If I’m in the right mood, I can be easily convinced to join a group of people and play a game. My in-laws are really big game people, and that always makes for a lot of laughs at family gatherings. Most of the time, the humor comes from someone making a Freudian slip and saying something completely inappropriate, causing the entire room to erupt in deep belly laughter.

This past Christmas, my wife and I gave my brother-in-law a new board game. It was a game that none of us had ever played before, so the routine course of action took place before we all gathered around to play: we read the rules.

To be honest, I absolutely can’t stand reading the rules before playing a game. I just want to get to it! There is fun to be had and pausing to make sure I engage in the fun correctly kind of saps away some of the excitement. The truth is, though, that if someone didn’t read the rules first, we would end up playing the game wrong, the scoring wouldn’t make sense, and the actual fun would get derailed by arguments, frustration and someone inadvertently kicking the chair where grandma sits. Bad things would happen, man. Bad things.

For many areas of life (not just playing board games) the key to fruitfulness is appropriate preparation. And evangelism is no exception. Yes, it is important to practice and be prepared to answer specific questions that might come up, but the preparation I’m talking about here has to do with prayer.

If you closely examine the ministry of Jesus, you will easily discover that He was a man who took prayer very seriously. The bible says that Jesus often withdrew to lonely places to pray (Luke 5:16), even in the midst of a lot of work that needed to be done. A kind of running motto should pretty much always be on the mind and heart of every Christian, and it goes like this: “If it’s good enough for Jesus, it’s good enough for me” (although this doesn’t fit on a bracelet quite as well as “WWJD.”) Jesus’ life didn’t lack prayer and neither should ours.

Frankly, if we’re not praying throughout the entire process of communicating our faith, we’re trying to accomplish the work of God through our own efforts.

Prayer is where our strength comes from, it’s where our hearts become aligned with God’s, it’s where our motivations are focused on the appropriate things and it’s where we recognize who is really behind all of this anyway. We need to ask God to open people’s hearts to the gospel before we open our mouths. We must be talking to Him about our fears and apprehension in a way that honestly recognizes that He must work in order for people’s lives to genuinely change. It may sound cheesy but it’s the some of the best evangelism advice I’ve ever heard: before you talk to people about God, talk to God about people. It really is the best way to prepare in order to see good things happen.

Read John 17

1. What does this passage reveal about the prayer life of Jesus?
2. If prayer truly is the way to properly align your heart for effective evangelism, what might be pushing you to “skip it and move on to the action”?
3. How has Jesus’ model of prayer inspired you when it comes to evangelism?