How to Help People Get to Jesus
The following is the summary and transcript of a video by Pastor Vincent Carpenter of Antioch, Waco. The video is found here: https://lifegroupleaders.com/pastoral-care/
Introductory story: “Throughout my teens and my years of college, I played football, but actually I started my athletic career much younger, playing baseball.
Now, I wasn’t really a very good basketball player, so that was kind of my motivation to develop my football skills. But when I played Little League baseball, I had two coaches on the team I was part of. I had the head coach and the assistant coach. The head coach is what I would describe as your typical old-school style coach. I mean, he was very intense. He yelled at us a lot, would tell us when we did something wrong.
And the assistant coach was kind of different. He would encourage me, helped build me up, you know. I felt like he was just there for me. And so, I noticed whenever the head coach would work with me, I felt a little nervous and didn’t play very well. I would be prone to miss the ball and couldn’t hit very well. But whenever the assistant coach would work with me, he was always encouraging me, and I felt more confident.
Now, I never became a great baseball player. But I felt so empowered when the assistant coach would work with me. Now, I share the story because that’s a picture of pastoral care. As life group leaders, you provide pastoral care to the people of our church. And we are so thankful for that. You walk alongside people, you help them.
And now, it could be easy to assume that pastoral care is just kind of helping people through problems, helping people with the pain of life. And it can be that, sometimes, but actually, pastoral care is a lot more. Pastoral care is actually helping people get closer to Jesus. And so, I want to talk with you in the rest of this video about what that looks like.”
Text: John 12:1-11 NASB
Here, he describes the different characters in the story and says Mary is our model because she got close to Jesus.
“First of all, to provide pastoral care simply means to love people well. Whenever people feel loved, they’re more open to us. And when they feel loved, they are more open to Jesus and the work he wants to do in their life. So, we make people feel loved (and so pastor them well) when we do the following things.
- We pastor people well when we make them feel loved:
- Affirm and encourage them.
- Listen well.
- Ask good questions.
- Speak truth in love.
- We pastor people well when we help them discern their real problem:[1]
- Pray before, during, and after time with people.
- Ensure accurate understanding of the situation.
- Equip and practice listening to God with them.
“Whenever I’m meeting with our people, I encourage them that they can hear from God. We want God speaking into their problem. We want God speaking to their pain. I tell them John 10:27, my sheep hear my voice, and they follow me. That’s a hallmark scripture to help us know that God speaks to us and because of that, we can hear him. And so, I explain that how God uses the word as a primary way to speak to us. He uses the body to speak to us, that’s why we go to church, that’s why we go to life group, he uses that still small voice described in 1 Kings 19, that God can speak to our hearts and that little inner voice that we can hear. And then God can sometimes just give us peace about a decision or direction we need to go in. God speaks in other ways as well.
And so, once I’ve encouraged them that God can speak into their problem, then we practice it right then and there. We take time and pray, and we just wait and listen to God. I encourage them afterward that they don’t have to hear some big word from God. It’s okay if they don’t hear anything at all. If they feel like they didn’t hear anything, I just ask them, well, what was the first thought that came to your mind? And oftentimes, when they share that God has spoken through that simple thought they had in their mind. So, we help people feel loved, and then we help them discern what the real problem is.”
- We pastor people well when we help them identify a biblical response:
- Ask what they have found in the Bible related to their problem.
- Read an appropriate passage with them.
- Discuss what obedience to the passage looks like for them.
“And after they’ve discerned what the real issue is, now we help them identify a biblical response. You see, we can easily just give them advice. We can share our experience that’s similar to something they went through, and sometimes that can be helpful. But actually, we don’t want them to know our advice or our experience. We want them to hear what God has to say. And we do that by simply asking them, what has God said to you either in your prayer time or your study of the word related to the issue you are going through? Oftentimes, people haven’t really studied the word related to the problems they’re going through. So, there’s an opportunity for you to take them through the word of God. And you begin to explore and look at what does the Bible say about this situation? And you can look at those passages and begin to ask yourself simple questions. What does this passage say to me? How can I obey? How can I respond? How can I apply this to my life? So, we speak the truth to people. The word says that the truth will set us free. Be mindful that we always speak the truth of God’s word, but we always speak it in love.
I was meeting with a gentleman once who was having marital problems and we were talking and we prayed. As we prayed, I felt like God led me to Ephesians 5. When I read Ephesians 5:31, which says, “Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh,” he responded very emotionally. And so, I asked him what the response was about. And he said to me, my wife’s main complaint is that I have prioritized my relationship to my mom over her. And so, hearing that passage gave him revelation that his wife needed to be his first priority after Jesus.
God uses his word to give us a way to respond to the challenges of our lives.
So, once we’ve discerned with them what the real issue is [diagnosis] and helped them to identify a biblical response [treatment], now we actually help them apply it.
- We pastor people well when we exhort them to follow through on obedience to God:
(Ask the person to summarize what God has said through the meeting and what they feel He wants them to do.)- Remind them that they cannot do what is needed alone (John 15:5).
- They must seek empowerment from the Holy Spirit (Romans 8:26-27).
- They must engage the body of Christ for help (1 Cor. 12:12-13).
And so, once we have discerned what the word of God has to say about the problem, about the pain that we’re going through, we wrap up our care by giving our people a simple exhortation. And what I mean by exhortation is we want them to summarize what God has said through this time together. What is God encouraging you to do? And then we exhort them to follow through on that.
We simply do that by letting them know that God, most times doesn’t make problems go away just like that.
We would like to get an instant result. We’d like to get the pain resolved immediately. And sometimes that happens. But in most cases, it’s a process. So, we encourage them to embrace the process of walking with God through the challenge that they’re facing. We further encourage them that they cannot walk this journey by themselves. John 15:5 says I’m the vine and you’re the branches. Without me you can’t do anything. So, we exhort them that they have to seek God. They cannot go through their challenge under their own strength.
They need the power of the Holy Spirit, and they need the body. Romans 8 says that the spirit of God intercedes for us with groans that we cannot even comprehend. So, the Holy Spirit knows we need more so than we do. So, we have to rely on the Holy Spirit’s power to get through our challenges. And further, it says, we need the body.
1 Cor 12 says the body has many parts and they all work together. But oftentimes when we are in pain, oftentimes when we have problems, we feel embarrassed. We feel ashamed, we feel guilty. And so, because of that, we have this tendency to wanna pull away from the body.
But the more pain we have, all the more we ought to press into the body. And so, we encourage our brothers and sisters, we exhort them that they need the Holy Spirit. They need the body to be able to be faithful to follow through on what God has said to them.
We’re pastoring people, we’re loving people, and a lot of people have a lot of problems, and God has invited us to walk alongside these individuals.
But I want you to know there is no pressure for you to solve people’s problems. There’s no expectation for you to make pain go away from anyone’s life. Your responsibility is simply to walk alongside them and help them get closer to Jesus. And through the power of the Holy Spirit, and through the wisdom of His word, you can do that in a very effective way. Thank you. God bless you for serving our people.”
[1][1] When people go to a doctor, they tell them their symptoms and he helps them diagnose their health problems. The same is true with pastoral care. When people tell us their issues, we listen and help them diagnose their spiritual problems.
