March 1999
About Mike
During Wednesday morning EE training, EE Vice President for Eurasia, Buddy Gaines, took a team to a Food Bank and Thrift Store. Buddy spotted a young man named Mike sitting on the curb reading a New Testament. “I struck up a conversation with him,” said Buddy.
Mike said that he and his grandmother attend church, but he wasn’t certain about his assurance of eternal life. Buddy shared the Gospel with him. It made sense to Mike and he prayed to receive Christ as his Savior. With a smile on his face, Mike signed his spiritual birth certificate.
Then they walked into the church’s food bank. Mike filled out an application to receive food for his body. He accepted Jesus into his heart for his personal salvation, and he also accepted the church’s gift of love with some temporal food for him and his grandmother.
Which brings to mind this bible verse: “What use is it, my brethren, if someone says he has faith but he has no works? Can that faith save him? If a brother or sister is without clothing and in need of daily food, and one of you says to them, go in peace, be warmed and be filled, and yet you do not give them what is necessary for their body, what use is that? Even so faith, if it has no works, is dead, being by itself.” James 2:14–17
From the ditch to the mountain top.
While driving to a church evening service, Larry Bohanan slammed on the brakes to avoid running into the back of a pickup truck that was in a ditch with its lights out and its back end sticking into the traffic lane.
Larry turned on his flashers to keep oncoming cars alert to the situation. Soon Larry learned that the man in the pickup truck had been drinking. “He just kept saying how sorry he was for not going to church with his family and what a mess he was in,” said Larry.
It took awhile to get the pickup out of the ditch, which was near the man’s home. The man’s two 18-year-old sons came out to help. Larry asked the two boys if they were to die tonight would they awake in Heaven. They responded that they would go to Hell. While Larry shared with them, their dog was trying to bite him, and succeeded. “I thought that the dog had a demon in him,” said Larry. Finally, they invited Larry into their home.
As Larry continued sharing the Gospel, the mother and three teenage girls returned home from church. While they were regular church attendees, they were not saved. Larry shared the Gospel with all seven of them, and all seven prayed to receive Christ. “I went home to get them a bible and some material,” remarked Larry. “And when I returned, they were singing Gospel songs.”
It Works
As we’ve experienced from stories like these, EE works. It’s working in hundreds of local churches through the U.S., in prisons, in nursing homes, in high schools, and on college campuses. Little children, enthusiastic youth, and seasoned adults have seen it work in every nation of the world and in a growing number of people groups within those nations. In 1998, nearly one-and-a-half million people came to Christ through EE. If you’re not involved in EE, we encourage you to enroll in the next semester of training at your church. Obey Christ’s first command to fish for people!
Here is the same information in a PDF file format. The information is layed out with both pages on a single page so that the page can be folded in half and used as a bulletin insert.
©1998
Copyright Evangelism Explosion
International, Inc. All rights reserved. Please address comments
on this webpage to webmaster@eeinternational.org.
Revised: July 25, 2000.