Foundation for Living # 13 January 22, 2006

17 Deal bountifully with Your servant,
That I may live and keep Your word.
18 Open my eyes, that I may see
         Wondrous things from Your law.
19 I am a stranger in the earth;
         Do not hide Your commandments from me.
20 My soul breaks with longing
         For Your judgments at all times.
21 You rebuke the proud—the cursed,
         Who stray from Your commandments.
22 Remove from me reproach and contempt,
         For I have kept Your testimonies.
23 Princes also sit and speak against me,
But Your servant meditates on Your statutes.
24 Your testimonies also are my delight
And my counselors.

Father we are indeed grateful that we can gather together this morning in freedom to study Your word. We thank You that we have Your word, that You have revealed it through the prophets and apostles, and that You preserve it through God the Holy Spirit who indeed indwells us and teaches us and guides and directs our thinking through Your word. And Father, we pray that as we study Your word today that we might not take this for granted, but we might recognize that this is a priority for us as believers and that we might not be conformed to the world but we might be transformed by the renewing of our thinking. Father, we pray that You would challenge us with the things we study this morning . We pray this in Christ's name. Amen.

I want to begin this morning by having you open your Bibles to Matthew 16. This is a well known passage that has been distorted by many people over the ages. It is a passage that deals with a vital question, one that each of us as individuals are going to have to deal with during this coming year, especially if we are having any kind of interaction with the culture around us. Jesus asks the question of His disciples in verse 13:

“Who do men say that I, the Son of Man, am?”

This year we are going to be faced with the release of the movie The DaVinci Code, which promises to be a blockbuster, it is going to come out in May, and going to be released world wide. This was even an issue over in Kiev, it has been translated into I don’t know how many languages and this is one of the reasons Jim asked me to teach about this because whenever we are witnessing to people, we have to be aware of the issues they might raise, and trust me, when the lies that are in this particular book and movie really get out there through the film version, then when we are involved in witnessing to people, we are going to hear a lot of very technical objections and the problem with technical objections is they require technical answers, and most Christians are so ignorant of church history , so ignorant of how we got the Bible, how we got the gospels. They are so ignorant of doctrines related to the person of Christ and the scriptures to go to that they are just going to just be absolutely befuddled and fumbling around in the process of trying to communicate the gospel to people. So this is a key question. Who is Jesus Christ?

So He asks His disciples, and they say, well, there are a lot of different opinions floating around, some people say You are John the Baptist, some say You are Elijah, others say You are Jeremiah, or one of the other prophets.

15 He said to them, “But who do you say that I am?”
16 Simon Peter answered and said, “You are the Christ (that is, the Messiah), the Son of the living God.”
17 Jesus answered and said to him, “Blessed are you, Simon Bar-Jonah, for flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but My Father who is in heaven. 18 And I also say to you that you are Peter, and on this rock I will build My church, and the gates of Hades shall not prevail against it.

Now this is a key verse for establishing a principle that I want to study this morning, and that is the importance of personal evangelism and witnessing in the believer’s life.

We have been going through a study for the last several months on basics. And in the last part of this series we have been looking at basics related to the Christian life. We looked at basic spiritual principles that under gird all spiritual growth and from there we looked at the responsibilities of the priesthood and now we are looking at the duties of an ambassador.

So Jesus is talking to Peter, and what I want to lay out here initially is the biblical basis for evangelism. And this is the foundation. In Matthew 16:18 He addresses Peter, and in this statement there is a play on words. There is a bit of a pun to establish the doctrine.

He says,

I also say to you that you are Peter.

The name Peter comes from the noun petros, which means a rock or a stone.

It is a masculine noun. And then Jesus said:

and on this rock,

and He shifts from using a masculine to using the feminine demonstrative, which has to refer to a feminine noun or concept, not to a masculine noun. So when He says this rock, He is not referring to petros, or Peter’s name. He is not saying that I am building My church on you Peter, which is the Roman Catholic error, He is not building it on Peter, Peter is not the foundation of the church, Peter is not the founder of the church, He is talking about something different. When He shifts to the feminine He actually has in mind the noun pistis which is the feminine noun for faith.

It is on this rock,

and he shifts from petros to petra, which is a feminine, and petra refers to a large rock formation, or a bedrock or a foundation stone. So the best way to translate this would be to say:

I say to you that you are Peter, petros, and on this foundation stone,

which is the statement he just made, that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the living God,

on this foundation I will build My church, and the gates of Hades shall not prevail against it.

In the next verse He says,

19 And I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.”

Now, the keys are not apostleship. The gift of apostleship was not distributed until after the ascension according to Ephesians 4:8-12. When Jesus ascended, it was then that He gave gifts to men, including the gift of apostle, prophet, evangelist, and pastor teacher. So this is not talking about Peter being given the position as the cornerstone of the church, he is not being given apostleship here, what He is referring to is witnessing. The keys to the kingdom is the gospel message. That Jesus Christ is the Son of the living God who has died on the cross for our sin. That is what is the basis for our entrance into heaven. So the biblical basis for evangelism begins here with an understanding of the nature of the keys. It is something that is given to every believer that we can proclaim the truth of the word of God.

Now as Jesus goes to the cross and is crucified, following the crucifixion and resurrection, He gives a commission to all believers and this commission is related to witnessing, it is not just to the disciples. Some people come to that error because Jesus is addressing what appears to be the eleven who are in front of Him. But He is addressing all the church through them, and it is clear that it is the responsibility of every believer to be involved in witnessing. It is part of our ambassadorship. I want to briefly go through the parallel passages, sometimes referred to as the great commission. A form of this is given in every gospel, as well as in Acts.

Mark 16:15 And He said to them, “Go into all the world and preach the gospel

The word there, kerruso, means to make a proclamation. It is not what we normally think of as preaching today. Preaching today is more of an oratorical form. Preaching at this time was simply making a pronouncement, a kerux would be a herald in the ancient world. They did not have CNN, or Fox News, or radio to make an announcements, so they would send a herald through the town, and his job was to go and to make the announcement and not to stop and talk to anybody, not to get involved in any distractions, but to focus on making the message clear, making it known as he went through the town, village or city carrying out his task of proclaiming a message. So Jesus gives the task to the disciples to go into all the world and to proclaim the gospel to every creature. We see a parallel to this in Acts 1:8, just before Jesus ascended into heaven He told the disciples to wait in Jerusalem until the Holy Spirit came, and He says:

8 But you shall receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you shall be witnesses to Me in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth.”

A quick observation is, there a connection here between power when the Holy Spirit comes and the task of being witnesses. The real power in the witnessing of the believer’s life today is not in your intellectual capabilities to present the gospel, not in your persuasiveness, not in some form of technique, you don’t have to find just the right way to say it, just the right way to answer their objections, the real power comes, as we’ll see in other passages, from God the Holy Spirit who is the sovereign executive of evangelism. This means that you and I can just relax in the process of proclaiming the gospel. We do the best we can, we may fumble a bit, we may stumble around we may not be able to answer somebody’s questions to the best of our ability, but remember, the issue is not reason, the issue is not whatever they think it is, the issue is making the gospel clear, and it is God the Holy Spirit who drives the point home. No matter how we may fumble or bumble around, no matter how we may state the gospel in some sort of unclear manner and go home and kick ourselves because we didn’t say this when they said that, and all this other stuff, we don’ t have to worry about it. We can just relax and let God the Holy Spirit work with what we say, and He always does that.

In Luke 24:45 we have another statement that Jesus gave in another context, for the disciples to proclaim the gospel. Here He is talking to the eleven plus at least 2 others.

He has just met with Cleopus and another unnamed disciple, not one of the eleven, but another disciple on the road to Emmaeus and He opened the Scriptures to them then He comes back to Jerusalem and He meets with the eleven. Cleopus and the other unnamed disciple had traveled back to Jerusalem and announced the fact that they had seen the Lord on the way to Emmeus and then Jesus suddenly appeared to them.

45 And He opened their understanding, that they might comprehend the Scriptures.

46 Then He said to them, “Thus it is written, and thus it was necessary for the Christ to suffer and to rise from the dead the third day, 47 and that repentance

Literally, a change of mind in relation to who Jesus is, it is not remorse. That is the problem you have with so many people, they think repentance s remorse. In fact, this is one of the things I always have to deal with over in Ukraine or in Russia, the word for repentance that they use is remorse. So you have to educate and cut through a lot of stuff because the poor translation automatically implies this sort of emotional remorse, feeling sorry for your sin and everything else. It teaches that repentance

and remission of sin should be preached in His name to all nations, beginning at Jerusalem.

The same thing that is said in Acts 1:8:

But you shall receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you shall be witnesses to Me in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth.”

The gospel message is designed to be taken to everybody because Christ has died for everybody. So the foundation element of the gospel is understanding unlimited atonement.

And Jesus concludes in Luke 24:48:

And you are witnesses of these things.

So, as believers in the Lord Jesus Christ who have studied the Word, and understand the gospel, we too become witnesses, even though we are not direct eyewitnesses, we are eyewitnesses through their eyes, and it is our job to continue the task of taking the gospel to those who are ignorant of the truth that Jesus Christ died on the cross for their sins.

This is clearly carried out. For example, the Apostle Paul, when he is saved as an apostle out of time, he says that Jesus told him

you will be his witness to all men of what you have seen and heard.

So Paul carried this out. It was understood throughout Acts that the way this command was to be applied was to take the gospel around from city to city, village to village, and to tell people the message that Jesus Christ had died on the cross for their sins.

One other time Jesus that appeared to the disciples is given in Matthew 28:19 & 20. If you look carefully at the context there, and you go back a couple of verses, what you will discover is that Jesus had given the disciples, the eleven, a task. And He talks to the women at the tomb, and He talks to the disciples, and then He says:

Do not be afraid, go and tell My brethren – that is the other believers

in the Jerusalem area- to go to Galilee and there they will see Me.

So He call for a meeting, not just with the eleven, but with more that the eleven, and then in verse 16 we are told:

Then the eleven disciples went away into Galilee, to the mountain which Jesus had appointed for them

So who all is going there? Just the eleven? No, there are other believers as well. He is not just addressing the disciples. And He says:

19 Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, 20 teaching them to observe all things that I have commanded you; and lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age.” Amen.

So the command is to make disciples, make students, make learners of everything. And that includes the starting point to the end point, starting with evangelism and explaining the gospel, extending through teaching everything related to the spiritual life. So again and again and again, before Jesus ascended to heaven, He made the point to give the command to His disciples that they were to be involved in witnessing. And this is how they understood it, and this is how it developed through the book of Acts. Peter, on the day of Pentecost has a gospel message in Acts 3 again, he has a gospel message, then he and John are going to the temple in Acts 4 and there they again are proclaiming the gospel. We see Phillip, one of those chosen in Act 6 explaining the gospel to the Ethiopian eunuch. And in Acts 7 we see Stephen giving another message that included the gospel presentation, and of course, we have Paul and Barnabas going out on their on their first missionary journey, and Paul on his second and third missionary journey as you go through Acts, again and again and again what they are doing is carrying out the mandate that was given by the Lord Jesus Christ prior to His ascension. So we see that witnessing is a responsibility of the believer and it is part of our ambassadorship. And this comes to play in 2 Corinthians 5:17-21. This gives us a foundation for witnessing. It is part of our ambassadorship. What is an ambassador? An ambassador is someone who is appointed by a nation a king or a ruler to represent that nation. And it is the king, the government, the ruler that does the appointing. The ambassador is not self appointed. He is not on his own self appointed mission. So the conclusion by analogy is that every believer is appointed an ambassador by God the Father, because it is God the Father who is, in Christ, reconciling the world to Himself.

2 Corinthian 5:17 talks about the fact that this is part of being a new creation in Christ.

Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; old things have passed away; behold, all things have become new. 18 Now all things are of God, who has reconciled us to Himself through Jesus Christ, and has given us the ministry of reconciliation,

I want you to notice the use of that first person plural pronoun, us, is that referring to only the apostles, or is it referring to all believers? It is referring to all believers in context because God has reconciled us, meaning all believers, not just the apostles. He has reconciled us to Himself, and so the ministry of reconciliation given to us is that we are to go out and proclaim that message to other people. Now this is part of our ambassadorship as seen in next couple of verses, verse 20 specifically.

20 Now then, we are ambassadors for Christ

Now an ambassador is not only appointed by the head of the kingdom, the ruler, whoever that may be, but it is the responsibility of that ruler to logistically support and protect and provide for the ambassador as he is sent out from his kingdom he is to be supported in case there are any kind of attacks against him so that involves not only logistical support, but also security and protection, and there is a certain authority that is give to the ambassador that is given by the king or president or whoever the governing power is.

A third observation is that the ambassador represents someone else. So that the ambassador’s life is no longer his own, he has to be careful how he lives, he lives to represent the one who sent him, not to live for himself. So it involves an exchange of priorities, and he must place the cause and concerns of the kingdom he represents above his own cares and concerns.

An ambassador also needs to avoid becoming entangled in the thought forms and the culture and the world view of the culture to which he is sent. That is true for the believer, we don’t need to be caught up with the thinking of the culture we are going to.

Whether it is here in America, whether it is in Russia, Europe, Asia, Africa, every culture has it’s human viewpoint thought forms and value systems. So as ambassadors we need to be able to identify the values of the culture we are going to. We need to understand how that culture thinks. In our situation we have grown up in that culture and we have to figure out how to get rid of that, which is what Paul refers to in Romans 12, not to be conformed to the world. So we have to avoid becoming entangled in the thinking of the culture to which we are being sent. So we have to do a lot of work studying the word of God to find out what the truth is, so we can then in turn, evaluate our own thinking so we can remove the human viewpoint cultural influences on our own thinking and that is a process that takes the rest of our lives. So the ambassador needs to avoid becoming entangled and influenced by the culture or the world view of the people to whom he is sent.

Ambassadors have instructions in written form. There is a commissioning. This is our commission, that we have already looked at, to take the gospel to the gentiles, to the world. So we have our instructions and we have specific guidelines in the word of God as to how to do this, what the content of our message is as well as the methodology. A lot of folks do not understand that. There are right ways and wrong ways to evangelize people. We find all kinds of different methods used today because in America today we think that the end justifies the means, so it doesn’t matter how we evangelize people.

The first time that was driven home to me was back in the mid seventies. Some of you have been around long enough to remember that Campus Crusade had a campaign called, I Found It, and they stuck this statement, I Found It on bumper stickers and bill boards and everywhere. I remember going up to visit Randy Price at Dallas Seminary about 1974, and there was a neighbor of his, an unsaved Jew, and he made a comment, we Jews have respect for God, we never put Him on a billboard. That is the first time I thought that the way we approach witnessing reveals certain underlying presuppositions about God and nature and reality, and sometimes we can actually compromise the message of our witness by how we present the gospel. So this involves a little further thought than what we are going to get into this morning.

Furthermore, number 6, an ambassador represents his country and does not treat rejection as personal. They are not rejecting you when you present the gospel, they are rejecting Jesus Christ. And that is a problem many of us have had, that we are afraid to witness, we don’t want to deal with the rejection, we don’t want to deal with

whatever negative consequences might ensue, somebody calls us a religious zealot or a Jesus freak, or whatever it might be, and we don’t like that. We want people to think we are intellectually capable, we don’t want to be run down by other people so sometimes we are a little hesitant to give the gospel, but the point is, as an ambassador it is our job to give the gospel, and recognize that it will be rejected many times, but it is not a rejection of us, it’s not something we should take personally, it is a rejection of God and His grace.

Now what is involved in witnessing? I want to go over some general principles that we need to be aware of when we are explaining the gospel to those who are not saved. First of all we have to recognize that witnessing is the responsibility of every believer. There are two areas in which we witness in our life. We witness in our life itself, and we witness with our lips. We witness with our lives: 2 Corinthians 3:3 and 6:3.

Unbelievers watch us, they observe us. Sometimes they observe us very carefully and it may be years they watch us and they say, okay, I understand what they are saying, now does that match their life? What is the relationship here? We are not always aware of the fact that people are watching us. There is sort of a double edged problem here, too many times I hear believers say, well, my witness is my life. Your life is a support for what you say with your mouth, don’t think that by somebody just watching how you live that they can figure out that Jesus Christ died on the cross for your sins. See, that is one of those rationalizations people use to avoid stepping out and explaining the gospel to folks. We have to explain the content of the gospel to people. 2 Peter 3:15 says that we should always be ready to give an answer for the hope that is in us. That means we have to understand the gospel message, the content of the gospel message, but we also have to be ready to explain that within the context of the culture. That means there has to be flexibility. There is no such thing as just drive by evangelists. You don’t throw out: believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and you will be saved, and then you are out of there. Get involved in a conversation with people, get involved in understanding what they are dealing with what they are trying to understand. So witnessing, number one, is the responsibility of every believer.

Point number 2, the challenge to witness based on 2 Corinthians 5:17 and following is based on two doctrines, the doctrine of reconciliation, God was in Christ, reconciling the world to Himself, and unlimited atonement. That Christ is the propitiation not for our sins but for the sins of the whole world. Because Jesus Christ died for everyone, everyone needs to hear the gospel and have it made clear to them. Jesus Christ died for them, no matter how obnoxious they may be to you or to me, Jesus Christ died on the cross for them. Sometimes I think that, though we are all saved by grace, some people are saves by an extra measure of grace. And we all know people who are like that. But nevertheless, it is our responsibility to give them the gospel, no matter how much we may not like that person, no matter how distasteful it may be, no matter how socially unacceptable they may be, who knows what God the Holy Spirit is going to do in that persons life.

Third principle, your effectiveness as a witness depends on the ministry of God the Holy Spirit, it is not dependent on your power, it is not dependent on your education, your intellectual ability, your persuasiveness, we have to remember that God the Holy Spirit is the sovereign executive of salvation and evangelism. Paul says, in Romans 1:16,

for I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ, for it is the power of God to salvation for everyone who believes, for the Jew first, then the Greek.

The power is in the Word itself because the Word is truth. And because it is true, it is not a mystical power, it is the power of truth.

Then Paul says in 1 Thessalonians 1:5

For our gospel did not come to you in word only, but also in power

that is an instrumental dative, by means of power,

and by means of the Holy Spirit.

So he actually says three things about the gospel. Our gospel did not come to you by means of the word only, so it is not just words, the issue with the unbeliever is not just an intellectual problem, as we will see from Romans 1:18 and following. The problem is a spiritual problem, it is not that they do not know anything, it is that they don’t accept it. They don’t want to know, they are in rejection. So Paul says

our gospel did not come to you by means of word only, but by means of power and by means of the Holy Spirit.

So is the Holy Spirit who works together with the word of God to make the issues clear to the unbeliever. So we can just relax. It is our job to get the message out there. It is God the Holy Spirit’s job to make it clear and drive it home. So we don’t need to sweat about the fact that this person may ask this question or that question, don’t get too concerned about the fact that well, I’m supposed to give an answer for the hope that’s in me and I can’t answer. Great, tell them you’ll look up the answer and get back with them next week. Sometimes it takes a long time. Most of you know the story about this last year, when I had the privilege of explaining the gospel again to Col. Calahan who had been a professor of military science of mine back in college. The first time I gave him the gospel was in 1970, it took from 1970 until I led him to the Lord last April for him to get saved. It takes awhile. You never know where we are in the process of someone’s life. That could just as easily been someone else who brought that to completion. But as Paul uses that analogy, one person plants, another person waters and it may take years. Some studies say that on the average the unbeliever hears the gospel 7.5 times. I know a few people who give that half gospel presentation. The average unbeliever hears the gospel 7.5 times before he is saved. So we never know where we are in that pipeline. We may be the first person and they hear, and say, I’m not so sure about that. But we lay the groundwork, and it may be months or years before they finally hear it and respond. But it is our job to be faithful in explaining the gospel to unbelievers. It is God the Holy Spirit who makes it clear. That gives us confidence so that we can just relax and do our job and leave the results up to the Lord.

The fourth principle, therefore, because it is God the Holy Spirit who is in charge, we should not be discouraged by opposition, by resistance, by questions you can’t answer, or by rejection. That is easy to say, but sometimes it is hard for us to take. But the reality is, just relax, it is up to God, don’t be discouraged by these things. You might think, I worked so hard explaining the gospel to that person. Well, you did a great job. Your job was to make it clear, your job is not to get them saved. It is not salesmanship. This is one of the great dangers that has entered into American evangelism, we have adopted salesmanship techniques to evangelism. We think we just have to say it right, get them with the right motivation, sing 25 verses of Just As I Am. If we just do the right thing, say the right thing, have the right argument, present it the right way, then they will be saved. Well, there is such a thing as negative volition and hostility to the gospel, and no matter how accurate you may be, no matter how clear your presentation may be there are thousands of people who will reject it because they reject the truth.

Paul says in 1 Thessalonians 2:2

But even after we had suffered before and were spitefully treated at Philippi, as you know, we were bold in our God to speak to you the gospel of God in much conflict.

Paul did not let a little opposition stop him or slow him down. Because the issue is serving the Lord, the issue is making a case presenting the gospel, and we know that we can expect, that just as the world was hostile to the Lord Jesus Christ, it is going to be hostile to us as well.

Fifth point, We have to realize that God has chosen believers to be the agents in witnessing. He is not going to do it apart from you. This is a tremendous privilege that we have. It is constantly impressed upon me, that it is not me that is doing anything, it is not in teaching, it is not in witnessing, I didn’t say or do anything different last week than anyone else did in that church did in xxxxx but it was by presenting the gospel, I had the privilege of watching the Lord work. And that is how we should look at it, we present the gospel, and every now and then the Lord uses us and it is just amazing that He uses fallen sinful creatures like us to bring others to a saving knowledge of Jesus Christ. And we get to stand by and watch. And if we don’t get involved in the witnessing, the Lord is going to get the gospel to that individual but we miss out on the privilege of being used by the Lord, serving the Lord and watching Him do something like that through us. There is nothing quite as humbling as to go to someplace like last week when I was in xxxx and have this pastor just taking my Spiritual Warfare book, and he had it all folded up, it was all dog eared and he had tears running down his face, he was so glad for me to be there, and I thought gee, I remember writing that, I had no idea anything like this would happen. What did I say? I need to go read that book again. And it is just how the Lord uses it, and we get to be instruments that process, so the believer is the agent of witnessing. God is not going to do it apart from us. This is a privilege that we have, to be used by the Lord in this way.

Sixth, God uses prepared believers. We need to know the biblical issues, we need to be prepared, we need to be ready so that we can take advantage of any opportunity and this starts by knowing the biblical issues. We need to understand basic things about doctrine. Basic doctrines related to sin, that the issue is not personal sin, the issue is Adam’s sin. People are not condemned because they sin, they are condemned because they’re born that way, they have an inherited sin nature. And that sin was paid for by Jesus Christ on the cross. We have to understand who Jesus Christ is. We have to be able to explain to them who Jesus is, it is not Jesus who lives down the street. It is Jesus of Nazareth and He was born in Israel, in Bethlehem, in fulfillment of all the prophecies. We may have to go back to Genesis, we may have to answer hundreds of questions in the process, but we have to explain who Jesus is. It is not the Jesus of the Mormons, it is not the Jesus of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, it is the Jesus who is presented in the Old Testament, we have to make sure that when people are believing in Jesus that the Jesus they are believing in is the Jesus of the Bible and not some other Jesus. We have to understand that the solution to sin is the substitutionary atonement of Christ, we have to be able to explain that, now in some ways we can explain that very simply to some folks, especially to children. The gospel can be very very simple, but there are some folks. Because of their background, because of their education, because of what they had been exposed to, they are going to ask more difficult questions they have either objections that are real to them, or there are objections they have heard from some body else. And so they are either throwing these questions up as a smokescreen or diversion to try to get you to just change the subject and talk about something else, or maybe these are real questions for them. Maybe they are people who think of themselves as fairly intelligent and very educated, intelligent sophisticated people and what they have seen of Christianity is what you see on

TBN, so their intelligence is insulted by what they think Christianity is. So it is up to us to explain to them what Christianity really is, and that may take time. That is when they may observe you, get to know you, have a relationship with you and it may take years. That was one of the things, I think, that was an issue with Calahan. Back when I was witnessing to him was can I really trust this without putting my brain in neutral. There are many people who feel that way today, so we have to make the gospel clear to them and make sure they understand that no, it doesn’t mean you just turn into some kind of a moron. So you have to be prepared. God uses prepared believers. Furthermore, a prepared believer knows how to answer some of the questions unbelievers will raise. You know your culture. What are some of the questions they may raise? They may ask questions about creation and evolution, they may ask questions about like with the DaVinci Code, well I heard that the gospels were not written for hundreds of years after Jesus, and hasn’t the Bible been translated so many times we don’t know what it really says. We have to be prepared to answer those questions. If you were going to be a missionary to Zambia or Uruguay or Papua New Guinea, part of your training would be to understand the culture you were going to, their beliefs, their religious background, all of these different things so that you could more effectively communicate what you are saying. It is not that the message changes, but you have to know your audience. The apostle Paul did, when he approached a Jewish audience he started on the basis of what they had as common ground in the Old Testament, but when he went to a gentile audience, he went back to say, I claim to proclaim to you that God who is the creator of the heavens and the earth, he had to go back to creation. So just because the audience is different you have to change how you present the gospel. So you have to know your audience and know where they are coming from. Today we also have to deal with issues related to homosexuality, issues related to Islam, issues related to the exclusivity of the gospel. We have to be prepared to handle these. You have to understand too, and this comes with experience, I am not an expert at this by any means, but we have to understand when a person is just throwing a red herring on the trail to divert us and get us off track, and when the question they are asking is one that is a serious problem for them that needs to be addressed before they are ready to accept the gospel. Sometimes it takes time and experience on our part before we learn to be able to discern the difference here.

Eight point, effective personal contact is necessary for most witnessing. There are people who will just read a tract, or see something written and they will respond, but that is rare. God can use anything though, but what He uses mostly is people talking to people. People building a relationship. It is not just some sort of drive by evangelism. 1 Thessalonians 2:1, Paul says,

For yourselves brethren, know our entrance unto you

their entrance, he came to them, he did not just send a letter to them to explain the gospel, Paul went to these cities and towns, and he lived with the people and he communicated the gospel to them and it was not in vain.

Ninth point: witnessing is not salesmanship or manipulation. It is not trying to figure out just the right thing to say, which is so typical today, it is not using some sort of multilevel marketing scheme, it is not another form of Amway. Remember that commercial, for some sort of hair color or something, where she tells two people and she tells two people and she tells two people and the television screen divides and divides again til you have thousands of people up there. But you will hear this, evangelism explosion was one of the techniques to train people to teach the gospel, but it comes down to where the emphasis is on technique and not communicating the gospel. You have to recognize a few things related to the realities of people. .

I will come back and finish this next week because we are running out of time and I have a number of things I want to cover on this, and we got started a little late because of my report on Kiev.

We will come back next week and talk about things we have to keep in mind when we are witnessing, observations and general principles, a few ideas on how you can make the gospel clear.

Let’s bow our heads in closing prayer.

Father, I do thank you for Your word, that it is a lamp unto our feet and a light unto our path, that the psalmist said it is in Your light that we see life. And it is in the light of Your Word that we understand the realities of our existence, that all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, but that the free gift that You have given us is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord. The Scripture says that You loved us in such a way that You sent Your Son to die on the cross for us, and that on the cross He paid the penalty for all sins. So that sin is no longer the issue, the issue is what do we think about Jesus Christ. He who believes on Him is not condemned, but He who believeth not is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God.

The Scripture says there is no other name under heaven given among men whereby we must be saved. If you are here this morning and you have never put your faith in Jesus Christ, if you have never understood the gospel, this is you opportunity to make your salvation certain. Right where you sit you can make that decision, you can put your trust in Jesus Christ, and the instant you do so God imputes to you the perfect righteousness of Jesus Christ, and at that point He declares you justified, and He gives you eternal life, which can never be taken from you. This is your opportunity to determine your eternal destiny. Now Father, we pray that You would challenge the rest if us with what we have studied today, to recognize that we are Your ambassadors, that You have appointed us as the agents of communicating the gospel to a fallen race, to lost humanity, and it is not just for pastors or professional Christian workers or missionaries, but that every single believer is a missionary sent to their particular culture to explain the gospel and to proclaim the truth that Jesus Christ died on the cross for our sins. Now Father we pray that You would drive these principles home in our own thinking. We pray this in Christ’s name. Amen.