How to Hit the Target in Open-Air Preaching

From Ray Comfort’s book, Fifty Years of Open-Air Preaching – Everything I’ve Learned

Some preachers are like a loud gun that misses the target. It may sound effective, but if the bullet misses the target, the exercise is in vain. He may be the largest-lunged, pulpit-pounding preacher this side of the Book of Acts. He may have great teaching on faith, but if the sinner leaves the meeting failing to understand his desperate need of God’s forgiveness, then the preacher has failed. He has missed the target, which is the understanding of the sinner. Sinners will not flee from the wrath to come until they understand that they are guilty and under condemnation.

This is why the Law of God must be used in preaching. It teaches and instructs. The Law serves as a “tutor” to bring sinners to Christ (Galatians 3:24). A sinner will come to “know His will, and approve the things that are excellent,” if he is “instructed out of the Law” (Romans 2:18)

“Some preachers are like a loud gun that misses the target. It may sound effective, but if the bullet misses the target, the exercise is in vain.”

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In the parable of the sower, the “good-soil” hearer is he who “hears the word and understands it” (Matthew 13:23). Perhaps this is why Philip the evangelist saw fit to ask his potential convert, the Ethiopian eunuch, “Do you understand what you are reading?” (Acts 8:30).

This understanding seems to refer not only to sin, but also to the gospel. In the parable of the sower, the enemy is able to snatch the good seed from the wayside hearer because he lacks understanding. He doesn’t understand that it is the message of everlasting life, so he gives it no value: “When anyone hears the word of the kingdom, and does not understand it, then the wicked one comes and snatches away what was sown in his heart” (Matthew 13:19).

My great desire is for sinners to understand the gospel and be saved. Although God alone saves the sinner, from the sowing to the reaping, I believe that, as a preacher of the gospel, my job is to strive (with the help of God) to bring about understanding. So rather than using “persuasive words of human wisdom” (1 Corinthians 2:4), I keep the message simple in the hope that the sinner will grasp what I am trying to say.

From Ray Comfort’s book, Fifty Years of Open-Air Preaching – Everything I’ve Learned