Six Steps to Giving a Successful Invitation
March 30, 2020
My wife is a wedding photographer (in my humble opinion she’s the best in the world). I get to travel with her quite often and one of my favorite aspects of these adventures is photographing proposals. We’ve woken up at 3 am to hide on top of a mountain, we’ve hidden under decks and recently stood in the pouring rain, all to capture this defining moment.
Everything is about to change for this couple! A “yes” means agreeing to spend the rest of their lives together. They are agreeing to lay their lives down to become one.
The Bible is clear that marriage is a picture of the relationship between Christ and the Church (Ephesians 5:32). The return of Christ and the culmination of His Kingdom is represented as a wedding feast (Revelation 19:6-9). Therefore, it is fair to say that a marriage proposal is a picture of the invitation to enter into an eternal relationship with God. God is making his appeal through us to His beloved.
Just as a proposal requires a YES or NO answer, the Gospel is not merely something to think about, but something to respond to. The Gospel requires a response. We can either accept Jesus’ offer or we can reject Him. In this short article, I’m going to offer six steps to give an effective invitation, so God’s appeal to His beloved is as clear as possible.
1 - Preach the Gospel clearly.
The first essential for giving a good invitation is to clearly explain the Gospel. A good invitation doesn’t start with a message on finances or stress or “God loves you,” without a clear presentation of the Gospel. Before a hopeful spouse responds to a proposal, they must first know what their lover is asking. I have written an article previously that gives extensive clarity around how to do this portion well. I think here it’s enough to say, give people the real Gospel before jumping into an invitation, but I’d highly recommend going back to read that article. For more study on this topic, Matt Chandler’s book, Explicit Gospel is a very helpful resource.
2 - Explain what is required to follow Jesus.
In Luke 14:25-33, Jesus says,
"If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple. Whoever does not bear his own cross and come after me cannot be my disciple. For which of you, desiring to build a tower, does not first sit down and count the cost, whether he has enough to complete it? Otherwise, when he has laid a foundation and is not able to finish, all who see it begin to mock him, saying, ‘This man began to build and was not able to finish.’ Or what king, going out to encounter another king in war, will not sit down first and deliberate whether he is able with ten thousand to meet him who comes against him with twenty thousand? And if not, while the other is yet a great way off, he sends a delegation and asks for terms of peace. So, therefore, any one of you who does not renounce all that he has cannot be my disciple."
Jesus is telling us to not make a hasty decision in following Him without first considering the cost. They need to know the cost of following Jesus, but also the cost of not following Jesus. We must tell the listeners about the good parts (you can’t oversell the Gospel), but also about the suffering, or else they will be like the seed in the Parable of the Sower that fell away when persecution and suffering came. Responding to the invitation is not the finished line, but the starting block, and we need to help the listener understand the implications of this decision.
3 - Explain what a genuine response to the Gospel looks like- REPENT and BELIEVE.
An in-depth study through the book of Acts gives us the clearest picture of what a Gospel invitation looks like. We see in Acts 2:38, 3:19, 8:12-13, 8:37, and many other places, either the word, “repent,” or the word, “believe,” as the invitation to be converted or explanation of someone’s conversion. As a new believer, this was slightly confusing to me, but after further study, I realize these are two sides of the same coin. Genuine belief includes repentance and genuine repentance only flows from belief.
One of the clearest pictures of this is in Luke 15 in the prodigal’s return home. After the young son hits bottom in the middle of a famine, he leaves the pigpen (repentance) and returns home, running into the father’s arms (faith). If the son would have stayed in the pigpen, claiming God loved him and asserting doctrinal truths, he would have been gravely mistaken. The proof of his faith was that he left the pigpen.
Repentance and faith are two sides of the same coin, and we must explain what this looks like. Likewise, a girl that doesn’t know what marriage means would love to accept the shiny ring, but without knowing that her “YES” response implies that she will be with only him forever and must move in with him, forsaking all others, she cannot make an informed response. To say “yes” to Jesus means you say “no” to all other gods and paths and you will be His forever.
Just like the joy-filled response of a girl who is enthralled with bubbling love for her future husband, if God has opened the listener’s eyes to how sublimely beautiful He is, this response will flow naturally. He is truly the Greatest Treasure in the Universe and it only makes sense for us to give up everything for Him!
A great resource for deeper study in this area is JD Greear’s book, Stop Asking Jesus Into Your Heart.
4 - Give them a chance to respond.
Once you’ve clearly explained the Gospel, the requirements of following Jesus, and what it means to repent and believe, now it’s time to give them a chance to respond. I often do this by leading them in prayer while they are in their seats, but it can be done in many different ways: coming forward to pray, praying in their chair, being connected with a person to pray one-on-one, or even being baptized on the spot. The important thing isn’t how this is done, but that you give them a chance to act on the information they’ve heard.
Like we said at the beginning, the Gospel requires a response. Therefore we should give the listener a chance to respond. A key component I often emphasize here is that the prayer isn’t what saves you. If you repeat exactly what I say without having a heart of faith, it is void. What saves us is not outward prayer, but rather genuine faith that expresses itself in desperate prayer to the Loving God of the universe!
5 - Celebrate what just happened.
My favorite proposals are the ones with loved ones present, because of the celebration that ensues afterward. When it's just the couple, it feels a little awkward because it’s a much bigger moment than two people and the photographer (and the photographer’s husband) can produce in a few cheers. When dozens of friends and many generations of family members are there, it just feels like a more proper response as loud cheers of genuine elation erupt!
If I’m honest, celebrating is something I’m still working on. I am typically very focused on giving the perfect invitation that I sometimes forget to celebrate. The Bible says that Heaven throws a massive party when one sinner repents, therefore, we should celebrate when people respond to the Gospel as well (Luke 15:7, 10, 22-24). I typically do this by having people raise their hands and then encouraging everyone to celebrate with the new believers, but you can also celebrate as you connect them with the last step in how to give an effective invitation…
6 - Connect them with a person and a next step.
One of the issues with the modern wedding culture is that we put too little emphasis on the actual marriage. We put hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars into having one big party that will last a few hours, but spend just a couple of hours and almost no time in premarital counseling and planning for a marriage that will last decades! It is my fear we do this with evangelism as well.
I have been to many weddings where we send the newlyweds off with sparklers and celebration, with many questions on how the actual marriage will turn out. As an evangelist, I’ve had this thought way too many times as I leave an event where many people just responded to the Gospel. I wonder how they will be discipled at this church. We must not only focus on the response but do our best to set them up for a lifetime of following Christ. We must equip these new converts to be “married” to Jesus forever.
Practically how I do this is by trying to connect every person who responds to the Gospel with a person to have a 1on1 conversation. We wrote a new believer devotional to give to every person who responds, which covers topics such as abiding, community, praying, reading the Bible, killing sin, and living on mission. It is also good here to encourage them to be baptized and to plug into a local church. If the event is held at a church, we encourage the church staff/volunteers to capture their information and follow-up with them over the next few days and weeks.
What a massive privilege it is to be the vessel God uses to herald His Good News and give His proposal to this world?!? This is sublime stuff and we shouldn’t be flippant about it. I will close with a story from DL Moody’s experience, which helps emphasize the importance of giving an invitation.
On October 8th, 1871, Moody preached to a massive crowd and ended his message by telling them to think about the Gospel and come back the following week, rather than giving an invitation as he typically did. That “next time” never came, because that night the city of Chicago went up in flames with the awful Chicago fires. Many never heard the Gospel again. He deeply regretted his decision to not give an invitation and vowed to never make the same mistake again. (Source)
Reminiscing on this experience, Moody says,
“I have never since dared to give an audience a week to think of their salvation. If they were lost they might rise up in judgment against me. I have never seen that congregation since. I will never meet those people until I meet them in another world. But I want to tell you of one lesson that I learned that night which I have never forgotten, and that is, when I preach, to press Christ upon the people then and there and try to bring them to a decision on the spot. I would rather have that right hand cut off than to give an audience a week now to decide what to do with Jesus.”