Witnessing Report: Keep the volume down... please

I'm reminded of just how much I enjoy writing, but these days with working 50 hours a week, doing all kinds of ministry, and being married I don't seem to have the time for much else. This also accounts for my consistent absence on facebook. All that is ok though. I don't think I'd change a thing. I prefer my life today without regrets. All that time whining about wondering when my life will "begin" beyond singleness and beyond Tom Thumb has arrived.

My wife went out of town for 4 days this weekend and I found myself "free" in a sense. I spent plenty of time watching star trek, going to the dollar movies, doing little projects around the apartment, running errands, reading, taking naps, eating badly, looking at prices of old sports cars on ebay, staying up late, and sleeping in. It was the single life. I enjoyed a larger bed (It's not easy to fit 2 people on a full sized bed). But you know... when day 4 came, the single life got old. I was bored and I missed my wonderful wife. I did learn that I really need personal time to think, process, and recharge, but eventually I'm reminded that too much of that time is what I wanted to escape through a good job and marriage... and I have. It truly is the good life and I wouldn't trade it for star trek, a sports car, or any combination of money and junk that moth and rust would destroy. I love my wife and I thank God for how He has so graciously provided for me.


One of the things I got to do was go witnessing Saturday night with Nick, his old roommate and his roommate's wife. There weren't many opportunities for personal conversation so Nick and I preached a few times. We were in the same location in Sundance Square near the apartment complex. Nearly every time and everywhere we preach we get complaints. It's just the nature of it. It's clear to me that people complain not primarily because of the noise, but because of the annoying message of the gospel and the confrontation of sin. It never ceases to amaze me how much contemporary Christians and churches get so caught up in sharing the "love of Jesus" that they think when people get offended, we must not be loving enough or we must be doing something wrong. We never speak of sharing the wrath of Jesus, only His love. I'm convinced this Christian ignorance of the sinful nature in the lost is giving Satan much victory in our day. Churches, pastors, and Bible colleges seem to have become so concerned with relevance, receptiveness, pragmatism, and results that we have wandered away from a biblical understanding of unredeemed man and how to reach him.

So of course we had another episode in downtown... this time not with the police, but with the security. I don't think I saw one police officer down there but I saw many security personnel on bikes. After warning us that people might call and that if they call it would be a problem... they of course came back after being called. It's interesting to me how when people call and complain it's as if they are making the law. People can complain all they want, but it doesn't remove or modify our first amendment rights. They have the same rights to speak as I do. So the security guards came and asked us to move. I explained to him that the best locations for foot traffic were nearest the apartment buildings which were also nearest the restaurants and entertainment venues. He tried to suggest other locations, but I said frankly that people will complain no matter where we are. If we go nearer a restaurant then that place will complain. If we go near apartments then they will complain. If we go near the bars then those people will call and complain. The truth is no one wants to hear the gospel message and we can't change that. I told him we'd be leaving in about 45 min. but that we were going to stay and do what we came to do.

They came by a few more times to tell us we were being too loud. I know I was being loud... it was intentional. I explained that I want people to hear the message... it's not hard to understand. In fact especially those people who are complaining need to hear the message. But here's my main observation for the night ... For Christians who don't like to mention clearly the wrath of God and discuss sin in a no-nonsense way as the Bible does and teaches... this is for you...

After I finished preaching, my friend Nick got up to preach. Nick isn't quite as loud as I am and not surprisingly... one of the security guards rode by to also tell him he was being too loud. When would it end to the point where the complainers would be satisfied? The Answer: When we were so quiet that no one could be bothered by the message of eternal life. Nick responded to the guard by raising his voice a bit as he preached. I think Satan can use unbelieving security guards. If they don't believe then they are his children the Bible says. they are "children of wrath." They are yet another means for Satan to drown out the preaching of the gospel. For this reason it's SO hard to be gracious toward them and cooperate with them in any way. If we know our rights I wonder if we should just exercise them without interruption so the gospel isn't hindered. Every moment we aren't sharing out there (or anywhere really) because of an interruption is a dare I say, a moment or a few minutes of victory for Satan. If the world had its way we would cooperate with them so much so that the gospel could only be communicated to ourselves in a sound proof room behind a locked door. I fear and know inside that one day our "cooperating" will cooperate the gospel right out of the picture. But do you know what's worse than that? When Christians cooperate without being asked to. They cooperate by only sharing the most inoffensive things they can about the gospel. Sadly however, when they do this... they are no longer presenting the gospel of the Bible. Is it too far to say they are presenting a gospel that Satan has authorized and supported? One that does not offend and fills our churches with false converts that go out and try to produce other false converts? An old friend of mine once said, "Satan loves to teach people how to share the gospel." I think his students are passing with flying colors and yet in God's school they are already expelled.

Witnessing Reports

4-12-13: “My Wife is Dying of Cancer You Idiot!”

Though there was a vulgar group of tattooed college aged kids singing filthy songs behind us trying to drown out the preaching in rebellion and Alex spoke with a drunk guy who couldn’t even say a clear sentence, our most interesting encounter this night began when a police officer told us there had been a complaint about our preaching. At that location (which had been the best one since the construction in downtown ft. worth there was an apartment building directly to our left. Other times we’ve seen people listening to the preaching out their window. I told the officer that I was surprised they could hear us over the loud vulgar singing of the other group. He said we could move to another location, lower our voices, or that we didn’t have to listen to him at all. While this is true, I was curious as to why he said that. He said an older man called making the complaints and that he complains about everything. We continued preaching however because the laws and ordinances allow us to preach for as long, as loud, and as late as we want without amplified sound. I suspected that this old man needed the gospel anyway.

As I was preaching later, I saw this old man storming across the street over to me and he kinda slapped me in the stomach, walked about 5 feet away, stopped, and said I need to talk to you RIGHT NOW! You need to come here RIGHT NOW! And he pointed to the ground in front of him. The slap felt like it wanted to be a punch because it stung. It occurred to me at that time that he had no authority to tell me to do any such thing. When he saw I wasn’t cooperating immediately, he stood a foot in front of me and yelled, “I’ve called the police and security ____ times!” “My wife is dying of cancer you idiot!” This was at about 8:30pm or so, so it wasn’t terribly late. My thought later though I don’t think I told him in the moment was that his wife having cancer just meant she needed what I had to say all the more… as did he. It’s interesting how when the police didn’t solve his problem he took matters into his own hands. This is what sin does. It only cooperates to it’s own interests. Unbelievers also think it selfish and offensive of us to preach in such circumstances, but God and other believers always rejoice when the gospel is preached. The bottom line is that it’s better for someone to be inconvenienced and hear the message that will save their souls than to be comfortable and yet comfortably headed to hell. I told we have a legal right to be there. He then called me a liar. I said I’d been doing it for a long time and I know. He then said I’d been a liar for all that time. The reality was he was hindering the gospel so as I was about to start preaching over him, Alex stepped in and asked him to step back a few times or he would call the police. He ignored this and said, “Call them!” Then Ron (an older gentleman) stepped in with the most unlikely response.

Ron interrupted the man and said if his wife has cancer then we need to pray for her. He didn’t respond favorably to that and eventually he saw a bicycle cop off to the side and said, “officer!” He went over to the police officer and I continued preaching. The officer told him I was legally allowed so he proceeded to yell at the rest of the group and stormed away. The group then prayed for him and his wife. Minutes later he stormed back and asked my wife for a gospel tract! While we don’t know his intentions for the tract, it could have been that God was already doing something in his heart.  


4-20-13: Main St. Arts Festival

The Main St. Arts Festival in downtown Ft. Worth, Sundance Square this year lasted from Thursday to Sunday night. A few went out Thursday night and we joined them late that night. We just handed out tracts and had one conversation with an intellectual guy who liked to debate everything we had to say. Near the end I finished the conversation with the same point I enjoy making with Atheists and Agnostics… “The truth is that you don’t need a good argument or better information because it’s not a head issue, but a heart issue. You know that if there was a God and the Bible is true then you would be subject to Him and would have to order your life around Him and that’s a terrifying thought. It’s so terrifying that you’ll believe anything but the truth or you’ll make up your own belief system to suit how you live. You do this because it’s more comfortable to feel like you’re in control of your life and free from moral standards.” Kirk Cameron used this in one of the episodes of The Way of The Master and I’ve never forgotten it. It really stops the mouth of the Atheist because they realize how true it is. On that particular episode the woman actually nodded in agreement with Kirk and in my case the guy did something similar.

Alex went out to preach by himself Friday night and my wife and I went out with him again Saturday night. When we got there Saturday I saw the same bagpipe player that tried to drown out the preaching 7 years ago when I went before. I was also struck with fear. I hadn’t been to such festivals in years and there were so many people. We handed out some tracts and I waited for Alex to arrive an hour later. When he did, we chose a good preaching location and he stood up first to preach. Alex preached 3-4 times as did I and our friend Ron preached once also. We had a number of hecklers, but only one of them was consistent. Alex had two women that pretended to be lesbians just to see what he would say about homosexuality and he said it was a sin. I had a large angry man who asked what I believed about the law and I told him believers aren’t under the law and he yelled that I was wrong. He said he was a messianic Jew and that we do have to keep the law. Apparently he hadn’t read Galatians, Romans, or Hebrews. The fun heckler was a man who ran the art booth to our right. We were positioned on the corner of Main St. and 3rd in front of a Jewelry store and the booth was in the street slightly to our right.

Minutes after I began preaching the artist running the booth walked up and stood a foot away from me yelling that I was stealing from him. He said he paid for that booth space and I was stealing business from him. I’m surprised he didn’t play the guitar he had to try to drown us out. I told him if he wanted to talk he could step back. He refused so I preached over him. Later Ron preached and Ron said the artists out there were merely mimicking what God had done in creation. God was the ultimate creator. The artist harassed him afterward claiming Ron was bashing the artists with his comment. Ron wasn’t bashing the artists however. He was merely explaining how good God was. A family from our church showed up to watch and hand out some tracts and after Alex and I were burnt out from preaching, some of us went to the restroom and returned only to find that another group of about 5-6 more people, some of them preachers had seemingly taken the next shift of the night (also right by that artist’s booth! Lol) and they weren’t bad either. Apparently one of them knew me by first and last name, even remembering what we talked about when we met years ago. We exchanged a few numbers.

The real excitement happened just as we were about to leave. Alex stood near the artist’s booth and was about to compliment him on his art (because Alex wants to study art himself and go to college for it), but the man turned around to argue with us again. He said he just finished a conversation with a woman who had cancer. She apparently stopped by earlier but wouldn’t talk because of the preaching. He told me these were “God-loving” people out at the festival who just wanted to have conversations, a peaceful time, and fun. I explained to him that we had freedom of speech in a public place, but that didn’t matter to him. I almost thought with the God-loving statement that he was claiming to be a Christian so I explained that the bottom line was that people who truly love God will rejoice at any circumstance that the gospel is preached. I said the fact that people were dying and going to hell is more important than people having conversations and having fun AND more important than making money. He opened his mouth in a hilariously wide fashion in utter shock at my saying something like that. It should have occurred to me sooner that if this man was opposing the preaching in the beginning, it had to mean he was not a Christian. A Christian rejoices at the preaching of the gospel. In fact we had a number of believers shake our hands while preaching and at one point an entire church group who said how encouraged they were by the preaching. The artist and his friend began asking what it would be like if they came to our place of business and began preaching. I told them I would rather lose my job and my money and the gospel be preached than to make money and it not be preached. Unbelievers can’t handle this kind of reasoning because as Scripture says… it is foolishness to them. This was a classic example of loving money more than God. They were more concerned with making money than they were people going to hell.

This wasn’t the end of it however. The artist was derailed by another guy out there witnessing who decided to continue the argument with him while his friend began arguing with me. He explained that we could have preached there for 30 minutes and moved to a different location. I certainly understood his reasoning, but what if we did that do you think he would see that gesture and go to bed that night thinking he should get saved? Possibly, but not probably. We’d also run into the same problem anywhere else we moved. We couldn’t move away from the booths as another artist suggested because that’s not where the people were. Frankly we didn’t legally have to move and though it may sound harsh, I wasn’t concerned with the artists making money nor was I concerned with them “feeling better” about us. Unbelievers take as many liberties as they can. If we compromise with them on one thing, they’ll likely push for another until we have such things like “free speech locations” on public college campuses where they try to regulate a 1st Amendment right, thereby restricting freedom not permitting it. I was unwilling to move, if for no other reason that this artist and his friend would be themselves be flooded with the gospel message… because they clearly needed it. The bottom line was that the gospel is more important than their money and their business. In the grand scheme of eternity, this has to be true. An eternal perspective realizes this and acts accordingly.

My wife nudged me to bring to my attention to the fact that the conversation was going nowhere so I motioned to Alex that we should go. We'd already been there for about 5 hours. The artist’s friend at this point began yelling and chasing us back to our vehicle. He angrily stomped beside me causing a scene as we walked yelling at me that I was selfish, that I was not acting like a Christian, and saying this was how it feels to be bothered when you can’t do anything about it. It’s interesting that I was apparently the selfish one considering their concern was money over souls. As we walked I knew that if something wasn’t done he would follow us to our vehicle and I didn’t want him to know what we drove or where we parked so I took us into Barnes n Noble for refuge. He knew he couldn’t yell in there so he cussed at us as we walked in and left. We were then able to call security to escort us to our vehicles. Such a good lesson in the sinful nature. I truly believe that if Christians really were on the frontlines sharing their faith they would see this level of depravity and rebellion toward God in all its glory. Their eyes would be opened to just how much the world needs the hard truths of judgment, hell, and repentance. We must speak the truth in love, not simply speak love. To share grace without truth is remove the reason for the grace in the beginning.