3. Spiritual Disciplines Series
April 26th, 2009
Evangelism
You know you are in the middle of no-where in the mid-west when you find yourself 20 minutes or more from the nearest wal-mart. I can proudly say that I have pioneered at least one of these uncivilized areas of Kansas. When I was in college I was preaching at this church in Lafontaine Kansas. It was a little town of about 20 or so people out in the middle of nowhere I am not even sure there was a stop sign in town. The people there actually called their town la-fountain. At this point I had been preaching at this church every week for about two months. After a few weeks there was a little boy who started coming but without his parents. In the middle of one of my sermons, a particularly fine one I might add this little boy raised his hand. I hadn’t done a lot of preaching at this point but in my experience this seemed unusual. Not totally sure what to do, I called on him. He said: “I was at Wal-Mart last night trying to get some boots but they were closed because they had no power.” I wasn’t really sure what to do with that but luckily he continued by asking: “so I was wondering could we pray for independence?” Now directions are not one of my strong suits. So I went with my heart, I said: “aww I’m sorry little boy that no one has told you we won our independence a few hundred years ago.” I smiled thinking that would put his mind at rest. Problem was Lafontaine is near another slightly larger and pretty well known town called Independence Kansas which is what the boy was referring to. So I felt like an idiot because I really didn’t get it. It was such a simple logical connection but because I didn’t understand one little thing I totally missed what this boy was asking for.
It is easy to miss the point if we don’t know what we should. As Christians we can sometimes miss the point on some of the more important aspects of our Christian lives. Just look at evangelism. One of Jesus final commands before ascending to Heaven was the Great Commission. Jesus gives His servants the task of carrying the Gospel to the world. We are called to make Disciples of all nations. But what does that mean? Certainly God does not expect people like us to do this. God uses people like David, people like Paul, like Peter, you know Spiritual people to make a difference in the world. Certainly He wouldn’t try to use someone like me. We know that we called to evangelize the lost. We know that this commission was given to us but really how are we supposed to carry out the mission of God?
So often we may wrestle with this because evangelism can be pretty scary. We may want to pretend that God didn’t give us this command so we don’t have feel guilty for ignoring it. Evangelism has become one of those touchy subjects that many people try to avoid. There are some who are faithful givers, some faithful to the word, faithful to prayer, faithful to serve but I don’t know of many who would honestly say that they are faithful in their evangelistic efforts. One of the primary problems we face is what Donald Whitney refers to in his book ‘Spiritual Disciplines’ as evangelophobia. This fear of evangelism is often caused by our understanding of the seriousness and importance of evangelism. So much rides on getting it right that we stress ourselves out in the moment. We believe that heaven and hell are at stake and we find ourselves feeling overwhelmed and under prepared to deal with such responsibility. One of the primary things that holds us back is fear. We are afraid of failing at such and important task. We ask ourselves how are we supposed to carry out the mission of God? So rather than risk failing we say nothing and we fail silently.
Sometimes inadequacy gets in the way. Many Christians do not obey command to evangelize because they feel they must have a certain amount of knowledge or familiarity with the Word of God or they wait to have a certainty that never comes. What if the Gerasenes demoniac who had the demons cast from him by Jesus had acted that way? The people in his town were terrified of him. He had been running around naked and screaming like a mad man. He is certainly not the ideal candidate to proclaim the gospel. What if he had allowed his inadequacy to stop him? He would not have gone to tell everyone he could what Jesus had done for him. What if the Samaritan woman at the well had thought that way? She would not have brought her whole village to Christ. Now if anyone was going to wrestle with feelings of inadequacy to share the gospel it should be this woman. She was not well thought of in the community. She was trash. People would not want to hear what she had to say for she was thought of as scum in her society. This woman knew that there was something different about Jesus and she wanted to share that with everyone. She didn’t let fear get the best of her. You might think: so what, she is in the bible. She is not like me. God could use her sure but how are we supposed to carry out the mission of God? Sometimes we make evangelism far more difficult than it needs to be.
Turn in your Bibles to John 9. Here we see Jesus encountering a man who was born blind. So Jesus spit in the ground to make some mud and put it on the man’s eyes. Then Jesus told the man to go wash in the pool of Siloam. When this blind man did as he had been instructed he gained his sight. Can you imagine? Can you imagine having lived your whole life in darkness having seen nothing, not skies, not hills, not tree, not the buildings of the city, nor the faces of your family? This man was born blind. He had not seen anything. All he had was his imagination of what the world around him looked like. Can you imagine what it would be like to see for the first time? To see colors and shapes, can you imagine the wonder of seeing texture and all the things we take for granted? The people who saw him did not believe he was the same person. When they demanded how to know his eye were opened he told them that a man named Jesus put mud on his eyes and now he could see. Having heard his report the people brought the not-so blind man to the Pharisees so that they could investigate the matter further. The Pharisees tried talking to this man and they tried talking with his parents but got no where.
Jn 9:24 A second time they summoned the man who had been blind. “Give glory to God,’” they said. “We know this man is a sinner.” Jn 9:25 He replied, “Whether he is a sinner or not, I don’t know. One thing I do know. I was blind but now I see!” Jn 9:26 Then they asked him, “What did he do to you? How did he open your eyes?” Jn 9:27 He answered, “I have told you already and you did not listen. Why do you want to hear it again? Do you want to become his disciples, too?” Jn 9:28 Then they hurled insults at him and said, “You are this fellow’s disciple! We are disciples of Moses! Jn 9:29 We know that God spoke to Moses, but as for this fellow, we don’t even know where he comes from.” Jn 9:30 The man answered, “Now that is remarkable! You don’t know where he comes from, yet he opened my eyes. Jn 9:31 We know that God does not listen to sinners. He listens to the godly man who does his will. Jn 9:32 Nobody has ever heard of opening the eyes of a man born blind. Jn 9:33 If this man were not from God, he could do nothing.” Jn 9:34 To this they replied, “You were steeped in sin at birth; how dare you lecture us!” And they threw him out.
I love this guy. He is not educated. He would not have attended a school for the blind. He had no training. He had no Bible courses. Yet he is an incredible evangelist. Why? It is simple. He told others of what Jesus had done for him. When people asked he told them Jesus healed him. When the religious leaders questioned he gave them an answer he knew they wouldn’t like. When they questioned him again he didn’t back down. He boldly proclaimed what Jesus had done for him and argued against these religious leaders. This guy is awesome. He had been a believer for only a few minutes and was willing to share what Jesus had done for him. “This I know I was blind, and now I see.” Isn’t that exactly what Jesus did for us? We were all blind living in our sin oblivious to the truth of God and He opened our eyes. He gave us life. If this man can confidently and powerfully stand before religious experts and be a witness to God after a few minutes of believing, shouldn’t we after years of faith be able to stand before our world as well?
I used to work at Red Lobster with a guy named Rich. You could tell that Rich had his problems but you could also tell that he had a good heart. One night we were both closing and everyone else had gone. For some reason that night Rich started asking me questions. Finally when we got everything done we were walking out of the restaurant to our cars. I knew this was the last opportunity I might have to really talk with Rich about God. So without having any idea of what I was going to do I just started talking. It was one of the weirdest moments of my life. I was standing there talking but I almost felt like I wasn’t me as if I was just watching someone else control me. I heard myself saying all these things that I didn’t even remember knowing. It was one of the most amazing experiences of my life. Of all the things I said in that conversation I am not really sure I said a single word of them. Rich and I stood out in the cold parking lot talking conversing back and forth until 3:30 in the morning. He had agreed to come to church with me that next Sunday. I was so pleased everything was going great. Rich was going to be my first conversion story. I remember how excited I was when I got home. I didn’t even really sleep that night. I was so thrilled with how things had gone. Sunday came around and Rich never showed up. He didn’t answer my calls. A few weeks later he moved. I haven’t seen or heard from him since. In a moment the joy and excitement I had felt at that conversation faded to nothing. I found myself wondering what I had done wrong. Why did this happen? I really started to think that I had failed. God had put this opportunity right in front of me and I had screwed it up. I had a chance to bring someone to Christ and I failed.
There are so many things that keep us from accomplishing our goal. Sometimes previous failures get in the way in the way of our efforts to share the gospel. When we finally put ourselves out there and try and things don’t go perfectly it can destroy what little confidence we may have had. It is important for us to have a proper understanding of evangelism. Obviously the goal is to bring them to Christ but does that mean that if they reject the message than we failed? Logically the answer would seem to be yes. But that answer poses a serious problem. Was Jesus an evangelistic failure when crowds turned away or people rejected Him? No. We are not responsible for the response of a person to the message. We are only responsible for sharing the message itself. How are we supposed to carry out the mission of God?
We carry out the mission of God by sharing our faith. Sharing your faith is successful evangelism. Let me ask you this: How you would feel if you found out your friend one $10 million and you got to be the one to tell them? Would you be nervous? Would you be scared about that conversation? No you would be excited because you got to give them great news. Everyone loves to get good news so why should sharing the good news be uncomfortable? The joy of evangelism is that you get to share the greatest news in the world. You get to tell the world of the love of God in sending His Son to die on the cross for them so that they could have eternal life. What could be better than that? We carry out the mission of God by sharing our faith. You don’t have to be an expert in the Bible to do it.
You know the gospel well enough to have come to a relationship with Christ yourself. So you know enough to share the gospel with others. All you need to do is be able to tell the world why you are a Christian. Tell them what brought you to a relationship with God. Tell them of God’s love. Evangelism is a natural overflow of the Christian life. When we fill ourselves with God and invest ourselves in prayer and the Word evangelism is one of those things that just flows out of us. Don’t let this other issues get in the way, all you have to do is tell those you love about the love of God. God loved us so much that He sent His Son to die on the cross for us. We may not be able to love like God but maybe we can love enough to share the good news of what God has done. If you can do that, you are an evangelist.
