Many People, One Gospel

Listen Online:

Transcript:

I love this example of the Bereans, and it says here in verse 11 that the Bereans were more noble than those in Thessalonica, and that they received the Word with all readiness of mind and searched the Scriptures daily whether those things were so. And I think that’s a good example for all of us. We ought to be checking every day not only the things that we hear and the things that we’re taught, but our attitudes and the condition of our heart.

We ought to be checking all of these things against Scripture to make sure everything falls into line, because it’s the Bible that is the standard. I mean, we could spend all night talking just about that verse, but there’s more to this passage than just that verse on the Bereans. I was wrong when I was younger about a lot of things.

I was wrong many times. But about one thing in particular, I was very wrong, and I think I’ve told you all before that I was probably in high school or college before I realized that the Holy Spirit had a role to play in evangelism. I thought it was just we go and twist somebody’s arms, and because of our excellent debating skills, we could argue somebody into heaven.

And I don’t think I’ve ever seen that work. At least not with me, it hasn’t. Maybe I don’t have great debating skills.

But I was older than I should have been before I realized that the Holy Spirit has a role to play here. And God is at work. It really is God’s job to convict.

It’s God’s job to draw people to Him. It’s just our job to tell people. And as a result, I wasn’t always, and probably still am not, always as compassionate toward non-believers as I should be.

You know, sometimes I’ll find my attitude, you know, I expect them to live and act the same way and respond to things the same way that we’re supposed to. And the fact is we can’t expect non-believers, we can’t expect lost people to behave like saved people when we can’t even get all the saved people to act like saved people. It’d be funny if it wasn’t so sad.

But we expect the lost world to be just like us, and they’re not. We’re not even like we should be sometimes. And as a result, we tend to look down on the people that we should be ministering to.

We talked last week about witnessing to Muslims and sharing Christ with Muslims, and I hope you learn some things from that. In my younger days, not that I’m so old, but in my younger days, high school and such, I loved things like that where I could learn about how to argue with people who didn’t believe the way I did. In other words, people who were wrong.

I loved to learn how to argue and prove to them that they were wrong, whether it was the Muslims, whether it was the Mormons, whether it was the Jehovah’s Witnesses. I loved to argue with them, loved to learn how to argue with them so I could prove them wrong and prove that not just I was right, but that the Bible was right, and win that little victory. And when you’re focused, since we’ve talked some about witnessing to Muslims and people of other religions, if we’re focused on just winning the point, winning the argument, then we’re not going to win the person to Christ. We’ve got to demonstrate, we’ve got to come from a perspective of having compassion on those that Christ had compassion on.

If we look at it as just an intellectual exercise where I’m going to learn all that I can so I can, as a friend of mine says, go and load up my Bible gun and go blow the unbeliever away. I can’t even imagine Jesus saying anything like that. And by the way, when he says that, he says that to make the same point.

And for many years, that’s what I did. Don’t have a whole lot to show for it. But I’ve learned over the years, and I’m still learning, that part of being a Christian is not just proclaiming the truth, but having compassion and reaching people where they are about doing it.

And I want to look at Acts chapter 17 tonight. I just thought of this a minute ago, but we could call this a tale of three cities, if you’re familiar with the book A Tale of Two Cities. Anyway, it’s about Paul’s journey through three cities as he’s on one of his missionary journeys.

And the way he approaches the lost people, I want to follow up last week with this discussion really about the condition of our heart and how we approach people, not so much the mechanics last week where we learn just facts that we need to know, but something about the heart behind it as we talk to people of other religions and even just the lost people that identify themselves as Christians because they’re here in the Bible belt, but they’ve never been born again. We need to have compassion toward them. We need to approach them in a certain way, not as our mission project, but as someone that Christ loved and that Christ died for and that we love also.

So we’ll look at Acts chapter 17. Paul was not always known for the gentleness of his approach. And I’m not saying that we have to sugarcoat things in order to show people that we love them.

Paul was not known for sugarcoating things. But we see here Paul approaching people in a way that they could understand, in a way where he could speak to their hearts. Acts chapter 17, verse 1, and it says, Now when they had passed through Amphipolis and Apollonia, they came to Thessalonica, where was a synagogue of the Jews.

And Paul, as his manner was, went in unto them, and three Sabbath days reasoned with them out of the Scriptures, opening and alleging that Christ must needs have suffered and risen again from the dead, and that this Jesus, whom I preach unto you, is Christ. And some of them believed and consorted with Paul and Silas, and of the devout Greeks a great multitude, and of the chief women not a few. So they’ve come to Thessalonica in this first part of the passage. They’ve come to Thessalonica and they go, first of all, to the synagogue where the Jews met for worship.

And they came there on the Sabbath day. So basically, they have gone into. .

. It would be the equivalent of somebody coming in to share their religion with us and coming in here on a Sunday morning to tell us all about it. He went for their Sabbath services to where they met to practice the Jewish religion.

And he goes in there and it says it was as his manner was. This was something Paul did on a routine basis. He went in unto them in three Sabbath days, reasoned with them out of the Scriptures.

So for three weeks, for three weeks he’s there meeting after meeting, talking to them out of the Scriptures. That’s not the whole Bible as we have it today, but he’s taking the Old Testament, which the Jews held as Scripture and still do. He reasoned with them out of the Scriptures, opening and alleging that Christ must needs have suffered and risen again from the dead, and that this Jesus whom I preach unto you is Christ. And that word Christ, the Greek word Christ, is the translation of the Hebrew word Messiah, the promised one, the anointed one of God.

And they would have been very familiar with that term. And so what he’s doing is he’s going in and he’s witnessing to the Jews in a way that they would understand. He takes their scriptures, he takes the Old Testament, and he begins to open it, and he begins to show them from places in the Old Testament that they were familiar with that Jesus Christ fulfilled the things that God had written through His prophets hundreds of years earlier.

And from their own scriptures, these people who had rejected Christ as their Messiah, he goes through their scriptures and makes the case for them that Jesus was sent here to die and that He was the Messiah, that He was sent here to die and to rise again, that He must needs have suffered and risen again from the dead, and that this Jesus whom I preach unto you is Christ. So he goes in, he opens the Old Testament Scriptures, and he begins to witness to them out of the Old Testament Scriptures, using what God had said and what they had in common here as a springboard toward sharing the gospel with them. And as a result, it says in verse 4, And some of them believed and consorted with Paul and Silas, of the devout Greeks, a great multitude, and of the chief women, not a few. So of the devout Greeks, it means those Greeks who had converted to Judaism.

So a multitude of them, some of the chief women, not just a few, but a lot, they turned and they believed. They believed in Christ. They believed the message of the gospel that Paul had brought, and it says they consorted with Paul and Silas. Now, we could probably look at them as being part of the beginning of the church at Thessalonica, because this word consort is a really good word.

It doesn’t mean just that, this is not the Greek definition, this is just how I understand it in English, The word consort doesn’t mean just run around together. It means you run around together and you’re up to something. They were involved with each other and in the sharing of the gospel.

They were involved in this same mission together. And so we see here that they didn’t just believe, but they believed and they actually committed to Christ and they became part of the beginning of this church in Thessalonica. And they carried on the same mission that Paul had.

In verse 5, it says, but the Jews which. . .

This is still in Thessalonica. But the Jews which believed not moved with envy. They were jealous.

Took unto them certain lewd fellows of a baser sort and gathered a company and set all the city on an uproar and assaulted the house of Jason and sought to bring them out of the people. And when they found them not, they drew Jason and certain brethren unto the rulers of the city, crying, These that have turned the world upside down are come hither also. So they were so upset, so jealous, that Paul and Silas were drawing some of the Jews away after the gospel that instead of arguing against the gospel, instead of doing any of these things, they go out and it says they took certain lewd fellows of the baser sort.

They got the dregs of humanity. They got the lowest of the low there in town, and they got them together, and they formed a mob, and they went to the house of Jason. It says they set the city, all the city, on an uproar, and they assaulted the house of Jason.

They were looking to bring these new Christian believers out of the house. And when they couldn’t find them, they got Jason out and certain brethren to the rulers of the city. And they accused them of what I would hope that one day people in Fayetteville, Arkansas, would accuse us at Eastside Missionary Baptist Church of being those who have turned the world upside down, have come here also.

As believers in Christ, I’m not talking about rebellion. I’m not talking about upheaval and lawlessness. But we as Christians, as believers, we ought to be people who turn the world upside down.

Because we come bringing a message that is not of this world, that changes people’s lives and their eternities. And that ought to change some people. That ought to change some things.

And it ought to turn the world upside down, at least our corner of the world. These people that have turned the world upside down have come here also. And they persist in getting the city in an uproar.

Whom Jason hath received, and these all do contrary to the decrees of Caesar, saying that there is another king, one Jesus. And they troubled the people and the rulers of the city when they heard these things. And when they had taken security of Jason and of the other, they let them go.

So when they brought them in here, they say these people have turned the world upside down, and they begin to appeal to the Romans. They say these people have caused problems in the past because they recognize somebody other than Caesar. They recognize a king named Jesus.

And the intent there is to get the Romans to clamp down on the Christians. And throughout history, we’ve seen example after example of governments going after Christianity when they perceive it as a threat They don’t understand it. We’re a threat to their power because we recognize a higher king.

We recognize Jesus Christ as our king, but what they don’t understand is that his kingdom is not of this world, that we’re not a threat to them. As we discussed in our Sunday school class this morning, we’re taught to obey our authorities, that we’re taught to be submissive to those in authority as God has placed them there. And yet, even from the beginning, people didn’t understand this about Christianity and said, these are revolutionaries.

They come talking about another king. And they were at this point just grasping at any straws they could to try to get the city to turn on the Christians and to throw them out or worse. Verse 10, And the brethren immediately sent away Paul and Silas by night unto Berea, who coming thither went into the synagogue of the Jews.

He does it again. He goes to another city nearby and Paul does it again. It’s not by accident that Luke writes here that it was Paul’s manner when he wrote it earlier, because here we see in another city.

And these were more noble than those in Thessalonica, talking about the Jews in the synagogue, in that they received the word with all readiness of mind. They were ready to hear from God’s word, and they searched the Scriptures daily, whether those things were so. Two important things there, that they were not only ready to hear from God, but they also checked to see if it was in line with what God had already said.

And there are a lot of people in a lot of churches that are not willing to hear what God has said. There’s also another problem, another sign to that coin, when people are so ready to hear from God that they accept anything anybody tells them and they never bother to check it against what God has already said. But they not only were willing to receive the word, ready to receive the word, but they searched the Scriptures daily whether those things were so.

Therefore, many of them believed. It calls them noble even before they were believers, because they were ready to hear from God. Therefore, many of them believed also of the honorable women, which were Greeks, and of men not a few.

So again, multitudes of people were turning to Christ in the synagogue there in Berea. But when the Jews of Thessalonica had knowledge that the word of God was preached of Paul at Berea, they came thither also and stirred up the people. So the Jews of Thessalonica were upset that Paul was a troublemaker and that he had come into their city.

So when Paul leaves, what do they do? They go and be troublemakers in another city. Kind of hypocritical, if you ask me.

They came up thither also and stirred up the people. And then immediately the brethren sent away Paul to go, as it were, to the sea. But Silas and Timothy abode there still.

And they that conducted Paul brought him unto Athens, and receiving a commandment unto Silas and Timothy, for to come to him with all speed, they departed. So Paul gets separated from Timothy and Silas. And he goes on, we’ll see here in just a minute, to Athens.

At this point, Paul has gone into two cities, into Thessalonica and to Berea. And the first thing he does is he goes into the synagogue. What does he do when he goes into the synagogue?

He begins to open God’s Word. He opens the Old Testament Scriptures and begins to point them to Jesus Christ. You say, well, that’s quite a leap. Not so.

The entire Old Testament is filled with pictures and direct references to Jesus Christ. Isaiah chapter 53. I don’t see how anybody can read. I believe it’s Isaiah chapter 53.

can read Isaiah chapter 53 and come to any conclusion other than the fact that it’s talking about Jesus Christ in great detail of His suffering and what He would go through. In other places in Isaiah, I believe it’s Isaiah chapter 7, says that He would come born of a virgin, that it would be a sign from God. It talks about His coming.

Other passages in the Old Testament, other prophecies, talk about Him being born in Bethlehem. The Old Testament is full of references to Jesus Christ. On top of that, it’s full of pictures, shadows of things to come of what Jesus Christ would do. Moses, being a deliverer, was a picture of Christ. The whole Bible, the whole Old Testament points forward to Christ, just as the entire New Testament points backwards to Christ. And so it was a very easy step, I think, for Paul to open this up and say, he’s all through here.

Let me tell you about him. Now, it’s just up to them whether or not they were willing to listen, and apparently some were. But that’s how he approached the Jews.

Then in verse 16, Now while Paul waited for them at Athens, his spirit was stirred in him when he saw the city wholly given to idolatry. Therefore disputed he in the synagogue with the Jews and with the devout persons and in the market daily with them that met with him. So he comes to Athens and he sees not the same thing as he had seen in Thessalonica and Berea.

He doesn’t see these massive synagogues full of devout Greeks who had converted to Judaism to the worship of the one true God, he sees a city that is wholly given to idolatry. The entire city is oriented around the worship of these pagan idols. And his spirit was stirred in him, it says.

So he goes in and he does speak to the Jews in the synagogue, but he also goes into the market daily and meets with people there. And it says certain philosophers of the Epicureans and Stoics encountered him, and some said, what will this babbler say? The Epicureans and Stoics, if you’re not familiar with who they are, there are two schools of Greek philosophy.

The Epicureans, it’s probably an oversimplification, but the Epicureans on one side believed that the entire pursuit of life was about pleasure. They gave up on the search for objective truth, for meaning in life. It was all about seeking pleasure, eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow you may die.

That was the Epicurean philosophy boiled down to its essence. The Stoics, on the other hand, believed that the entire meaning of life was summed up in duty, and doing what you were obligated to do, fulfilling your responsibilities. That’s where we get the word stoic from.

And so you have these two competing philosophies, and they didn’t even agree with each other, and certainly didn’t agree with Paul, but they wanted to hear what he said, and some said, What will this babbler say? Others said, He seemeth to be a setter forth of strange gods, because he preached unto them Jesus and the resurrection. It’s ironic to me that these people, with all their pantheon, said Paul, was a setter forth of strange gods.

Hello. Look in the mirror, folks. He was a setter forth of strange gods because he preached unto them Jesus and the resurrection.

It was absurd to them the idea that God could die. It’s even more absurd to them the idea that somebody could come back from the dead. See, they gave up long ago on any kind of meaning in life.

When you die, that was it. Whatever pleasure you had attained or whatever duty you had fulfilled, depending on which philosophy you were in, That was what was left of you, and there was nothing else, no resurrection, no spirit, nothing. So this was completely absurd to these Greeks that he’s speaking to.

And they took him and brought him unto Areopagus, saying, May we know what this new doctrine is, whereof thou speakest. I’m sorry, what this new doctrine, whereof thou speakest is. So they take him and they say, We want to hear from you what this new doctrine is that you’re preaching. We want to hear more.

Verse 20, For thou bringest certain strange things to our ears. We would know, therefore, what these things mean. Again, I can’t get over this.

Strange things. They’re accusing him of teaching strange things. The Greeks, I don’t remember all of their gods’ names, but Zeus was the king of their gods, and they believed that one of his offspring, one of the goddesses, was born when one of the other deities drove an axe through his head and split it open, and she came out.

And they’re accusing Paul of teaching strange doctrine. Wow. For thou bringest certain strange things to our ears.

We would know, therefore, what these things mean. For all the Athenians and strangers which were there spent their time in nothing else, but either to tell or to hear some new thing. The driving force behind what they were involved in here was they always wanted novelty.

They always wanted to hear the new teaching. They were like philosophy professors today, a lot of them. Let’s just sit around and discuss new ideas and see what new things we can come up with.

Doesn’t matter how bizarre. Let’s see what we can come up with. That was all they did.

They wanted to hear or to tell some new thing. But you know what? At least they were willing to hear what he said.

They said, we want to know what these things mean. So Paul obliges them. Verse 22, then Paul stood in the midst of the Mars Hill and said, Ye men of Athens, I perceive that in all things ye are too superstitious.

Like I said, Paul was not known for sugarcoating things. He gets right to the heart of it. You people are involved in a bunch of superstitious nonsense.

For as I passed by and beheld your devotions, I found an altar with this inscription to the unknown God. Again, they accused him of setting up strange gods, and they had so many that they made an altar to the unknown God just in case they forgot one. I found an altar with this inscription to the unknown God, whom therefore ye ignorantly worship, him I declare unto you.

This unknown God that you worship in ignorance, I’ve come to tell you about him. God that made the world and all things therein, seeing that he is the Lord of heaven and earth, dwelleth not in temples made with hands, neither is worshipped with men’s hands as though he needed anything, seeing he giveth to all life and breath and all things. He’s going to the heart of their idolatry here.

Their gods were just like human beings. In some ways, they had more problems than the human beings that worshipped them. I mean, crazy.

things. And they lived in temples made by human hands, and they were cared for by human hands. And Paul says, in contrast, let me tell you about this unknown God who does not live in temples made by human hands.

He’s not served by human hands. He’s the Lord of heaven and earth, and He doesn’t need us as though He needed anything, seeing He giveth to all life and breath and all things. He’s the giver of all things.

He’s responsible for all of this being here, and have made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on the face of the earth and have determined the times before appointed and the bounds of their habitation. He created all mankind and He’s appointed certain things in the ebb and flow of history. And this stood in stark contrast to their gods who were, they believed were more powerful than they were, but even they were not all powerful.

They were involved with power struggles and dysfunction with one another. And here He says, the unknown God is sovereign in all things. That they should seek the Lord if happily they might after him and find him, though he be not far from every one of us.

And he’s not far. You just have to look. For in him we live and move and have our being, as certain also of your own poets have said, for we are also his offspring.

He quotes their own poets, Epimenides and Aratus. And he says, even these, they can point to the, not that these worshipped the one true God, but even what they said pointed to who He was, that in Him we live and move and have our being, that He’s over all things, that He gives all things. For as much, verse 29, then as we are the offspring of God, we ought not to think that God, that the Godhead, is like unto gold or silver or stone, graven by art and man’s device.

Again, they had to build their gods out of wood and stone and silver. And the times of this ignorance God winked at. So there was a time when God looked at the ignorance and idolatry, and He said, I’m going to let it go for a little while.

He said, God winked at this, but now commandeth all men everywhere to repent, because He hath appointed a day in which He will judge the world in righteousness by that man whom He hath ordained, whereof He hath given assurance unto all men that He hath raised Him from the dead. So He’s pointed out this unknown God that they ignorantly worship is more powerful than they even could imagine, and He brings it right around back to the fact that if He’s so powerful that He created earth, He created life, He’s the giver of all things. Why is it outside the realm of possibility?

Paul was a great philosopher. Why is it outside the realm of possibility that He could raise somebody from the dead and that He hath raised Him from the dead? And when they heard of the resurrection of the dead, some mocked, some mocked.

Some others said, We will hear thee again of this matter. We want to hear more about this. So Paul departed from among them.

Howbeit certain men clave unto him and believed, among the which was Dionysius the Areopagite, and a woman named Damaris, and others with them. They cleaved to him. That’s the same word that the Bible uses for a man and wife.

Not that they were involved in that kind of relationship, but they followed him closely. These people turned to Christ and they followed Paul. Just like the Jews consorted with him, the Greeks cleaved to him and to his mission.

You say, okay, what does all this have to do with lost people, with unbelievers and having compassion toward them? There are probably more but four things I see in this passage that we can learn about our interaction with people as we’re sharing the gospel. You say, well, I don’t share the gospel that much.

Well, number one, we should. And number two, hopefully if we get something straight in our own minds and hearts, that it’s not as hard as we think it is. It’s not as complicated as we think it is, and really once we get into it, not as scary as we think it is.

and realize it’s not about having all the answers, but it’s about knowing the one who has all the answers, and it’s about having compassion towards those who need the answers, then maybe we can witness to people a little more freely. The first thing that we can see from this passage is that all people have the same need for the gospel. All people have the same need for the gospel.

He went into the wicked, idolatrous Greeks and said, here’s the gospel of Christ. Christ died for our sins and God raised him from the dead. He explained it to them because the Greeks needed to be saved. But you know what?

It wasn’t just the wicked, idolatrous Greeks who had only worshipped God in ignorance and among other gods. It was the devout Greek Jews as well who needed Jesus Christ. It says over and over that these people he met in the synagogues were noble and they were devout, But even people who are noble and devout by human standards need the gospel. Because our goodness compared to the goodness of God is not goodness at all.

And so even these devout Jews needed to hear the gospel because their own righteousness, their own goodness, hear me on this, their own goodness and effort would not save them and get them to heaven. Just like today, our own goodness and effort will not get us to heaven. It will not.

And so we can learn from Paul’s preaching to the Jews and His preaching to the Greeks that all people have the same need for the gospel. And it’s the same gospel. It’s the same need for the same gospel.

That Christ died for our sins, He shed His blood for the payment for our sins, died on the cross, was buried, rose again the third day, and now sits at the right hand of God the Father, waiting to one day take us home. All people have the same need for that gospel. The people we like, the people we don’t like, the people we just as soon not talk to when we see them at the store, The person we love to death.

I don’t understand that expression, love to death, but I don’t want to be loved to death. But I hear people say it all the time. I love them to death.

All right, love them to death, not me. But the people we just love so much, the people we can’t stand, our good friends, our worst enemies, the people we barely know, the best person I know, the worst person you know, they all have the same need for the same gospel. And until we get that through our heads, get that into our hearts, we won’t tell people about Christ like we ought to.

Once we get that through our heads and our hearts, we won’t worry so much about, well, am I supposed to do this? Am I supposed to do that? Well, how am I supposed to?

We’ll just do it. All of us aren’t going to do it in the same way. All of us aren’t going to approach it in the same way, but it’s the same gospel, and God equips us in different ways to get through to different people, but we’ll just take the way God’s equipped us, and we’ll go do it.

The second thing we can learn from this passage is that we must meet people where they are. We must meet people where they are. There’s a word that goes around in missions theory.

They call it missiology. That’s not the word, but they call it missiology, the study of missions. And I got to hear all the wonderful theories when I was involved in state missions next door.

The word is contextualization. And they, people smarter than I am, tell us that we need to contextualize the gospel. Problem is I’ve heard different people say different things about what contextualization means.

But we’re told we need to contextualize the gospel. We need to take the gospel and put it in a form that they can understand, that they can relate to. Okay?

If that means we sugarcoat it, if that means we leave out the cross, we leave out the blood, we leave out hell and judgment because it’s offensive, absolutely not. That’s not contextualizing the gospel. That’s changing the gospel.

That’s watering down the gospel. If we take out things that are essential to the gospel, just in order to make people feel better about themselves, make people feel warm and fuzzy toward us, it’s not the gospel anymore. We’re just contextualizing something.

But if we’re talking about an approach where we take the same message and we approach different people with the same message in different ways where they can understand it, then I can absolutely 100% get behind contextualization. I can get behind that. And what I think of contextualizing and meeting people where they are, I think of the difference between meeting somebody in Bible Belt, Arkansas, or Oklahoma, and meeting a Buddhist in the mountains of Bataa

Powered by atecplugins.com