A Divine Commitment: 40 Days of Praying for Enhanced Gospel Outreach
Nov 05, 2023
Jason Hovde
Show Notes:
Ready to take your faith deeper and stretch your evangelism muscles? Brace yourself for a spiritually invigorating journey as we dedicate 40 days to prayer. We'll be reminded of our imperative to share the gospel with not just our fellow Gentiles, but our Jewish brothers and sisters, too. With a prayerful heart, we’ll face our shortcomings head on, asking God to help improve our evangelical efforts and remove any obstacles that stand in our way.
Looking to the future, we’re committed to bringing you more stimulating episodes of Truth Trek, including special ones for the holiday season. With God's strength and guidance, we're on a mission to share the gospel globally. As we step out of our comfort zones to fulfill His great commission, we trust in His promises and prepare ourselves for the work ahead. So, stick with us as we strive to live a life of faith, obedience, and commitment to sharing the Good News.
Ready to take your faith deeper and stretch your evangelism muscles? Brace yourself for a spiritually invigorating journey as we dedicate 40 days to prayer. We'll be reminded of our imperative to share the gospel with not just our fellow Gentiles, but our Jewish brothers and sisters, too. With a prayerful heart, we’ll face our shortcomings head on, asking God to help improve our evangelical efforts and remove any obstacles that stand in our way.
Looking to the future, we’re committed to bringing you more stimulating episodes of Truth Trek, including special ones for the holiday season. With God's strength and guidance, we're on a mission to share the gospel globally. As we step out of our comfort zones to fulfill His great commission, we trust in His promises and prepare ourselves for the work ahead. So, stick with us as we strive to live a life of faith, obedience, and commitment to sharing the Good News.
Welcome to another special bonus episode of Truth Track as we take some time in our 40 days of prayer for evangelism. When we began this journey together in prayer two weeks ago, I let my Truth Track listeners know that this was a challenge that I brought to my church, oasis Church, and I wanted to bring it to the Truth Track family as well, and so I've got people from Oasis Church and Truth Track listeners around the world and I want to continue to challenge you to be praying for evangelism, praying for your opportunity to share Christ with others, to live out the life of faith and the command of Christ of calling others to repent and believe in the gospel of Jesus Christ, as he commands us to do in His great commission and allows us this great privilege to go along with Him in this kingdom work. So here we are again. This is the third Sunday in a row of a special bonus episode of Truth Track where we're going to take a moment to pray together about evangelism. So as we do that, I want to just let you know that this morning we had a great worship service and celebrated together. We had a guest from a Messianic congregation nearby, that Pastor Bruce, who came and shared with us, and we were really blessed to be together this morning.
Speaker 1:
It was a great reminder as well that the Jewish people are one of the greatest, actually the biggest, unreached people group probably in the world. That is about 1% or 1.5% of Jews are actually believers in their Messiah, jesus Christ, and so there's a lot of work to be done to reach Jews, and so there are some great organizations to do that. Jews for Jesus, chosen people, ministries and others have made it their mission to reach Jewish people with the gospel of Jesus Christ, and I'm reminded as we do that that we have an opportunity and an obligation to Jews and Gentiles to share the gospel, as Paul wrote in Romans 1.16, I'm not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God into salvation for the Jew first, and also to the Greek or the Gentile, and that's a great reminder to us that we often can overlook that obligation. We have to share the gospel with everyone, but God's people especially need to hear it, because so few of them are believers in Jesus Christ. I was so thankful that Pastor Bruce could come and join us this morning as we celebrate together.
Speaker 1:
We had the Lord's Supper together and this was a reminder that across the world, across many barriers that normally would be there between people, the family of Christ can come together and celebrate our unity that is found in him, and so it was a great time this morning. Also in this morning's service we had another video from John Sapia. John is one of our church members here but also works for the district of our denomination here in Florida, and he's been doing a series of videos for us that is challenging us in our prayer and our efforts to evangelize. In this morning's video, john was challenging us to pray that we would have open eyes, ears and hearts to see how God is working in the world around us and how we may be part of his work, and that was a great reminder as well. So, all in all, we had a wonderful worship service this morning and a lot of great reminders of the goodness of God and also what he's called us to do in serving him by obeying his great commission. So let's take a moment together to pray for those things that God would open our eyes, ears and hearts to the work he's doing around us. And this will be a little bit of a shorter episode than normal, but I trust that you will keep praying throughout the week for your opportunities to reach out with the gospel to those people who God has given you in your spheres of influence, whether it be neighbor or families, or friends, or even fellow students. Wherever it may be that God has placed people in your lives, let's pray together.
Speaker 1:
Lord, we do thank you once again. You are an amazing God and you've provided an amazing salvation, and so many of us stand in awe when we consider our own sinfulness and your salvation, which is so great. When we consider the greatness of your majesty, lord, the creation you've created and the plan of salvation that you've played out throughout history. We stand in awe of that and we ask you, lord, to forgive us of the many times when we've fallen short. We fall short, lord, in particular in this prayer time, and remember that we are lacking sometimes in our evangelistic zeal and efforts. Lord, we confess that we have missed many opportunities to share the gospel with people you've placed in our lives. So we ask, lord, that you would forgive us of those sins, of neglecting our duty to you. And, lord, would you help us, please, to do a better job of obeying your commands. And we thank you, lord, we thank you that you have given us these many opportunities, and we thank you that you're going to continue to show us your grace and mercy in giving us new opportunities as well.
Speaker 1:
Lord, as we are thanking you as well, we ask for your help. Would you help us, lord, to be empowered by your Holy Spirit, to be sensitive to your word and remember and recall those things that you have taught us as we try to reach others with your gospel? Lord, when others have questions that we have difficulty answering, we would like to trust you, lord, to help us to best answer those questions. And ultimately, lord, help us to remember that unless you are working, we can't do any work that will be productive at all. Lord, help us to be reminded that there are veils over people's eyes.
Speaker 1:
There are people who cannot see the truth of the gospel because they're blinded by the God of this world, satan, and they're deceived within themselves as well.
Speaker 1:
And so, lord, the biggest prayer we can ask is that you would go out ahead of us and enter into the lives of these people that you're calling us to reach for Christ and doing the work that only you can do to remove the blinders and the obstacles they have to come to faith in you that you would draw people to yourself, lord, so that when we show up and share the gospel with them, their heart may be ready to receive it.
Speaker 1:
So we ask for that help as well, lord, and we thank you for all of this and we're trusting you, lord, that we may see results according to your promises and that you would sustain us to do the work you've called us to do In Jesus' name, amen.
Speaker 1:
Thank you for praying with me, and I pray that you will continue that prayer throughout your week, looking for opportunities at every chance you can to see who's out there, that God has put you in a specific location for that you can reach out and touch and reach with the gospel of Jesus Christ, and we will see you again on the next episode of Truth Trek. I've been trying to get the new episodes out during the week, on Wednesday mornings early, and I will continue having a bonus episode on Sundays, at least in the near future, and I do want to let you know as a little bit of a teaser ahead of time, I've got some very special Truth Trek episodes planned for the holiday season that I think you'll enjoy, and so we're looking forward to presenting those to you as well. So God bless you and have a great day and stay tuned to Truth Trek and we will see you again soon.