I do want to pray for the Lord to glorify himself and, yes, I also will pray for an outpouring of his Spirit, but I also will rejoice in what he is doing now, and I will try to be a faithful steward of the gospel by preaching it "in season and out of season", as Paul reminds us. So I want to be careful not to make an idol out of revival, or to rely upon it to the point where I don't plan for evangelism.

Sadly, there are some fine Christian people who believe that the only way to advance the gospel is to pray for revival and nothing else. You don't know if they have any non-Christian friends or if they have ever shared the gospel with anybody in the last 30 years. It's depressing going to prayer meetings like that. I don't want to pray like that.

We need the word proclaimed so that we hear the gospel clearly, but then it's also very natural to have people talk about the Christian faith in ordinary conversation.

Christians are defined not by our heritage, but by our mission; not by our blood, but by His.

I assume that normally the Lord will be bringing people to himself through the instrumentality of the preached word. However, we have to be very careful that we don't assume that if we are 'X' faithful in evangelism, then we will see 'Y' results right now. It doesn't work like that.

The difference between apologetics and evangelism is that in apologetics, you are answering objections that the world raises, whereas in evangelism, you are bringing the message that Christ brought. So unbelievers tend to set the agenda in apologetics, and you set the agenda in evangelism.

An evangelist no more imposes his views on others than a pilot imposes his views on his passengers when he lands a plane on a runway. I bet the passengers are glad!