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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.
Evangelism
Our responsibility to evangelism.
| Sermon ID | 82624132161184 |
| Duration | 22:05 |
| Date | |
| Category | Sunday - AM |
| Bible Text | Leviticus 2:13 |
| Language | English |
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