Walking as a Witness

Hello everyone. My name is John Ewart, and I'm

the senior pastor of Inglewood Baptist Church here in Rocky

Mount, NC. Thank you for joining us in this

series of episodes. We're entitling Walking in

Prayer. You can use this as you're

walking around the neighborhood, walking the dog, and you want a

prayer guide to accompany you, but you could frankly also use

this just in your personal quiet time if you wanted to.

In this episode, I want to share more about how do we walk as a

witness as we talk about praying evangelistically, how do we pray

for our lost friends and neighbors?

And in each section of prayer that I'm going to mention to you

today, there's going to be a prayer for the lost person, but

there's also going to be a prayer for fellow believers to

join you in that effort of lifting people up who don't know

Jesus in prayer. This outline's going to spell

outreach. I want you to note that just to

help you remember it, but I'm also going to be sharing some

scripture along the way. So as you walk or as you begin

your prayer time right now, let's open this prayer time with

the idea of receptivity. The ability to receive the

gospel is something we don't talk about enough.

We often jump farther ahead than that when we pray for people,

but we need to pray that people would actually be receptive to

the gospel, that the Holy Spirit would open up their hearts and

minds to be willing to listen. I can't force people to believe,

and neither can you. So we want to pray that the

hearts of the unsaved that we know and that we'll meet along

the way would be open to the truth of the gospel.

Let me read a couple of passages of Scripture to help us in First

1 Corinthians 1 · chapter mention

Corinthians chapter 1, and you might want to go back later and

read that more fully. But it says for the word of the

cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are

being saved, it is the power of God.

Then later it says, but we preach Christ crucified, A

stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles.

The reason it's that way is in chapter 2 it says the natural

person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God for

they are folly to him and he is not able to understand them

because they are spiritually discerned.

And so I want our heart and our mind and our passion to be that

of Paul's where he says in Romans 10/1, brothers, my

heart's desire and prayer to God for them as that they may be

saved, but we have to pray that the Holy Spirit would work in

their lives first. So as you think of a lost person

that you know, a friend, a family, neighbor, someone you

work with, someone you go to school with, I want you to think

of their name right now. I want you to picture them in

your mind as you're walking or you're praying, and I want you

to begin to pray that the Holy Spirit would open their heart

that they would be receptive to the gospel.

And then I also want you to pray one other part to this, and then

I'll pause for a moment. I want you to pray that other

believers will be receptive to joining you in prayer and an

outreach to the lost. In Matthew 938, Jesus tells the

disciples to pray earnestly to the Lord of the harvest to send

out laborers into his harvest. So we need to pray that fellow

laborers would join us in prayer as we begin to pray that hearts

would be open to the gospel. So you take a few moments right

now as you're walking or as you're praying to ask the Lord

to do that, especially specifically for that person in

your heart and mind. And also maybe for the person

you see right now in your neighborhood as you're walking,

that person in the park or that person on the track with you or

the person down the street. So specifically pray for them

right now that the Holy Spirit would work in their heart.

The. The.

The. The.

The. And as we continue this journey

together, not only do we want to pray for receptivity, but

secondly, we want to pray for exposure.

We want to pray for the opportunity to actually share

the gospel with that person that we're praying for, that neighbor

or that person that we need to meet today that we don't know

yet, but we're going to meet. And so we want to pray that the

opportunity will be made available and it it'll be very

clear to us when it's that moment, the Holy Spirit will jog

our hearts and our minds to say, this is the moment you've been

praying for. Share now.

Speak to them. When Paul was in prison, he

asked the Church of Colossae to pray for him and to pray that

the door or the window of the gospel would be open in

Colossians chapter 4. And so we want to pray for that

Colossians 4 · chapter mention

kind of opening. We want to pray that the Holy

Spirit removing their spiritual blindness, removing their

spiritual deafness and receptivity is now going to

actually provide the opportunity for exposure to the gospel.

And then I also would ask you to pray that you and other

believers will, will build relational and spiritual bridges

to the laws, that you'll be intentional.

Romans 10 asks our question, how are they going to hear unless

someone goes and preaches to them?

And so we need to pray that we would be available when those

moments of exposure take place. So as you walk and pray now and

you focus upon those lost people in your heart and mind or those

you're seeing right now, be sure and pray for that opportunity of

exposing them to the truth of the Gospel.

The. The.

The. The.

Well, now that we've been praying for receptivity and

exposure, it's time to pray for acceptance.

We actually want to pray that they will be saved.

We've been doing the pre work. We've been doing the laying the

groundwork, asking the Holy Spirit to work in their hearts

and minds, asking for the opportunity for them to hear the

gospel, that the window would be open, that we'd be bold enough

to share. And now we want to ask the the

Holy Spirit to work in their heart for them to actually

believe and accept the truth of the gospel, that they would be

accepted by God through his grace and be accepted by him

through faith and the truth of the gospel.

Again, Romans 10 says be if we confess with our mouths that

Jesus is Lord and believe in our heart that God raised him from

the dead, we can be saved. And so we need to pray right now

that people would not only hear the gospel, but that they would

believe that they would have the faith that they would be saved

when they hear that truth. We also want to pray that we

ourselves will be accepting and willing to be obedient to obey

the Great Commission and to share the gospel as we walk

through our daily life or as you encounter people now walking

down the sidewalk or walking around the park or wherever you

might be right now. And so I ask you now to take a

few moments to not only pray for that receptivity, not only for

exposure, but now for acceptance.

The. The.

The. The.

The. Well, hopefully we're saying

praise the Lord and that someone has been saved or that someone

soon will be. So not only we want to pray that

someone would accept the gospel and be accepted by God in faith,

by His grace, but we also want to pray next for commitment,

that those who are accepting Christ would commit their lives

to him and to His Church. In 2nd Corinthians 515 it says

and he died for all, that those who live might no longer live

for themselves, but for Him who for their sake died and was

raised. We can never forget Hebrews

10/25, which really does challenge a lot of people

because it talks about being in church.

It talks about not neglecting to meet together as the habit of

some, but encouraging one another and all the more as you

see the day drawing near. So we want to pray that not only

will someone be saved, but that they would commit themselves to

a life of discipleship and to a church family.

We need to be instrumental if we've been the one sharing with

them to help guide them to that place, to bring them to our home

church. If you're a part of the Rocky

Mount community, bring them to Inglewood.

If you're outside the Rocky Mount community, find a Bible

believing evangelical church and and help them get connected.

We also want to pray that they'd make their commitment known,

that they would do that publicly, that they would follow

the Lord in baptism, and that they would follow through with

whatever steps of church membership and commitment and

accountability that they need to take.

We also want to pray that we ourselves will commit to

persistent prayer for the lost and obedience to God and and

outreach and evangelism ourselves, that we will be

committed, that we won't stop praying.

We won't stop seeking to share the gospel.

I once had a friend named James and I I probably should the

gospel with him six or seven times.

He knew everything he needed to know, but I had to pray for him

for five years before he actually accepted Christ.

Sometimes it takes perseverance, but we want to do as Paul

commanded us in Romans 12, and we want to offer ourselves as

living sacrifices, holy and acceptable to God, which is our

spiritual worship. We don't want to be conformed to

this world, but we want to be transformed by the renewing of

our mind so that we might know the will of God and we might

follow it and he might use us. So spend a few moments now

praying for those who need to commit.

They they need to follow through with their decision to follow

Christ. The.

The. The.

The. And finally, I like for us to

pray for honor. We've been praying for

receptivity. We've prayed for exposure.

We've prayed for acceptance. We've prayed for commitment, but

I do pray that we will finish this time together by praying

that God would be glorified by all of this, that God would be

honored by the lives that are changed, that God would be

honored by the growth of his church that only He can produce.

I'm reminded of what Paul wrote to the church at Ephesus and

Ephesians 2. He said, so then you're no

longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the

Saints and members of the household of God built on the

foundation of the apostles and prophets.

Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone in whom the whole

structure of being joined together grows into a holy

temple in the Lord. In him you also are being built

together into a dwelling place for God by the Spirit.

So we want to join together. That's part of what the church

is all about, that we would encourage one another, support

one another, share with others in your small group, share with

others in your circle of friends within the church body about the

name of the person for whom you've been praying, that lost

person for whom you're burdened. And let's share that together.

God will be honored and glorified by our prayers.

He'll be honored and glorified with our lives when we think of

others that way and we think of His Kingdom that way.

And let me just finish this time with a word of praise and a word

of honor to God out of Psalm 96-O.

Sing to the Lord a new song. Sing to the Lord all the earth.

Sing to the Lord, bless His name, tell of His salvation from

day-to-day, declare His glory among the nations, His marvelous

works among all the peoples. For great is the Lord, and

greatly to be praised. He is to be feared above all

gods. If you would pray this way every

day for lost people, if you would think of four or five,

perhaps even more lost people that you know and someone that I

often refer to as person X, that's that person I haven't met

yet today, but I'm going to meet today.

I'm going to meet him at at the store, or I'm going to run into

him at the gas station or somewhere along the way, maybe a

waitress or a waiter, someone for whom I need to pray and

someone that might need to know about Jesus.

I want to be ready for them. I want to be, I'm going to be

open to the opportunity that God gives us.

So we want to also pray that God would open the door in our own

hearts that we would always be ready in season and out of

season to give a reason for our hope and to trust that the Holy

Spirit will give us the words that we need to say.

So as you walk with Him and you walk in prayer, I encourage you

to walk as a witness and bring Him great glory.

The. The.

The. The.

I want to thank you again for joining us for this episode.

And if you don't have a church home and you're in the Rocky

Mount area, we'd love for you to join us this Sunday or this

Wednesday night at Inglewood Baptist Church on Winstead Ave.

If there's ever anything we can do for you or you have anything

we can pray about with you, please let us know.

And I look forward to joining you again in our next episode of

Walking in Prayer.