Years ago I took my aunt to an evangelistic meeting–the time I had ever gotten to hear the gospel preached. At the end of his message, the evangelist said, “I want everyone to stand up,” and everyone stood. Then he said, “Now I want all the Christians to sit down.”
I watched my aunt’s face as her eyes immediately turned to steel and her jaw stiffened in anger and embarrassment.
It took me three years to get her to listen the preaching of the gospel again, and she came that time only because I was preaching it–”I know you’d never pull a trick like that on me,” she said.
My friend, we’ve got to do our homework on how people out there feel. They’re scared to death to come into our churches, and all my sympathy is with them.
–Howard Hendricks, Teaching to Change Lives.
