In The Last Days Newsletter, Leonard Ravenhill tells about a group of tourists visiting a picturesque village. They walked by an old man sitting beside a fence, and one of them asked, “Were any great men born in this village?” The old man replied, “Nope, only babies.” (Leonard Ravenhill, The Last Days Newsletter; www.PreacingToday.com)
And that’s the way it is everywhere, even here on Washington Island. Nobody starts out great. We all start out as infants, but God made us for greatness. God designed us to grow. When He created the first man and the first woman, both in his own image, He said to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it” (Genesis 1:28).
That’s God’s mandate to His original creation, and that’s God’s mandate to His new creation, as well! Thousands of years later, when God put together the church from those who were new creations in Christ, He said to them, “Go and make disciples of all the nations” (Matthew 28:19). “Be my witnesses [starting] in Jerusalem, [then spreading] in all Judea and Samaria, and [then] to the ends of the earth” (Acts 1:8).
God never intended for us to remain small. Rather, He designed us, and redesigned us, for growth and greatness.
But the question is: How? How do we bear fruit and increase in number? How do we fill the earth and subdue it? How do we spread the influence of Christ to the ends of the earth, starting right here at home? How do we multiply disciples of Christ who love God and people?
Well, if you have your Bibles, I invite you to turn with me to Exodus 1, Exodus 1, where we see how God’s ancient people, the Jews, multiplied and spread throughout all of Egypt.
Exodus 1:1-7 These are the names of the sons of Israel who went to Egypt with Jacob, each with his family: Reuben, Simeon, Levi and Judah; Issachar, Zebulun and Benjamin; Dan and Naphtali; Gad and Asher. The descendants of Jacob numbered seventy in all; Joseph was already in Egypt. Now Joseph and all his brothers and all that generation died, but the Israelites were fruitful and multiplied greatly and became exceedingly numerous, so that the land was filled with them. (NIV)
This verse uses the same Hebrew words of God’s original mandate to Adam and Eve, here translated as “fruitful,” “multiply,” and “filled.” The point is: the Israelites grew from just 70 individuals to over 2 million people, according to some estimates. They were “fruitful.” They “multiplied.” They became “exceeding numerous” and “filled” the land, just as God had promised Jacob they would do before he moved to Egypt nearly 400 years before this.
In Genesis 46, God said to Jacob, “Do not be afraid to go down to Egypt, for I will make you into a great nation there” (Genesis 46:3). And that’s exactly what happened. God is simply fulfilling the promise He made to Jacob.
Now, this raises the first point about our own growth. It is not so much about what WE do as it is about what GOD is doing in and through us. He made a promise, and He will fulfill that promise no matter what.
So if we want to bear fruit and increase in number, if we want to spread the influence of Christ and multiply disciples of Christ, then all we have to do is believe that promise. In other words…
MULTIPLY THROUGH FAITH IN GOD’S PROMISE.
Grow by trusting in God’s Word. Fill the earth by depending on what God has already said. Jesus promised us, “I will build my church, and the gates of Hell will not overcome it” (Matthew 16:18). Jesus promised us, “You will be my witnesses…to the ends of the earth” (Acts 1:8). So, fundamentally, our growth and expansion is simply a matter of relying on that promise!
An Australian Christian author and speaker, John Dickson, talks about how he came to Christ. He says the Australian public schools used to offer a Scripture class taught by a volunteer from the local church, and Glenda became his teacher. She was an ordinary, middle-aged mother, but she loved young people. Glenda ended up inviting the whole class to her house on Friday afternoons for lunch and honest conversation about Jesus.
Dickson says they went back the next Friday and the next and the next, where slowly the “Jesus stuff” became as important as the food, so they came with more and more friends. Now, “some of those 15-year-olds were the worst sinners in the school,” Dickson says. “But Glenda just opened her heart every Friday afternoon and treated us all like we were family.”
Then there was a night when Dickson’s friend, Daniel, was quite intoxicated. His friends knew they couldn't take him to his house. His dad was an army man and would be livid. But they didn't want to leave him on the street, so they all said, “Let's take him to Glenda's house. She'll have him. She'll clean him up.”
It was near midnight when they knocked on her door. As it turned out, she was finishing up some kind of posh dinner party with lots of guests, but she didn't bat an eye. She welcomed her late-night visitors in, showed them straight past her guests into the back of the house. She went and got some spare clothes and said, “Throw him in the shower, clean him up, and just put him to bed. We'll sort it out in the morning.” So they did.
The next morning they went back to Glenda's house around 10:00 a.m. to pick Daniel up. He was sitting at the kitchen table, Glenda was making him bacon and eggs, and they were having a good old chat.
Dickson says they took Daniel to Glenda's house because she had left a real impression on them that Christians actually like sinners. They had no doubt that she hated their drinking habits. She was a teetotaler, and talked openly about avoiding alcohol. “But even in that situation,” Dickson says, “her first instinct was not to condemn us but to love us more, and it was extraordinary.”
After about six months of Scripture classes, Friday afternoon events, and the incident with Daniel, Dickson and his friends found themselves thinking that Jesus was real, that he is inescapable, that he is powerful. So about six or eight months into it, about five of them became Christians. Dickson says, “We really surrendered to Christ's lordship and accepted his mercy.”
Years later, Dickson was starting his own ministry and trying to explore new modes of reaching people. So his first thought was, “I'll go to Glenda and ask her what her secret was.” Since several of them had become Christians through her influence, he figured she must have had some strategy. But when he asked her about what program she used, without batting an eye, she said, “Prayer.”
Dickson was really disappointed, but she continued, “That year a bunch of us who taught Scripture decided to make it a year of prayer – just to plead the Lord of the harvest to do something special. And we did. By the end of the year, there you all were, confessing Jesus.”
Dickson says, “For an activist like me, that was a poignant lesson: in the end, the harvest is God's. It's not mine – it’s not my creativity, it's not my skill – it’s God's.” (Adapted from Jeff Manion's sermon “The Guest List,” preached in 2011; www.PreachingToday.com)
We just need to depend on Him to keep His Word. Make it a matter of prayer and watch God work! Only He may not work in the way you expect. Look at what happened to the Israelites.
Exodus 1:8 Then a new king, who did not know about Joseph, came to power in Egypt. (NIV)
This new king was the start of a new dynasty (the 18th), which rejected the older dynasty’s toleration of foreigners. This new dynasty brought in a new wave of Egyptian nationalism and empire building, pushing its borders all the way into Palestine and its influence beyond the Euphrates River. The peace and prosperity the Israelites enjoyed under the old Dynasty was about to come to an end because of extreme prejudice and mistrust.
Exodus 1:9-14 “Look,” he said to his people, “the Israelites have become much too numerous for us. Come, we must deal shrewdly with them or they will become even more numerous and, if war breaks out, will join our enemies, fight against us and leave the country.” So they put slave masters over them to oppress them with forced labor, and they built Pithom and Rameses as store cities for Pharaoh. But the more they were oppressed, the more they multiplied and spread; so the Egyptians came to dread the Israelites and worked them ruthlessly. They made their lives bitter with hard labor in brick and mortar and with all kinds of work in the fields; in all their hard labor the Egyptians used them ruthlessly. (NIV)
The Egyptians forced the Israelites into slave labor and oppressed them. The Hebrew word for “oppress” was used in some contexts to described rape. It’s a harsh word which speaks of an oppressor’s extreme mistreatment and violation of an individual.
But the more the Israelites were oppressed, the more they multiplied and spread. Like smashing a piece of pottery onto a hard surface, the Jewish people flew apart into millions of pieces all over the place. Instead of stopping them, the oppression only scattered and increased their numbers. It’s not what the Israelites expected, but it’s how they multiplied even more. You see, 1st, we multiply through faith in God’s promises. Then 2nd, we…
MULTIPLY THROUGH OPPRESSION.
We grow EVEN MORE in times of trial and pain. We spread the influence of Christ EVEN MORE when we are harassed and persecuted. I call it the law of spiritual thermodynamics: the greater the heat, the greater the expansion.
Jesus told us in John 15 that in order to bear fruit, we must remain in Him. He used the analogy of a branch connected to a grape vine to say that as long as we are connected to Him we will bear fruit. Then He added something very strange. He said, “very branch that does bear fruit [God] prunes so that it will be even more fruitful” (John 15:2). In other words, God causes us to grow and increase in number through the painful process of cutting and pruning.
That was the experience of the early church in Acts. Acts 8 says that on the day the church’s first martyr was killed, “a great persecution broke out against the church at Jerusalem, and all except the apostles were scattered throughout Judea and Samaria… [And] Those who had been scattered preached the word wherever they went” (Acts 8:1,4).
The church had become comfortable in their home town of Jerusalem, so God allowed a great persecution to break out against the church. This forced them out of their comfort zone into the world where they could spread the Gospel with even more people.
When the church gets too comfortable, we become ineffective in our mission to multiply disciples of Christ. So God has to shake us up every once in a while. He has to do a little pruning, so we become even more fruitful.
I imagine the Israelites got very comfortable under the old dynasty in Egypt. They had the best of the land. They had experienced tremendous prosperity, and they were well respected. Then a new dynasty arose, which despised and feared the Israelites. And all of a sudden, God’s people lost their status in Egypt, and they were reduced to forced labor. They were violated and severely mistreated, but that was the very thing God used to make them even more fruitful in Egypt and to give them a desire to leave Egypt for a land He had prepared for them. Otherwise, they would have been content to stay in their comfort zone and never become the nation God called them to be.
As the church in America loses its respect in the mainstream culture, as our material prosperity dwindles, might not God be doing the same thing for us? I believe so! He is forcing us out of our comfort zones, so we can be even more fruitful for His Kingdom.
In 1977, just a couple of years before the Iranian revolution deposed the Shaw of Iran, there were only 2,700 evangelical Christians in the country out of a population of 45 million. Of those 2,700 only 300 were former Muslims. 25 years later, with militant, extremist Muslims overrunning the country all that time, missiologists counted close to 55 thousand believers, of whom 27 thousand were from Muslim backgrounds.” (Michael G. Maudlin, “Have You Seen Jesus Lately?” Books & Culture, May/June 2002, p. 14; www.PreachingToday.com)
Persecution didn’t hurt the church in Iran. It expanded the church! And the same thing happened in China years before that.
When the Communists overran China in 1949 there were several hundred thousand Christians. Then the Red Guard went on a rampage. They closed churches; and everywhere they found a cross, they tore it down. They put as many Christians as they could find in prison, and the rest were driven to the countryside.
Today, there are multiple millions of Christians in China. Before the communists took over, people were free to do as they please. Missionaries had been working for centuries in China, winning hundreds of thousands of converts to Christ. Then the communists entered the picture and did in half a century what Christian missionaries couldn’t do in several centuries. Communist persecution caused Christians to multiply and suddenly there are multiple millions! (Phil Lineberger, “Great People Do for Others,” Preaching Today, Tape No. 62; www.PreachingToday.com)
The greater the heat, the greater the expansion. So dear friends, when you hear criticism about Bethel Church in the community, don’t let it bother you. Rather, let it motivate you to share the good news about what God is doing here, because we are seeing an expansion in the number of new believers here despite the criticism, or maybe because of it.
Over a hundred years ago, in a Scottish seaside inn, a group of fishermen were relaxing after a long day at sea. As a serving maid was walking past the fishermen's table with a pot of tea, one of the men made a sweeping gesture to describe the size of the fish he claimed to have caught. His hand collided with the teapot and sent it crashing against the whitewashed wall, leaving a terrible, brown splotch.
Standing nearby, the innkeeper complained, “That stain will never come out. The whole wall will have to be repainted.”
“Perhaps not,” somebody replied; and all eyes turned to the stranger who had just spoken.
“What do you mean?” asked the innkeeper.
“Let me work with the stain,” said the stranger, standing up from his table in the corner. “If my work meets your approval, you won't need to repaint the wall.”
The stranger picked up a box and went to the wall. Opening the box, he withdrew pencils, brushes, and some glass jars of linseed oil and pigment. He began to sketch lines around the stain and fill it in here and there with dabs of color and swashes of shading. Soon a picture began to emerge. The random splashes of tea had been turned into the image of a stag with a magnificent rack of antlers. At the bottom of the picture, the man signed his name. Then he paid for his meal and left.
The innkeeper was stunned. When he saw the signature at the bottom of the picture, he asked in amazement, “Do you know who that man was?” The signature read “E.H. Landseer!” That little Scottish inn had been visited by the well-known painter of wild life, Sir Edwin Landseer. (“Mistreated,” Leadership, Vol. 12, no. 3; www.PreachingToday.com)
Now, that’s a picture of what God wants to do through the stains and disappointments of our lives. He doesn’t want to erase them; He wants to turn them into a thing of beauty. So when the hard times come, don’t be afraid; just believe. Multiply through faith in God’s promises. Multiply through oppression. And finally…
MULTIPLY THROUGH OBEDIENCE to God’s word.
Grow by doing what God tells you to do no matter what the opposition. Spread the influence of Christ by submitting to God rather than to those who oppose God. That’s what the Hebrew midwives did.
Exodus 1:15 The king of Egypt said to the Hebrew midwives, whose names were Shiphrah and Puah (NIV) – Literally, “Beauty” and “Splendor”
Exodus 1:16 “When you help the Hebrew women in childbirth and observe them on the delivery stool, if it is a boy, kill him; but if it is a girl, let her live.” (NIV)
The “delivery stool” in the Hebrew is literally “two stones.” It could be a reference to an ancient custom of mothers delivering their babies while sitting on two stones. But more likely, it’s a reference to the “two stones” or testicles on a baby boy. In other words, Pharaoh is demanding that as soon as they see the “two stones,” they are to kill the baby boy before he is all the way delivered. They might suffocate the baby before he utters his first cry. Then the midwife could say, “Oh, I’m so sorry; this one is stillborn” (Swindoll, Moses, p.12). It’s an ancient form of partial birth abortion.
Exodus 1:17-19 The midwives, however, feared God and did not do what the king of Egypt had told them to do; they let the boys live. Then the king of Egypt summoned the midwives and asked them, “Why have you done this? Why have you let the boys live?” The midwives answered Pharaoh, “Hebrew women are not like Egyptian women; they are vigorous and give birth before the midwives arrive.” (NIV)
Apparently, the mothers delivered their baby boys before the midwives could get there. And perhaps, the midwives deliberately took their time in responding to house calls so the mothers could hide their babies. Either way, the midwives refused to obey the king’s edict, choosing instead to obey God.
Exodus 1:20-21 So God was kind to the midwives and the people increased and became even more numerous. And because the midwives feared God, he gave them families of their own. (NIV)
Not only did God multiply the Israelites through their obedience; He also multiplied the number of children in their own families.
Exodus 1:22 Then Pharaoh gave this order to all his people: “Every boy that is born you must throw into the Nile, but let every girl live.” (NIV)
When Pharaoh failed to exterminate the Israelites secretly through the midwives, he enlisted the help of EVERY Egyptian, ordering ALL of them to throw the Israelite boys into the Nile River. Secret genocide became public genocide, but it all backfired on him. Warren Wiersbe says, “Keep in mind that this same ruler who wanted to drown God’s people saw his own army drowned in the Red Sea (Exodus 15:4–5).” In other words, the more Pharaoh tried to oppose God’s people, the more his own troubles multiplied while God’s people continued to multiply in ever greater numbers.
No one can stop God’s plan of expansion, especially when God’s people choose to obey Him despite the opposition.
That’s what the Hebrew midwives did, and that’s what we must do when others oppose us. Like the Hebrew midwives, we must fear God more than we fear any man and do what’s right no matter what the threat is against us.
That was the attitude of the early church in the book of Acts. When the governing authorities told the early church leaders to stop spreading the good news about Jesus, they simply replied, “We must obey God rather than men!” (Acts 5:29). As a result, the church in the first century multiplied and grew, spreading very quickly all over the ancient Roman Empire.
Sociologist, Rodney Stark, in his book The Rise of Christianity, describes how Christianity arose from a small group… to become the dominant force of the Roman Empire in such a short time. He notes that there were two great epidemics during those first few centuries. Many succumbed, but only those who got care had a good chance of survival. Often, though, when a person contracted the disease, his or her family fled for places not affected, leaving the diseased person behind.
The Christians, however, did not do this… They stayed to care for their own families and also for those who had been left behind. Such heroic compassion on the part of believers, the willingness to face sickness and death themselves, played a large part in great numbers of people turning to Christ in the Roman Empire. (Ajith Fernando, The Call to Joy & Pain, Crossway, 2007, p. 91; www.PreachingToday.com)
Believers did what was right even when the whole world did what was wrong, and God used it to grow His church.
My friends, that’s how we multiply and grow today. Multiply through faith in God’s Word. Multiply through opposition. And multiply through obedience to God despite the opposition.
Once to every man and nation
Comes the moment to decide,
In the strife of truth with falsehood,
For the good or evil side…
Though the cause of evil prosper,
Yet the truth alone is strong;
Though her portion be the scaffold,
And upon the throne be wrong,
Yet that scaffold sways the future,
And, behind the dim unknown,
Standeth God within the shadow,
Keeping watch above His own. (James Russel Lowell)
