In a small church on the U.S. East Coast a pastor delivered a sermon on abortion, and after the service a German man who lived in Nazi Germany told of hi experience: I lived in Germany during the Nazi Holocaust. I considered myself a Christian. We heard stories of what was happening to the Jews, but we tried to distance ourselves from it, because, what could anyone do to stop it?
A railroad track ran behind our small church, and each Sunday morning we could hear the whistle in the distance and then the wheels coming over the tracks. We became disturbed when we heard the cries coming from the train as it passed by. We realized that it was carrying Jews like cattle in the cars!
Week after week the whistle would blow. We dreaded to hear the sound of those wheels because we knew that we would hear the cries of the Jews en route to the death camp. Their screams tormented us.
We knew the time the train came past our church and when we heard the whistle blow we began singing hymns. By the time the train came past our church we were singing at the top of our voices. If we heard the screams, we sang more loudly and soon we heard them no more.
Years have passed and no one talks about it anymore. But I still hear that train whistle in my sleep. God forgive me; forgive all of us who called ourselves Christians and yet did nothing....
There are people all around us in a similar situation as those Jews in the train cars, but their destination is an even worse one: they are on their way to hell. Are you like those German Christians? Do you only want to ignore the problem, or do you want to do something to help? There should be no question as to what you should do if you are a Christian because you have the one thing that is able to save them from destruction: the gospel.
Vance Havner once said, “We do not have a secret to be hidden but a story to be heralded.”
The act of sharing the gospel is called evangelism.
• Evangelism is the sob of God. It is the anguished cry of Jesus as He weeps over a doomed city.
• It is the cry of Paul, “I could wish that myself were accursed from Christ for my brethren, my kinsmen according to the flesh.”
• Evangelism is the heart-winning plea of Moses. “Oh this people have sinned.—Yet now, if thou wilt, forgive their sin—; if not, blot me, I pray thee, out of the book which thou hast written.”
• It is the cry of John Knox, “Give me Scotland or I die.” It is the declaration of John Wesley, “The world is my parish.” It is the sob of parents in the night, weeping over a prodigal child.
The key to evangelism is a burden for the lost.
I. THERE IS A REASON FOR SHARING THE GOSPEL (v. 1).
1 For yourselves, brethren, know our entrance [visit] in unto you, that it was not in vain:
The word “vain” denotes what is empty of real meaning and purpose. Paul had come to them because he believed the gospel himself, and truly felt that the people of Thessalonica were eternally lost without that message.
Britain’s King George V was to give the opening address at a special disarmament conference, with a speech relayed by radio to the United States. As the broadcast was about to begin, a cable broke in the New York radio station, and more than a million listeners were left without sound.
A junior mechanic in the station, Harold Vivien, solved the problem by picking up both ends of the cable and allowing 250 volts of electricity to pass through him. He was the living link that allowed the king’s message to get through.
We are the link between God and the unsaved. We have His message, and we are told to take that message to those who need to hear it.
II. THERE ARE EXCUSES FOR NOT SHARING THE GOSPEL (v. 2).
Right now you’re probably thinking of reasons why you shouldn’t share the gospel.
2 But even after that we had suffered before, and were shamefully entreated, as ye know, at Philippi, we were bold in our God to speak unto you the gospel of God with much contention.
The opposite of the empty ministry denied in v. 1 is one where no obstacle or threat is sufficient to deter the speaker of God’s gospel.
Paul’s troubles in Philippi (Acts 16:19-24).
Paul’s troubles in Thessalonica (Acts 17:5).
David Brainerd once shared his burden for the lost when he said, “I cared not where or how I lived, or what hardships I went through, so that I could but gain souls for Christ. While I was asleep, I dreamed of these things, and when I awoke, the first thing I thought of what this great work.”
Bill Bright shared his approach to evangelism: Although I have shared Christ personally with many thousands of people through the years, I am a rather reserved person and I do not always find it easy to witness.
But I have made this my practice, and I urge you to do the same: Assume that whenever you are alone with another person for more than a few moments, you are there by divine appointment to explain to that person the love and forgiveness he can know through faith in Jesus Christ.
You may say, “I’m not like Paul. I can’t witness the way he did.” And you’re right; you can’t witness the same way Paul did. God has made each one of us unique, and so God has give to all of us a unique ability to witness.
According to Mark Mittelberg, director of evangelism at Willow Creek Community Church of suburban Chicago, “God knew what he was doing when he made you. He custom-designed you with your unique combination of personality, temperament, talents, and background, and he wants to use you to reach others in a fashion that fits your design.” For example, says Mittelberg, consider these six people in the New Testament:
• Peter’s Confrontational Approach—He was direct, bold, and to the point.
• Paul’s Intellectual Approach—He could be confrontational, but he was a well-educated man who could reason from the Scriptures, explaining and proving that Jesus was the Christ.
• The Blind Man’s Testimonial Approach—The man in John 9 didn’t know a great deal of theology, but he could say, “One thing I know: I once was blind and now I see.”
• The Samaritan Woman’s Invitational Approach—Leaving her water jug at the well, the woman in John 4 went into her village and invited her friends to come and hear the man “who told me everything I ever did.”
• Matthew’s Interpersonal Approach—In Luke 5:29 Matthew put on a big banquet for his tax-collecting buddies in an effort to expose them to Jesus. He relied on the relationships he’d built with these men and sought to further shore up their friendships, inviting them into his home and using his channels of friendship for evangelism.
• Dorcas’ Service Approach—In Acts 9, we meet a woman who witnessed by serving others in Jesus’ name, making clothes for the needy and helping the poor.
III. THERE IS NO SHAME IN SHARING THE GOSPEL (v. 3).
3 For our exhortation was not of deceit, not or uncleanness, nor in guile:
Paul could boldly exhort people to receive the gospel of God for three reasons.
First, Paul was assured that the gospel did not have its source in error. “Not of deceit” means “error,” not “deceit.”
The early missionaries of the cross knew that they were not victims of a great deception or lie. The facts and purpose of Christ’s life, death, and resurrection were and are true.
Second, the secret of the gospel was not in its appeal to uncleanness. It may seem strange to us to realize that Paul felt it necessary to disclaim sensuality, but the success of heathen religions could often be traced to their sanction of immorality.
Third, the sending of the truth was not with impure motives. Paul loved the truth because it did not require guile to convince. The word “guile” is from a word which means “bait” and thus signifies any crafty design or catching. The gospel does not require deception.
There is no shame in sharing the gospel!
Jacob Koshy grew up in Singapore with one driving ambition: to be a success in life, to gain all the money and possessions he could. That led him into the world of drugs and gambling, and eventually he became the lord of an international smuggling network. In 1980, he was arrested and placed in a government drug rehabilitation prison in Singapore.
He was frustrated beyond endurance. All his goals, purposes, dreams, and ambitions were locked up with him in a tiny cell, and his heart was full of a cold emptiness.
He was a smoker, and cigarettes weren’t allowed in the center. Instead, he smuggled in tobacco and rolled it in the pages of a Gideon Bible. One day he fell asleep while smoking. He awoke to find that the cigarette had burned out, and all that remained was a scrap of charred paper. He unrolled it and read what was written: “Saul, Saul, Why do you persecute me?”
Jacob asked for another Bible and read the entire story of the conversion of Saul of Tarsus. He suddenly realized that if God could help someone like Saul, god could help him, too. There in his cell he knelt and prayed, asking Christ to come into his life and change him. He began crying and couldn’t stop. The tears of a wasted life washed away his pain, and God saved him. He started sharing his story with the other prisoners, and as soon as he was released he became involved in a church. He met a Christian woman, married, and is now a missionary in the Far East where he tells people far and wide, “Who would have believed that I could find the truth by smoking the Word of God?”
IV. THERE IS THE GOAL OF GOD’S APPROVAL WHEN SHARING THE GOSPEL (v. 4).
4 But as we were allowed [approved] of God to be put in trust with the gospel, even so we speak: not as pleasers of men, but God, which trieth our hearts.
It was because Paul realized that it is God who gives approval that he did not aim his ministry at pleasing men but God who proves the heart. It is always a temptation to gear our message to that which pleases men, and to aim our methods at that which will not displease them in any way. This Paul did not do.
We must proclaim the true gospel:
• The need for the gospel—All have sinned.
• Jesus is the only way to heaven.
• Salvation is by faith alone.
An elevator operator at a hospital in Nashville once said, “I’m just a nobody telling everybody about somebody who can save anybody.”
It was A. T. Pierson who said, “Witnessing is the whole work of the whole church for the whole age.”
Vance Havner said, “The gospel is not something we come to church to hear; it is something we go from church to tell.”
