Battle Log
Monday 1 June 2020
Posted 1 June 2020, 11:47 PM by Matthew Andersen. Permalink
Monday on Omegle was an encouraging day and a good reminder! When it comes to evangelistic techniques you can hear "seasoned" or "professional" evangelists share their ideas and thoughts on the best way to communicate the gospel. You can meet a faithful Christian and they will share theirs but the issue is in practice we can often all fall into the same trap, whether by accident or thinking we need something better than the gospel. When trying to draw someone to Christianity we can often forget that it is the gospel that is the power of God unto salvation, not apologetics.
There is a sense in which knowing answers to common objections is important or being able to ask good questions to draw a person out and get them engaged whilst learning about who they are and what they believe but we must never trade good answer and good conversational skills for the God appointed weapon of the law and the God provided solution of the penal substitionary and atoning death of Jesus.
There were three good reminders of that today the first, penultimate and last conversations. The first was with a guy whose phone froze and he didn't return. He was shown God's existence, his guilt via the law but he through a smoke screen and the conversation ended up on a tangent, defending the reliabiity of the Bible but after twenty minutes of conversation instead of hearing the gospel and having an opportunity to trusting in Christ for the forgiveness of his sins, he was left having some understanding of why we can trust the Bible but no idea what it really had to say. Although this wasn't a complete failure, it would be a struggle to call it "evangelism".
The second last was with an American student who said he had zero Christian friends. He took was being relatively stubborn on the existence of God but instead of getting caught there, the information was left, the law and gospel was shown and then the objections were returned to at the end after he had comprehended the way to Heaven! He was extremely surprised and quite impressed that Christianity was such a complete worldview and was glad for the conversation and he too said he had much to think about!
A similar conversation took place with Emily though at the end of the evening. She had a Buddhist background but wasn't super into it. About 15 minutes was spent trying to establish God's existence and little progress was made until it was pointed out with a simple analogy that her rejection of God was on the basis of her desire not to be accountable to Him, with the simple, "You can't leave the area of His authority" analogy. To which she responded, "Yeah that makes sense I suppose I believe in God now". Then she was taken through the gospel and each little objection was answered briefly the bigger ones brushed aside till then end to the point where she comprhended the gospel and said, "I really will have to think about this, thanks for the chat!"
It was a good day of reminder, the gospel is the power of God for salvation to those who believe. So why not join us, you don't need great apologetics, just the gospel! We'd love to have you along!
View previous Online Evangelism report (22 May 2020)
Online Evangelism
Here are the tentative weekly outreach times for online evangelism:
Sunday 1-3pm (Practical Training Outreach)
Monday 9am-5pm
Tuesday 1-5pm
Wednesday 1-5pm
Thursday 9am-5pm
Friday 1-4pm
Saturday 1-4pm
These times are all in AEST (GMT+10), so adjust them based on your own timezone.
How to take part
To watch any of our online outreaches, you can watch live on our YouTube channel or Facebook page.
Or to take part in any of these outreaches, email us for the virtual room meeting link.