Battle Log
Battle Log > Plymouth Team > Friday, 4 September, 2009
Friday, 4 September, 2009
Fri 4th September. After the Summer Holidays and lots of kids running around every day, I have finally mustered the energy to start the Friday night ministry again. I am also now in a better position to be able to try advertise it in other Churches as am now a member of my Church.
Well, the first evening back was just myself and my new fiancee Rachelle who is very keen. We went out just after 9pm, and our first chat was with a student at Plymouth University. He was intregued with the million pound note gospel tract, and his face lit up when I said I was a youth worker as he had done some in the past before as well, so that commenality enabled us to have a good chat. We went through the good person test with him, and after a couple he announced that he was a Christian. After my own false conversion in the past, I am always keen to dig a little deeper with people as to what they think that means. So, I asked him when he had become a Christian, and why he thought that God should let him into heaven?
He said that he had a Church of England background, had been a Christian since birth, and that God should let him into heaven if at the end of his life God weighed up all his good and bad deeds etc and if he had been good enough. Gulp! I was really glad I asked him, I suppose with Rowan Williams as the head of the CofE Church then this may be the response of many within the Church of England today.
So, I then had great pleasure in explaining to him the meaning of John 3 v 3, where Jesus said that 'unless a man is born again, he can'ot enter the kingdom of heaven'. He had not heard this before, and with explaining the court room scene to him, he understood that a good judge cant just let the guilty criminal go no matter how sorry he was or asked the judge's forgiveness, no matter how much 'good works' he had professed he had done, nor even if it had been in the past. The only escape the criminal may have is if someone came to his mercy and paid his fine, then a Just Judge could uphold the law and be merciful at the same time.
His eyes lit up when he undertsood this and we applied it to our lives as sinners, and that Christ paid our fine in full, and through repentance towards God and faith in Jesus Christ, he could be born again and have assurance of heaven and eternal life. He seemed to greatly appreciate the chat, and after reasoning with him, he acknowledged that if he had died that day, he would have ended up in hell, and so understandably knew he must get right with God that night, and took a few tracts to read. He said he had a Bible at home and encouraged him to read the gosopel of John again.
I was blown away when he left, as the gospel had really made sense to him, and so prayed he would be saved.
We later went up to the top Macdonalds where a group of teenagers had just gotten in trouble with the police. I had chatted to a few of them before as some go to the local secondary school opposite the YMCA where I work. We got into a chat with them, a group of about 10 14-15yr old lads and girls. They loved the optical illsuion tracts, and we then tried to reason with them about hell. One of the leaders of the group said he would go to hell because of all the bad things he had done and gotten into trouble with the Police before, and so I explained what hell was actually like. Someone had a lighter, and so they gathered around as one lad held out his finger for about 5 seconds with the lighter underneath. We then reasoned that Hell would be so hot for people because of how serious sin was to God, and with a couple of analogies from wretched tv about not how bad the crime necessarily was, but whom the crime was against, they understood why hell made sense because all our sins were primarily against God.
Most of them took a few million pound gospel tracts and optical illusion tracts each, and generally the conversations went well.
On Saturday the 5th September, 5 of us went to Exeter to do some open air preaching and the good person test was filmed and put on facebook, with good discussions with several groups of teenagers and passers by.
Sometimes its hard 'just' having conversations with people without seeing any results of fruit in peoples lives at first, though we all must take comfort that it is God who gives the increase, with Jesus getting all the glory, thanking him he would even use us, as weak and helpless as we are, to spread the good news with the lost!