Transcript

00:00 Paul Tripp: Hey, Shelby.

00:01 Shelby Abbott: Hey, Paul.

00:02 Paul: It's great to be back here in the studio with you and all you. Excited about the conversations we have. Today is really cold in Philadelphia. It's a rude greeting for somebody who spent six months in Southern California.

00:17 Shelby: I apologize personally.

00:19 Paul: But I decided on the way here, it wasn't best to curse God and die.

00:25 Shelby: Good choice.

00:26 Paul: That's right and I'm really excited about our topic today. The more I thought about it, the more excited I got and one of the things that excites me is I'm sitting with a very committed and skilled evangelist; and so, I'm here not just to contribute, but to learn.

00:51 Shelby: Committed, at the very least. Maybe not skilled.

00:55 Paul: I'm glad they released you. So we're going to start real small. We're going to get real big and then, get small again. So I wanted you to start with just giving me your best, easy-to-understand definition of this thing called evangelism. When we talk about evangelism, what are we talking about

01:22 Shelby: Yes, I think there's probably a stigma around the word in general and a lot of people get a little bit afraid when they hear the word "evangelism", but evangelism is just sharing the good news of what Jesus has done for the world and done for the person personally.

01:39 It's sharing the good news that Jesus came to earth, lived a life of perfection, was executed unjustly on a Roman cross for the sins of humanity, was buried, was resurrected three days later, and eventually, ascended to the Father to be at His right side.

01:58 And so, to help a person understand that that's not just a story that exists somewhere in antiquity or someplace in the Bible. It's a true event that happened and it's relevant to the person you're speaking to very, very intentionally.

02:15 Help them to understand this is not just some random thing that they may have heard about. It's actually personally relevant to that person and then, they need to make a decision based on what they believe about the truth of that story.

02:27 Paul: So let me jump in here. What you described is the best story ever, the best news ever. It is the goodest of good news and it's such a beautiful, beautiful way of thinking about life and who God is and the best gifts ever; and if that's true, why are we so afraid to share the gospel? Why are we all so timid? I mean, I experience that timidity.

03:11 Shelby: Sure, yes, I think there's always been this stigma that people do not want to hear what you have to say when it comes to the subject of Jesus. Some people would just say just religion, but for our purposes, Jesus; and as a result, you're going into every conversation assuming that the person is already upset just with the subject matter that's coming up.

03:34 And when you make that assumption in your mind before you even open your mouth and say anything, when you make that assumption you're already walking in, the whistle has just been blowing and you're already two touchdowns behind it. That's what it feels like.

03:48 So when you come into that naturally, emotions are going to be like, "This person doesn't want to hear what I have to say. This is going to be a negative conversation." It's just like walking into any conversation that you assume is going to be a bad conversation.

04:03 You are nervous about it. You don't want to deliver bad news to someone. You don't want to be in an argument with another person and so, the fear of man ends up taking over instead of having a reverence and a fear of God. I think that's why.

04:19 Paul: But isn't it true that the social media view of Christianity — which now dominates our thought ecology, it just does — it has a very negative view of Christianity. So am I not starting with that negative because, you know, I talk with people and they just say to me, "Christians are crazy," and they don't mean that crazy in the way you're committed and, I mean, that's a bit of a compliment.

05:03 You're crazy for what? You know, it's like somebody saying you're crazy for the Phillies. It's not that. It's just, "You're weird, insane, negative, horrible people." So am I not dealing with that as I share the gospel?

05:19 Shelby: Yes, I mean, sure. You're probably dealing with the pre-loaded presuppositions that people have about Christianity in general; and it's easy to be angry and make comments and make assumptions and statements and all that kind of stuff when you're behind the safety of your phone or your computer, and so, people feel the liberty to do that.

05:39 I have found, personally, whether it be I'm talking to a college student or I'm talking to the random person sitting next to me on the airplane, that when you're in front of a human being, when you're in front of another person, it's just a different scenario.

05:57 It feels like you're not going to immediately hop to arguing with a person, especially, when there's all the social norms of asking questions and being kind and looking somebody in the eye and body language and all that kind of stuff.

06:13 I found that if you're intentional about being a human being in front of other human beings, you can very quickly defuse any kind of presuppositions that that person has about you based on the fact that he or she labels you as a Christian.

06:31 They might think a bunch of things about you before they get involved in the conversation, but I have seen conversations that I've been involved in where you can almost tell that the roadblocks this person has up against Christians start to come down the more human you just act in front of someone.

06:51 If you're not this stereotype, if you're not a caricature of a Christian when you're sharing the gospel with someone, you'd be surprised by how quickly somebody gets diffused in their presuppositions about what they have about Christians, how they think about Christians.

07:11 I can knock down a lot of those obstacles simply by asking a person three questions — I'm just pulling that number out of random, but not necessarily spiritual questions — just about themselves, being curious about who they are, what they do, what's their family like?

07:26 Where do they come from? What do they pound the table about? What are they passionate about? All those kinds of questions, you can defuse situations very, very quickly simply by caring about other people before you engage in a conversation that you feel might be a turn-off to them before it even starts. Does that make sense?

07:46 Paul: Yes, it does and I think what's wise about what you said is maybe I carry more cultural consciousness because I know how Christians have been viewed than that person is and so, I'm not evangelizing the culture.

08:06 This is an individual in front of me with a real story and treating that person like a real person opens all kinds of doors into talking about the most important thing in the world. So let's do this. I want you to tell me your story how evangelism became such a significant part of your life, and if you would go back to whenever and walk us through, that would be helpful.

08:41 Shelby: When I got involved with Cru as a college student [in] my freshman year, there was no question about the fact that the organization itself on campus where I was at Virginia Tech was committed to sharing the gospel, was committed to evangelism.

08:59 And that was obvious by the fact that it wasn't just fellowship events that we did, which there was that. It wasn't just large group meetings and worship sessions, which there was that. It wasn't just social events, which there was that.

09:13 There was [an] intentional commitment to going out on campus and communicating the gospel, and that got instilled in me very, very young because I became a believer [in] January of my freshman year; and less than two months later, I was down in Panama City Beach, Florida for spring break, learning how to share the gospel at a conference and then, going out onto the beach during the day to share the gospel with drunk college students who were there to party.

09:40 Paul: So what was that first experience like for you?

09:42 Shelby: Oh, terrifying. It was absolutely terrifying. There's no question. I mean, I can still remember exactly when we got together on the beach and gathered, and the staff member said, "Okay, anybody who has experience sharing the gospel over here and anybody who doesn't have any experience sharing the gospel over here," and then, they paired everybody up and I was like, "I got nothing."

10:03 So I remember being paired up and then, going out onto the beach and then, graciously, by the love and kindness of God, the person I was with said, "Hey, you don't have to say anything. You could just let me talk and initiate conversations," and I was like, "Cool, let's do that."

10:20 So many of those conversations were initiated by the person I was going out with and I found that it wasn't as scary as I initially believed it would be. Like I said earlier, if you assume the conversation is going to go bad or it's going to be argumentative, you're terrified to start it.

10:40 But based on the person standing in front of you, sitting in front of you, whatever, it's pretty shocking how quickly you can go, "Well, I have something to contribute to this conversation," and so, I remember contributing to those conversations and talking about the relationship that I had just come into two months before.

10:59 So that was my first experience with evangelism. Very scary, but also very life-giving, spiritually. I have walked away from more than one evangelistic conversation — regardless of how the conversation has gone, good or bad — audibly saying out loud, "I feel so alive right now."

11:23 And I remember saying that and having a Cru staff member go, "What do you think you were made for? What do you think you were made for?" So I realized very early on, it was instilled in me through the ministry of Cru and, specifically, Cru staff members that evangelism isn't just something that you do, it's part of who you are as a believer. It's not just this event that you do.

11:48 Now, Cru is a little bit famous for going out and talking to random strangers, and going through a gospel track like a presentation and sharing the gospel that way. But what I found that's been actually more helpful that Cru has taught me has been what we call, basically, natural mode of evangelism, which is lifestyle evangelism of sharing the gospel with people you're already in a relationship with.

12:12 It gave me the tools to be able to find strategically different points of interest in someone's life and then, connect those points to the gospel and that takes... yes, it takes practice, it takes intentionality, but it also takes just a heart to say this person who I've engaged with — like my neighbor has been a next-door neighbor of mine for eight years.

12:37 What am I doing to share the gospel with that person because it's not going to be a one and done thing where I walk up to them, go through a tract and then, say, "Okay, see you later." Those are almost easier sometimes because you never see that person again.

12:48 But the person you're involved with on a regular basis, whether it be a family member or, like I said, a neighbor or a friend or someone you interact with at the gym or whatever, you're going to see that person again. So naturally, what does your life look like in relation to the message that you're communicating?

13:05 So Cru gave me those skills to say, "Hey." This isn't just something that you share, it's something that you live. It's who you are, so make sure that when people hear what you're communicating about knowing God, they actually witness when you're living your life out in front of them.

13:19 So I've learned a lot of different things when it's come to evangelism. I've shared the gospel with lots of different people over the years, including people who are family members, like I said, friends who have been close, neighbors, but also random strangers.

13:35 And, usually, when I'm doing the random stranger thing, if I'm walking on a boardwalk or on a beach or something like that, I will intentionally... I'll make it a difficult workout for me that day. You know, so when you're going to the gym, you know, like it's leg day and I don't want to do leg day, but I'm going to do it anyway. I'm going to get pumped and do it.

13:54 When I'm walking on a boardwalk and I randomly am with a student or someone else and we're doing evangelism, I will find the scariest people to me and try to go up and talk to them. And so, it's usually a group of guys who are all together laughing and having fun, and I will say, "I'm about ready to come in and share the gospel with these people."

14:17 So I will intentionally make myself do that in order to get a good spiritual workout in that day and challenge myself to be intentional to say why is this scary to me? What am I more afraid of right now? Am I more afraid of God or I'm more afraid of these people? The answer is usually people.

14:35 Paul: You're reminding me of, yes, [an] incident in my own life where I think my first real, bold attempt to share the gospel was in Columbia, South Carolina. I went down to the downtown area where... it was during the Vietnam War and Fort Jackson was right there, and it was the base that these 18-, 19-year-olds will go before they go to Vietnam.

15:11 And so, I knew there'd be a lot of soldiers down there and went down to share the gospel. And I was terrified because in my thinking, these guys are on leave for two days. This is their wild weekend. What would they care about hearing my message?

15:31 What I actually encountered was a lot of guys who were scared to death and we're thinking about life and death; and I realized that there's a lot more hunger in hearts out there than we think and somebody would stop, care enough to ask them how they're doing and what's it like, you know where you're going, you've heard the stories.

16:03 These guys just opened up and one incident, I was talking to a guy and a couple other guys came up, and they started asking me questions. I ended up standing up on a park bench preaching to about 30 or 40 soldiers and, finally, the military police came by and said, "You're blocking the street. You can't do this."

16:25 Shelby: "Get out of here."

16:25 Paul: But it was just an indication of the hunger that was out there; and I think your story and my story says often the difficult evangelism doesn't exist with the person who needs evangelism. It's in our hearts.

16:42 Shelby: It's totally in our hearts, yes.

16:42 Paul: We just have to get beyond all of our presuppositions that keep us from opening our mouths. One of the most interesting conversations I had was when we first moved to Philadelphia, our son was still living in New York City and we'd take the Chinatown bus because it was the cheapest transportation.

17:05 I was coming back one day, and I sat next to a young kid and began to ask him about his life; and he was an atheist, said he didn't believe anything. But that sort of aggression in the beginning was a thin veneer of a broken, hungry kid and we had such an awesome conversation; and somewhere in the conversation, it was clear he wasn't thinking me as a stereotype, typical Christian he had thought about.

17:46 And again, in that conversation, it's very aware for me when he was aggressive at the beginning and saying he didn't believe anything, about how religion was stupid, I'm thinking, "Oh, why'd I sit next to him," but that was me.

18:05 That was inside of me and he was really quite open, really willing to have the conversation, which we did have. It lasted an hour and a half on the bus, and I think when he got off the bus, he was sort of sad that it was over. I thought later how what I was thinking was totally in the way of that. I had no idea that that conversation was going in that direction because of the misconceptions inside of me.

18:46 Shelby: Yes, and it's very similar to a lot of the other spiritual disciplines that you and I have even talked about of like, most of the time, we think that life is all about circumstances. We think it's about, "Well, this bad thing happens to me, therefore, I have the right to act like this and respond like this and be a jerk or whatever."

19:08 But it's not about that. It's actually about what's going on in your heart. The circumstances are always going to change. They're always going to be different variables and what's going on inside of you is actually what's going to determine whether or not the situation gets better or gets worse.

19:23 And I found that when you're talking to people about the gospel, you're making these assumptions. You're thinking that it's going to go poorly before it even starts and that can be based on previous history because there's been plenty of conversations I've been involved in where people are like, "No, no, no, I don't want..."

19:39 But most of the time, it's just like a dismissive kind of thing. It's not like [an] angry pointing-the-finger thing. It can happen and I've definitely seen that happen before, but we have the most negative history in our mind or a presupposition about what someone's going to say and we think a caricature... because just as much as they make a caricature out of Christians, we make caricatures out of non-believers.

20:02 We like to think that they're all smarter than us. They're all atheists. They've all been to an Ivy League school. They're all going to have arguments that are going to shoot everything that we have to say down. We make all those assumptions before we even get in there and like you said, you were sitting next to an atheist on a bus and you're assuming this is going to go poorly.

20:22 You ask one, maybe two questions, you respond like a normal human being and they realize that you're a human and that veneer of what they believe a "Christian" is like is all of a sudden ripped to shreds, and now they're having a conversation with a human being instead of a caricature.

20:37 Paul: Yes, so respond to this. I had someone say to me once, "The reason why I'm afraid to share the gospel is I'm afraid that someone will ask me a question I can't answer."

20:51 Shelby: Yes, I've had that be a fear in a lot of young people's minds and so, that's part of the reason why we do training. That's part of the reason why apologetics is important, that we're able to answer those kinds of questions. I've never been one of those guys that's been able to go, "Well, let me tell you this about history. Let me tell you this about biblical study. Let me tell you about this, about the Greek and the Hebrew," all that kind of stuff. I'm not that kind of a person. My brain just doesn't function that way, but what we try to tell young people...

21:26 Paul: "We know we've listened to it on the podcast."

21:29 Shelby: Yes, there it is. I was waiting for the first shot. There it is. We got to get this actually rolling.

21:35 Paul: That's the tender heart of an evangelist.

21:37 Shelby: Yes, and it makes me know that you love me. I think that one of the things we have to help young people understand and help anybody understand who wants to share the gospel is that successful evangelism is not being able to answer everybody's questions perfectly.

21:58 It's not being able to get through a four-point presentation about what it means to know God personally through the person of Jesus Christ. It can be those things, but it's not exclusive to those things is what I'm saying. What we try to tell students is successful evangelism is taking the initiative in the power of the Holy Spirit and leaving the results to God. That's what successful evangelism is.

22:21 So if you engage in a conversation with someone and your thought process is, "I want this person to know Jesus," and you engage in, maybe, frivolous kind of chit-chat about whatever and then, you talk about the fact that God has moved in your life or you were reading your Bible this morning and you make the spiritual elements of your life a normal in front of them, I'd say that if you're being intentional about it, I'd say that that's a successful evangelistic conversation. A lot of people would argue with that and they would say, "No, it's not because you didn't get through Christ crucified and all that kind of stuff.

23:01 Paul: Well, let me respond. I think there's a very, very important point and I want to expand this to all of ministry. Successful ministry is not known by the size of its fruit because nobody in any form of ministry has any ability on their own to produce fruit. You just can't.

23:30 If the person is dead in sin, I can't make them alive. I mean, we just need to be biblical. Only God breathes life into a being. That's what it means to be born again and so, I think there are many pastors who walk around with guilt or people who are sharing the gospel walk around with guilt because they don't see this huge harvest of fruit. It's not your job.

24:07 I had a mother once say to me, "If it's the last thing I do, I'll get my children to believe." I immediately thought in my brain, "I don't want to be one of your children," because that's going to lead her to do things she shouldn't do. That's not your job.

24:26 Only God can produce belief in the heart of a human being who has no God-ward awareness and is, in fact, spiritually dead in sin. So what failure is unwillingness to participate, laziness, selfishness, dis-compassion, a distortion of the message, but we just need to be clear that we are never anything more than tools in the hands of a very powerful Redeemer. Redemption is His work, not ours.

25:13 Shelby: Yes, we can't ever be so arrogant as to believe that we are responsible for the eternal destiny of a human soul and I think a lot of times when people share the gospel, they think, "Oh, I got that illustration wrong or I mixed up those points or I didn't say that the exact way to help them understand."

25:31 The truth is you could have a perfect, eloquent, beautifully-communicated presentation of the gospel and somebody can still say no or make fun of you in the process. I mean, we want to lower the obstacles as much as we can on our ends. We want to be clear.

25:47 I'm not saying that doesn't matter. We want to be clear. We want to be kind. We want to be eloquent. We want, to best of our ability, use what God has given us in order to be able to communicate the gospel clearly, but it's not a responsibility. It's not a responsibility to change someone's heart.

26:04 Paul: Well, absolutely. The other thing is, too, in those moments, you have a snapshot, you don't have the video. I had a guy tell me a story. He was doing some street preaching, which is really hard to do, and there's a guy that just heckled him the whole time.

26:27 He said it was so discouraging and he fought with anger inside of himself, but he continued and finished his gospel presentation. Several years later, he was asked to speak at a conference and at a break, a guy came up to [him] and said, "You used to do street preaching, didn't you," and he said, "Yes."

26:49 He says, "Do you remember a time when a guy heckled you like crazy?" He said, "Yes." He says, "I was that heckler," and he said, "Your demeanor and you kept on message, and I couldn't get away from the message or you and I ended up coming to Christ."

27:16 Shelby: Love that. That's amazing.

27:18 Paul: And so, we don't know. There's going to be a lot of surprises in glory.

27:23 Shelby: Yes, there is. Me being the biggest one. I can't believe I'm here.

27:26 Paul: Yes, absolutely. I told Luella that I won't see her in heaven because she'll be up there real close to Jesus and my rear end will be against the gate.

27:39 Shelby: "But we got an eternity, so eventually, I'll bump into you once you come back."

27:43 Paul: Yes, so I just think this conversation about what is your responsibility and what you give to God is so important. When that person walks away, you have no idea where that will go and you also don't want to get in there and try to produce fruit that you can't produce. Then you become that scary Christian and so, we're just tools.

28:27 Shelby: Yes, and I've been in Cru for a long time and so, I came up through college in the 90s. The 90s were a different time. The 90s were very like residual "the 80s", basically, is what I said. In the 80s, we're churning, you know. Let's produce, produce, money, money, money and results and growth and all that kind of stuff.

28:49 90s were like residual effect of that and so, what we used to do when I was very young... and everybody's heart was in the right place, so let me preface it with that. We used to do statistics and tally marks of how many people came to Christ, indicated decisions for Christ.

29:07 Now, we still do count that. I'm not saying that's not important, but that was basically the only thing we counted and there was something about that that created this like, "Well, if someone doesn't trust Christ, if someone doesn't bow their head and pray a prayer to receive Christ, this was a failed evangelism conversation."

29:27 And I remember a lot of staff members going, "I don't know where this came from, this mentality that we have to get someone to receive Christ. First of all, it's not our responsibility. Second of all, that's not a measure of success," and going back to that true definition of successful evangelism is taking the initiative and the power of the Holy Spirit, leaving the results to God.

29:48 I just came back from speaking at an evangelism conference, that one I mentioned that I went to two months after I became a believer. It's still going on and I was a speaker this time at it. 375 college students there to learn how to share the gospel, going through training in the mornings, biblical motivation, going out on the beach, sharing the gospel, coming back at night and celebrating what God had done.

30:13 One of the things they did differently, which I love about this generation, is they had lined the walls with this black paper and they had these gel pens, and they would write down the names of the people they initiated conversations with who heard the gospel.

30:27 So all of a sudden, the metric was different. The metric was about, "Hey, this is like I took the initiative in the power of the Holy Spirit to share the gospel with Julian or Dave or Sandy or whatever, and I write their names down and all of a sudden, it's up to God about what happens with these names. It's not up to me at all," and it was a different kind of celebration.

30:53 It's a celebration of the fact that, "Hey, we were being intentional to worship God by taking the initiative and moving into fear and saying, 'God, You can handle this,' but at the same time praying for those people and saying, "Lord, they are Your responsibility. Would You bring them to their to Yourself," and I love that perspective shift. It was really, really great.

31:12 Yes, I was thinking as you're talking, Jesus says, "My sheep know My voice and they come to Me," that God has names written in His book of life and I don't know who those names are. It's not my job. My job is to share the gospel in every opportunity I have and God knows, and it's a beautiful thing that His sheep do hear His voice. Isn't that beautiful?

31:45 Shelby: It really is.

31:46 Paul: And they're there.

31:48 Shelby: Yes, and they're there and it's so freeing on our part because then it's like, "These aren't my sheep. It's not my voice that they're following after. It's His voice and they're His sheep. My responsibility is just to participate in it. So in reality, evangelism is a gracious, loving invitation from God to us to participate in the work that He's already doing.

32:09 I have found — I don't know about you, I won't speak for you — most of the time now, when I share the gospel with someone, it's been, I think, more about what God wants to do in my heart than, at least, the fruit that I'm seeing in front of me of the conversation.

32:25 Now, who knows what happens after the conversation what God does in their heart. There's stories like the one you just told about, "Hey, I was that heckler," and that's beautiful and amazing. But I found that a lot of times, God wants to do transformative work in my heart as I'm going out there and being obedient to Him and saying I'm going to move into fear and I'm going to let God take control here, and you'd be surprised by how much change happens in my life as I'm supposed to be sharing the gospel with someone so that they can change. It's actually about me changing.

32:56 Yes, I want to talk about the theology of that passage for a minute. There's a real difference in mentality for me to think that "there are sheep out there" versus "this is just totally random and that God has already acted toward people in His grace, and I'm never the starting point". He's already started the process and to now connect this person to Jesus, how beautiful is that?

33:43 Shelby: What a privilege!

33:44 Paul: Versus "this is a random thing and who knows and..." It's not how it's presented in scripture at all and that tender picture of a shepherd and that the sheep respond to His voice is really beautiful; and that I get to be part of this.

34:08 Shelby: Yes. I love that idea of "I get to be a part of this" as opposed to "I have to go and do this" or "I have to make sure that I'm saying something". It's like, have you ever been in a group context where people are playing a game or doing something fun or there's a group of people talking about something and someone turns to you and goes, "Hey, you got to get in on this. This is really fun."

34:32 Or you're a foodie, so I'll just say you're like, "Let's have a great meal. You've got to get in on this meal because this is one of the greatest things I've ever tasted," and that's essentially what evangelism is.

34:43 It's an invitation from God to saying, "You've got to get in on this. This is the good stuff. This is the best meal ever," or, "This is the best conversation ever," or, "This is the best game that we're playing. Don't you want to participate in this," as opposed to, "You have to participate in this," or, "You have to eat this delicious meal."

35:03 It's a totally different heart posture. It's a totally different mindset and when we have the right mindset, we're like, "This is an invitation that God is inviting me into to be a part of and I have no idea what's going to happen. I have no idea what the conversation is going to be like," but it's so much fun if you have that different kind of perspective.

35:21 Paul: And let's take that a step further. In that passage, He says, "And no one can snatch him out of My hand." When through me, Jesus touches the life of a person, it will stick. It will stick. It's eternal. That is so amazing. Now, that can be a process of ups and downs and ins and outs, but Jesus says, "When they're in My hands, it's final."

36:01 Shelby: Yes, nobody's going anywhere.

36:02 Paul: It's so beautiful.

36:03 Shelby: Yes. Can you believe that you get to be a part of something like that? There's someone that I actually had the privilege to lead to Christ back when I was on staff with Cru at James Madison University in Virginia.

36:16 There was a guy who was being invited out to come to our large group meeting. God was doing some incredible stuff in the early 2000s at JMU in terms of numbers. When I first arrived at campus, there was about 70 people coming out to our large group meeting and by the time... maybe four years later, five years later, there was close to 700 people coming out to the meeting.

36:39 So God was just doing something really cool and crazy at the time, and there was this kid, Brandon, who was being invited to come out to our large group meetings. So he would come to large group meetings. Then after the meeting was done, a lot of the guys that were in my Bible study would get together at this lawnmower shed behind someone's house that had been cleared out, and he had made a poker table.

37:01 And so, we would play poker on Thursday nights after our large group meeting and we just invited this guy to come. And so, we'd play poker and interact with him, and he'd just see us joking around and talking about the Lord and talking about random different things.

37:16 And I remember one time — his name's Brandon — I go at the poker thing. I was like, "Hey, have you talked to anybody about what it actually means to be a follower of Jesus," and he's like, "Yes, kind of." And I was like, "Well, you want to get together," and he's like, "Sure."

37:30 So I got together with him. I remember the next day on a Friday, and we just got together and got coffee; and I went through a gospel presentation with him. And Brandon was like, "I need this. I need this in my life. I've never done this before."

37:44 And I said, "Do you want to pray right now?" We were in the student center and he goes, "I do want to pray, but tomorrow's my birthday, so I'm going to wait until tonight at midnight, so my spiritual birthday can be the same as my natural birthday." And I was like, "All right, I don't know what you're waiting for. Okay, that's kind of poetic and beautiful."

38:05 Well, he had texted me later that night at 10:30 and he was like, "I couldn't wait," which I thought was beautiful. And Brandon turned his life around. He ended up marrying a girl who came on staff with Cru. They were on staff for a while.

38:18 He launched a ministry in Richmond, Virginia for a while. Loves the Lord and I still keep in touch with him to this day. He's still a good friend and so, it's been incredible to see how God can move and do stuff like that if we just keep our eyes open. I got to be in on that story and his wife, every now and then, will message me and say, "Hey, thank you for being an instrument in God's hands to transform my husband's life."

38:47 Paul: Well, let me tell my story because I think it really fits this conversation. So I went to a summer camp. I don't know what was going on in my family, but my parents emptied the home for the summer, so I was at camp for six weeks.

39:03 All four children were sent somewhere, so there was something going on. And I was eight. My camp counselor shared Romans 3 with us. I'm eight years old. I remember just being under conviction of my sin and that night, I got off my third-level bunk and climbed down and knelt in the middle of the floor because I thought it was wrong to pray laying down, and asked God for forgiveness and committed my life to him.

39:49 Never told the counselor. I was an eight-year-old boy, but I couldn't wait for my mom and dad to pick us up at the end of summer to tell him what had happened to me. Now, that man has no idea where that story went. What's the result of that? It's 50 years of gospel ministry.

40:11 Obviously, I get emotional as I talk about it. I think how beautiful is that? This man had the courage to share this with little boys and he was faithful, has no idea what the harvest was and everything that's happened since in ministry is a result of that encounter that summer in that cabin with that man.

40:39 Shelby: Yes, and you never know. You absolutely never know what God's going to do. Nobody would have assumed that Saul of Tarsus would be the man.

40:49 Paul: And through that man, this sheep heard a familiar voice.

40:55 Shelby: Yes, yes. I love that. I think one of the assumptions that we make, too, is people love their sin more than they love the idea of being forgiven of their sin and so, we think people aren't going to want to stop drinking or people aren't going to want to stop sleeping around or people aren't going to want to stop making money the way that they're making money in a deceptive kind of way or they're not going to want to abandon their gossip or their superstition or whatever.

41:32 We just make that assumption all the time, whether it be for a little eight-year-old boy at a camp who wants what he wants or a 35-year-old father of two or two doors down from me in my neighborhood is a gay man who lives by himself.

41:50 And my assumption is he's never going to want to abandon his lifestyle for Jesus and I'm like, where's the problem in that thinking? The problem is not in the gospel. The problem is right here. This is the problem and so, if we stop making those assumptions, whether it be we're sharing the gospel with a 5-, 6-, 7-year-old kid or a 75-year-old man, it doesn't it doesn't matter. Stop making assumptions. Our job is to liberally spread that seed, keep spreading the seed as much as possible.

42:27 Paul: Yes, and the rather self-righteous, self-congratulatory judgment gets in the way of that.

42:37 Shelby: What do you mean?

42:38 Paul: Well, you look down on people. I had an experience of talking with a lady who was known for being sexually obsessed, I'd say, and multiple relationship with men. And as I had her tell her story, one moment, she — I was contrasting that with the story of the love of Jesus — she burst into tears and said, "It's not that I like sex. I've been searching for love. I wanted somebody to say that they love me."

43:27 Now, from a distance, you would look at it, "This woman just loves sex and how's she going to care about my message." That wasn't the motivation going on at all. She had a hunger in her heart that she was trying to satisfy by something that would never satisfy it.

43:47 Maybe with somebody else, it's business success or a fleet of cool cars or the next great restaurant. That's what sinners do because they have that hole in their hearts that everybody has. In fact, I love what it says in Ecclesiastes, that God has woven eternity in everybody's heart.

44:09 How amazing is that, that there's a hunger for paradise in everybody and so, everybody out there is searching for paradise and... well, you won't find it horizontally. It just can't be found and we can look at those people and say, "Oh, he's a drunk or a sex addict or whatever, businessman who's destroyed his family because he just loves money," and that judgment can keep you from moving forward, when behind the addiction is a deep, abiding hunger that only Jesus can fill and you got to see beyond that, and we are where we are only because of grace.

45:12 We're all addicts going someplace to happen apart from rescuing grace. How dare we look at people that way? It's so sad. Or, you know, the loathing a transgender person. Now, I think the Bible is very clear about that issue, but what is the story behind that? What is the hunger behind that. What's the lostness behind that person? I had an experience of going into Graterford Prison, going there once a month and it's one of...

45:57 Shelby: When was this?

45:58 Paul: Oh, that's probably 30 years ago, one of these high security prisons. In fact, when the state police bring somebody into the prison, they have to surrender their guns before they go in because if somebody grabs it from them, there's no getting out.

46:20 And we would have a worship service and then, we just do personal evangelism afterwards. And a guy walked in dressed completely as a woman and I said to the guy next to me, "I hope he doesn't sit next you," and guess what?

46:48 When it broke up, he came and sat next to me and I'm so thankful for that moment because all of my self-righteous judgment just melted away as I began to talk to this broken person and hungry for something to feed his heart.

47:13 And as I talked, I can remember thinking that I wasn't noticing his wig and his dress anymore. It was just a man who needed rescue and rescue from himself. And so, that tendency to judgmentally categorize people and then, categorize their propensity to listen to my message, it's just wrong.

47:44 Shelby: It really is. Yes, and the idea, too, you spoke really well about this, is a huge obstacle in our way is often our self-righteousness of believing that we're better than other people and that they need something that I have; and if they were smart as I am or as humble as I am [ironically] that they would say yes to this message, when in reality, what we're doing when we're communicating that is thinking that our sin is not as great as their sin.

48:20 And when we have that posture of looking down on people that we're sharing the gospel with, that they're not "as righteous as I am", we forget the essence of the gospel. We forget the truth that we need grace just as much as anybody else does and then, we communicate it from a posture of self-righteousness and arrogance, as opposed to "isn't this amazing, He rescued me, too".

48:45 There's this phrase that we've used. It's like, "Hey, we're just thirsty sheep telling other thirsty sheep where to find water," and that mentality is so much different than, "I have to be the person to answer every theological question that they have. I have to be the person to educate them into a position where they finally will intellectually agree with what I'm saying and then, relinquish and agree that I've won the argument."

49:12 Those two postures are very different in how we communicate the gospel and if the "how" is wrong which — you and I have talked about this — the heart is what matters. If you're doing it with an inappropriate heart, it don't count.

49:27 Paul: Yes, well, and deserving. If my self-concept is "I'm deserving law keeper", I want to have compassion on law-breakers.

49:35 Shelby: Yes, you're in so much trouble. Yes, so much trouble.

49:39 Paul: They're disgusting to me and maybe, the simplest way to say it — and I want to say this — pride is the enemy of evangelism. It just is. Evangelism doesn't grow in the soil of spiritual pride and let's confess that that spiritual pride is in all of us.

50:07 And so, before I become a tool of rescue in the life of somebody else, I have to be rescued from me because I can go in those directions so quickly. I can remember conversations with my children when they would push back and although I didn't say this to them, I'm thinking, "Do you know who you're talking to?"

50:38 Shelby: Clearly, they didn't.

50:39 Paul: "How dare you. I know, right now, more about the Bible than you'll ever know." You know, well.

50:47 Shelby: "Than you'll ever know," making some grand, sweeping assumptions about what they're going to be studying in the future.

50:53 Paul: I remember once I was about to enter one of those encounters with one of my children and...

51:05 Shelby: Can I guess who?

51:07 Paul: Luella said, "You should pray," and I said — because I was about ready to go into the room — I said, "I don't even know if I can pray for them right now." And she said, "No, I wasn't thinking you should pray for them. You should pray for you." She said, "You just go in that room and just pray," and I'm praying and I just get it; and I just think...

51:38 Shelby: "Search me and know me."

51:40 Paul: It's just... and right now, this kid doesn't need a self-righteous lecturer and I had this conversation where I asked him how his week was and how the weekend was, and just sort of engaging him and then, said to him, "You know, you've you pretty much lived in the light. You've been an easy kid, but you took a step toward darkness today and all I want to say is just the Father loves you. Don't go toward darkness." And I said, "That's all I want to say to you. We'll talk more later."

52:27 And I started to walk away and this teenager says to me, "Dad, I want to live in the light, but it's so hard. Would you help me?" Of course! And had I not prayed first for me, I'd have gone in. I would have said those stupid things. "I would have never thought to do what you did this," you know, all that stuff that just drives a person deeper away.

52:57 And I want to say to everybody who's watching or listening, be humble enough to confess that there are things still inside of you that get in the way of God's call to you to be an evangelist and just own those. There's bountiful grace for those. Jesus died for every one of those rotten instincts and He's not surprised by any of them. Just own them.

53:25 Shelby: Yes, you're not better than anybody else and I try to remind myself of that. That's a good posture to have before you're going to share the gospel with someone and if you have a posture of "I'm not better than them", it just changes the entire landscape of why you're doing what you're doing.

53:46 It helps you to think proactively that "I'm a fellow participant in the grace of Jesus and I'm ready to tell other people about the grace of Jesus", as opposed to "I have to go out and evangelize to other people". It's a "one up, one down" principle.

54:05 Paul: I'm just thinking that we're almost an hour into our discussion on evangelism and we're just in the introduction. We haven't have started.

54:17 Shelby: This is the introduction? Oh, I thought we're in the meat of it.

54:19 Paul: No, we're not. We haven't even started yet, which is wonderful. I want these conversations — I know you do, too — to be meaty and helpful. And sometimes, I think we make too many assumptions and we rush too quickly through these topics.

54:37 So I want to thank you. I mean, your commitment to this aspect of your life has been a real motivation for me and I think this conversation has been important. So let's start big. If you had to describe what the Bible is — because no Bible, no evangelism — if you had to describe what the Bible is, how would you describe it?

55:07 Shelby: Who am I talking to? I think that's always important. Am I talking to a believer or am I talking to someone who does not know the word of God?

55:15 Paul: Whatever audience.

55:16 Shelby: Whatever audience, okay. The Bible is the word of God. This is how God has chosen to reveal Himself and communicate to us. Not only is it a history book, a poetry book, an instructional book, it's a book that's centered around the central theme of Jesus Christ.

55:45 From the Old Testament to the New Testament, it's all one grand, sweeping story with Jesus at the center of everything. It's a revelation of who God is and what He cares about, and how He's involved in the story of humanity and rescuing people from their own sin.

56:09 But in general, I think it's easy to think about the Bible as 66 individual books and not one story that's focusing on one major theme. And so, probably, if I had to quickly describe elevator-pitch of what the Bible is, it's God's word to us that tells one story about the redemption of humanity.

56:33 Paul: Yes, that's really good. I do think that there are a lot of misconceptions about the nature of the Bible, that it's a book of religious wisdom sayings, it's a collection of theological observations, it's a collection of individual stories.

56:55 And none of those actually do justice to what the Bible is actually about. As you say, it is the biography of Jesus, but it tells the story of why we should be interested in the life and ministry, death, resurrection, and royal priestly ascension of Jesus.

57:23 And one of the ways that I think about it is the Bible is the world's best and most trustworthy diagnostic. Every human psychology, every human philosophy is basically a diagnostic. What's the matter with human beings and how does it get solved?

57:47 And so, the question that everybody asks and answers: where am I going to look for that diagnosis? Am I going to look to philosophers, psychologists, politicians, educators, sociologists, historians? Who's going to tell me the story that will tell me how this thing gets set right?

58:20 And so, why would I look to the Bible, this rather weird, ancient, hard-to-understand, Middle Eastern book? So if someone asked you that question, what would you say? Why the Bible? Is it just another book on the shelf of human philosophy?

58:47 Shelby: Yes, I would say no, of course, but I'd say that the Bible is... and you can get into a lot of the specifics of why the Bible and the historicity of it is reliable, and why we should trust it and really coming back to the central theme of who it's talking about.

59:08 It's the revelation of who Jesus is and what He did, and the fact that it tells a story about the fact that He's alive right now, that He's alive. And so, I always think that the best argument for Christianity is the resurrection, that Jesus is not dead right now.

59:27 His bones are not buried somewhere in the Middle East, waiting for an archeologist to dig Him up. He's actually alive right now. The Bible reveals the most intricate details about who He is, what He did, and the fact that He is alive right now.

59:42 Can we trust that? And then, not only trusting in what the Bible communicates about that story, but connecting it to other points of history, archeology, other things like that narrative that communicates the truth about the fact that Jesus is not dead, that He is alive right now.

1:00:01 If Jesus is alive right now, then we can assume that He holds the keys to life and death. Okay, let's just assume that because He is alive. If He holds the keys to life and death, we should trust everything that He said while He was here on earth.

1:00:18 Well, Jesus talks very often about elements of the Old Testament. He mentions specific people from the Old Testament. He mentions Jonah, he mentions Moses, he mentions Abraham. All these people and events that happened in the Old Testament has been made valid by the fact that Jesus said what He said about them while He was here on this planet and because He rose from the dead, I could trust Him. Therefore, I could trust the reliability of the Bible.

1:00:48 This is one of those domino things that helps me to just think about one central thing, as opposed to "I've got to remember all this stuff about the reliability of scripture". And there are historians and theologians and tons of people like you who have been in ministry for 50 years, who know how to answer good apologetics questions about the Bible. I usually just come back straight to "is Jesus alive right now". If Jesus is alive right now, then we could start to work our way backward into trusting the reliability of this book because Jesus did.

1:01:21 Paul: Yes, I think that's really, really very helpful. There's another way that I think about this and it's not unrelated to what you said.

1:01:28 Shelby: Yes, I'd love to hear how you would [inaudible] to it, too.

1:01:31 Paul: I think there's a relationship between the doctrine of scripture and the doctrine of creation. That is really very important. You could argue that the fundamental reliability of scripture is that it was written by the Creator.

1:01:51 The reason that owner's manual in your glove box in your car is reliable and can tell you how to maintain and fix that car is because it was written by the person who made it. And so, if this book, in fact, has been put together by the Creator through the use of human minds and human personalities and human hands, then of course it's reliable because who would better know everything about life, everything about me, everything about how things were meant to be and how things are broken by sin than the one who made it all.

1:02:38 It just makes perfect sense to me and I think once you embrace the fact that there is a Creator, then it makes this book way easier to hold on to because... Recently, we had a light show up in our car and we had no conversation about who should we talk to about this warning light. What did I immediately do?

1:03:14 Shelby: Made an appointment with the mechanic.

1:03:15 Paul: No, I got into the glove box.

1:03:19 Shelby: All right. I would've made an appointment with the mechanic.

1:03:21 Paul: Because the book is there.

1:03:21 Shelby: Well, if you don't know what the symbol is, yes, I understand that. Yes, what is the symbol telling.

1:03:25 Paul: And we realized this is not something we need to worry about versus "we need to get out of this car and run, it's about to blow up". But this is God's owner's manual. That just is so helpful to me and then, obviously, then it's endorsed a thousand times by the Creator. Who is the Creator? Paul says of Jesus, "By Him were all things made," so of course, He's endorsing His book.

1:04:09 So that is just really simple and helpful for me; and then, what is this book about? Well, what the book is about, the entire content of the book is summarized in the first three chapters of the book, Genesis. God creates a beautiful world. He creates perfect people made in His image.

1:04:39 He sets boundaries for their living because He's a wise and holy God. They listen to the tempter, step beyond those boundaries. Sin enters the world with all of its curses, but that's not where the story ends. God immediately promises a Redeemer who's going to defeat the work of the enemy.

1:05:08 Creation, fall, redemption is all there in the beginning of the book and at the center of that story of creation, fall, redemption is Jesus. Jesus is there at the creation. He's in the garden after the fall. There's the promise of His continuing work. It's all there. So beautiful.

1:05:30 Shelby: Yes, and a lot of people just don't know how to summarize that because the Bible is very complicated in many ways and can be very confusing; and so, to summarize things in that way — especially, as you're talking about like a manual in a glove compartment for a car. That makes sense, so I appreciate you breaking it down in ways that help an average person understand how to communicate why should we even trust this book?

1:06:00 Paul: But maybe the evangelistic apologetic part of this is everybody has a Bible. Everybody has an authority. Nobody is making it up purely on their own. Everybody is a person under influence, so I'm looking for not just practical, strategic answers of life. I'm looking for ultimate answers.

1:06:25 When a person says, "I am..." and then, it makes some kind of identity, where'd they get that? Or they say, "I would never believe that," or, "There's no such thing as absolute truth." People say these things with such sureness and authority.

1:06:46 Well, that means there's some authority that they're looking for. There's some diagnostic that they've bought into that they believe explains, describes life to them. So how do you know the authority you're looking at is reliable?

1:07:07 Shelby: Yes, there's no authority vacuum. If you tear down something like the Bible and you say that that doesn't belong as my authority, something has to fill that gap. Something does because you can't live without having some sort of authority structure in your life. You've got to believe in something or even when you say yes, there is no absolute truth. That's an absolute statement.

1:07:32 Paul: That's right. It's said with absolute surety.

1:07:35 Shelby: Yes, I remember I was doing evangelism one time in a dining hall on a campus in Colorado and I pulled a guy who worked there. He was on his break and having lunch. I was like, "Hey, do you mind if I sit with you mind if I sit with you and eat?" He was like, "No."

1:07:47 So we started talking and I was like, "Hey, I'm doing this thing," and I asked him a few questions and then, I said, "What's your philosophy in life?"

And he goes, "Everything's relative."

And I said, "Everything?"

And he goes, "Yes, everything's relative."

And I'm like, "Even what you just said is relative?"

And he goes, "Yes."

I was like, "Okay," because I made him think for a second that what he was saying was not relative, it was absolute and so, it's good to have people even question their own worldview.

1:08:22 A lot of times we think — again, this comes back to the fear — we think people are going to take shots at us and ask us a ton of hard questions about the Bible, and they might; but I think it's important to help them understand that, "Hey, I'm resting my authority here. You're resting your authority somewhere. Where is that? What do you actually believe in because if you don't believe in this, you believe in something," and helping them to see what that is.

1:08:46 A lot of times, people just haven't even thought about that. They haven't even thought what I do believe. They think about what they don't believe or what they're against as opposed to what they're for.

1:08:53 Paul: Yes, another way of saying this, everybody is hooking their hope to something. Everybody's putting their trust in something. One of the things that I think about quite often is after God created Adam and Eve, the first thing He did was talk to them and the reason He did that is because He knows the being He created.

1:09:19 These are meaning-makers. Every human being is a meaning-maker. That means we think. We don't leave our lives alone. We're always trying to figure out life, and we're looking for meaning and purpose and identity; and so, Jesus understands that in order to make proper sense of life, I need truth outside of myself.

1:09:48 I need someone who is reliable, who has ultimate wisdom, ultimate perspective to tell me who I am, what I'm meant to do and how to think. And if that was necessary in a perfect world, how much more necessary is that in this broken world?

1:10:15 In the perfect world, there was only one voice. It was God's voice. Now, everyday, we wake up to millions of voices. Imagine if you get up in the morning and you just turn on TikTok or Twitter, just this bombardment of authorities. We call them influencers, but they're all authorities that are telling you, "This is how to think, this is how to act, this is what to choose, this is right, this is wrong, this is wise, this is stupid."

1:10:53 And what a gift it is to know that there is an utterly, infinitely reliable source because the One who made it all has spoken. That's just so beautiful to me and, yes, we ought to admit the Bible's a tough book. I don't like presentations that make the Bible seem simple.

1:11:26 It's not simple, but its message gives life because what the story really is is it's the biography of Jesus, and Jesus is the only one you can hook your hope to that won't fail you. And so, in a real way, I want people not just to trust Jesus, but to buy into His book because if you buy into the message of Jesus, but you're not really sure about His book, where's that going to go?

1:12:18 Shelby: Yes, you'll derail pretty quickly.

1:12:20 Paul: I mean, between the "already" of my first belief and "not yet" of my homegoing, God's two best gifts to me, other than my relationship with Jesus, are His word and His church. This book and then, the people who fellowship with me and teach me more about this book.

1:12:42 Shelby: Yes, yes and there's so much there that we could talk about when it comes to the Bible and why it's valuable for the purposes of evangelism, as we're framing this conversation. But if we want to run with it, where the thirsty sheep telling other thirsty sheep where to find water, how do they get to know about the process of where the water even comes from? It's from the scripture.

1:13:08 And also, we're in a relationship with a Person. You can't be in a relationship with a person if you never communicate with them and the best way that God communicates with us is through the person and work of Jesus revealed to us in the scriptures.

1:13:24 I like to say this to young people because this is... help them understand. It's like, "Do you have a girlfriend," if I'm talking to a guy.

"Yes," if he does.

"Okay, if you have a girlfriend and you only speak to her once in the morning and then, maybe really quickly in the evening before you go to sleep, are you going to have much of a relationship with that girl?"

"No, we're going to communicate regularly throughout the day."

1:13:49 Well, the way that you have a relationship is communication and communication happens primarily through prayer and through reading His word. You can't have a relationship with someone you don't actually know and the way that you get to know God is through His word.

1:14:03 Paul: Yes, and yes, that's a real good point. I was thinking as you're talking, one of the reasons you have a good marriage is you committed yourself to be a student of Rachael. It's been a lifelong commitment and you're always willing to learn more so you can deepen your knowledge and your love of her.

1:14:26 And so, if I'm serious about my relationship to Jesus, I want to be a student of Jesus. Well, here it is. That just drives you to His word. The level of obvious biblical illiteracy in people who claim to be believers, to me is just shocking. It doesn't make any sense.

1:14:54 This is not a burden. This is not a textbook in a classroom that I think, "I got to read and I got to spit it back on a test. Okay, I'll do that." This is just a beautiful gift and I'll read a passage to Luella, and I'll say something like, "How can you not love Jesus?" You know you just...

1:15:24 Shelby: Well, I'm teaching at my church's youth group tomorrow night for the monthly large group and one of the things I'm going to say — I'm going to talk about doubt, actually — and one of the things I'm going to say is, "How many of you in here would call yourself a follower of Jesus Christ, a Christian," and see how many hands go up. And then, say, "I'm not going to have you raise your hands, but how many of you have read the Bible cover to cover," and watch barely any hands go up.

1:15:57 Now, we're talking about youth group kids, but if you say that to a church honestly and maybe you don't want to embarrass people by actually having them raise their hands, but the one thing that I communicate right on the heels of that is, "Hey, you guys, this is low-hanging fruit. You can literally type into Google "Bible in a year" and get 8 million reading plans that you could choose to do and you could be done in a year.

1:16:19 Or you could just decide that I'm going to read this every single day until I read it and that's like just... if you're talking to someone about what you believe and you believe that these are the very words of God, how can you, with integrity, tell someone that they should believe what you believe if you haven't even read everything that God has communicated to you?

1:16:40 Now, I'm not saying that to shame anybody or make someone feel guilty, but there's a lethargic kind of approach that we have to the Bible or a duty-driven approach that we have to the Bible, where we have to check off the box and say, "I read my Bible today," or it's like, "I don't want to do this," that kind of a thing.

1:16:58 And we're all open, you know, we all have those moments where we're like, "This is something I don't want to do," but I remember Tim Keller saying, "Hey, if you don't want to read the Bible and pray, just do it anyway." Just do it anyway. Maybe that day, you're just having a bad day, just do it anyway.

1:17:13 I've kind of taken that approach. If I don't feel like doing it, I just do it anyway because it's good for me, like exercise. But I want people to understand that if you want people to take you seriously and you claim that the Bible is the very word of God, why would you not have enough integrity to say, "I have read every single word that God has communicated to me."

1:17:36 I think that should be one of the first goals that a young believer has, is to read through the Bible and listen to everything that He has to say because, as you have communicated in many, many ways, there's nothing that's unintentional when it comes to the scriptures. Nothing.

1:17:54 Paul: So let's take this "what is the Bible" conversation somewhere else. It's only when you have that kind of true biblical literacy that you will do evangelism that's biblical that really leads people to encounter God's diagnostic in the way God presents it.

1:18:24 The Bible breaks down my self-righteousness. The Bible breaks down my tendency toward judgmentalism and a condemning spirit. The Bible breaks down my passivity and the Bible is a manual of how to communicate truth to people who don't know truth.

1:18:45 I've said this many times and it's not where I leave people, but they'll say, "Just how do I learn to share the gospel?" I said, "Well, read your Bible." And so, it's not just that we want to lead people to love the word of God as they love the God of the word, but we want to be those people because that shapes the way we see people.

1:19:19 It shapes the way we communicate to people. It shapes what is important to us to communicate. You know, I don't want to communicate to people to make sure they understand all the various genres of scripture.

1:19:38 I want them to know Jesus because Jesus keeps rising to the top in scripture, so being bathed in scripture as an evangelist just shapes everything you're going to do and I just don't want to see us separate evangelism from the evangelist being thoroughly bathed in this beautiful message of the word of God because it shapes your heart.

1:20:07 It shapes your thinking. It shapes the way you view other people. It shapes the whole way you think about the process of evangelism. And one of the other things that really hit me as I was doing this big Bible project I did last couple of years was the utter patience of the Lord.

1:20:30 I can just give up on people so quickly; and I remember reading through the prophets and writing devotionals to the prophets thinking how many prophets is God going to send before He's going to say, "Enough already! How many times do you need to hear this message?"

1:20:51 Shelby: Yes, which I've said to my children multiple times. "How many times have I told you?"

1:20:55 Paul: "I do what I do for you and this the thanks I get?" It just doesn't happen and the other thing that really hit me is with every warning comes a promise of redemption again and again and again in the prophets.

1:21:19 So as I walk through this world of lost people, I want to be shaped by the Bible. I want the Bible to shape who I am. I want the Bible to shape the way I think about people, the way I think about myself, the way I communicate to people, the level of my patience and so, I need the Bible in my life. I need to be in it all the time because that shaping work is not complete.

1:21:46 Shelby: Yes, and you and I are both in positions, I think — yes, we are — of people who want to be in God's word consistently. We are people who are hungering for the word. We never feel like we have it palmed, like it's "oh, I got that, I don't need it anymore" kind of a deal. You're never a graduate of that. That's one of the things you say all the time.

1:22:10 I feel like there are people out there, though, who are like, "I just don't want to read the Bible. It's boring to me or it's confusing to me, whatever reason. I don't want to read the Bible." And I talked to a guy one time who said, basically, he said, "If you don't want something that's a good thing, that we that we know is good, that God calls good, if you don't want it, do you want to want it?"

1:22:37 And so, I think I might pose that question to anybody who's thinking, "I don't really want to read the Bible," but, "As we've been having this conversation and then, you've been listening, do you want to want to read the Bible?"

1:22:54 And if that answer is probably yes or if it's no, you can go, "Do you want to want to want to read the..." Get down to the base level of everything and from that position, cry out to God in need. Cry out to God and say, "You know what, God, I don't want to read the Bible right now, but I want to want to read the Bible. Can You help me?"

1:23:13 That's actually a really good prayer to pray because it's being honest about where your heart is at and it's crying out to God to change you, and He will meet you in those moments. And then, all of a sudden, the desire...

1:23:26 There have been plenty of times I don't want to read the Bible. I just don't want to do it and there have been years, sometimes, where I do it because I feel like I have to. But if I would have prayed in those moments, "God, would You give me a thirst, a hunger, a passion, a desire for Your word? Would You change me," maybe I would have changed a lot sooner in life, instead of where I'm at now, which is ridiculously behind for being a believer for 30-something years. I think wanting to want to read the scriptures is a good place to be because it's being honest about where you are and wanting God to change you.

1:24:00 Paul: Yes, I've spent the last six months in my devotional time in the book of Acts and I'm very aware that when I get up in the morning, there are moments where I think, "Okay, I need to read my Bible." I don't have that hunger and enthusiasm, and that's just the ebb and flow of spirituality and the battle for the heart that's still going on.

1:24:38 But the other morning, I have one of those mornings and I was reading about Paul near the end of Acts. He's in front of Festus and Agrippa, and he's arguing for the illegitimacy of a trial against him because he has broken no Roman law and he's a Roman citizen. And he does argue for that, but at every point he gives the story of the gospel.

1:25:21 Now, he's doing that at a moment where his life is at stake and I immediately have this pang in my heart because I thought I'd have been very good at arguing for my Roman citizenship that you can't touch me. But what I said, "But let me tell you why I've said the things I've said."

1:25:55 He always makes this turn and sometimes, the response is, "This man's insane." Other times, the Roman ruler wants to know more, but I thought do I see opportunity or am I so into my thing that I miss opportunity? The difference between Paul and me is he saw opportunity in those moments.

1:26:23 Now, the scene is I'm defending myself against false charge and I have the right to do that because I'm a Roman citizen. There's nothing wrong with that. That's completely just to do. He had a right to do that, but he sees through that and sees opportunity.

1:26:40 I think my issue is not want of opportunity. My issue is eyes closed to opportunity because there are other priorities that are engaging me that close my eyes to opportunity. And I had to confess I'm way too project-oriented.

1:27:06 I wake up everyday, Shelby, and I know exactly what I want to accomplish that day. I've already mapped out when I'm going to do all of these things. Luella thinks I'm absolutely crazy and I am. And I'm frustrated if something gets in the way of those things and there's a pretty significant idolatry in that because at the end of the day, who do I give credit to?

1:27:39 It's just so perverse and so, God, who is sovereign, could place a person in my pathway, but I'm so focused on my agenda that I walk right by that person or I say a quick hello and don't ask a question because I try to engage people in conversation. "How was your day, blah, blah, blah" and it's missed the opportunity.

1:28:11 Now, the Lord of heaven and earth knew that on this day, I would be reading that portion in Acts and knew how much I needed that. Isn't that amazing? And all of a sudden, it's not about every other creature out there. It's about Paul Tripp and the Apostle Paul, and God's just drilling down into my heart.

1:28:40 There's no book that can do that, but this one and makes clear to me how my priorities so easily get in the way of God's priorities. And I want to say this — not sinful priorities. Good ones. What Paul is arguing for is a good thing.

1:29:05 He has a right as a Roman citizen to say, "This is wrong, this is an injustice." But he had a deeper motivation in that moment because he had a higher priority in that moment than just defend himself.

1:29:23 He was defending the message of the gospel to people who needed to hear it and who else would stand? Who else got into that palace? Nobody. The average disciple of Jesus wasn't getting into that palace. Paul was in the palace.

1:29:44 Shelby: So strategic.

1:29:45 Paul: How cool is that? And he got it.

1:29:49 Shelby: Yes, and this comes back to even our conversations that we've had about suffering, too, of a lot of times we ask the question why is this happening or this is a bad thing, but honestly, this is one of your sayings.

1:30:06 This is like God will lead you to places you'd never intended to go in order to produce in you the things you would have never been able to achieve on your own and that's the story you just told about Paul being in the palace.

1:30:18 I don't think he would have wanted to say, "I need to get arrested," but it gave him the opportunity and God led him to a place he never would have intended to go in order to produce something he never would have been able to achieve on his own. It's pretty incredible.

1:30:35 Paul: Yes, and the fact that that encounter of Paul by God's beautiful, lavish mercies was recorded and preserved for Paul Tripp, so on a morning where he's not feeling very godly, I'm faced with that I can be so into my priorities for my life that I miss these beautiful opportunities to be a tool in God's hands that are right in front of my face.

1:31:24 Shelby: Yes, I don't think having an appropriate perspective like that would prevent you from opening your Bible. It's like, "Oh, I get to get in my Bible today," is probably the perspective that you would have if that was on your heart.

1:31:37 Paul: Well, and that's exactly what it did to me. Right away, all that reticence, all that devotion as a duty just bled over me and I'm just broken. I'm so thankful that I had that day in God's word, reading that account that was preserved by God because He loves me.

1:32:00 I say all the time to people, "That hard passage you're reading in scripture was recorded and preserved because God loves you. Don't just run through it. Ask the question, why would God [inaudible] me? Why do I need to read this story of Paul defending himself against some king?

1:32:24 Well, that's why. Because every scripture is profitable. And so, we're arguing the case again that my calling as an evangelist is reinforced, my passion for that is reinforced that day by God revealing my sin to me and my incessant desire to be sovereign in ways that I'm not sovereign.

1:33:00 And when you're sovereign that way, you see people not as people. You see them as obstacles in your way and how can I get through this obstacle to get on to what is really important to me? You've heard the story before I taught at a class, a counseling class to seminary students who wanted to be preachers but didn't want to be pastors.

1:33:32 I would just tell stories of broken people until, finally, the class would say, "Okay, we know we're going to need what you have to offer." And they missed one lecturer, student raises his hand and says, "Okay, Dr. Tripp, I know we're going to have these projects in our church. Tell us what to do with them so we can get back to the work of the ministry."

1:33:56 Shelby: What a question! What a heart revealing question!

1:33:59 Paul: Yes, it's a sad question, but it's gold for a teacher and so, I walked down the aisle between the desk, I knelt next to his desk so we're face to face and I said, "I want you to say that again right to me, but say it loud enough so everybody can hear the exact words."

1:34:20 And then, I said to him, "I have two things I want to say. One is you didn't even call them people." Projects. And I was emotional. And then, I said, "If they're in the way of ministry, then what is ministry? Tell me what that "so we can get back to the work of the ministry". What is that work of ministry?"

1:35:01 Well, I'd like to think that that's not in me, but it is. By the way, I had a... this was another one of these aftermath things. I was speaking at a conference and a guy came up to me and said, "Do you remember when you were a professor at Westminster and this guy called people projects, and you walked up," and he says, "I was in that class." He said, "Professor Tripp, nobody in that class will ever forget that moment." I just said, "Praise God, praise God."

1:35:40 Shelby: Praise God, yes. God used that stupid question to help solidify some stuff in people, but we all need to... we need that. Just like what you said, how many times is that my perspective? Like often.

1:35:51 Paul: Well, think of your most... if you're married and have children, your most immediate evangelism is with your kids. And how many times do you walk down the hallway thinking this? "I don't I want to deal with this now. You got to be kidding me. I just started watching Severance."

1:36:16 And what I say to parents is if your eyes ever see or your ears ever hear the sin, weakness, and failure of your children, it's never an accident, it's never an interruption. It's always grace. God loves those children. He'll reveal their need to you so you can be a tool of His grace. That's true of everyone. If my eyes ever see sin, weakness, and failure, it's never an accident.

1:36:52 Shelby: What a life-altering perspective! Seriously, I have thought that sometimes, when one of my kids is tantrum-ing, I have thought this is an opportunity for me. This is an opportunity, but most of the time, I'm like, "How dare you?"

1:37:13 Again, "Do you know who I am? Do you know how many times I've told you this? How many times has this tantrum benefited you? How many times have you gotten the outcome that you've wanted? If anything, you're digging your heels in." I'm digging my heels in even more.

1:37:30 Paul: So in those tough moments with your kids, the wise heavenly Father is working on everybody in the room.

1:37:37 Shelby: Yes, it's not just them, it's me.

1:37:40 Paul: And that's true in evangelism, too. In this moment where, like I'm on the bus, I just want to get home. I sit next to this kid. He's willing to engage me in a bit of an argument. God's working on me and we've got to live with that mentality.

1:38:05 Now, what that takes is surrender. My life doesn't actually belong to me. I was bought with a price. I'm not my own anymore and so, it's God's right to do with me whatever He chooses to do to accomplish whatever purpose He has in His world. And so, you have to live with open hands.

1:38:41 I can remember when I was engaged to Luella. I was smitten, smitten, smitten, but I was afraid of loving her more than I loved my Lord and I used to pray with open hands and say, "I love this woman. I think that she has brought good things into my life, good things that would please You, but I don't want to love her more than You and if it's Your will, You take her." That's hard to pray.

1:39:18 Shelby: That's very hard to pray.

1:39:20 Paul: But that should be everything in my life. I mean, maybe evangelism is hard for us because we don't live in a posture of surrender, because I still want people to like me and I still want life to be easy and I don't want awkward, weird, human conversations and I want to get from point A to point B and I don't want to be argued with. And, you know, the list just goes on and on.

1:39:50 Well, that's me laying claim on my life and wanting to determine what my life will be, rather than the surrender of saying, "There is a transaction. You bought me. I'm not mine anymore," and maybe, we should start everyday praying prayers of surrender because surrender is absolutely counterintuitive for us.

1:40:22 It's absolutely unnatural for us, apart from the rescue of grace; but good evangelists are people who have surrendered, who don't look at other human beings as obstacles, who aren't in such a rush, who aren't ruled by fear of man and desire to be liked and list goes on.

1:40:42 Shelby: I think that the desire that we have to be liked by people or the desire to be comfortable are probably my two major obstacles when it comes to evangelism. I don't want to be uncomfortable and I don't want to be disliked by other people, and asking those questions of myself before I know I'm going to go into a time of evangelism where I share the Gospel or if I'm going to be intentional about doing it, it's always a healthy reminder to go, "These are the things that I'm actually afraid of right now," and don't let those slip by me because I want to make sure that I'm addressing them specifically and counteracting them with the truth of the gospel, counteracting them specifically with scripture. 1 Corinthians 6, I'm bought with a price. I don't belong to myself."

1:41:44 It's really important to refresh that. Just like a someone getting ready to play a game of some kind. They're like, "I'm going to need to remember, then..." Or golf, you know, "I need to remember to bring my shoulder up and not swing through this way."

1:41:56 There's nothing wrong with that. I think a lot of people... there's this mysticism behind evangelism, where people think, "Oh, I have to be this type of charismatic personality that's able to [what we talked about] answer everybody's questions, engage in the perfect conversation, know it all."

1:42:15 But honestly, there's a little bit more of a mechanical element to it where you can say, "You know, I need to remind myself of what the truth is. I need to remind myself and I need to approach this conversation with open hands."

1:42:27 There's nothing wrong with doing that and praying in a posture of neediness because neediness is always going to be a good thing to God. God wants to use needy people and if you admit to your neediness before going into any kind of evangelistic conversation, you're in a good position to be, regardless of what you know.

1:42:44 Paul: Yes, my way of saying this is a bit of a Tripp-ism, is try to track down your surrender susceptibility. For you, it's fear of man. You know this about me. I don't give a rip of a care what people think about me, other than people who love the Lord and have concern about me and bring... I'm there.

1:43:06 Shelby: Yes. It's not like you're incapable.

1:43:09 Paul: But that other stuff just doesn't bother me. So fear of man has not been an issue for me, but busy-ness and hurry is. That project-orientation is. That's where I'm susceptible to not surrender and so, it's helpful to ask yourself the question, "Where am I susceptible to take my life back?"

1:43:30 Maybe I just lack compassion. Maybe it is self-righteousness. I mean, that's a really good exercise for people to have because we all have those areas of susceptibility. We'll have those until we're on the other side and so, for me, it is self-sovereignty.

1:43:50 I don't actually think I'm control the world, but I can act like I am and want my own agenda, and that's been a big issue. Luella's said to me a million times in our marriage when we're the group of people and I say, "This is what we ought to do," she'll say, "Have you asked everybody else," because no, I don't want to go through that lengthy conversation. I just think, "Let's just get at it." And I go, "Okay."

1:44:24 Shelby: But to remind yourself of where your weak spots are before you enter in those kind of... often, when people... before you take a picture, you check the mirror or if you're leaving your apartment or whatever, you usually check the mirror to see how you look before you go out.

1:44:38 Well, I think this is a mirror check. It's like, "Okay, what's going on? What do I value right now? I'm valuing my schedule before I'm valuing people. Lord, help me not to do that." Just let me take a look at reality.

1:44:50 "I'm not feeling that I want to read the Bible today. Lord, would You help me in these moments where I just don't feel like opening Your word. I'm more afraid right now of what people will think of me than a call to obedience."

1:45:02 Paul: On the other side of tracking your susceptibility and confessing your weakness isn't condemnation, it's grace. Jesus carried all those weaknesses, all those susceptibilities to the cross, and the worst thing He sustained on the cross was the Father's rejection. It wasn't physical suffering.

1:45:26 He sustained the full range of His Father's rejection, so in my weakness and failure, I'd never see the back of God's head. So I don't have to be afraid of weakness. What I need to be afraid of is delusions of strength because those keep me from crying out for help.

1:45:54 A sure sign of Christian maturity is not independence, not self-sufficiency. The more you walk with the Lord, the more willingly dependent you become and so, if I'm going to be an evangelist, I need to ask myself the question, what lives in my heart right now that's in the way of this?

1:46:19 Now, how we got to that conversation was through a single passage in Acts. This half-hour conversation is because of a single passage in Acts because the ultimate mirror is this book. It'll show you you like you really are and so, I go stand in front of the mirror of the word that morning just like I do in the morning, physically with a physical mirror, not knowing exactly what I'm going to see and look what it's revealed. And so, if you confess that there may be things in the way of your zeal, passion, compassion for evangelism, how about looking in God's mirror?

1:47:08 Shelby: Yes, that's really important to do. Really, really important.

1:47:10 Paul: And we all sin, but we don't all sin exactly the same and so, the thing that you struggle with is not what I struggle with, but I struggle, too. That's why to ask the question, "Where am I susceptible to take back my life, to run away from this life of surrender that says my life belongs to You and wherever I am, whoever I'm with, whatever situation, location, circumstance, I want to be available to You," what a great question to be asking. And you don't ask it once. You ask it over and over again, and you never know.

1:47:57 We were in a situation recently where somebody asked us the question just out of the blue about the things of the Lord and, obviously, we weren't prepared for that, but it was the result of some observations that they had made about us and forcing that moment, I just knew right away, "This is what this this moment is about." It's not about anything else, not about whatever we had in mind this is about and we have the conversation, but I'm not always there.

1:48:39 Shelby: Yes, and you know, especially, when you're thinking about two longer relationships that happen, like family members or friends or neighbors or that kind of thing. And sometimes, it just takes intentionally living the Christian life in front of people without embarrassment.

1:48:55 If someone asks you what did you do today, "When I got up, we went to church and we came back and blah, blah, blah," or, "I got up, I read my Bible this morning because I can't start my day without that."

1:49:09 You know, that kind of thing we think is going to be weird, but you'd be surprised by how many people eventually, cumulatively, will start to respond to that, to the point that one time, my neighbors know who we are. They know what we do. We're on staff with Cru, we're missionaries, and we talk about that kind of stuff all the time.

1:49:28 Well, my wife's out in front of our house watching the kids play and we live on a cul de sac. Kids are bouncing basketballs, and one of our neighbors comes over and goes to my wife, "Hey, you guys are Christians. What do you think about this, this, and this?"

1:49:40 And, you know, we're talking about like current events or what was happening in the news, and Rachel had the opportunity to talk about... it was just one of those out of the blue like, "Hey, here's a softball opportunity for you to swing at," and she did.

1:49:54 She did a great job, but that question wouldn't have been posed to her if we wouldn't have lived in a specific way in front of them, unapologetically, unembarrassed to be Christians in front of other people.

1:50:09 Paul: I want to confess that God loves softballs at me. They hit me because I'm already moving. I've dropped the bat. I'm already moving. I get hit by softballs all the time.

1:50:20 Shelby: Well, I mean, there's even stuff as simple as talking to random people that you interact with quickly, that kind of stuff. We think, "Oh, I don't have time to share the gospel." You have time to live the Christian life in front of other people. You just do.

1:50:35 You have the time to be kind. You have the time to be thoughtful, to be generous, to ask questions. You have the time to do that and people will eventually see who you are. Even the people that you run into at a restaurant that you frequent. They know who you are based upon the fact that you're there often.

1:50:57 Well, there's a cumulative effect of not only how much you're there, how much you tip at the end of a meal, but how you treat the staff, how you ask good questions, if you're kind to the people who accidentally reserved your table for someone else.

1:51:12 That kind of stuff witnesses. That's evangelism in some form or fashion because you're living the Christian life in front of other people who see you as an example of what it means to be a follower of Jesus, and break down the stereotype of what they think it is based on what we were talking about at the beginning, the online stereotype.

1:51:32 Paul: So we've done it again.

1:51:35 Shelby: Only got through what? Two points, maybe three?

1:51:37 Paul: One.

1:51:38 Shelby: One! Great.

1:51:39 Paul: But I think we have really rich things coming. They'll really help people to get up and get going. And you had something you brought in you want to talk about?

1:51:53 Shelby: Yes, this is actually brand-new that has just come out from crossway. You wrote a booklet called "Unsatisfied", which is essentially a gospel tract to be able to share the gospel with people. It's small. It's able to be gone through pretty easily and distributed. It's called "Unsatisfied". You wrote this. Do you want to talk about this a little bit?

1:52:15 Paul: Well, one of the things that I... two things, let me say. First is I think there are all kinds of windows into the story of Jesus and one of the windows is everybody's looking for satisfaction. Everyone wants to be content. Everyone want to say, "I'm okay," and so, all of us are unsatisfied in some way and I wanted to write about that because I think that's a universal human experience.

1:52:50 It'd be easy for people to buy into that. But what's about this? It's a little bit longer than the average tract. It gives it gives time for people to think through the question of satisfaction and where am I looking for satisfaction, and are the places I'm looking fulfilling to me and where do I find true satisfaction?

1:53:11 Yes, love it and it really is, I mean, right at the beginning here, it says, "We want to be satisfied permanently and at the deepest levels of our personhood." That's bait. That's fishing for men because that is a compelling story in and of itself.

1:53:29 And I like how even the design is "Unsatisfied". Where's the "i"? The "i" is down here, trying to get up to "Unsatisfied", which is where God meets us. God comes down to us. These can be found at www.paultripp.com/unsatisfied. You can get copies of those there.

1:53:45 Paul: Yes, and they're so cheap, just get a bundle. And Luella, my wife, has begun to carry them in her purse and she's already had opportunities to give them out to people.

1:53:55 Shelby: Even if you don't get to go through it word by word with people. You have a gospel conversation with someone, you say, "Hey, this talks about this a little bit more."` You could just hand it to people like that.

1:54:04 Paul: If you do that, write your phone number on the back of it. Your first name and your phone number, so people can contact you. Say, "Please contact me or text me if you have questions."

1:54:16 Shelby: I do that all the time. There's always space and I tell people, "Hey, you can keep this, you can throw it away, whatever you want to do, but this has changed my life. This message that's in here has changed my life. If you want to talk about it more, here's my social media handle, here's my email address, here's my number. Get in contact," to continue conversations with people. You will be surprised about what God will do in those little, tiny "watering of the seed" conversations that end up blossoming into bigger things in the future.

1:54:45 Paul: So why don't we end by praying for us and for all the people out there who find evangelism hard, and pray that this conversation will begin to encourage them? Let's pray.

Lord, thank You for this conversation we'd been able to have. It's just the starter, as we think about what it means to represent You in this world that is so broken by sin. Lord, all of us are susceptible to want to rule our own lives. All of us have things that get in the way of representing You well and willingly and seeing opportunities. And we pray that You would meet us there with Your rescuing and empowering grace. And we pray that You would use this conversation in the lives of many to begin to get them surrendering and mobilized for Your service. Thank You for hearing us. You are our rock, You are our fortress, You are our sun, You are our shield. You are life and health and peace and truth, redemption and reconciliation. You are our eternal hope. We love You, but we are so thankful that You first loved us. We pray these in the sweet and strong name of Jesus, amen.

1:56:16 Shelby: Amen. Thanks, brother.

1:56:18 Paul: Yes. Thank you.