The Great Reward

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Transcript:

Turn with me in your Bibles to Acts chapter 18. Acts chapter 18. Good to see all of you here tonight.

We’ve been talking about the importance for the church to make disciples. If you’ll recall the last two weeks, we’ve started with talking about the reasons why we are supposed to make disciples. We talked about the Great Commission and the very simple point that Christ commanded us to go make disciples.

That’s reason number one, why we need to share the gospel, why we need to lead people to trust Christ, and then subsequently lead them to follow Him as well. Reason number one is because Christ commanded. Second reason is because of the great need.

We don’t just have the great commission, but we have the great need. And folks, we believe what the Bible says. As a church, we believe what the Bible says, that our options in the life to come are eternity in heaven or eternity in hell.

And we accept at face value what Jesus said when he said, I am the way, the truth, and the life, and no man comes unto the Father but by me. And we realize that without Jesus Christ, there is no hope for salvation for any of us. And that there’s a great need among those who have not heard, even in our community.

Tonight, I want to talk to you about the great reward. But before we get into that, I want to go back and revisit just briefly what we talked about last week with the great need. You see, it’s very easy sometimes to think about the area we live in and think that the job has pretty well been accomplished, that everybody’s heard God’s Word, everybody’s heard the Gospel, and move on.

The problem is, well, just to tell you, we went to the mission symposium in Conway this week, and they talked about some cities in our country that had fewer Christians by percentage and sometimes by total number, some cities in the United States that had fewer Christians than some of the countries that we send missionaries to from our country. They talked about the entire state of Utah being less than 2% what they call evangelical. And that actually would classify the state of Utah as an unreached people group. Talked about cities like Boston and Providence that just were barely at 3%.

And they pointed out the fact that Providence was where the first Baptist church in the United States was organized, and it’s now less than 3% claiming to be evangelical. And I’ll tell you in a minute what is meant by that term, because I think they throw it out a little too loosely. The numbers are probably a little more dire even than that. As they talked about this stuff, I thought, what about here?

Because we don’t live in Boston. We don’t live in Providence. We don’t live in Utah or San Francisco or any of these other, I mean, let’s face it, they might as well be different countries for the difference in culture.

We don’t live in any of these places. We live in the Bible Belt. Even Fayetteville, college town, a little more liberal than the rest of Arkansas, and I don’t say that to run it down.

The town I came from in Oklahoma was the same way. But even being more liberal than the rest of Arkansas, it’s still Bible Belt, and it’s easy to get complacent and get satisfied with where we are because we think everybody’s heard the gospel. The job is done.

The job is accomplished. After hearing some of the numbers that they said, I went and did some research for myself, and the numbers aren’t as bad as Boston or Providence or some of these other cities, but the numbers made me sick to my stomach. And I wrote this out.

I wrote it out so I would remember the numbers, and I’m going to read it to you, and we’re going to talk about it a little bit. The tri-state area centered around Fayetteville was home to 360,000 people in the year 2000. Stay with me.

I’m going to throw a lot of numbers at you, but you don’t have to have all of them. If you want a copy of this, I can get it to you later. was home to 360,000 people, over 360,000 people in the year 2000.

That same year, it was reported that 35% of the population in this area claimed a connection to an evangelical church, which in the corresponding report seems to be rather loosely defined as those groups which believe that a person must experience a personal conversion. When we’re talking about evangelical churches, we’re not talking about BMA. We’re not even talking about Baptist. We’re just talking about churches that very basically believe you have to have some kind of personal conversion experience, that it’s not just something that you’re born with.

In other words, they believe you have to be born again. That’s pretty basic stuff. This means that nearly a quarter of a million people in our area are either in churches that do not preach the basic biblical truth that we must be born again or they’re in no church at all.

A quarter of a million people in our area. Still sound like the job’s accomplished? If we consider that not everyone who attends an evangelical church is born again, As we know, not everybody who walks inside the church door is born again.

And we subtract 35% of their number. And I’m going to say that’s a conservative estimate because there have been studies by major evangelical denominations that estimate that up to 50% of the people that sit in their pews on a weekly basis are lost. We’ll give a conservative estimate and say 35%. If we take away that 35%, we can estimate that nearly 285,000 of our neighbors have either not been born again or show no evidence of being.

285,000 people. We’re not talking nationwide. We’re not even talking Arkansas-wide.

We’re talking northwest Arkansas and the parts of Oklahoma and Missouri that are kind of attached to us. In the year 2000, when these numbers were taken, if we were to evangelize these 285,000 people, each evangelical church would need to reach an additional 633 people. That’s not have a total of 633.

That’s 633 more than what they have now. However, not all so-called evangelical churches preach the gospel accurately or completely, and unfortunately, many of those who do are not always evangelistic. The difference between evangelical and evangelistic.

So, we’ll narrow the scope. If we Baptists were to take up the cause of reaching these 285,000 with the message of salvation by God’s grace, through faith in Christ, without works, we could only do it if each church, each Baptist church in our region, reached an additional 1,523 people. 1,523 people.

But, we can’t expect others to do the work if we’re not willing to do it ourselves. And folks, we are missionary Baptists for a reason. That’s kind of what we do or we’re supposed to do.

So what if we led the way? How daunting would the task be if the missionary Baptist churches in this part of the country took up the cause and said, we’re going to get this started. Folks, we would each, each of our churches would need to reach 5,814 additional people than what we’ve got sitting in our pews right now.

If those numbers weren’t enough to bother you, and I hope they bother you, they bother me. If those numbers weren’t enough, consider the fact that those numbers are over a decade old. In 2010, the population of this same area was almost 490,000 people.

The population here grew by over 30% in a decade. The Christian population of this area did not grow by 30% in a decade. Folks, a lot of churches have closed their doors in the last 10 years.

What we can take from this is that there are many people in our own city and area who have never heard the gospel, and there are others who need to hear it again because they didn’t understand it. And with a mission field that grows larger every day, we cannot any longer afford to wait and expect the world to come to us. So that’s what I got out of the mission symposium.

More than I enjoyed hearing from the missionaries, I enjoyed the presentations such as they were, but hearing people talk about their mission fields made me think about Fayetteville. I came back and did the research on my own, and folks, the numbers are not good. It’s easy to think because there are so many people that are part of churches, there are so many churches, there are so many people that profess to be Christians, that our job is done.

Folks, a lot of the people who profess to be Christians would not know what it means to be born again. I think I told you last week that we live in a country that’s 80 to 90 percent, and I’m almost done with the statistics, I promise. 80 to 90 percent of people in America claim to be Christian, but when they’re asked what does that mean, only around 30 percent describe anything resembling being born again.

And what that tells us is that 50 to 60 percent of the people in this country think they’re Christians and are as lost as they can be. That’s not 50% of the Christians. That’s 50% of the total of this country think they’re Christians and are as lost as they can be.

Folks, we’ve got a job to do. And if you wonder why I’m taking so long talking about evangelism, why I’m talking so long about the reasons why we need to make disciples, it’s because it doesn’t bother me enough yet. The call to make disciples doesn’t bother me enough yet.

And it doesn’t bother us enough yet. If we can sit here and think about 285,000 of our neighbors, co-workers and friends, thinking that they’re Christians, thinking that they’re alright, thinking that they’re going to be good enough, and really they stand on the precipice, stand on the edge, ready to fall into hell if God decides not to delay His coming, if God decides not to delay His coming for them any longer. If we can think about that and it not bring us to tears, it doesn’t bother us enough yet.

So I keep preaching on it until God gets a hold of me sufficiently, until God gets a hold of us sufficiently. Folks, there’s a great need, and we can’t afford to sit and wait for them to come to us and afford to think, oh, most of the work’s been done, but we can just coast from here on out. Folks, there’s an incredible job left to be done in making disciples, even here in Arkansas.

And don’t even get started on places around the country and overseas where the numbers are even worse than that. You know, I told you here it’d be something like 600 lost people to every evangelical church. That’s a tiny number compared to the 9,000 they were talking about in Providence, Rhode Island.

Folks, the job is not done. And I’m here to tell you, if God has left breath in your body, your job is not done either. Folks, my job is not done.

It’s easy to sit and say, well, I’ve served in the past, I’ve done my time. No. When we’ve done our time and are ready to punch out is when the Lord takes us home.

Folks, there’s a great need. We talked about that last week. We talked about it some a little bit tonight.

I don’t want to be completely negative and beat you up and use math to be mean to you. Math was always mean to me in school, so I don’t want to use it to be mean to you. I don’t want to just talk to you about the great need.

I want to talk to you about the great reward there is in making disciples. Folks, it should not be a drudgery to say we’re going to go and make disciples. It should not be an obligation to say I’ve got to go tell people about Christ. If there’s something in us that says, I don’t want to go and witness to people because it’s too hard, or it’s something that the preacher, the mean old preacher, is twisting my arm and making me feel bad if I don’t do it, there’s something wrong with the way we perceive going about this.

There’s something wrong in the way we’ve been taught about this, folks, because the greatest privilege that we have as believers is to introduce the world to the one who died for them. The greatest privilege we have, it’s not just a responsibility, The greatest privilege we have is introducing people to Jesus Christ, leading them to trust Him. Do you realize what happens?

I know we do. I’m not trying to insult you. That’s a rhetorical question.

We know what happens when somebody trusts Christ, but do we really take the time to realize what that means? That here is somebody who is in danger of hellfire, not just for a little while, but for all of eternity, and deservedly so, and we have the privilege, we have the joy of being able to tell them about the one who died for them who can change all of that, who can change their eternity, give them peace with God, give them a place in heaven, and change their lives here on earth. Folks, what greater privilege could we have?

The fact of making disciples is a reward in itself. That God even sees fit to use us in his work is an incredible thing. And when I think of it as a hard thing, and I’ll be honest with you, I think that sometimes too.

When I think of it as a hard thing or a scary thing, or when you think that way, we’re thinking about it wrong. Because it’s not about us. It’s about what Christ did for us.

It’s about what Christ can do for others. And there’s a great reward. I want to talk to you tonight about the reward for the church for making disciples.

The reward for making disciples. We’re going to look at Acts chapter 18, a few passages in here. Acts chapter 18, verse 1 says, After these things, Paul departed from Athens and came to Corinth, and found a certain Jew named Aquila, born in Pontus, lately come from Italy with his wife Priscilla, because that Claudius had commanded all Jews to depart from Rome, and came unto them.

And because he was of the same craft, he abode with them and wrought, for by their occupation they were tent makers. And he reasoned in the synagogue every Sabbath, and persuaded the Jews and the Greeks. And when Silas and Timotheus were come from Macedonia, Paul was pressed in the spirit, and testified to the Jews that Jesus was Christ. And when they opposed themselves and blasphemed, he shook his raiment and said unto them, Your blood be upon your own heads.

I am clean. From henceforth I will go unto the Gentiles. And he departed thence and entered into a certain man’s house named Justice, one that worshipped God and whose house joined hard to the synagogue.

And Crispus, the chief ruler of the synagogue, believed on the Lord with all his house and many of the Corinthians, hearing, believed, and were baptized. And then spake the Lord to Paul in the night by a vision, Be not afraid, but speak, and hold not thy peace. For I am with thee, and no man shall set on me to hurt thee, for I have much people in this city.

And he continued there a year and six months, teaching the word of God among them. And we’ll pick up again in verse 23 in just a minute. But what we’ve seen so far here is that Paul has come into Corinth, and he’s found this man named Aquila.

Now, if you’re familiar with Acts chapter 17, or you remember months ago when I preached on it, and if you do, you’ll get a gold star, because I had to go back and see what I said about it. But if you’re familiar with Acts chapter 17, and what has just happened in Paul’s life, he’s gone to Thessalonica, and the people there were so incensed by his preaching that there was a riot, and Paul was run out of town. Then he went to Berea.

And what we know about the Bereans is that God says they were more noble because they searched the Scriptures daily to see if the things that Paul was teaching them were so. But even in Berea, his reputation preceded itself, and the people in the town became so upset that he had come there that he had to be forced out of town again. So Paul has been run out of Thessalonica.

He’s been run out of Berea, and he finds himself in Athens, the center of their Greek pagan worship, and he goes to Mars Hill, and he goes to all these places, and he preaches, and he disputes with the philosophers, and the Bible says he’s there by himself in Athens. And he goes and he takes the whole city on, one man versus the entire pagan system of Athens. And he preaches the gospel, and some people are changed, some people trust Christ and follow Christ, but Paul is persecuted and mocked even in Athens.

And he leaves Athens after a while, and he comes to Corinth. Folks, of all the places to go after an experience like that, Corinth would probably not have been my first choice. If you know much about the book of 1 Corinthians, Paul had to write to the church at Corinth because there was all kinds of wickedness going on even in the church because they had carried so much of this trash and baggage over with them from their pagan culture that even the church was infested with it.

So wicked was the city of Corinth. It was a foul place. And yet Paul leaves from Athens after being mocked and being by himself, after being run out of two other towns, and he says, I’m going to go to the heart of darkness here.

I’m going to go into Corinth. And he finds, the Bible says, a Jew named Aquila and his wife Priscilla. We’ll see them a few more times in the New Testament.

The Bible says he was a Jew named Aquila. And I wondered about this afternoon, looking at it again, if that meant he was of Jewish background or if he was still practicing. The Bible, I saw no indication in the Bible that at this time, Aquila was already a Jewish convert to Christianity.

And some of the commentaries back me up in that, the ones that say something about that. We see no reason to think that he was already a convert. The Bible says he’s a Jew.

We kind of contrast this with earlier in the book of Acts where it talks about Timothy and his mother. It doesn’t name her by name at that point, but Eunice, his mother, is called a Jewess who believed. We see no such qualifying of it here that he was a Jew who believed.

The Bible here just says he was a Jew. I’ll explain why that’s important in a minute. But he meets Aquila and Priscilla, and it says he came unto them.

And because they were of the same craft, they had the same trade, they had something in common. And he went and stayed with them, and it says, and wrought, they worked, for by their occupation they were tent makers. And so he went and stayed with Aquila and Priscilla, and they worked together, they spent time together, and all the while he’s going into the synagogue every Sabbath, and he’s reasoning with people, and he’s persuading, it says, the Jews and the Greeks.

And so Paul is there in Corinth, he’s doing ministry, he’s spending time with Aquila and Priscilla, and he’s spending time in the synagogue preaching the word, and people are being converted, and it talks about Crispus, the chief ruler of the synagogue, believed on the Lord with all his house, and many of the Corinthians, hearing, believed and were baptized. So Paul’s had an incredible, even just a very short ministry here. Great things are happening, and the Bible says he continued there a year and six months, and God protected him.

God told him, nothing’s going to happen to you here. We fast forward to verse 23. It says, and after he had spent some time there, talking about Antioch, in the meantime he’s done some more traveling and come to Antioch, and after he had spent some time there, he departed and went over all the country of Galatia and Phrygia in order, strengthening all the disciples.

And a certain Jew named Apollos, born at Alexandria, an eloquent man and mighty in the scriptures, came to Ephesus. This man was instructed in the way of the Lord and being fervent in the spirit, and he spake and taught diligently the things of the Lord, knowing only the baptism of John. So what we see here is that he’s left Antioch, and Paul has gone on to Ephesus, and he’s strengthening the believers, strengthening the disciples wherever he goes.

And we see at Ephesus there’s this man named Apollos, And it talks about him diligently teaching the scriptures. An eloquent man, a good teacher. But it says, knowing only the baptism of John.

Well, what that means is he had been part of John’s ministry, where John had come to prepare the way for Jesus to come. And he’d probably been baptized with John’s baptism. And he’d been taught about repentance toward God.

But he’d probably left the area before Christ came on the scene because he knew nothing about Jesus. He knew only John’s baptism. But folks, what he knew about, he was faithful in teaching.

He was teaching God’s word to the extent he knew and understood it. So he’s in Ephesus and teaching. And verse 26 says, And he began to speak boldly in the synagogue, whom when Aquila and Priscilla had heard, Oh, here we are in Ephesus, and Aquila and Priscilla show up again.

And they’re there in the synagogue. When we last left them, they were Jews in Corinth. And I know all these places start to run together, Corinth and Ephesus and Thessalonica.

Corinth was in Greece. Ephesus was a completely different city in what’s now Turkey. So they’ve traveled all this way to Ephesus, and here they are in the synagogue there, when Apollos steps forward to speak.

Whom when Aquila and Priscilla had heard, they took him unto them, and expounded unto him the way of God more perfectly. So here we have them. They probably would have been familiar with what he was teaching, and yet the Bible says they expounded the word of God to Apollos more perfectly.

Something has happened in between verse 2 and verse 20, where did we leave off, verse 26. Because we meet up with Aquila and Priscilla. They are, as far as we can tell, practicing Jews who meet up with Paul.

And then sometime later, they’re in another country in the synagogue. And when this Jewish teacher comes in and begins to teach God’s word, they explain to him the fullness of God’s word. And we can deduce from this because it’s talking about Paul’s ministry.

They’re teaching him about Jesus, who was the one that John, you know, John was just there as a forerunner of Christ, there to prepare the way. And so when he’s only teaching about John’s baptism and repentance, he doesn’t know the whole story. And so in come these people to fill him in on the rest of the story.

It means at some point, they had heard the rest of the story. At some point, they had trusted in the rest of the story. And my guess is that they’d heard that from Paul.

Imagine somebody like the Apostle Paul that was always preaching everywhere he went, sometimes it seems like. Imagine having him live in your house. He didn’t even get up and go to work in the morning and leave you alone because he’s there working with you.

My guess is you’re going to hear the gospel at some point. You’re going to hear the gospel at several points, because he was always talking about Jesus. And so not only had Aquila and Priscilla heard the gospel, but they had believed, and now they’re going and teaching other people the gospel as well.

Verse 27, And when he was disposed to pass into Achaia, which is another part of Greece, he’s talking about going back to Greece from Ephesus, the brethren wrote, exhorting the disciples to receive him, who, when he was come, helped them much which had believed through grace. He had been a help to the believers. And he was determined to go back to Achaia and the church at Ephesus sent a letter to the churches over there and said, Receive him.

He’s been a good help. Verse 28, For he mightily convinced the Jews, and that publicly showing by the scriptures that Jesus was Christ. Folks, we see three generations of disciples in this one chapter. Three generations of disciples.

Paul goes into Corinth, and we can take from the text that he witnessed to Aquila and Priscilla. And it wasn’t just a drive-by witnessing. He spent some time with them, taught them, invested in their lives.

Like the discipleship relationship we talked about two weeks ago, where it wasn’t just I’m getting information from somewhere. It was like a teacher and student relationship, like Jesus and his disciples. And they spent some time together.

And then we see Aquila and Priscilla showing up in a completely different country, and they’re instructing somebody about the Word of God. They’re instructing somebody about Christ. And then he’s determined to go back and tell other people about Jesus Christ. It’s an incredible thing we see going on here. Folks, this is what it’s supposed to be.

This is the difference between just focusing on evangelism, which is important, and focusing on discipleship as a whole. Evangelism and discipleship, in my view of it, are not two different things that we’ve got to somehow put together and we’ve got to do both of. Discipleship is the whole picture, and evangelism is a slice of it.

The first step in somebody becoming a disciple is to be evangelized, to be converted through the hearing and response to the gospel, and then to grow in Christ. And when we focus just on evangelism, folks, we need to do evangelism. We need to focus on that, and we need to get better at it than we are. No matter how good we are, we need to get better.

But if all we ever do is evangelize, all we ever do is tell people about the gospel, we get them saved, which is important. Do not get me wrong. That’s so important.

But we get them saved, and then we abandon them to the world, and they never grow past that point. Better said, they usually don’t grow past that point. By the grace of God, some people get into the Word and off they go.

But for the most part, I’m convinced that a lot of the people that we see today, that we argue, well, Christians argue, well, did they lose it or did they never have it? I don’t know that it was a matter of never having it. I believe they may have been genuine in their expression of faith in the first place, but then they were never discipled and that seed was snatched away.

That’s why we never saw them grow, because we didn’t take the time to disciple them. But the point I’m trying to make is that if all we ever focus on is evangelism, if that’s all we do, then we can work and work and work and see a few people get saved and see a little bit of ministry done. If we take a little more time with people and we share the gospel with them, evangelize them, and we see them come to Christ, we lead them to trust Christ, and then we take the time to lead them to follow Christ, then not only are we working in evangelism, but we’ve discipled other people who are working alongside of us.

And two of us can do more than one of us. And we reach more people and disciple them, and suddenly four of us can do more than just me. See, we don’t want to perpetuate the idea of immature Christians.

I don’t mean that as an insult, but I mean Christians who’ve never been taught and Christians who’ve never been grown to be able to serve. There’s a reward for the church in discipling people for many reasons, but for one, because of the help we get in the work of the ministry. When I say the reward of the church, the great reward of discipleship, I don’t want to mislead you into thinking I’m talking about material things.

Now, I can tell you it was an amazing thing to see when I was a church planter in Oklahoma. Our church in Blanchard that sponsored the work, really it was a new concept for them starting a church. But they said, we’re going to step out on faith.

We think this is what God’s calling us to do. They endorsed us. They sent us.

They did all of this stuff and said, you know, we could take people with us if we needed the help that they would invest finances in it. when they stepped out on faith not knowing where the provision for this was going to come and sent us to start working on making disciples in Norman, I can tell you in that instance that attendance went up to higher than it had been in a long time. Giving went up to higher than it had been in a long time.

It didn’t make any sense that here we’re sending people over there and we’re sending money over there and yet we have more people and money than we started with. God is faithful and God can reward. But folks, that’s not what I’m talking about.

That, oh, if we do God’s work, he’s going to bless us with more money. I’m not talking about material rewards. The first reward is that we’re rewarded for faithfulness in ministry.

We are rewarded for faithfulness in ministry. I talked about the awful things that Paul had been through at Thessalonica and Berea and Athens. And for Paul, he would probably say those were minor in contrast with some of the other things that he’d gone through, beatings and imprisonment.

Those things would have been minor to him. For us, those would have been catastrophic things. For many of us, and maybe myself included, those are the kind of things that cause us to give up on ministry, cause us to give up on serving.

Well, a meeting with all this opposition must not be God’s will. That’s not necessarily true. Paul had been faithful when he was run out of Thessalonica.

He went to Berea and preached. When he was run out of Berea, he went on to Athens and preached. When he was mocked, he left there and went to Corinth and took on the task of trying to reach this awful city.

He was consistently faithful in what he did, and God rewarded his ministry for his faithfulness. Because we look and see that because of his faithfulness in going to Corinth, God brought him to Aquila and Priscilla. And God brought him to the synagogue in verse 4, where he persuaded the Jews and the Greeks.

And God brought him to Crispus, the ruler of the synagogue, who believed, not just him, but his whole house believed, and many of the Corinthians. And God gave him an incredible ministry. Why?

Because he’d been faithful in the past in making disciples. And he was faithful to go there in the first place. And folks, I believe that if we will focus on what God has actually called the church to do, that God will bless the ministry of the church.

It is a mistake for us to say, well, we’re going to make our plans, and we’re going to decide what we want to do, and then we’re going to pray for God to bless it. We need to be faithful in the ministry to which God has called us and then expect Him to reward that faithfulness. God rewards faithfulness in ministry.

Second thing we see here is that we’re rewarded by witnessing God at work. This is so much more incredible than any material blessing, any material reward we could receive. Because Paul was faithful and because Paul went and made disciples, Paul got to see God at work in ways that we don’t get to see a lot of.

We see people in the Bible, and I’ve often thought, why don’t I get to see the things Paul did? Why don’t I get to see the things that Peter did? Probably because I don’t do the things that Peter did and Paul did.

Folks, they’re faithful in their ministry, and they’re rewarded by witnessing God at work. He got to see God at work in Aquila and Priscilla’s li