 This video is sponsored by Shortform. So what's your name? I'm Jordan. Jordan, my name's Isaac. Wait a minute, pause for a second. That was 17-year-old me behind the camera. I think my voice was like three octaves higher at that point. But anyway, I was out with a couple of my buddies. We were sharing the Gospel with strangers on the street and filming the encounters. We were new to this, very new, but we were inspired by Ray Comfort of Living Waters Ministry. He went out on the street, shared the Gospel with folks, filmed the encounters, we watched some of them, and man, we were like, we can do this too. So we grabbed our camcorder and we headed out. What transpired was an unexpected conversation with, well, I'll get to that. But first, I want to share with you three of the things that I was trying to keep in mind as I was going out there to share the Gospel. This might be helpful for you as you look to do evangelism on your own. So first was my key question. Are you a good person? This is such a powerful question. It didn't come from me. It came from Ray Comfort. And I think it gets at the heart of what we believe about ourselves. Are we good? Are we evil? Do we believe we are sinners? Do we think we need God's grace? And this gives us a gateway. This question gives us a gateway into actually unpacking. Are you a good person according to God's law? And we can walk through the law and then we can see, hey, wait, we're actually all sinners. We've all fallen short of the glory of God. And that's why we need Jesus. It's a powerful question. The second thing that I was trying to keep in mind was stay focused on the law and the Gospel. Look, at that point in my life, 17 years old, I was no apologist. Yes, I had done some apologetics work in the past, but ultimately I wasn't that thoroughly equipped to answer a lot of the accusations around the faith. I could do some, but there were some things that I just wasn't super aware of or equipped in. And that's okay. And that's why I want to encourage you guys to get out there and do it because you don't need to know all the answers to everything because your mission and your focus is to stay on the bad news of sin and the good news of Jesus. That's where I want to stay focused. Ultimately, apologetics should serve as a pit stop, not a destination. And that was my mindset going into it. Number three, and it's pretty basic, but have a conversation, not a confrontation. I think we, as Christians, can have a little bit of a tendency to become defensive. At least I can when somebody says, hey, I don't believe the Bible or Christianity is not true or Jesus didn't say that or whatever else. You can start to feel yourself getting a little tense and you're like, no, I need to fight back against this. And that's not to say that you can't give good answers to objections that people bring forward, but stay grounded. That was my mentality. Okay, Isaac, you got to stay in the conversation. Let them share what they believe. Don't feel the need to just cut them off all of a sudden just because you disagree with it. Let them say their piece and ask them probing questions to get to the heart of their worldview. Now back to the story. Me and my friends, we were out witnessing, filming the encounters. We had just finished up an interview witnessing encounter with one young fellow, kind of our age. And another guy walked up to us and he asked to be interviewed. We thought, oh my goodness, we hit the jackpot because it was painstaking work to try to go up to people and say, hey, you know, we're shooting some interviews about what happens after you die. Like, would you like to have a conversation with us? That's pretty nerve wracking to have to do that to a whole bunch of people and get rejected. It wasn't very fun. So it felt like a godsend when this guy just came up to us and he said, hey, interview me. I'm like, this is amazing. I remember him telling us that he ran some sort of YouTube channel and us grabbing a scrap piece of paper from the camcorder bag, writing it down and waiting with anticipation to get home to finally look up this channel. When we got back to my parents' place, we headed down to the basement, which was our hangout space and we typed into YouTube the channel name and what we saw blew us away. What I didn't realize till after this conversation was that this man was the creator of a very popular YouTube new agey spirituality YouTube channel. We couldn't believe that this popular YouTuber guy lived in our random Canadian city and also we had the opportunity to share the gospel with him. Now the reaction from all of us externally was excitement. We were pumped, but internally, I was sick to my stomach. And the reason is I really didn't feel like I did a good job. He questioned the idea of a conscience. The idea of a conscience was actually invented by the Greeks long time ago. So they were trying to describe something, but it's kind of like Osho said. If the moment that you like create a religion or a belief or ideology about a thing, then you take away from the magic of what the thing is. And from that regard, Buddhism is anti-Buddha. Christianity is the anti-Christ. He rejected the biblical understanding of future judgment. And so just as I have lied and just as I have hated, so have I told the truth and so have I loved. And in fact, it was the doing of the lie in the first place and experiencing how that felt that allowed me to be like, to make a change in my consciousness and say, you know what? I can actually, I can, hold on, I can fix this and fix the vibe. And so then when you create a healing amongst the lie, then the lie, you've created a recompense. That's what God wants. That's what Jesus wants. He embraced what could be seen as a pantheistic or panentheistic worldview. Do you associate with yourself with any worldview of any kind or are you kind of a free threat thinker? All. What do you mean by that? It is the only word that I've been able to find or learn so far that accurately describes all. It's all. That's God. God is all. Like I said, I had some apologetics training but in the moment trying to respond, especially with the pressure of the camera, it made me sweat. Now, fast forward back to my parents' place and I was letting my insecurities really get ahold of me. Why did I talk so loud? Why do I sound so dumb? Why does my voice sound like that? Why did I respond that way? Oh, that's what he was talking about. I didn't understand that and otherwise I would have responded differently. I was just letting these thoughts consume me. At that time in my life, nearly seven years ago, as I've shared here before, I really tied my performance to God's love for me, that God's love for me was proportional on how I performed, how good I was. For a moment, I considered to try to convince the guys to not post the video at all but ultimately it was this tension because I wanted people to watch the video. I wanted them to see the gospel but I didn't want them to see how much of a fool I was or felt like I was. But the one comfort I had at that time was that we only had 200 subscribers. Great, nobody would really watch it and the people that were supposed to watch it to hear the gospel, they'd watch it but for the most part, it would just go into obscurity. The next day, something happened that I never expected but before I share the second half of the story with you, I want to share with you a service that I really love. Shortform has the best book guides to thousands of nonfiction books. I use Shortform for overviews on books I'm curious about and to learn the key ideas that I can apply to my life and ministry. A few of my favorite genres are productivity, leadership, and communication. I just finished the guide to Cal Newport's book, Deep Work. One of the helpful strategies in the book is to disconnect ourselves from social media for a distinct chunk of time in order to let boredom happen because our brains need downtime in order to produce great ideas and to achieve focus. I love this, so Shortform drops new articles and guides every single week and they get the subscribers to vote on what books to cover. By joining through my link in the description, shortform.com slash daily disciple. You'll receive five days of unlimited access and an additional 20% discounted annual membership. This will give you access to thousands of book guides for the price of like one book a month. Thanks so much to Shortform for sponsoring this video. Now, back to the story. So the next day I kid you not, my dream came true and my greatest nightmare. The video started blowing up and for us with a YouTube channel of about 200 subscribers, that meant that it got a thousand views and then 10,000 views and then 30,000 views. We had been in the YouTube space for a while. We tried all sorts of different things to try to catch the algorithm, but finally a video was catching and a video that was really cool. We were sharing the gospel in it, like that's awesome and amazing. But for me, I had a pit in my stomach. Like what's going on? I should be thrilled. What we wanted to happen is happening and yet I feel this great anxiety in my soul and looking at the comments was my final blow. Comment after comment tearing me apart. At least that's what it felt like. My fears were confirmed. I'm a joke. Pause for a second though. At this point in the story, where was my attention? It was on myself. It was on my flaws or my perceived flaws, my perceived inadequacies or my actual inadequacies. I was self-focused. There's no doubt about it. But because I was so consumed with those things, I hid myself relationally from God because I felt like I didn't deserve to be a part of his work. I felt like unfit to be a part of God's mission. And I was also wanted to protect myself from receiving any more rejection or perceived hate. But if I'm honest, here's the hard truth that I needed to hear. Number one, our standards aren't always God's standards. You may be holding unrealistic expectations over your head. You won't always say the perfect things or come up with the perfect responses. But that's okay. Like God calls us to faithfulness. Number two, you are inadequate and flawed. But God planned it this way that in everything you would have to trust in him that you would remain humble and that all the fruit that would come from this would be as a result of God's work and not your own. But don't get discouraged. In Philippians 1-6 it says, I'm sure of this, that he who began a good work and you will bring it to completion on the day of Jesus Christ. Second Corinthians 12-9, but he said to me, my grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness. Therefore I will boast all the more gladly in my weakness so that the power of Christ may rest on me. Getting all those hate comments back then almost marked the end of my online ministry. I felt like, okay, I'm not equipped enough to do what God wants me to do and I was scared of online rejection or people thinking that I was stupid. But ultimately I needed to hone into what God said of me and what he equipped me in that, yes, I am flawed. Yes, I make mistakes. Yes, I am inadequate in a lot of ways. But God wants to use me even in the midst of my weaknesses because he is strong. If I could share one last thing with you, it'd be this, don't let unrealistic expectations, personal inadequacies, outside hate or internal insecurities stop you from following Christ. And where he has called you because what I'm learning is you will encounter resistance. You will, whether that's internal or external. But if you're following Christ, you're on the right path. So trust in him, submit to him. He knows what he's doing. Thanks so much for watching guys and I'll see you next time. God bless.