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 in Lyons, Kansas. 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 multiply and 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 nations” (Matthew 28:19). “Be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth” (Acts 1:8).
God never intended for His church 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? 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 came to Egypt with Jacob, each with his household: Reuben, Simeon, Levi, and Judah, Issachar, Zebulun, and Benjamin, Dan and Naphtali, Gad and Asher. All the descendants of Jacob were seventy persons; Joseph was already in Egypt. Then Joseph died, and all his brothers and all that generation. But the people of Israel were fruitful and increased greatly; they multiplied and grew exceedingly strong, so that the land was filled with them (ESV).
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 end 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 apologist, 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).
You 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 Now there arose a new king over Egypt, who did not know Joseph (ESV).
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 And he said to his people, “Behold, the people of Israel are too many and too mighty for us. Come, let us deal shrewdly with them, lest they multiply, and, if war breaks out, they join our enemies and fight against us and escape from the land.” Therefore they set taskmasters over them to afflict them with heavy burdens. They built for Pharaoh store cities, Pithom and Raamses. But the more they were oppressed, the more they multiplied and the more they spread abroad. And the Egyptians were in dread of the people of Israel. So they ruthlessly made the people of Israel work as slaves and made their lives bitter with hard service, in mortar and brick, and in all kinds of work in the field. In all their work they ruthlessly made them work as slaves (ESV).
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.
If that’s what you want, if you want to grow, then 1st, multiply through faith in God’s promises. Then 2nd…
MULTIPLY THROUGH OPPRESSION.
Grow EVEN MORE in times of trial and pain. Spread the influence of Christ EVEN MORE when you are harassed and persecuted. Howard Hendricks calls 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 abide 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, “Every branch that does bear fruit [God] prunes, that it may bear more fruit” (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 when the church’s first martyr was killed, “There arose on that day a great persecution against the church in Jerusalem, and they were all scattered throughout the regions of Judea and Samaria, except the apostles… [And] those who were scattered went about preaching the word (Acts 8:1,4). The church had become comfortable in their hometown 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 God used that very thing 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.
Perhaps, God is doing the same thing for the church in America during these difficult days.
Our culture no longer respects believers like it once did. And Christians find themselves under increasing persecution. It just might be that God is forcing us out of our comfort zones, so we can be even more fruitful for His Kingdom.
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.
More recently, 38th Street and Chicago Avenue in Minneapolis became a place where God worked in powerful ways to bring many to faith in Christ. That intersection is the site where a Minneapolis police officer killed George Floyd on May 25, 2020. Just a month later, authorities blocked traffic as numerous visitors laid flowers and murals. Musicians gave concerts and various evangelists and pastors preached the gospel.
Joshua Giles, a local Black pastor, described it as “revival and awakening.” He helped in several spontaneous baptisms and decisions for Christ. Local evangelist Joshua Lindquist posted on his Facebook page: “The spiritual climate has completely shifted. We believe that this location is going to turn into an epicenter of revival.”
A visiting evangelist from California, representing a ministry named Circuit Riders, told the media: “We’re at the intersection of pain in America.” A Black evangelist from Hawaii said: “We’ve seen these beautiful moments of reconciliation and forgiveness. This isn’t some Instagram corny photo-op.” The Christian Broadcasting Network reported: “The area was once flooded with riots and chaos but has now seen an outpouring of God’s power. According to a Christian radio station, “At the ‘epicenter of pain and darkness,’ a message of hope through Christ is taking hold and spreading” (Ruth Graham, “The Street Corner Where George Floyd Was Killed Has Become a Christian Revivalist Site,” Slate, 6-29-20; www.PreachingToday.com).
The greater the heat, the greater the expansion.
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 1:15-16 Then the king of Egypt said to the Hebrew midwives, one of whom was named Shiphrah and the other Puah—Literally, “Beauty” and “Splendor”—“When you serve as midwife to the Hebrew women and see them on the birthstool, if it is a son, you shall kill him, but if it is a daughter, she shall live” (ESV).
The “birth 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 But the midwives feared God and did not do as the king of Egypt commanded them, but let the male children live. So the king of Egypt called the midwives and said to them, “Why have you done this, and let the male children live?” The midwives said to Pharaoh, “Because the Hebrew women are not like the Egyptian women, for they are vigorous and give birth before the midwife comes to them” (ESV).
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 dealt well with the midwives. And the people multiplied and grew very strong. And because the midwives feared God, he gave them families (ESV).
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 commanded all his people, “Every son that is born to the Hebrews you shall cast into the Nile, but you shall let every daughter live” (ESV).
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, that’s what you must do when others oppose you. Like the Hebrew midwives, fear God more than you fear any person, and do what’s right no matter what the threat is against you.
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. In the same we, we grow in the 21st Century by maintaining biblical values in a culture that is hostile to those values.
Historian 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.
James Russel Lowell challenges us with these words:
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).
