Good afternoon everyone, your friend MB here again. About a week ago I was thinking about something, and God turned it into a teachable moment for me that I will now share.

Every day we wake up, we have to brush our teeth. But why?

The most immediate reason is… morning breath!

(If it lingers beyond Listerine, we can upgrade it to halitosis, or chronic bad breath.)

If we skip the toothbrush, no matter what we say during the morning (and no matter what we do to mask it), we will be “offensive” to those we speak to.

Ad previously mentioned, He turned this fact into a lesson for me, a lesson that I feel led to share.

A lesson about… Evangelism!

One of the key responsibilities of believers, it has been since Jesus walked this earth in the first century AD.

the problem with a lot of evangelists, or people who attempt to evangelize, rather, is that they’re not doing so out of love.

Most people are doing it just because God said so.

While that is the only reason you really need to do anything, in order to evangelize effectively, we also need to carry ourselves as Christ would have, to speak as he would have and to love as he would have.

We need to speak and act out of love when we evangelize.

We don’t speak from a place of superiority, but from a place of love and a desire to share the gift that God has given us with the world.

Many of us are surrounded by people we think wouldn’t listen to his gospel if someone spoke about it. And sadly, the assumption is right most of the time.

But why? Why do you think that is?

While people who do not follow Jesus have their reasons for not doing so, many people claim their reason to be that Christians are hypocrites and that we don’t practice what we preach.

Sadly, many of us don’t.

Many of us speak to people like we are superior. Many of us speak to people with a very “holier than thou” attitude. Many of us look down our nose at people we think are beneath us.

But I tell you brothers and sisters those thought processes are wrong; not only are they wrong but they are sinful.

No man is above another, no man is better than another. No man deserves salvation, but we all deserve damnation.

Through Jesus Christ, YHWH, Jehovah, our great Elohim, the creator of all things had mercy on us. He sent Jesus Christ, his only begotten son, to save us from our sins; to save us from the penalty of death and separation from himself.

He did so by coming down in human form through Jesus Christ.

He humbled himself by becoming a human and living a perfect and sinless human life.

He sacrificed himself, he was beaten, mocked, disfigured, crucified… All so that we could have salvation.

He rose from the dead three days after his crucifixion, claiming victory over death hell and the grave. Not just for himself, but for all who believe in him.

We humans are sinners and deserve the punishment of sinners. In that, we are all equal.

So I ask you… Who are we to judge anyone? Who are we to look down our noses at anyone? Who are we to think we are superior to anyone? Who are we to think we are above anyone when the one who is above all lowered himself down to our level temporarily to save us?

So let’s not be hypocrites, brothers and sisters…

Let’s not forget our equality with our fellow man. Let us not forget that we all deserve the same fate. Let us not forget that were it not for Jesus, we would all be burning in hell.

When we speak of Christ to others, when we act in his name…let us do these things with his love. Let us do these things with his desire for communion with those whom he created. Let us do these things driven by his will and in his way. Let us call out to him in prayer for those who are lost every day. Let us call out to him in prayer before we ever step foot out into the world with the intent on acting in his name. Let us pray for guidance, let us pray for wisdom, let us pray that he will soften our hearts and give warmth to our gaze. Let us pray that before we tell anyone to change that we would be changed by him first.

There’s an old saying that I used to hear a lot, “you catch more flies with honey than you do vinegar”. That simply means that acting in a friendly manner and speaking nicely to people will draw more of them to you in a favorable way. It applies here as well.

Yes, you will deal with people who want nothing to do with you and who will show you this in many very unfriendly ways, but you never know who that that’s going to be. You never know if the next person you speak to might turn to Christ if you are kind to them as you speak. You never know if the next person you speak to might turn to Christ because you did not act like you were better than them when you spoke to them.

You never know who’s watching you every time you step out of your house. Someone could be watching you today that knows you are a Christian and is looking toward you to see how a true Christian really acts. Always keep these things in mind and try to act and speak as Jesus himself would.

As an evangelist you will have many difficult things to say. You will have to puncture the bubble of peoples world view and point them to the true world view, God’s world view. If you do so in the right way, you may just open someone’s heart to Jesus and allow the Holy Spirit to do his work on them.

So don’t speak to people with spiritual halitosis.

-MB