Invite Friends to Church John 1:35-42 CLICK TITLE FOR AUDIO
You should invite friends, acquaintances, and contacts to come to church with you. Do you wonder why you should invite them? Well, here are some very good reasons you should invite your friends to church. Inviting your friends to church:
Fulfills God’s purpose. Jesus left us here to bring others to Christ. If he did not want us to have an influence on others for the sake of bringing them to Christ, he would have taken us out of the world as soon as we had gotten saved. Yet, we are here doing his work, while he is bodily seated at the right hand of the Father in heaven [Jn 17:15, 18, 20-21; Phil 2:15-16]. So, invite friends to church to hear the gospel preached.
Helps them come to Christ. The Holy Spirit works very powerfully when the gospel is preached in church. People are praying, the pastor is well prepared, the Spirit has liberty and the visitor senses the responsiveness of others to the message. Your friend is in a place where there are few, if any, distractions during the preaching so that the Spirit has his undivided attention. See 1 Cor 1:21; Rom 10:14.
Keeps the church healthy. A healthy church is a reproducing church. When you see the church in the Acts of the Apostles, it is multiplying and increasing [Acts 2:42, 4:4, 5:14, etc.]. Today, you don’t see growth like that. And the mega church growth is not the same kind of growth. Today, men are drawn by the music. The Bible says that God and Jesus must draw them. Music is for saved people to praise God not for lost people to come to Christ. They won’t find him in the midst of the world’s music. The reason you don’t see the proper growth is simple; people are not out telling others about Christ. They are preoccupied with the world. A friend of ours challenged his fellow church members to get up a crowd in their Sunday evening service by inviting their friends and neighbors to church. At first, they scoffed. Nevertheless, he spent his entire week telling others to come to his church on the following Sunday evening. He had over 100 visitors accept his invitation. Several were saved. Invite friends with you.
Gets them connected to the body. 1 Cor 12:27 says, “Now ye are the body of Christ, and members in particular.” When your friends get saved, they are going to be already connected to a body of believers. I believe in personal evangelism. But one of the drawbacks is that when a person gets saved in his home, he is more inclined to believe that’s all the Lord expects of him. And so, he can be rather hard to get to church. Of course, if he doesn’t come to church he is not going to grow much as a Christian. He needs to learn to pray for others, to give to the Lord’s work, to study the Bible, and to tell others about Jesus. He’s not going to do that sitting at home.
When your friends get saved and start coming to church with you, you are more likely to center your activities around the church rather than in the world. This will help to keep you from having one foot in the world and one in the church. Christians are often plagued by living two lives. They live one around the church where they learn to act pious and they live the other among their friends in the world where they are worldly. Thus, they live the life of a hypocrite. There is not a more miserable life as a Christian. Living like this will undoubtedly draw you right out of the church at some point in time.
Encourages them. Your friends will have friends that they can invite to church, as well. And so, you and your friends will be responsible for bringing souls to Christ and new members to the church. After all, it is from the new members that your pastor will be able to expand the work of your church’s ministry. Who knows, one of your friends may ultimately become a pastor or a missionary one of these days. Andrew’s brother, Peter, did. So, invite friends to church.
Conclusion: invite friends to church. This is particularly important on a special day when people, who don’t regularly attend church, are considering where to go.