Session 1 - Always Be Ready: Dr. Hugh Ross

those advertisers were gonna be talking about this book always be ready and incidentally you can get a free chapter of this book by going to reasons org slash Ross you can also get free chapters of a number of other books and also you can do that where there are other as scholars so if you want to get the books written by Fazal rana go to reasons org slash rana and you can download free chapters but this book always be ready is based on this passage we see in first Peter 3:15 always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have but do this with gentleness and respect first Peter 3:15 and the promise there is if you prepare good reasons for your Christian faith and are able to deliver those reasons with gentleness and respect you will see God supernaturally bringing people to you to hear and respond to your reasons now before I became the president of reasons to believe I've served for several years as a minister of evangelism and missions at a churches between Caltech and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and what I discovered is of people in our church we're thinking that what you see in the book of Acts ended for the first century I mean you read the book of Acts you see God's Holy Spirit doing amazing things to bring people who are not yet believers to people like Peter and Paul to receive Jesus and you'd see God doing miraculous things if you look at the book of Acts it just ends there's no conclusion it just stops dead stream which I believe implies that the book of Acts is continuing through the present era and as a research scientist after I became a Christian I said I'm gonna put this to the test I'm gonna do what Peter says in first Peter and do what I see in the book of Acts and see if God doesn't perform miracles like he did during the first century and this is what this book always be ready is all about basically to offering you a guarantee if you prepared good reasons for your Christian faith and can deliver them with a Christian demeanor of gentleness and respect you'll see God doing miraculous things just like he did in the book of Acts and it's not just for isolated individuals I believe it's for everybody and also having served as a pastor for several decades one things I've noticed is in order to sustain your walk with the Holy Spirit it's crucial that you see the Spirit working in your life in miraculous ways I mean if you look at the book of Exodus the children of Israel were fervent about their belief in God when they were seeing miracles but when they were not they began to drift away I believe that's a key to a faithful long lasting walk with the Lord and a loving relationship with it is to be having that personal experience of God performing miracles in your life I'll give you one quick story I was with a brand-new Christian young man who had just received Christ and you know what we do is we get them sharing their faith right away and so he went with me and we did cold turkey knocking on doors in a neighborhood and we're doing this in the evening and we had knocked on 20 doors nobody answered the door and I was getting around 9 o'clock and I said well it's about time we should wrap up and he said let's do one more so we did we went to this place and was overgrown with bushes and we saw the gate we opened the gate and there was this big German Shepherd dog there and it was totally dark and but the dog guided us to the front door turned out it was a five acre property with no lights and the dog got us right to the front door we knocked on the door a man opened the door and he said how did you get here and we said well your dog showed us the way so didn't you see the sign by the gate it's well lit it's big said no we didn't see any sign says how could you have missed it and he said this dog did the dog bark no the dog didn't bark did the dog pinion to the ground no the dog didn't Tenace to the ground and he said this is a trained attack dog this dog is trained to bark loudly at anybody comes near the gate anybody who opens a gate the dog is trained to physically subdue the person and today none of that happened and he said he looked at us intently and said you two wouldn't be Christians would you and I said well why did you ask he says because my wife and I and her three children had been praying this evening that God would send us Christians so we could know how to have a relationship with Jesus Christ he invited us in and he had a lot of questions and his wife and children had questions too so he answered their questions and then they said you know I think we're ready he and his wife and all three children gave their lives to Jesus Christ that evening with the dogs sitting beside him and he said that's another piece of evidence our dog never sits with a stranger he only sits with us he says you don't believe what happened tonight do you he says let me show you what this dog is all about he gave a command and the dog went out the back door into the chicken coop roasted out the three roosters when the chicken coop went to each chicken one at a time grabbed the egg that was underneath the chicken and brought it to the back door and put it in a basket then he took us out to the gate and there was his big sign well-lit warning us that there was a trained attack dog on the premise and the young man that was with me said this is just like the book of Acts says God blinded us to the sign and blinded us to what was happening the dog guided us all the way the front door he says this was a miracle at tonight and they men and his family said yes it was know what I share with you is not an isolated story I mean when I was here a year ago I talked about how I was changed from the seat that I had in an airplane to a different seat and a German quantum physicist sat beside me who announced himself as an atheist and a skeptic by the way that's often typical of German academics they just get right to the point and you know I had a two-hour conversation when he can read about it and always be ready but here's what I can share with you that tells you that it has to be the Holy Spirit at work I have all these conversations on airplanes with strangers but over half the conversations I have are with people seated next to me that either have a PhD in one of the sciences or a doctorate in theology and we all know that doesn't make up half of the US traveling public god knows who I am he knows who they are and he puts us together now a friend of mine in our church he came out of a Mormon religion and became a Christian he like me flies a lot he says when I'm on an airplane I don't get to sit next to scientists or theologians I get to sit beside Mormons and X Mormons and he has these incredible conversations God knows who you are he knows who they are so if you put into practice first Peter 3:15 the same kinds of miracles will happen in your life by 40 years of pastoral experience proves me it's not just exceptional people this will happen to anyone however surveys have been done by the Pew and Barna people about how often Christians who attend church every Sunday actually share their faith with a non-christian adult the statistics are only ten percent as one reason I come to you this message this should be a hundred percent it shouldn't be ten percent it shouldn't be just 10 percent of us that are having the thrill have seen God at work we all should be incidents but having been a minister of evangelism for many years these are the two excuses I hear all the time while I'm not like you I don't have the gift of evangelism and so well where did you get that from as I look at the spiritual gift passages in the Bible the only place I see a gift of evangelism is Ephesians 4 and there is referring to the office gets how God raises up elders within the church to equip people to do evangelism it's not that they do the evangelism they put people to do the evangelism just like there's no gift of hospitality because God wants all of us to be involved in hospitality likewise there's no gift of evangelism because God wants all of us to use her spiritual gifts to bring people to faith in Christ but probably the most frequent excuse I hear is this one I am NOT prepared this happened to me when I was on the faculty of Caltech famous astronomers would invite me into their office and when I come in they would say close the door and when the door was closed they would tell me they were a Christian and they were involved in church such-and-such but they made me promise not to tell anybody else at Caltech that they were a Christian and I said why they said because I'm not prepared to use science to show people how Christianity is true they were not prepared and so they they kept it secret and that explains why I waited 30 years to bring out this book always be ready before that I brought out 17 other books that were designed to help people get prepared so yes I could have written this book decades ago but my goal was we need to first take away that excuse provide the resources they'll prepare people so they can be confident that they have the evidences to show the reasons why they believe always be prepared to give an answer everyone asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have but do this with gentleness and respect now this is in the middle of first Peter 3 you need to look at everything and first Peter 3 and first Peter for the whole two chapters are all about evangelism how to share your faith in a way to bring people of faith in Christ and you also need to see what it says in Hebrews where it says let us consider how we may spur one another on toward love and good deeds let us not give up meeting together I think it's important to realize that if God wanted the Gospel message to be shared in a way where there is no mistakes no embarrassment perfect knowledge he would have sent the angels instead he chooses to send us human beings now the context of 1st Peter 4 in Hebrews 10 is we need to help one another in other words all of you will help me to become a better evangelist we all help one another and also making the point that we need to do this in a spirit of love people will listen to your good reasons if they see that you're being compassionate people ask me all the time how come you have all these amazing encounters I just ask people questions one reason why I want to know what kind of non-christian talking to you can only find out by asking questions and I also discovered people like to talk about themselves and so it's easy to get a conversation if you shut your mouth and just ask questions and listen and listen in a compassionate manner and then process you'll discover what kind of non-christian you're dealing with but I think one of my most favorite passages for effective evangelism as 2nd Peter 4 and 2nd Peter for the whole chapter is about the fact that we are broken jars all of us have deficiencies and defects and handicaps and God's goal is through His Holy Spirit to work through our deficiencies and handicaps yes God is gonna use your strengths as a way to communicate the gospel but he's gonna use your handicaps and deficiencies in even greater ways and he's gonna use your strengths I think this is a missing factory side venoth in the pastoral ministry I see Christians trying to hide their deficiencies or to patch them over so it Dolan can see them a message of 2nd Peter for God's Holy Spirit was to shine through our deficiencies so the people will know it's not us but the Spirit of God that is at work and so let the Holy Spirit shine through your deficiencies and weaknesses and incidentally we all have them God makes sure he blesses each one of us with a handicap or deficiency or a weakness now hum you've ever heard of the strength finders tests okay that's something we do at reasons to believe we have every one of our employees take the strength finders test which basically tries to identify the strongest attributes you have as a person we even make them post them on their office door that way and you walk in you know what kind of person you're dealing with and if you're curious these are my top five strengths that are posted on my door top is ideation I like to invent things a learner achiever focus responsibility and looking at those strengths you can say wow that that is great for research scientists it explains why I can write the books that I do but we also have our employees identify their bottom strengths and you know if you look at these strengths you say well I'm not sure I want to engage somebody like that incidentally if you're curious as to where I stand on the myers-briggs I'm an N e Rd okay but this is my bottom strength whoo which means winning others over so if you look at my strength and my weakness on the strength finders I would be at the bottom of being an effective evangelist these are not the characteristics you want in a salesman and yet God is able to use us in spite of our weaknesses however my greatest weakness is that I'm on the autistic spectrum also known as Asperger's syndrome and you know when I was growing up nobody even knew about this disorder it's now becoming quite well publicized and we're all different that's why they call this spectrum everybody in the spectrum is different everybody else in the spectrum but these are the things we share in common it's difficult for us to read the emotions of others it's even difficult for us to read our own emotions and we can't read body language and our emotional responses a lot of people for example think I don't have any emotions that's not true they're just delayed by three or four hours now this helps me when I'm debating an angry atheists because it takes me two or three hours to realize that I've been insulted and I'm not aware of personal experience in fact my wife jokes about the first time she met me she said where did you get your clothes and I said well I bought him at the supermarket and she said you know why did you get those shoes well they cost $2 so and you know at caltech all you need is two changes of clothes one that you wear one day and you put the other one on the next day in fact we have a Caltech scientists on her staff he always comes to the office and khaki pants and an Oxford blue shirt and we said Dave don't you have any other closest oh yes I do I've got six more sets of clothes identical to this I don't have to think when I get up in the morning well I mean I think he's on the spectrum as well and what but probably the thing that really held me back on my education is I didn't know how to filter words I would say things just blurt it out mom dad that lady's really fat they said no no you can't say those kinds of things so I was trained not the talk I didn't really talk to love seven years of age and I almost failed grade one as a result of that and of course we have difficulty in relationships we're oblivious to what's most important in forming relationships however and I can tell you this story - I entered the University of British Columbia and that was a time when then the science program they failed half the students every year the professor said only one of the 16 of you are gonna graduate and for that reason because of the intense nature they had us go through a whole day of testing and then we had an hour with a psychologist before they would allow us to enroll in the science program and I remember what the psychologist has told me so as I've looked at all of your test results and I can share with you you'll be a success that anything you want to pursue here at the University with one very important caveat whatever you pursue that must not involve other human and when he found out I was going into astrophysics is this fine just relate to the stars in galaxies just stay away from human beings and you'll be fine now I was not a Christian at the time and my sophomore year at the end of my sophomore year after two years study of a Gideon Bible I decided I need to commit my life to Jesus Christ but I knew enough about the Bible to realize if I commit my life to Jesus Christ I'm also committing to go public with my faith in Jesus Christ so I says you know I got to start engaging people and it began to do that and that's what led me into the Ministry of evangelism I can even tell you about my first experience it said okay my best friend my physics lab partner I'm gonna talk to him and he looked at me and says Hugh I know you want to talk but please you gotta let me talk I've been having a lot of struggles in my life I need to talk about my de struggles I need to talk to somebody who knows God you only buddy Miscanthus ago same thing about God I said why just gave my life to God this is great let's sit down and talk that was my first clue if you make a commitment to serve the Lord he will open the door and pave the way and he's done that consistently in my life now the fact that I can't filter words I can't hide anything and my wife loves to play poker with me because she knows exactly what kind of hand I got cuz I just can't hide anything and she also says you know that I'm honest while the truth is everybody knows when I lie I can't lie if I do my everybody knows I'm lying so you just kind of give up consequently people have this idea that those of us that are on this spectrum have no guile and are honest but that does work to an advantage I'll be sitting in an airport waiting room and I'll notice some stranger will come to me and say please look after my bags while I take care of a number of that happens to me almost every time I travel I get picked out and I think it's just because they notice something but what happens is when they come back they feel obligated and a conversation gets started and I've led a number of people of Christ just because I've looked after their bags probably the most extreme example though as I saw this fraught looking woman come over towards me and she dropped her bags with me and her four young children and then she took off and it was thirty minutes before she came back I thought maybe I just I'm gonna have to adopt these four children so but again there was such a sense of obligation and so I got to share with her and her of four young children and maybe that explains why people just kind of tell me things when I meet them in a bank line or at a grocery store or whatever so that's what happens in airports and the Bible also tells us that when when we're in our weakest state that's when you can expect God to work the fact Peter talks about how those of us were followers of Jesus Christ God well on purpose take us through trials and points where we feel weak and one of the more dramatic examples of that was I came home from a flight from Australia and I was in economy in a middle seat and there's two big people on either side of me I really couldn't get up and when I got home my wife said you don't look that great after your run and she insisted I'd get checked and I passed all the stress tests but she said I know you're not normal she insisted I have an angiogram they found a big blood clot and that's what often happens if you're on an airplane for many many hours and so they had to do surgery on me to bypass that clock the clots gone now so I actually have an extra artery feeding my heart but what happened was I wound up spending four days in a hospital ward and the hospital was crowded so I was in a public rather people there with me and I got visited by five chaplains and what I later found out is nobody in that hospital gets more than one chaplain visit I got five chaplain visits and the first four chaplains that came to talk to me I asked him a lot of questions I always do that and I found out they were chaplains but they were not believers in Jesus Christ I said well you know how can you function as a chaplain if you don't even believe in God they said well we just like to give people comfort and then I said okay I need to ask you some questions why is it that you don't believe in Christianity and the message of the Bible and so everybody knows that science proves that the Bible is incorrect I said well I ever talked to his scientists who thought that the Bible actually had everything right they said we don't think such a person exists so I said well I think you're talking to one right now and then they began to ask me questions so I wound up having an hour and some Ohira was on the bed recovering from surgery and yet God and that weakness gave me the strength to spend an hour plus talking to each of them and every one of those four they weren't believers for be one of them science was the issue chaplain number five comes in and I recognized him because I spoke at a chaplains conference a couple years earlier and he was there and he was a believer and he knew those four he says they're the only for unbelieving chaplains I even know of they says I know all four I'm gonna ask me what resource he taught of the effective to leave with him and so I told him and they says I'm gonna have lunch appointment with each one of those four I'm gonna follow up on those four well again what are the odds that I would be the one patient at hospital that got five chaplain visits and what would be the odds I'd wind up with the only four that weren't believers and what are the odds that their big issue would be science and how they thought that science contradicted Bible these are not accidents and just likewise by the way the first four or five times that happens to you you'll think well this is just a coincidence but when it gets past a hundred you realize this is a spirit of God at work and I promising you if you put this into practice it will get past 100 always be ready to give an answer everyone who asked you to give the reason for the hope that you have but do this with gentleness and respect now it's crucial that we have that gentleness respect in the pure conscience and as a pastor people often ask me how do you develop that and I said well it didn't happen to me right away I was relatively obnoxious when I first started doing this but one of the things I would do is when I sensed that I wasn't really too successful in sharing my faith I would ask the person can you please tell me where my reasons really weren't helpful or where my demeanour was obnoxious here's what I discovered unbelievers are quite eager to tell you where you've been obnoxious with him and if you listen carefully to what they say and respond this over several years will help you to develop the gentleness respect and a clear conscience it doesn't come right away I think one of the reasons why God commands all of us to always be ready to share your faith is for your benefit about how it can build within you of the demeanor of Christ as you engage not only non-christians of the Christians as well so in that sense I would argue that sharing your faith with unbelievers is not just for God's benefit and for their benefit I think it's most of all important for your benefit this is how you build the characteristics of compassion gentleness kindness tenderness and a clear conscience but it's important to get feedback get feedback from the unbelievers you engage but also get feedback from the Christians that are watching and that means we need to be humble enough to actually take the counsel and advise that can tell you this I've gotten the best counsel and advice from angry non-christians they're the ones that have helped me the most and trying to over the years build the second part and the point is this you may have very good reasons that have been prepared but do expect the unbeliever to listen louder to your demeanor than he does your words and the only way we're gonna be able to develop good reasons and that demeanor is to help one another that's why we need to be engaged as a community that's why when I was a minister of evangelism we sent people out in twos and threes and groups and we always have a critique after we were done because we want to get better and better at sharing our faith so by prayer for all of you is that you would take that opportunity if you don't feel prepared contact us we have abundant resources at the table back there if you've got questions feel free to contact us we want you to be prepared and also encourage you engage one another build that Christian demeanor but it's my prayer that every one of you would have the miracle just in the next year a seeing someone come to faith in Christ in your life I believe this that every person in this church as a follower of Jesus Christ within the next year can have that experience maybe several times but at least once that's my prayer for you and with that we're gonna transition to questions on any subject that you care to bring up thank you for inviting me back it's a pleasure to be here and I love the questions I get from the audience here they're all over the map but I'd love to have it all over the map and incidentally I've learned enough about Ron he also loves to have things all over the map so he's gonna come out here and join me wes is gonna join me too there's gonna be no limit you can ask any question you want

Channel: Grace Church St. Louis

Views: 7,515

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Keywords: gracestl, stl, grace, hugh, ross, doctor, stars, prayer, rontucker, saint, louis

Id: njxsB9wDDBA

Length: 29min 22sec (1762 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 17 2019