to unbelievers is really important, but also the way we talk about them, because there’s. There’s some Christian circles who have that kind of. We wouldn’t say it like this, but it’s a self righteous attitude of like, hey, we, we’re smarter than them and all this. And I kind of learned this lesson a really hard, hard way. So when I was or after I became a believer, I was at Denton Bible Church and I was the evangelism pastor there for, for a couple years and we would do these Saturday trainings with how to share the gospel with, you know, Mormons or Muslims or Jehovah’s Witnesses and did this one on, on, on how to share the gospel with, with, with Mormons. And at one point in there I started talking about, you know, here come the guys in the black and white shirts on the bikes and kind of making some jokes and everybody in there started laughing and I was young, immature and kind of, you know, went with that a little bit and, and played it up a little bit and all this kind of stuff and. Well, anyway, after the, the thing was, was over, I was kind of feeling pretty good about my, my ministry and I was walking back and there was a couple that was standing there. I don’t remember their names, but they kind of waited till everybody was gone. I could tell they wanted to talk to me and walked up to them, said, hey, how are you guys doing? They said, hey, we want to thank you so much for today’s ministry. It was really helpful.

0:10:20 – (Garrett Kell): Uh, we, we have some gospel, we have some, some Mormon friends we’ve been trying to share the gospel with and but if I can, I just want to say I’m so glad we didn’t bring them today because the way you talked about them I think would have pushed them away from Jesus and man, I needed to hear that. It was such a helpful corrective moment in my pastoring ministry to just, you never know who’s there and you want to be really careful to make sure that our gospel is, is pleasing the Lord and, and, and, and meets everybody where they are. And we don’t, we don’t use straw men and be condescending and self righteous and tear people down. That’s, that’s not what this is about.

0:11:00 – (Lig Duncan): Yeah, that’s so good.

0:11:02 – (Matt Smethurst): Yeah. I’m reminded of Titus 3:2 which says slander no one, avoid fighting, be kind, always showing gentleness to all people. I think another translation says show perfect courtesy to all people. And in an age of outrage and disrespect and slander. That’s a needed word.

0:11:20 – (Garrett Kell): Yeah. Social media doesn’t disciple you in that. No, it disciples you in a worldly, ungodly, tear down sort of like, dunk on people kind of thing. Similar text, second Timothy, Paul says, the Lord’s servant must not be quarrelsome, but kind to everyone, able to teach, patiently enduring evil, correcting his opponents with gentleness. God may perhaps grant them repentance, leading them to a knowledge of the truth, that they may come to their senses and escape the snare of the devil after being captured by him.

0:11:54 – (Garrett Kell): I mean, even there you can hear Paul, he’s like, they’re, they’re ensnared by Satan. Like, be gentle, be clear, be truthful, love them with the gospel.

0:12:04 – (Matt Smethurst): Yeah, there’s a way to preach a sermon that feels like a screed, just a long scolding. And there’s a way to preach a sermon that feels like a prison break. And, and people are ensnared, they’re captive by the devil. And again, we want to preach.

0:12:19 – (Lig Duncan): People can smell your contempt for them. And I mean, you talk about social media, there are a lot of voices out there that ooze contempt. People can pick that up. And it’s very interesting. The follow up passage in Titus 3 gives the why? Why? Because God was kind to you when you were a sinner, when you were a rebel against his will, he was kind to you. So you show kindness to all men. And we’ve got a gospel motivation to not be contemptuous towards people that are dead in their trespasses and sins, to treat them as human beings in the image of God, that we want to be one into the blessing of communion with the living God. Not that we hate, not that we want to see them ground into dust. We want to see them one to Christ. We want them flourishing in the glory that God intended for them to experience in communion with him. And you can tell when a person is deadly serious about sin. Deadly serious about hell, yes, but also deadly serious about their love for you and their longing to see you be brought into the enjoyment of the sons of God.

0:13:36 – (Garrett Kell): That’s good. One of the things you just mentioned about hell, you know, I think it’s a doctrine that doesn’t. People don’t like preaching on. I think if you like preaching on hell, that’s an issue. Like if it’s your favorite thing to talk about, you know, I probably need some counseling, but like, there’s this podcast called Counseling, but it is a very real reality. And I think the way that we communicate the realities of hell, I think it was Moody who. It’s, you know what the exact quote was? I’m not sure, but it’s something like, I Can’t listen to a man preach on hell who does not weep while he does it. Right.

0:14:18 – (Lig Duncan): There’s a famous conversation between it’s either Horatius Bonar or Andrew Bonar and Robert Murray McCheyne, where maybe it’s McCheyne says, Bonar says, what did you preach on? Well, I preached on hell. And the response is, did you preach it with tears? So similar kind of thing to the Moody quote you just shared.

0:14:37 – (Garrett Kell): And you don’t want to make that up. That’s where it comes back to, Lord, help me to see lost people like you do. Like, think, think of the people among you who don’t know the Lord yet and, and, and preach it with sobriety. I know one of the mistakes I made as a young preacher was when that tension of a heavy, heavy word like that was happening. I would make a little comment that’s kind of, you know, sidebar, a little funny. Trying to light the mood. I just want to encourage. Please.

0:15:04 – (Garrett Kell): In an age of flippancy where we, we try to like, self medicate with humor, like, don’t, don’t do that around hell.

0:15:11 – (Lig Duncan): That’s really good.

0:15:11 – (Garrett Kell): Hell is never anything to joke about. It is, it is real, it is sobering, it is serious, and it is the eternal destiny of many.

0:15:19 – (Lig Duncan): It feels either mean or comical to our culture. And so you don’t wanna do anything that feeds into either that you’re not over there relishing it on the one hand, nor are you, as you say, lightening it up. There’s nothing funny about it. It’s deadly sober, earnest truth. And you wanna talk about it in such a way that conveys that you wanna unreal to people in our culture, be deadly real to them, and realize that you’re not gleefully talking about this, glibly talking about this, that it impacts you when you think about it.

0:15:59 – (Matt Smethurst): Yeah, well, our Lord Jesus talked about hell more than anyone.

0:16:04 – (Lig Duncan): Correct.

0:16:04 – (Matt Smethurst): And yet it also says he looked out on the crowd and he had compassion on them because he saw them as harassed and helpless like sheep without a shepherd.

0:16:13 – (Garrett Kell): So an example of how we might do that in a sermon. Recently we did a series on Micah and there was one of the themes, justice shows up. Right. So a couple things here. One is, I want to always try to preach. We’re preaching the gospel and we want to find creative ways to get to the gospel. You never get creative with the gospel. The gospel, it is the message. We don’t mess with that. But how do we get there? So we’re not just talking about like at the end. Oh, by the way, here’s your 32nd Jesus commercial. If you’d like to believe today’s the day kind of thing, but rather, how can you weave in, you know, something that’s there in the text? And so we’re talking about justice and be like, now, this is, this is an important moment for us to consider this, this justice that Micah’s crying out for.

0:16:55 – (Garrett Kell): There’s going to be justice in his day, but there’s. There’s an ultimate day of justice that is coming.

0:17:00 – (Lig Duncan): Right?

0:17:00 – (Garrett Kell): And so I want everyone to hear this. Particularly if you’re here today and you don’t know the Lord, I want you to know, you’re. You’re going to hear this, this moment. You’re going to see again. There is a last day coming when everyone will stand before God and give an account for every moment, every word, every thought, every deed. You’ll give an account for how you receive or dismiss this message right now.

0:17:24 – (Garrett Kell): So please hear. We live in a day where everybody cries, justice, justice. And that’s a good thing. God is a just God. But on that last day, what people will cry for is mercy, mercy, mercy. And I want you to know the only way to get mercy is through Jesus.

0:17:41 – (Lig Duncan): Yeah.

0:17:42 – (Garrett Kell): And then point them to the cross, where Jesus received the just wrath of God in our place and then went into the grave, which we’re all going to. But then three days later, he rose from the dead. And he rose, and with that authority, he wants to give mercy, turn to him. Today is the day of salvation. And like, you just talk to people like that, and that can feel uncomfortable, maybe, but. But it does so many things. It serves them, it keeps you honest, and it helps the congregation say, okay, when I’m talking to people about Jesus, I need to be able to get to the fact that you need to make a decision. The gospel is not just an option that, hey, this is what works for me.

0:18:19 – (Garrett Kell): It’s a call to repent and to believe. And you want to help them to see how to communicate that. Yeah.

0:18:25 – (Matt Smethurst): And what you did there, you connected before. You confronted, you found that moral intuition that is in so many people today by God’s grace. But you also showed how it’s a mistaken intuition apart from Christ, and that that’s good contextualization. There are bad ways to contextualize, but. But real contextualization, biblical contextualization is not, you know, dressing up the message to make it cool. It’s. It’s breaking it down, palatable.

0:18:58 – (Lig Duncan): Right. You’re not trying to make it palatable.

0:19:00 – (Matt Smethurst): Exactly.

0:19:01 – (Lig Duncan): You’re wanting it to land harder. Absolutely, but not in a comical or a stereotypical sort of way. You actually want to catch them a little bit off guard while you connect with that moral sense of the.

0:19:15 – (Matt Smethurst): You want to make the offense of the cross more clear. But the way you get to that is often by kind of drawing them in. And two books that I would commend to listeners that I think do this. Well, one is, I think, an underrated book Tim Keller wrote called Making Sense of God. So his first bestseller was the Reason for. For God. And a few years later, he wrote what he called a prequel to that because he realized that even within the span of a few years, some of the classic traditional objections to the faith that he was tackling in, the Reason for God, were no longer really the thing that was keeping people from considering a life with Christ. So it’s a book about things like justice, identity, meaning, morality, freedom, hope, and showing how those natural intuitions that people have, which of course is not natural, it’s because we’re living in the wake of the Jesus revolution, can lead us to the gospel. And the other book is Glenn Scrivener’s the Air We Breathe. And he does the exact same thing in a disarming kind of way.

0:20:24 – (Matt Smethurst): He challenges the skeptic to recognize the fact that. That their moral values, they’re operating on borrowed capital. They are trying to saw off the branch they’re sitting on when they attack Christianity with the very intuitions Christianity gave them. So enlightenment, consent, again, identity, freedom, progress, all of these things that our unbelieving friends, family, neighbors take for granted actually are coming to you from a Jesus worldview.

0:20:52 – (Garrett Kell): And I think reading and relationships are the two ways that help you, because people will say, well, how do I find that gospel springboard? You know, well, reading good books like that to help you see it, but then be around non believers. And what are the questions that they’re asking?

0:21:07 – (Matt Smethurst): Yeah, good question.

0:21:08 – (Garrett Kell): What are the things they’re. They’re wrestling with? What are you discipling your members? So one of the, you know, creating a culture, evangelism. One of the questions we’ll try to ask people regular, like, who lost people in your everyday life? And. And how. How’s it going with engaging them with the gospel? What questions are they asking? What are you thinking through? So we want to make that the normal air. But then as you’re helping them answer those questions and you’re studying for your Sunday sermon, you’re like, oh, if that person Comes on Sunday.

0:21:33 – (Garrett Kell): Here’s how I could show them the gospel. One other thing you mentioned a second ago was about, we want to make the offense of the gospel more clear. And this is where ecclesiology is really helpful. So one of the things that we’ve seen probably five or six people now come to know the Lord by is the way we fence the Lord’s Supper. So it’s been. So when we do the Lord’s Supper at our church, we do it every other week, so twice a month.

0:22:04 – (Garrett Kell): And we encourage the pastors to use something from the sermon as a springboard into the supper. The supper is a first application for. For us after we hear it. And then we want to be really clear about who this is for and who it’s not for. And we’ve had multiple people. I’m thinking of one sister now in particular, who she says, I sat there and I heard them say, this is not for me. And it bothered me. It irritated me.

0:22:31 – (Garrett Kell): But when the plate, the elements came by, she deep down thought, I must not take this. And she goes, I don’t know where that came from. And we know it’s the Holy Spirit was working on her, but how important it was. And then that ended up to conversations to where she says, I. I think at the Lord’s Supper, I. I felt welcomed here, but I felt like I’m in. I don’t feel like I’m here. Like, what. What is that? And then it just provided good opportunity.

0:22:58 – (Matt Smethurst): We actually had the exact same experience. College student, hadn’t grown up in a Christian environment. And for whatever reason, the comment that I made at the Lord’s table, something to the effect of, this is a meal for those who know their need for a savior. And if you’re not there yet, we’d encourage you to, you know, we pass the plates around. We’d encourage you to let the elements pass by and take the next few moments to consider your need for Christ.

0:23:24 – (Matt Smethurst): The Lord used that to awaken his

0:23:26 – (Garrett Kell): heart and praise the Lord. That’s encouraged.

0:23:29 – (Lig Duncan): So good. So membership is also an opportunity. You know, if you have people that are coming into membership of the church, same thing as the Lord’s Supper, that’s an opportunity. This is not a group of people who are good and they’re good enough. In fact, I will often say the only people who can join First Presbyterian Church are bad people. The first vow you make is that you’re not good to join this church. So if you’re good, please don’t join First Press because you’re not allowed here.

0:24:02 – (Lig Duncan): And so to just help people think about this is not about a group of us who are more morally superior to you gathering around the table. We’re people who were dead in our trespasses and sins. And were it not for the mercy of Christ, were it not for the work of the Holy Spirit in our lives, we’d still be dead in our trespasses and sins and we’d be under the judgment of God. But by his grace, we’re able to come to this table.

0:24:27 – (Lig Duncan): And so you’re making it clear in a way you’re talking to the rich young ruler. There is no one good except God. Jesus will say, so if you’re trying to get to God by being a good person, Jesus says there aren’t any. Jesus says, I don’t say it. The church doesn’t say it. Jesus says there are no good people. You’re going to have to trust in me if you want to get to God. And so to make people who may have sort of a low grade moralism, I’m trying to be good enough. I mean we’ve heard that in public

0:24:58 – (Matt Smethurst): life and they come in to church assuming that’s our message.

0:25:01 – (Lig Duncan): Right.

0:25:01 – (Garrett Kell): And I think that’s where another thing that we can do is think through. You mentioned apologetics. So apologetics should be part of our preaching. I think apologetics are not the gospel, but they can assist people in seeing it. So I think we were in the Gospel of John somewhere talking about, you know, Jesus died for the world and say, you know, if you were to go out right now and you were to just ask, this is part of a sermon. You just go out and ask anybody on the street, hey, how do you, how do you get to, how do you get to heaven?

0:25:29 – (Garrett Kell): A lot of people would say either you’re a good person or they would say, well, all roads lead to God. Honestly, I want to be really clear with you. All roads lead to God. That’s 100% true. But only one of them leads to God as Father. All the others lead. There is judge. So you just got to know that Satan wants you to believe half lie or half truth. And the half truth is that all roads do lead to God, but there’s only one that will lead to him as Father, and that’s Jesus says he’s the way, the truth and the life. So you can you figure out how to weave those little things in.

0:25:59 – (Lig Duncan): That’s exactly right.

0:26:01 – (Garrett Kell): There’s, there’s a, lots of those. Or how do you engage with somebody from, from Other faiths. So we were, we were talking about, I think this was in the Gospel of John. And we were talking about Jesus being the son of God. And this is, this is distinct between every other presentation of him and every other religion. I said, so for instance, the other day I was in a Uber going somewhere, and the, the driver asked him where he was from. He’s from a Middle Eastern country.

0:26:24 – (Garrett Kell): And I said, I said, oh. I said, well, our church regularly prays for, for your country. Are you, are you Christian or Muslim? Because we know, we know friends from, from there who are both Christian and Muslim. And he said, well, I’m Muslim. I said, okay. I said, well, I’m Christian. And he said, well, we believe the same thing. I said, I said, no. I said, we believe in Jesus. And he, and I was, I wanted him to say this. Oh, we believe in Jesus too. And I was like, oh, but we don’t, we don’t believe in the same Jesus. He goes, oh, it’s the same. It’s the same. I said, no, to be clear, we think that Jesus was the son of God who was born of a virgin, who was crucified, literally died on the cross, physically went to the grave, and then he rose three days later. And he goes, oh, that’s very bad.

0:27:02 – (Garrett Kell): And you know, I was like, and, but I told that story during this, during the sermon to help highlight, be like, you know, he’s a well intended, you know, person who’s thinking through things, but he’s, he’s got a wrong view of Jesus. Our job is to help people see Jesus rightly. Yeah, well, that Sunday afterwards, there was several Muslims who had, who were visiting with some, some friends and they, they said, I heard what you said about that was interesting. I’d like to talk more about that.

0:27:28 – (Lig Duncan): Yeah.

0:27:29 – (Garrett Kell): And you just never know what it’s going to do for people.

0:27:31 – (Matt Smethurst): You don’t. And again, in sharing that story in your sermon, you were training your people in how to have a conversation like that.

0:27:38 – (Lig Duncan): And it also shows, once again, the difference between good contextualization and bad contextualization. If you’re always trying to eliminate the distinctions in people’s minds, you’re not serving their souls. That he had to heighten the distinction. No, we’re not exactly alike. We don’t believe in the same God. We don’t believe in the same thing. And by the way, when you do that, you’re not dishonoring the internal testimony of the Muslim religion. If you really understood it, that one of their key points is that they’re not like us, and that we are actually guilty of heresy, the worst kind of heresy. When we say that we believe that Jesus is the son of God and that he died on the cross, that’s heresy.

0:28:26 – (Lig Duncan): And so you’re helping somebody think clearly. You’re not just agreeing with them, you’re

0:28:33 – (Matt Smethurst): not coddling them, but you’re dignifying them. You’re taking them seriously. And I think people tend to respond well to being taken seriously. And even if they’re going to finally disagree with us, at least they, you know, it’s been said that being listened to is so close to being loved that most people can’t tell the difference. People want to feel like you’ve listened to them. You’ve kind of tried to climb into their experiences, which is why I’m glad you mentioned, hey, it’s important to read books, but we also need to be having conversations and friendships with people who don’t yet know the Lord. Any final thoughts on this topic of evangelistic preaching?

0:29:14 – (Garrett Kell): Garrett I just want to encourage brothers to, to not assume that just because you may not have many visitors, that everybody who’s there on a Sunday morning are. Are believers. I can’t tell you how many times we’ve heard stories of somebody who, they just learned how to do the culture and they said the right things and, you know, drank the beer at the right time and all this kind of stuff. Like, they just, they just learn how to put on the show.

0:29:41 – (Garrett Kell): So I think just preach the gospel. And preaching the gospel evangelistically will also. It’s, you know, build it and they will come. I think it creates a desire for. I wish my unbelieving aunt or uncle would come and hear this. So I would just say, yeah, preach

0:29:54 – (Matt Smethurst): for those who you want to.

0:29:56 – (Garrett Kell): Want to be there. And I think that is. Is something that. And pray and pray and pray God. God seems to delight in answering prayers that are oriented around lost people coming to know him. He loves saving sinners. I mean, look who’s at the table, right? Like, this is what he does. And I think the more we can lean into that and trust him for that, it’s a joy to watch him work.

0:30:19 – (Lig Duncan): Matt I’d also say don’t set evangelistic preaching over against expository preaching. Expository preaching will open the door for you in 30,000 different ways to be evangelistic in your preaching. You don’t have to be stereotyped. If you’re doing good expository preaching, you’re going to come at the gospel from a bunch of different angles as you work through the passage. And again, my friend Mark Dever has taught me a lot about that. He has an article called Evangelistic Expository Preaching in the book for Jim Boice called Give Praise to God.

0:30:51 – (Lig Duncan): And that’s a very and then we talked a while ago about his messages on the Old Testament and the New Testament. If you look at those sort of sermon length overviews of Bible books, he finds different ways of getting at the gospel as he’s working working through different kinds of biblical material. And it’ll give ideas to pastors as they’re working through that material on how they can get to the gospel.

0:31:17 – (Matt Smethurst): Yeah, and sometimes it’s more drawn out three or four minutes addressing the unbeliever. Sometimes it’s just a passing comment to unsettle their unvoice a little bit.

0:31:27 – (Garrett Kell): 100%.

0:31:28 – (Matt Smethurst): Well, there’s so much more we could talk about in this regard, but what a privilege we have week in and week out to proclaim Christ to those who know him and need him afresh and those who don’t yet know Him. Thanks for joining us for this conversation on the everyday Pastor. We hope it’s been helpful for you and we’d encourage you to share it with a friend in ministry so that we can continue being faithful from the pulpit and helping one another find fresh joy in the work of ministry.