Over this coming week, North River will join the Christian and Missionary Alliance in praying for local evangelization.  We want to see our city reached with the good news of salvation through Jesus Christ. 

As we pray for local evangelization, however, we should keep the following words from Tim Keller in mind. 

To some degree the answers to many of our petitions would be facilitated by changes in us, but we usually do not take the time to consider this as we pray.  We should discipline ourselves to connect each petition to what we know about God, but we should also ask ourselves what our petition tells us about our own motives, our own loves, and even our own sins and weaknesses.

Keller didn’t specifically have evangelism in mind when he wrote those words.  He meant for us to consider more generally what our prayer requests tell us about ourselves and what God may wish to change in us.  He was also addressing our tendency to pray for change in others, while ignoring what we could change that would resolve the situation we are praying about. 

That also applies to evangelism.  It does little good to pray for our neighborhood, city and region to be reached with the gospel if we remain unwilling to be the vehicle God uses to accomplish the task. 

I encourage you to pray for the evangelization of our area and our city, but I also encourage you to pray for the Holy Spirit to give you the boldness to share your faith, the words to say, the willingness to say them, and the openings you need.  Let’s move from passive evangelism to active evangelism.