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
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.