Well, good morning, but I'm not sure it's too much of a break because I've taken a page out of Grandad's book and we'll only be looking at one verse today. That's actually the 13th verse of the 2nd chapter of Leviticus. But, since all scripture is breathed out by God and profitable to the man of God, let's all stand in reverence for the reading of His word. Just looking at verse 13. You shall season all of your grain offerings with salt. You shall not let the salt of your covenant with your God be missing from your grain offerings. With all of your offerings you shall offer salt. So let's pray. Dear Lord, we thank You for this opportunity that we have in this country to come together and to worship You and to hear Your Word. I pray, Lord, that You help us all to learn something today, including myself. I pray that Your conviction will be upon us, Lord, and that we'll be able to go out from this building and into this week and accomplish Your will. It's in Your name that we pray. Amen. So perhaps the general consensus is that next to the genealogies and the Chronicles and Kings, that Leviticus is the most boring book of the Bible. But personally I find a whole lot of beautiful and poetic metaphors of Christ and our relation with Him and aspects of our Christian life, especially in the ceremonial law in Leviticus. So, kind of moving forward with that mentality, I think that we can look at this verse as a metaphor. for our worship and our Christian lives. Specifically, I think that the salt mentioned in this verse represents evangelism and represents our acts to spread the gospel. And I think the grant offerings kind of represent our daily acts of worship. So essentially, this verse is saying, you shall season all of your worship with evangelism. With all of your worship, you shall offer evangelism. So what is worship? Is it just limited to when we come here in church and we sing hymns? Are there examples in our daily lives and our personal lives? What exactly is worship? I personally don't believe it's just limited to the time that we spend together as a congregation singing hymns. I think there are two parts to worship that Jesus said. He said, you must worship me in spirit and in truth. I think that correlates to faith and works as well. First, you have to believe in God to be able to worship him. What is not a faith is sin. But faith by itself is not enough. Faith without works is dead. So the two must be in tandem. I'm not saying necessarily that your works save you, but that faith generates works. If you believe in God's love and mercy and grace, you can't help but sing of it and praise him. It's almost like if you believed your friend was dying, that would affect your emotions, that would affect your thoughts, and that would affect your actions. You would be emotionally grieved for your friend, you would be constantly thinking about your friend, and unless your friend was dying of diabetes, you would probably do something nice like bake them a batch of chocolate chip cookies. So when you believe something, when you have faith in something, it will generate actions in your emotions, in your thoughts, and in what you do. Likewise, if you believe that God is just and will send unrepentant sinners to hell, you'll be out in the world and warn people of the danger they're in. It's like, what kind of person can sit by a pool and watch a child drown and go, it's not my kid, I'm reading a good book anyhow. So when we believe these things, when we believe that there is an impending punishment for sinners, we have to go out in the world because our conviction, the Holy Spirit, and our conscience will essentially force us to be out there in the world to witness to these people. Do you all remember Jesus' last command before he ascended into heaven? I know Granddad preached on it less than a year ago out of the last chapter of Matthew. Jesus said, Go ye therefore and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you. And lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world. Amen. What kind of love can we claim if we can't follow Jesus' last command? The Bible says again and again, Jesus said it himself. He said, if you love me, you keep my commandments. In 1 John it says, this is the love that we have towards God that we keep as commandments. It's almost like a young man courting a young woman. He can tell her he loves her. He can tell her he loves her. He can tell her he loves her. But if he's not doing anything, if he's not buying flowers, if he's not investing his time and also his resources into that relationship, she's never going to take him seriously. So if we come to church and we tell God we love Him and we sing these praises, but we don't take God's commands seriously, God can't take us seriously either. We have to be invested in our relationship with God, not just with our words, but also with our actions. And we have to follow this last command of Jesus. Personally, I believe, brethren, that it would be better if we neglected every other duty as a church, if only we did this one. I mean, no offense, but as a church, we will have eternity to praise God and eternity to spend in fellowship with one another. When we're in heaven, we'll have millennium and millennium and millennium to sing the worship and praises of God in ways we've never been able to on earth, and we'll have eternity to spend in communion with one another. But we will not have eternity to evangelize. There will be an incrossable chasm between heaven and hell. We will not have any opportunity to share the gospel with the lost. Ezekiel 33 verses 2 through 6 says, Son of man, speak to your people and say to them, if I bring a sword upon a land and the people of the land take a man from among them and make him their watchman, and if he sees the sword coming upon the land and blows the trumpet and warns the people, then if anyone who hears the sound of the trumpet does not take warning and the sword comes upon him and takes away, takes him away, his blood shall be upon his own head. He heard the sound of the trumpet, and did not take warning. His blood shall be upon himself. But if he had taken warning, he would have saved his life. But if the watchman sees the sword coming, and does not blow the trumpet, so that the people are not warned, and the sword comes and takes any one of them, that person is taken away in his iniquity. But his blood will I require at the watchman's hand. We're all watchmen, I believe. Whether that's in our workplace, whether that's in this city, this state, and in this nation, I believe God has made us all watchmen. And what that means is He's given us a responsibility for the lost people around us. We can't be apathetic towards the lost, but God has given us a personal responsibility to the lost people in our lives, to the lost people who are in our family, to the lost people who are our friends, to the lost people who are our co-workers. He's given us that personal responsibility to evangelize them, to warn them. It doesn't necessarily matter. A successful evangelist is not somebody who gets a lot of converts for Christ. It's somebody who's obedient to Christ and witnesses to those people who God has put in your life. I'm not saying that you need to go to Africa or you need to go to Uganda to find lost people to evangelize. I promise you God has put people in your life who are lost and who need the gospel preached and possibly who haven't ever heard the gospel preached. Penn Jillette is a famous celebrity. He does a magic show called Penn and Teller. He's also made it quite public that he's an atheist. And he posted a video online. And in this video, he posed the question, How much do you have to hate somebody to believe that everlasting life is possible and not tell them that? I mean, if I believed beyond the shadow of a doubt that a truck was coming at you, and you didn't believe that the truck was bearing down on you, there's a certain point where I would tackle you. And this is more important than that." End of quote. What the picture Penn Jillette was painting is, imagine a blind man and he's got his cane and his glasses and he's walking towards a highway. And maybe he's deaf too because he can't hear the trucks or something. But anyhow, this man is completely unaware of the danger he's walking towards. How much do you have to hate that man? How much do you have to be consumed with your own life to simply drive by and go, it's not my problem. And this is coming from an atheist, and he said elsewhere, he goes, I have no respect for any Christian who will not get out and evangelize. So he's saying that you see this impending danger of the lost around you. They're like blind men walking towards the pit, walking towards this highway with speeding trucks. He goes, and you're a passenger car on this highway. He goes, it is your personal responsibility to pull over and to lead that man by the hand away from this highway. Perhaps you already know that you ought to be evangelizing. Perhaps the Holy Spirit's been laying that on your heart recently. Perhaps he's been talking to you about the Great Commission. But maybe some fear or misconception or some hidden sin is keeping you from acting. So I have a short list here. It's certainly not exhaustive, but I just want to go over some common things prohibiting people from being active evangelists. First off, your pastor is not the church evangelist. He's a pastor, a shepherd. His primary role is to teach, lead, and comfort his sheep. He's not out in the world getting more sheep. He might pursue straying sheep from his congregation, as in the parable of the one out of 100 sheep that went astray. That's your pastor's job, is to go out and to reach those people from the church who are straying. But his primary role that God has given him. It's not evangelism. It's to be teaching his congregation. I think Genesis made it very clear. Sheep beget sheep, and shepherds beget shepherds. Shepherds can't beget sheep. That's the sheep's job. So, don't necessarily expect your pastor to do all the evangelism for a church. That's also our job as members. Second, I want to address that silent evangelism is ineffective. The idea that you can reach the world for Christ by playing Christian charades is as absurd as if Grandad got up here and tried to act out his sermon. Two things would happen. It would either take a very long time for us to get the point of what he was trying to say, or we would leave confused, never ultimately understanding what Grandad was trying to communicate. Now, the Bible does say that your actions can lead to conviction in people's lives. That is specifically in the context between a believing and an unbelieving spouse. But silent evangelism will never be a substitute for the gospel and act of evangelism. People need to hear the gospel and they need to have somebody preach the gospel to them. Your actions are never going to paint the whole picture. Nobody is ever going to see you acting a certain way and then go home and repent and come to the knowledge of Jesus Christ. They need somebody to preach that to them. If we go back to our analogy of the blind man and the truck, he's walking towards this highway. If he pulled over on the side of the road, let's say, and the blind man's walking towards the highway, and you try and motion him back from the highway, he can't see that. He's blind. It doesn't matter how animated you are. If you were just making motions, he's never going to turn around from the highway. He's blind. And that's exactly how the world is. The world is blind to the things of God. And when we act in a moral and in a Christian manner, there's no promise that they're going to see that. They will come up with any excuse before God moving in your life, then they will try to piece that together in their own life. They will make any excuse. They're blind to the Gospel. So what needs to happen is we need to vocalize the Gospel. We need to preach the Gospel. Again, if you have a blind man, he can still hear. And there takes a special intentionality to be able to preach the gospel that goes beyond just living your Christian life out. So I think that that needs to be a necessary step in evangelism in everyone's lives, is that we preach the gospel, not just living our Christian lives, but that we take a vocal stance on it. The third problem I want to talk about is that secret sin will inhibit you. I'm not going to spend a whole lot of time on this, but if you have some unconfessed struggle in your life and the Holy Spirit is working His conviction on your heart, give over to repentance. Any sort of secret sin, any unconfessed sin, it's going to inhibit you from being an effective evangelist. It's going to tarnish your testimony. So you need to be repentant of those sort of sins if you ever hope to be able to effectively reach the world for Christ. Fourth, you will be weak if you're starved of the Word of God. God has promised to strengthen us. We can look back at the Great Commission that I read off. You know, Jesus, He said, He'll be with you always. And that's kind of what we have right here. We have the Word of God. We're able to hold it in our hands. But if we're not in communion with the Word of God, if we're not reading the Word of God, then we don't get any strength from it. If we're not praying to Jesus Christ who is with us, we're never going to receive His guidance, we're never going to receive His strength. If as a Christian you're in the Word daily, and if you're not ceaseless in prayer, you're going to be unusable for God for evangelism. I promise God will strengthen you, but only if you choose to tap into His power. And so our excuse in evangelism can't be, I don't feel God with me. God has promised to strengthen us, and it is our choice to tap into that or not. Number five. This one's perhaps not applicable, but I wanted to touch on it anyhow. I believe the single largest factor causing a lack of evangelism in churches today is unsaved members. And I think that's also because of a false gospel that's been preached in America today. But kind of leading into that is this passage from Corinthians that Paul said. He said, test yourself to see whether you are in the faith. And I believe a large part of this congregation is saved. But what Paul meant was he meant, look at your life and see how can people identify that you are a Christian. Can you identify that you are a Christian by the way that you're acting, by what you think, by what you watch, by what you listen to? Charles Spurgeon had a quote. He said, have you no wish for others to be saved? He said, then you're not saved yourself, you can be sure of that. Again, he said, have you no wish to be saved? Then you're not saved. yourself. Be sure of that. He was saying every genuine Christian is going to have a desire to see the lost saved. Because our faith does generate actions. If we believe that sinners are going to hell and we believe the value of the gospel that we have and believe in the treasure that we have in Jesus Christ, we will go out and share that. Number six. If you feel unqualified to preach the gospel, then you're the perfect instrument for God to use. I can tell you that. Moses, Jonah, Jeremiah, and Paul all talked of their lack of qualifications to preach. You can look in your bulletin, I believe, the verse on the front page talks, even Paul, he's talking about how he comes in meekness or in weakness. Paul was not necessarily an oppressive figure we see in his letters. He goes, you know, my letters are big and grand. He goes, but, you know, I wasn't oppressive. A person, who knows, maybe he was shorter than average or something. But Paul was not, apparently, an oppressive public speaker. Moses said he had a stutter. Jeremiah said he was too young to preach the Word of God. But these are all ultimately excuses for fear. And the Bible promises us in Revelation that cowards even have their place in the lake of fire. God views fear and cowardice as a sin. And we need to confess that to God as a sin and address it as a sin. And to find safety in the Word of God to be released from this fear. Because ultimately, again, God has promised to strengthen us, and it becomes our choice to rely on that strength. And that's what's going to make us an effective evangelist. Not how smart we are, not how much apologetics we know, not how long even we've necessarily spent reading the Word, but how in touch we are going to be with God, how often we pray with Him, how often we read the Bible, and how much our faith is placed in Him. God can use even a donkey to preach His truth. He did that in the Old Testament. If God can use illiterate fishermen and donkeys to preach His gospel, then surely He can use us. We just need to believe in that, and to trust in that, and then to take action on it. That's the second part of faith again, and I keep on coming back to that. If we believe it, then we have to go take action on it. And there's not always going to be feelings associated with that. You're not necessarily going to pray a prayer and be like, I believe God can use me to evangelize. And then you're not going to get warm fuzzies all over. It's a knowledge that you're going to have to go act on after that. And the way you're going to see God's providence is when you choose to take that action. And God will supply the strength and will supply the words and the hour that you need them. To wrap it up, my intent in this sermon is not to provide a seminar on how to evangelize, but to leave you with the conviction that you ought to evangelize. Ultimately, it's going to come down to how this congregation feels and what this congregation believes. It's going to dictate how we're going to evangelize. I can't tell you that. And so if this congregation cares, we're going to begin to take personal responsibility for evangelism. We're going to teach one another to evangelize, and we're going to lead one another in evangelism and provide opportunities for each other to evangelize. We'll be encouraging each other, we'll be unified in one spirit towards evangelism if we ultimately care. If you'd like to begin a change today in this congregation, I can tell you we have gospel tracts out in the back that you can take with you to evangelize. Granddad and I try every Saturday evening when we're available to go witness on Dixon Street. That's something that we've started recently. We also have Bibles and tracts in bags that can hang on doors. We have all of those in boxes in a room back there. But they only need somebody to hand them out to these neighborhoods. But I personally would advise you to first start with prayer. Pray what Jesus prayed. He said, ask God to send more laborers into the field. I can tell you, the harvest is plentiful. All that's needed is laborers. And if you pray that, that more laborers would be sent into the field, and if you truly, sincerely open your heart in that prayer, what you'll find is not necessarily that all of your friends turn into evangelists, but the God will use you as an evangelist. I wanted this sermon to be funny. I wanted to include a couple of jokes and stuff, but it ended up being a little bit more serious than I intended. So just to finish it up, kind of referencing back to our text verse, you know, since we're soldiers of the kingdom of God, let us lay a salt on the earth. And that's all. Thank y'all.