Be Ready to Give an Answer
About this sermon
In “Be Ready to Give an Answer,” Pastor Dean Odle calls believers to move beyond receiving the Holy Spirit for personal blessing and become empowered witnesses. Recounting his return to Christ at nineteen, he explains that a fresh awareness of his own former blindness produced an urgent desire to warn family and friends. Acts 1:8 anchors the message: the Spirit gives power to testify about Jesus, and Christians must overcome fear, obey Christ’s commission, and tell others both what Jesus has done and what Scripture says.
Chronological teaching outline
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Odle opens by thanking Jesus for the cross, resurrection, and indwelling Spirit. He asks God to empty believers of selfishness and fear, restore holiness and boldness, and prepare the congregation for a fresh work in Auburn. Spiritual power, he insists, is given so believers can witness in life and speech even when obedience costs them.
After congregational prayer and announcements, Odle connects the message to earlier teaching on being led by the Spirit and spiritual gifts. God’s presence is not merely for private refreshing: those who are truly filled and led will increasingly share God’s concern for people who are lost and desire to speak words that bring conviction and salvation.
Odle recounts living in drunkenness, drugs, sexual sin, and spiritual blindness before returning to Jesus at nineteen. Once awakened, he felt compelled to warn his brother, friends, and parents. Although he knew little theology, he could testify to what Christ had done; mature believers who have grown dry must stir themselves and return to that first love and urgency.
Acts 1:8 promises power to witness, but Odle says that power is not always accompanied by a feeling of confidence. He recalls taking two new believers to share the gospel at a mall; acting while afraid helped them overcome fear and later become ministers. Testimony is powerful, yet believers should also prepare biblical answers and preach repentance rather than an unchanged life.
From 1 Peter 3 and Proverbs 15, Odle teaches that readiness is intentional. The righteous heart ponders and studies before answering because it cares whether people receive truth. He describes recording key references in his Bible, meditating on likely questions, and preparing to explain the hope of Christ with meekness rather than improvising carelessly.
A workplace conversation about Buddhism illustrates the partnership between preparation and the Spirit’s power. Not every hearer responds immediately: Felix trembled and Agrippa was almost persuaded, yet the seed still mattered. Odle encourages believers to plant many seeds, pray for hearers, and expect that faithful speaking will eventually yield visible fruit.
Odle rejects the claim that public or direct evangelism is inherently unloving. First Corinthians presents the preaching of the cross as foolishness to those who perish but God’s power to those being saved. Jesus’ conversation with the woman at the well shows that offering living water included confronting her sexual history so she could recognize sin and repent.
A lengthy campus preaching encounter demonstrates that contention does not necessarily mean hatred; people may argue and still continue listening. Jude supplies the needed balance: some wounded people require gentle compassion, while others must be warned urgently and pulled from danger through a sober fear of judgment. Odle argues that reducing the fear of God to reverence alone empties the gospel of an essential warning.
In Acts 24, Paul reasons with Felix about righteousness, self-control, and judgment to come until Felix trembles. Odle presents this as a model of complete evangelism: righteousness is found in Christ, the flesh must not rule, and every person will answer to God. Discernment determines whether a hearer needs tender healing or a forceful wake-up call.
Odle previews practical apologetics, citing the ancient Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures as historical evidence that messianic prophecies predated Jesus. He points to Psalm 22, Isaiah 53, Isaiah 9, and Daniel as material believers can learn and use. The sermon closes with prayer for grace to present repentance, salvation, and the cross boldly and in balance. The supplied automatic transcript ends at 53:25 although the source metadata lists a 60:28 video duration.
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- 0:00:15
Praise you, Lord, for your goodness, for the blood you shed on the cross, for your resurrection power, for your Holy Spirit you sent to dwell within us and to flow through us and to work through us. Lord God, for everything that we need, God, you've provided God all things that pertain to life and Godliness through Christ Jesus. Lord, you've provided what we need, Lord. You've provided the power, Lord, God, to be a witness, God, in this earth, Lord. God, with our lives, our examples, but also with our words that we speak, you, God, have empowered us, Lord, to be a witness, Father. And Lord, we just want more and more to be emptied of all of selfishness and flesh and lustly desires and lust and sins and just to be emptied out and those things washed away and Lord, to walk in that holiness and that purity and that hunger and that boldness for you, God. Lord, I pray that for everyone here, God, that you would just, Lord, just empty out all selfishness, all fear, all fear of man and Lord, that we would just get full of the Holy Spirit, God, and do what you've called us to do without fear or intimidation, without worry, Lord, even if it cost us things, even if we have to suffer loss to do the will of God, Lord, that that's more important. We thank you, God, that we know gain is not always Godliness and Father, this morning we just worship you, we want you, Lord, we want your glory and your power and your presence to flow again through the church, through your people, Lord, it's been dry too long, God. We're grateful for little things here and there, Lord, but I know, God, there's a move, there's an outpouring, there's a revival that you want to do. You're looking for people to show yourself strong, people whose hearts perfect Lord, Lord, that's what we are, pure heart, pure motives, a heart for the lost, a
- 0:03:16
heart for our brethren that are falling away, a heart for those that have been wounded so bad they can't even look up, Father, we pray, I think we just need to worship and just, we don't need to move from this spot for a moment, thank you for your goodness. You're about to do, Lord, in this area, Lord, in this church even, in this region, I know you're about to do something, sovereign, special, supernatural, God, you're about to fulfill some things promised, Lord, years and years and years ago, I know that you're about to move mightily in Auburn, especially, Lord, I know you're about to move in a mighty way, we want to be a part of that, we want to do our part, we want to not miss, Lord, what you want us to do, your perfect will, your destiny, for our lives, God, Jesus. Thank you, Lord. I feel like the Lord is going to give someone that interpretation, just if you feel the Lord speaking that to you or something to you, don't be afraid to speak it out. Praise you, Jesus. Thank you, Lord. Thank you, Lord. Thank you,
- 0:06:25
Jesus. Thank you, Jesus. Glory to God. You may be seated. Hallelujah. Yes, sir. Amen. Praise God. We receive that. Amen. Anybody else have anything? I'll tell you, it's amazing, but the Lord, he is, he definitely speaking to us. And of course, I just want to say, I don't really need this in here, but we are recording it, so I'm going to use this. But if it's too loud, tell me, I'll turn it down a little bit. But the Lord is definitely stirring us, and I just want you to get your Bibles, and we're going to get into the Word. I guess we're going to continue on what we've been doing the last few weeks. The Lord, I think, is getting us ready, getting us ready for this fall and getting us ready for some outreach. But before I do that, some of you may not know because you hadn't been to the meetings yet, but this is Gene May back here and his wife, Sheri. They are just being with us today. He's got another meeting today at 3.30 at Eastwood Christian School, and that's David James right there and his wife, Rita. They are, I guess, are you the principal, or how would I? So you're all of the above, okay, of the school out there and the founders, and went to Gene's church many years ago that he had here back in the 70s. How long were you from, what, 74 to 78 here? So anyway, but I hope those of you hadn't made it to one. I hope you can at 3.30 this afternoon. We'll be there. Anyway, I wasn't sure about that. No, I said I was it. I said I was going to ask you to make sure, but yes, okay. All right, so we'll do that. All right, so we'll be there. So I hope you can make it. If you need directions, just ask me afterwards. But back to the Word. I want you to turn in your Bibles this morning. I just go to Acts 1. We've been on a series talking about being led by the Spirit of God and how important that is. We've talked about the gifts last week and about the power of the gifts to be used in witnessing. But I just want to kind of shift gears because I know we're going to be flowing into kind of some evangelism training in the next few weeks, and I just feel like I need to give you some stuff today on that. But let's just, we need to remember something, that God wants
- 0:09:30
us, He wants us to be full of the Holy Spirit, not just so we can be blessed. I mean, that's true. I mean, God refreshes us and we get to experience His presence, and we get to experience joy and peace, and we get to experience healing, maybe inner healing sometimes of emotions and things, and we get to experience a lot of good things from the Lord. But those things aren't just to be kept to ourselves. And one of the main things God wants to get across to us, and as I've said, is that if you are full of the Holy Spirit and you are being led by the Holy Spirit, I guarantee you this thing's going to be happening. God is going to begin to give you His heart for people that are lost and on their way to hell around you. God's going to begin to give you His heart and a desire, not just His heart, not just what He feels about it, but a desire to do something about it, a desire to be used by God, to be a light, to be a witness, to be effective, not just that people might know you're a Christian, but to really be effective in speaking a word that may bring conviction or a word that may bring healing or a word that may bring somebody truly to repent and come to Jesus. And I just want you to know that if you're full of the Holy Spirit, He is going to begin to direct you in that path. And I mean to your neighbors, to your family, to your friends, I mean, you're going to begin to feel yourself moved in prayer to pray for them. I mean, I'm telling you, if you really have a revelation of what Jesus has done in you, in saving you, in washing your sins away, the reality that without Him you knew you were on your way to an eternity in hell and Jesus didn't have to die on the cross for you. He didn't have to convict you. He didn't have to draw you. He didn't have to forgive you again and again and again. He didn't have to. Sometimes I think Christians have this attitude that God owes them, you know, and He doesn't really owe us. It's His mercy. It's grace. It's, you know, it's goodness. And He doesn't owe us these things. But when you realize, and I think that's what motivated me so much when I came back to the Lord at 19, there was such a revelation to me that the way I was living, I was on my way to hell. And God made that very clear to me that I was, I was going to be lost forever if I did not change some things in my life, if I did not surrender my life fully to Him and follow Him. And when that transformation took place and when God came back into my life, I mean, I was, the revelation was so clear and the encounter with God was so clear. The realization came to me if I was like that, if I was so blinded by Satan and so in darkness and so, and really during that time period, you know, being in drunkenness and doing drugs and in fornication and pornography and all the stuff that I was into as a teenager and a college student and realizing that, you know, I thought I was okay. I thought,
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