We can't know at any given time how God will bless our faithful witness. So the apparent numerical growth of the church is never a good guide to how faithful we have been in evangelism.

Our examples of enduring hardship are often more powerful than our stories of success and triumph.

If you think that the gospel is all about what we can do, that the practice of it is optional, and that conversion is simply something that anyone can choose at any time, then I'm concerned that you'll think of evangelism as nothing more than a sales job where the prospect is to be won over to sign on the dotted line by praying a prayer, followed by an assurance that he is the proud owner of salvation.

Let's say you don't want to stress the urgency of the gospel. Imagine that you are a hyper-Calvinist, and you just figure that people's salvation is a matter for the sovereignty of God. Well, if that's the case, there will never be the heartfelt pleading that you would see in a Spurgeon or an Edwards, or in the Apostle Paul where he pours out his heart in Romans 9 and 10 for the Jewish people.

Too often preachers want to deal with people simply at the level of publicly accessible reason. We participate with them in their own epistemology. But this is not New Testament preaching. We have a message that is not from this world; it is from God. We don't know it by our own cleverness; we know it because God has revealed it.

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

I recognize that not all of us may have the same abilities and talents in sharing the gospel. But I want to keep the heat on all of us for getting the good news out there.