Evangelism

INTRO: The year, 2025 is upon us. We used to have church on New Year’s Day. Your pastor said that you do not do that here, so this message is looking ahead to the new year which, on our calendar, is happening a few days from now. The Bible set out two New Year’s Days for Israel and neither of those falls on the day of New Year’s Day. Nevertheless, that is how it is for us.
I want to challenge us to something I have found a weakness in my preaching, and that is to stress evangelism. I believe every church should be an evangelical church, not in name only, but in practice. I believe it should be our first nature when we meet a new person to say, “Lord, give me an opportunity to talk to this person about his or her eternal destiny.” A friend and I go fishing as a retirement hobby. One day we had a flat tire on my van when we were parked on the ice on a lake. I mounted the spare tire which hadn’t been used for years and it was so low we could only limp out and try to find a place to put some air in the tire.
The first place we came to was a very old farmstead and we pulled in. There was just a very old man and his son who was part native. They had no electricity but he was most helpful. He cranked up a generator, got an air compressor and then we put air in my tire with that. When we were done, I wanted to give him something for his help but he wouldn’t take anything, he was only too happy to help. Well, the language was quite foul and so I made an effort to talk to them about the Lord and they said they knew about the Lord. I have had a burden for them ever since.