The Most Important Tool In
Evangelism
By Victor Beshir
Do you want to be an evangelism worker of the Gospel and God’s salvation?
Do you want to reach out to others to share with them the good news of the New Testament?
Do you want to guide people to the spiritual treasures of the Coptic Orthodox Church?
If your answer is yes, then
continue to read carefully to find out what the most important thing you need
to is.
Let us follow the steps of the great evangelists to discover the secrets behind their success:
1- The Lord Jesus
Christ:
“Then each of them went home, while Jesus went to the Mount of Olives.”(John 7:53, 8:1). “At daybreak he departed and went into a deserted place. And the crowds were looking for him; and when they reached him, they wanted to prevent him from leaving them.”(Luke 4:42)
Jesus used to spend a great deal of time in prayers, including the whole night in prayers. Doing this, He showed us the secret of a successful evangelism, prayers.
2-
The Apostles:
“All these (the apostles and disciples) were constantly devoting themselves to prayer, together with certain women, including Mary the mother of Jesus, as well as his brothers.”(Acts 1:14).
Have you noticed the words ‘constantly to prayers.’ This is the secret behind their success.
As a conclusion, we see here two important practices go hand in hand in the lives of the servants of the New Testament. These two constitutes together the secret of the successful evangelism. They are:
Why Do Evangelism Workers Need Prayers?
Although evangelism workers need prayers for many reasons, I will write
here about one reason only and give you one example from the book of Daniel (10:12,13,
20)
“12 Then he said to me, “Do not
fear, Daniel, for from the first day that you set your heart to understand, and
to humble yourself before your God, your words were heard; and I have come
because of your words. 13
But the prince of the kingdom of Persia withstood me twenty-one days; and
behold, Michael, one of the chief princes, came to help me, for I had been left
alone there with the kings of Persia …20 Then he
said, “Do you know why I have come to you? And now I must return to fight with
the prince of
The above verses explain a very important fact that we need to be aware
of that is there is a spiritual war raged around us all the time. We don’t see it but it is there. In the above verses there was a spiritual war
that tried very hard to stop the building of the
Whenever you start a spiritual work within yourself or with others,
namely when you try to evangelize someone, the devil sends his soldiers to keep
that person away from God and to protect the person from your teaching and its
influence. Unless you do something
similar to what Daniel did, you can’t win the person to Christ. Daniel prayed, fasted,
and humiliated himself before God for 21 days,
God answered the prayer and sent an angel to do the job, but it took the
angel 21 days and he had to ask for another help from the archangel Michael. You see how fierce the spiritual war is!
Unless, we learn how to pray and continue to pray for every person and
every service, we will not win any person to Christ.
To give you a contemporary example of the spiritual war, I was told by
a monk, who witnessed the following incident, that in
one early morning a lady came to the monastery asking to meet the late Anba Mina, the bishop of St. Mina Monastery,
Have you realized that we are surrounding by raging spiritual warfare? Most likely, you and I will not reach that
level of the war faced by Anba Mina or the angel,
because of the level of our spiritual lives and the targets of the war. But, getting into winning souls for Christ
needs a lot of prayers to help the person we evangelize to overcome all the
spiritual war he/she faces.
First:
Personal Prayers:
The servant of God in general and the evangelism worker specially needs to learn:
Not in prayers for a few moments, but in devoted heartfelt prayers…
The problem we face today is a lack of prayers and a lack of bowing knees before God…
Without knees bowing down for long and a humiliated heart don’t expect any result from all evangelism activities no matter how sophisticated they are…
A
good peace of advice for good prayers is don’t wait until you are so tired and
ready to go to bed then to think of prayers.
Instead, pray before you start your study or start your evening
activities.
How you approach prayers is important. Raise your heart to the Lord by singing a hymn that touches your heart or reading from a spiritual book. These are good approaches to begin prayers. Then learn how to engage in deep dialogue with the Lord. Remember that you are in the presence of the creator of the whole universe. He sees you and listen to your words. Stand in awe before God. Learn how to stand up or kneed down, raise your hands in honorary ways suitable to God, and not as a sleepy person. Let the words come from the bottom of your heart. Let the written words of the Agpyia lead you to develop your own dialogue with the Lord whom you love so much. Please don’t approach prayers as a duty you have to do, but rather because you need it. Tell yourself I need life, forgiveness, peace, joy, spiritual food, and all these can be given in prayers. I pray because I need Him and I love Him.
We have a great example of a life devoted to prayers in St. Paul. Listen to his own words:
“For this reason I bow my knees before the Father… He may grant that you may be strengthened in your inner being with power through his Spirit, and that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith” (Eph 3: 14-17)
“ I appeal to you, brothers and sisters, by our Lord Jesus Christ and by the love of the Spirit, to join me in earnest prayer to God on my behalf, … that my ministry to Jerusalem may be acceptable to the saints”(Rom 15:30-33)
Second:
Prayers Meeting:
As individual prayers are important, prayers with others are also important and essential too. Let us take an example from the apostles:
“All these (the apostles and disciples) were constantly devoting themselves to prayer, together with certain women, including Mary the mother of Jesus, as well as his brothers.”(Acts 1:14).
“When they had prayed, the place in which they were gathered together was shaken; and they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and spoke the word of God with boldness.” (Acts 4:31)
One of the great sources of power in the first church was their prayer together. You will read about it throughout the entire book of Acts.
Current revival in the Coptic Orthodox Church started with prayers meeting. The late bishop Mina of the Monastery of St. Mina used to tell me about their prayers meeting in El Giza that sometimes extended for the whole night and ended up in taking Holy Communion in the morning. Similarly, most of the first generation of leaders of St. Anthony Church in Shoubra talked about their extended prayers meeting, in which they started a dedicated life to the service of God.
When I started serving in St. George in Heliopolis, Maser El-Gadeeda, Cairo, the total number of Sunday school children were about fifty. The new head of the servants, Dr. Aiad Riad El-Bahgoury asked us to start a prayers meeting. We used to go to the church every Wednesday evening, when no one else was in the church, entered a small chapel, turned off the light, prayed together, and sung spiritual songs. Soon that meeting became very essential in our life. We reaped great blessings from that meeting. We learned how to pray, supplicate, kneel down, cry to the Lord, and how to get filled spiritually. Every meeting was like a journey into heaven. While we started by thinking that we would just pray for Sunday school, we found ourselves praying for our poor spiritual life and asked for our own salvation. Not before long, Sunday school grew to have hundreds and thousands of children besides growth in the youth meeting and other services in the church.
One of the servants who used to attend the prayer meeting left to USA, and he wrote a letter saying: ‘If you have to stop all the meetings in the church, do not stop the prayer meeting.’ Prayers meetings were very essential for the service then and it should be now.
What
to do in prayers meetings?
You may start with praying the Agpyia, and then follow that by a moment of silence to let people pray silently. A leader starts after that by singing a part of a touching spiritual song that is followed by urging people to pray inaudibly for their spiritual needs. Ask if anyone could pray. Follow the prayer with another part of hymn and another invitation to pray for a specific service or group of people. Give people enough time to pray in silence.
I encourage you to pray by yourself and pray with others. Start a prayer meeting. It would be better if you have it in the church, but if this is not practical, pray in one home. It would be great if it is weekly, but if not make it every other week or even monthly.
When you do that you will feel a growth in your spiritual life, the fire of loving God and others will start consume your heart, you will fee the joy of the relationship with God, and this will be the beginning of many people steps toward dedicating their lives to Him.