Death and Life

D. James Kennedy died this week. He was one of the most fruitful pastors of our time. He began his working career as a dance instructor for the Arthur Murray Studios. After accepting Christ as his savior, he felt a call from God to become a pastor. He resigned his $3,000.00 per month job at the dance studio. That was a huge sum of money in the 1950's. In a short time he was an interim pastor of a small church in Clearwater, Florida making $250.00 per month.

In 1959, after completing seminary, he moved to Ft. Lauderdale, Florida to start Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church. They had 45 people in attendance their first Sunday. James often joked about "growing" the church to 17 people in the next 10 months.

Through the influence of another pastor, James developed an evangelism model that eventually was used in thousands of churches around the world. He called it Evangelism Explosion. EE was the first method of evangelism I ever used. It is famous for its two diagnostic questions:

• "Have you come to the place in your spiritual life where you know for certain that if you were to die today you would go to heaven?"
• "Suppose you were to die today and stand before God and He were to say to you, 'Why should I let you into my heaven?' What would you say?"
  

People using those two questions, then following them up with the EE presentation have led millions of people to Christ.

Those questions drove his life. Their influence is evident as he wrote about his own death:

“Now, I know that someday I am going to come to what some people will say is the end of this life. They will probably put me in a box and roll me right down here in front of the church, and some people will gather around, and a few people will cry. But I have told them not to do that because I don’t want them to cry. I want them to begin the service with the Doxology and end with the Hallelujah chorus, because I am not going to be there, and I am not going to be dead. I will be more alive than I have ever been in my life, and I will be looking down upon you poor people who are still in the land of dying and have not yet joined me in the land of the living. And I will be alive forevermore, in greater health and vitality and joy than ever, ever, I or anyone has known before.”

Some day all of us will leave the land of the dying. The way we answer those two diagnostic questions will determine whether or not we enter the land of the living.


more about Dr. Kennedy: http://65.240.226.104:8080/default.aspx

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