Introduction:
A. A Christian man who owned a barber shop went to a revival meeting one night and felt greatly burdened to do more with his testimony for Christ.
1. The next evening, the barber began attending a "soul winners class" at his church.
a. He attended faithfully every night for two weeks.
b. He rehearsed all the material, took extensive notes, and memorized the Bible verses.
c. At the end of the two weeks he received a certificate acknowledging his completion of the course – he was now a certified soul winner.
2. The next morning, in the barber shop, he hung the certificate and bowed his head. “Dear Lord,” he prayed, “help me to witness to the first man to come through that door this morning.”
3. At that moment in walked the biggest, meanest, foulest man the barber had ever seen.
a. It seems this man had recently lost a bet with some “biker” buddies and now he had to get his head shaved.
b. Needless to say, the barber did not feel very comfortable quoting Scripture to such a scary man.
4. The rest of the day did not go any better for the barber.
a. At 5:00 p.m., the barber was sobbing with shame. He had not witnessed to a single person.
b. He bowed his head again. This time he prayed, “Lord, if you will allow one more opportunity, I promise I will do my part.”
5. At that, the door opened and in walked a pleasant looking gentleman.
a. The man smiled at the barber, apologized for coming in so late and took a seat in the chair.
b. As the barber draped the man in his protective sheet, he began to try to remember what he was supposed to say. He began to get very confused.
c. As the barber put shaving cream on the man’s face, he tried to remember the answers he had learned to the possible objections.
d. As the barber began to strop his razor, he realized that he simply could not remember anything he had learned.
e. This made the barber very nervous and soon sweat began to break out on his forehead.
f. Finally, in desperation, he shook the razor at the man and screamed, “ARE YOU PREPARED TO DIE??!!!”
g. That’s probably not the best approach to share one’s faith.
B. Reaching out to others and talking with them about spiritual things can be very intimidating and nerve-racking.
1. But sharing the Good News is our glorious calling, and our sacred responsibility.
2. Jesus gave these marching orders in the Great Commission, “Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you.” (Mt. 28:19-20)
3. Mark records Jesus’ words, “Go into all the world and preach the good news to all creation. Whoever believes and is baptized will be saved, but whoever does not believe will be condemned.” (Mk. 16:15-16)
4. Luke records Jesus’ words, “But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.” (Acts 1:8)
C. So these have been the marching orders for followers of Jesus for the last 2000 years.
1. But if we are not careful, we become distracted and lose our focus and neglect our great commision.
2. In his book The Purpose-Driven Church, Rick Warren reports on a survey that found that 89% of church members believe that the church’s purpose is to “take care of my needs and those of my family.” Only 11% said, “The purpose is to win the world for Jesus Christ.”
3. According to George Barna, in his book called Evangelism That Works, most churches have only a small group of people who have a passion for evangelism.
4. Barna asks a probing question for all churches – “Is evangelism deemed the highest priority of the church?”
D. Here at Wetzel Road over the years, we have tried to hold evangelism up as one of our highest priorities.
1. We have tried to be a community of believers that really cares about the lost.
2. We have tried to be a community of believers that believes that knowing Christ is the best way to live and the only way to die.
3. Because we have embraced these truths, we have sent missionaries out into the field, and we have tried to focus our programs toward outreach.
4. This by no means says that we have done all that could have been done in the past, nor are we doing all that could be done in the present.
E. As you know, we are in a series called “A Healthy Church.”
1. We have been learning that to be a healthy church, we have to have a balanced approach.
2. So far, we have learned that a healthy church is one that is:
a. Growing deeper through discipleship.
b. Growing warmer through fellowship.
c. Growing broader through ministry.
3. But in addition to those things, a healthy church must also be growing larger through outreach.
F. What I would like to do for a few minutes is review some of the good evangelistic works that we have been involved in and have supported.
1. I won’t go into detail about any of them, but I want us to have the sense that we have been trying to grow larger through outreach.
2. We have helped to birth a number of new churches in Central New York.
a. Some of those churches continue to flourish and some have gone out of existence.
b. We helped to begin the Southside church of Christ, and the Oswego church of Christ, and they are both still are doing God’s work in their areas.
c. We also helped to begin congregations in Cortland, Auburn, on the Northside of Syracuse, and to some degree a congregation on the Eastside of Syracuse.
d. Unfortunately, those four congregations are no longer in existence.
3. As for mission work in the past, we helped send the Zito family to Italy and we supported the Kudi family in Africa for about 30 years.
a. After several years the Zitos returned to the United States, and we no longer support the Kudis, partly because Paul and Mary have passed on to their heavenly reward.
4. As for mission work in the present, we are involved in a number of good works.
a. Last July we helped send David and Audrey Bentley to Tanzania to do mission work.
b. In the last few years, we also began supporting an orphanage in Haiti, and were blessed to send three of our brothers to on a mission trip there last Fall.
c. For many years we have supported John Otis, who is a former member here at Wetzel Road who is working full-time as an evangelist with a small congregation in Pennsylvania.
G. So, as you can see, we as a congregation, have been blessed to faithfully send workers into several areas around the world.
1. Praise God for these good works and the souls that have been touched through them.
2. I look forward to someday being in heaven with those who have been saved through our mission efforts.
H. But as you know, the mission field isn’t just out there, it is right here in Central New York.
1. Every time we leave this building, we go into the mission field.
2. Souls that need the salvation of Jesus Christ are all around us – in our neighborhoods, workplaces, and schools.
3. God always blesses us with new converts every year as the result of our efforts.
a. In the last five years, we have helped 50 people be baptized into Christ.
b. That is almost one conversion per month.
4. But there are thousands and thousands more in Central New York that are lost.
5. We can’t sit back and simply enjoy our salvation and our fellowship, we have to try to reach as many as possible.
I. Most of us know something of the story of the Titanic and how more than 1,500 of the 2,200 passengers died when it sank on April 15, 1912.
1. Perhaps the greatest tragedy is that many of those people didn’t have to die.
2. A lot of people climbed into the 20 lifeboats that were available, but many of them were only half full.
3. Hundreds of people were in the cold water with life preservers on and did not die from drowning, but from freezing to death.
4. The people in those lifeboats heard the cries of those dying people, but they chose not to go to rescue them for fear of capsizing.
5. Only one or two of the 20 lifeboats went back to rescue people in the water, but they did so when it was too late – only six people were found still alive.
6. Those who were already saved didn’t go after those who were dying.
7. Spiritually, we must not let that happen, we who are saved must go after those who are lost and dying in their sins.
J. How can each of us be more involved in outreach?
1. Lord willing, in sermons for the next two weeks we will focus on the “how to” of evangelism.
2. For today, I want us to focus on our God-given commission and the great need for evangelism.
K. Each of us have been commissioned by God to help draw people to God.
1. In Matthew 5:13-14, Jesus says that we are “salt” and “light” for the world.
2. In 2 Cor. 5:20, Paul tells us that we are to be “ambassadors” for Christ.
3. Jesus said we are to be his “witnesses.” (Acts 1:8)
4. In Acts 4:20 the disciples said that they could not “help speaking about what they had seen and heard” about Jesus.
5. I hope and pray that that will be the reality of my life and yours’, that we just can’t help but speak to others about the love of Jesus and the grace of God, but also the reality of hell.
6. In 2 Cor. 5:11, Paul wrote about what motivated him to evangelize, he wrote, “Since, then, we know what it is to fear the Lord, we try to persuade men.”
L. The need for evangelism is so great, because many people are lost.
1. Heaven is real, but so is hell and real people will go there.
a. No person in the Bible talked about hell more than Jesus.
b. No preacher in the Bible talked about hell more than Jesus.
c. In our day we often call the people that don’t know Jesus the unchurched.
d. Jesus never used that word. He called them lost.
e. He said “I’ve come to seek and save the lost.” (Luke 19:10)
2. The word “Lost” is a strong word.
a. It’s the same word used in Mark 4:38 when the disciples are in the boat and the storm is upon them and they wake Jesus up and say “don’t you care that we drown?” That’s the word they used.
b. It’s the same word used in 2 Peter 3:9 when it says that God is not willing that anyone should perish but that all should be saved.
c. It’s the same word that Jesus used in John 17:12 when he said that none has been lost except Judas. It is a strong word.
3. I’ll show you where else it shows up. It is in the most famous verse from the Bible, Jn 3:16, “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.”
M. Ken Hemphill was president of Southwestern Theological Seminary in Fort Worth.
1. He tells a story about teaching his 6 year old daughter about John 3:16 and the night that he knew she finally understood it.
2. She had memorized the verse, and knew it well, but one night as she quoted it, her eyes got real big, and she looked at her dad and her voice quivered as she said, “Don’t perish daddy. Please don’t perish.”
3. She understood that Jesus is necessary and some people will perish.
4. See, hell is real and sadly real people will go to hell.
N. In the movie, Dead Poet’s Society, the late Robin Williams plays the role of a teacher in an exclusive prep school.
1. On the first day of school, he takes his class of boys out into the hallway to look at the pictures of past graduates of the school, who are now dead.
2. He says to the boys, “We are food for worms, Lads! Believe it or not each and every one of us in this room one day will stop breathing, turn cold, and die. Step forward and see these faces from the past. They were just like you are now. They believed they were destined for great things. Their eyes are full of hope. But, you see, gentleman, these boys are now fertilizing daffodils. If you listen real close, you will hear them whisper something. What do you hear them saying? Carpe Diem! Seize the day boys.”
3. Three people die every second, 180 a minute, 260,000 a day, 94 million a year.
4. Our lives are short, and so are the lives of those who need to hear the gospel.
5. That’s why when Paul wrote to the Colossians, he told them, “Carpe Diem.” He wrote, “Be wise in the way you act toward outsiders; make the most of every opportunity.” (Col. 4:5)
O. You know, some people treat church like it’s a gas station that they don’t want to leave.
1. Imagine going into a nice gas station, like one of Dave Hogan’s Fastracs.
2. It’s all clean, it’s got a great price for gas, it has your favorite hot or cold drinks and snacks, and the people are so nice that after you pay for everything, and they say, “Have a nice trip.”
3. But you say, “Well, I’ve had such a good experience here, I think I’ll just stay.”
4. “I think we will just park right here and spend the day.”
5. See, Dave doesn’t want you hanging around his gas stations, that’s not what they are for.
6. They are designed for us to come and get what we need so we can go where we need to go.
P. That’s why we meet here with God’s people. That’s why the church comes together.
1. We meet here to get filled up. To encourage each other. To inspire each other so we can go where God wants to send us into the world on His rescue mission.
2. I love what the scripture says in Psalm 96:1-3, “Sing to the Lord a new song; sing to the Lord, all the earth. Sing to the Lord, praise his name; proclaim his salvation day after day. Declare his glory among the nations, his marvelous deeds among all peoples.”
3. God is glorified when we witness to his saving acts in this world.
4. Let’s go public about our God? We’ve got something to say. We’ve got a testimony.
5. And you know something? We don’t have to go to the mission field, we are already in one.
6. What we do have to do is to be intentional about our witness.
Q. I heard a preacher tell about a time when he was invited to go to a church in Florida and preach a gospel meeting.
1. He was excited to go, but that first day of the meeting, he realized that there were no lost people in the audience.
2. That church had not prepared for that meeting. They had not fasted and prayed. They had not invited any of their friends.
3. They had the gospel meeting because that’s what they had been doing every Spring for 30 years.
4. The preacher went back to his hotel room that night and changed into running clothes and went out on the beach for a jog.
5. As he went along, he came upon a wild party with loud music and lots of drinking.
6. As he looked at the participants, he saw every color of hair but blond and brown and people were covered with tattoos and piercings.
7. He jogged by thinking, “I hope my kids don’t ever go to a party like that.”
8. Then God penetrated his brain with this thought: “God loves those people. Christ died for those people.”
9. Then he thought, “But what are the chances that someone like them is ever going to come to a gospel meeting? And what are the chances that someone like him is ever going to invite someone like them to come to a gospel meeting.”
10. I wish I could report that that preacher went back to that party and invited them to the Gospel meeting, but I can’t.
R. As God sees it, that’s the problem…God’s lost kids don’t know how to find him, and God’s saved kids aren’t helping them find the way.
1. People don’t stumble into salvation. Nobody accidentally gets saved.
2. That’s why God has commissioned us and why God sends us.
3. Our mission is to go out there and share God’s love with people who haven’t heard it, or at least haven’t heard it lately.
4. C.S. Lewis in his book Mere Christianity put it this way, “It’s so easy to think that the church has a lot of objectives. But the church exists for no other purpose but to draw men into Christ. If it is not doing that then all the cathedrals, clergy, missions, sermons, even the Bible are just a waste of time. God became man for no other purpose, it’s even doubtful that the whole universe was created for any other purpose.”
S. May God help us to keep outreach as one of our top priorities as a congregation and as individuals.
1. May God help us be a healthier church by growing larger through outreach.
2. Lord willing, next week we will wrestle with the “how to” of evangelism.
3. I hope today each of us is convinced of our evangelistic commission and convinced of the great need to reach out to those who are lost.
T. I want to leave us with this thought: think of how our church would grow if “each one reached one.”
1. If during 2015, each one of us simply brought one person into God’s family we would double in size – isn’t that an amazing thought? We would go from a church of 200 to a church of 400.
2. And what if that happened several years in a row? In 3 years, if the original 200 people each brought one person to Christ each year, we would be a church of 800 people and each of us would only have brought 3 people into God’s family during those 3 years!
3. Let’s be a healthy church that is growing both spiritually and numerically.
