The Predicament of Inability

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Transcript:

We are finishing up the series on evangelism and discipleship. And my wife actually asked me today at lunch if I can preach without preaching a series. And I said, yeah, I just figured that people would rather I take two months to go through a topic than throw it all at them in an hour.

But anyway, I’m sure it won’t be the last I ever say to you about evangelism and discipleship because they’re that important. And it’s also not all the training that we need. I need more training.

I think we all could use more, and I’d like at some point to do something about that. But the last few, if you’ll remember, we spent the first four weeks talking about the reasons to evangelize, the reasons to share the gospel, and we’ve spent the last three weeks and then tonight talking about the objections that we have, and we’ve talked about apathy, we’ve talked about a fear of failure, we’ve talked about a fear of rejection. Tonight I want to talk to you about inability, the predicament of inability.

See, a lot of people, probably more so than any of the other objections I’ve talked about, a lot of people have expressed to me that when we preach about evangelism, when we talk about it and train for it, have expressed the idea that they really are behind the idea of evangelism. They would like to do it. They would like to share their faith with people, not necessarily in going and standing out on a street corner with a bullhorn, which is not the only way to evangelize, not necessarily knocking on the door of somebody they’ve never met before, but they would like to share their faith with somebody.

And sometimes they even have somebody specific in mind that they want to share their faith with. And that’s a good thing. If we’re thinking, I want to share my faith and I’ve got somebody in mind, that their objection, the thing that stops them is saying, I don’t know how.

I don’t know how to begin telling somebody about my faith. I would not know what to say. And I’m not going to pretend that in the next half hour or so, I’m going to solve all of that for you, and I’m going to give you such deep teaching, you’re going to walk out of here and know exactly what to say in every circumstance because I’m not that good.

And I don’t know what to say in every circumstance. There are questions that I can’t answer. There are questions that men more brilliant than I am cannot answer.

But I want to give you an overview of some things that might help you. If you’ve come to that point and said, I really want to share my faith with somebody. I even have somebody in particular in mind.

I just don’t know how to how to address the topic. And as I said, I hear that a lot. I’ve told you before about the lady that I’d been teaching on evangelism for Wednesday nights for probably two months.

And she came to me and said, I just, it wasn’t here, but she said, I just don’t think I could ever do that. I said, do what? She said, tell somebody about Jesus.

I said, why? And she said, I have no idea what to say. She’d been a Christian for over 60 years and said, I don’t think I’d know what to say.

And it’d be easy to say, well, that’s pitiful. You’ve been a Christian for 60 years and you don’t know what to say. But instead of shooting people when they’re down, instead of shooting people when they tell us the truth, we ought to say, well, that’s fine.

Here’s how we fix it. Here’s how we fix the problem. I hope she wouldn’t mind me sharing this, but even my wife has been talking to me about what she’s been teaching the Awana kids downstairs.

And she’s even going through a series of lessons, building up to teaching them about salvation. And she told me in the car today, and she’s told me many times. I’m building up to it, but I’m so afraid I’m not going to tell them right.

She said, I know how you get saved, but I’m afraid I’m going to tell them one thing, one little thing wrong and mess them up forever. And I said, are you going to tell them? And I guess we’ve had this conversation so many times because she knew exactly what I was going to ask.

Are you going to tell them that there’s any way they can be good enough for God? I said, no. I said, well, as long as you stick to that point that we are not acceptable to God and cannot be acceptable to God on our own, and that Christ dying for us was the only way. You know, there’s only so much you can mess up if you keep it that simple, that Christ died to pay the penalty that we owed and couldn’t pay.

But it’s not that uncommon to say, yeah, I’ve been saved, I know the gospel, I just don’t know how to approach it with somebody. That’s what we’re going to talk about tonight. 1 Corinthians chapter 15.

Paul writes to the church at Corinth in verse 1, Moreover, brethren, I declare unto you the gospel which I preached unto you, which also ye have received, and wherein ye stand. He said, I’m declaring to you the gospel. I’m going to declare this gospel to you that you’ve already received from me that I’ve already preached to you.

You’ve already received it. You stand firm in it. I’m going to give you a reminder here of what the gospel is.

Verse 2, by which also ye are saved. The very same gospel that saved you. This is the same one that’s going to save the people you’re talking to.

By which also ye are saved, if ye keep in memory what I preached unto you, unless ye have believed in vain. He’s not talking about falling and losing your salvation there. If you read his letters as a whole, if you read the letters that he wrote to people in Galatia and so on and so forth, the problem that they had was not what a lot of people think of today that, oh, we’re going to mess up and we’re going to lose our salvation.

People read verses in the Bible, take them out of context and say, see, there you can sin, you can mess up and lose your salvation. A lot of these verses, they were dealing with a completely different problem of people who were kind of vacillating back and forth between the gospel and the Old Testament law. And you would have Christians that would either teach this or would be misled by Judaizers, people who would introduce them to the Old Testament law and say, well, yes, Christ died for you, but in order to be a Christian, you’ve also got to follow the Old Testament law.

And when a lot of these passages talk about drawing back, it’s not talking about people messing up, people slipping and falling and losing their salvation. It’s talking about people who have professed a belief in Jesus Christ, have professed faith that Christ died for them, and yet can’t seem to get past the idea that there’s something about it that they have to accomplish or earn or do, and having to go back to the Old Testament law. And what he’s talking about here is, you know, you’re saved if you hold fast. It’s not that they were saved and they were going to lose it.

It was that these people have professed belief in Christ, and the idea was that if they ever turned back and said, well, I’ve got to earn it for myself, I’ve got to follow the Old Testament law, I’ve got to do these rules and rituals and all these things. He says, he points out in Galatians that the law and grace do not coexist. It’s either all grace or it’s all law. And by the way, if it’s all law, there’s no hope for any of us.

So what he’s saying here is don’t draw back away from this because if you were ever truly saved, I believe the Bible teaches this, you’re always saved. But if they could profess a faith in Christ, a belief that they’d been saved by grace, and yet be persuaded later on that, hey, there’s something I can do about this. They never really put their faith in Christ because they always reserved a place in their hearts where some of my faith is in myself.

Some of my salvation is dependent on me following the law. And so when he says, which you have received and wherein you stand, by which also you are saved if you keep in memory what I have preached unto you unless you have believed in vain, he’s talking about people who professed faith in Christ But really, we’re trying to walk the line, I believe, between grace and law, trying to mix the two. Okay, verse 2, by which also you’re saved.

Verse 3 says, For I delivered unto you first of all, I delivered unto you first of all that which I received, how that Christ died. He says already in verse 1, I’m going to declare the gospel unto you, the gospel that you’ve been saved by, the gospel that I’ve preached, that you believe, that you stand firm in. And then he gives us the gospel in a nutshell in verses 3 and 4.

It doesn’t take. . .

The gospel, folks, is an incredible thing. The Bible calls it the power of God unto salvation. It’s not our presentation.

It’s not my words. It’s not my abilities. It’s the gospel.

And the gospel is so incredible because Paul could write entire books on it. The entire book of Romans is really a deep theological treatise examining salvation from all these different aspects and all the points and details about it. Salvation is so deep, the gospel is so deep that he could write the book of Romans to examine it.

And yet so simple that it can be summed up in two verses in 1 Corinthians 15, here in verses 3 and 4. For I delivered unto you, first of all, that which I also received. The same gospel I gave to you is the same one I received.

How that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures, and that he was buried, and that he rose again the third day according to the scriptures. That’s the gospel right there. And I won’t tell you there aren’t other details.

there are other details that are good to know we can build on that foundation but as far folks as what it’s necessary to know and to believe and to put our trust in in order to be saved it’s all summed up in a nutshell right in those two verses he says this is the gospel that I’ve received that has saved you that I’ve preached to you that you’ve received and you stand fast in Christ died for our sins he was buried and he rose again on the third day according to the scriptures as I said there are other details but this is the gospel in a nutshell. He goes on then to elaborate on it a little bit, and he says, and that he was seen of Cephas, then of the twelve, Cephas being another name for Peter. And after that he was seen of above five hundred brethren at once, of whom greater part remain unto this present, but some are fallen asleep.

So he’s gone on from a presentation of the gospel to actually what we call apologetics. And apologetics basically just means being able to defend the gospel. There’s presenting the gospel, and then there’s being able to defend it against attacks.

And sometimes in evangelism, sometimes as you present the gospel to people, people will have objections that are just really red herrings so they can avoid the issue of the conviction of their sins. But there are also people who have legitimate questions that plague them, and we need to be able, if we can, to answer those questions or at least tell them we’ll help them figure it out. But people believed, people were already saying, even as soon as Jesus was risen, and people were trying to say that his body had been stolen.

The disciples stole his body, or that his body had been moved, or any number of things had happened. And people are still saying those things today to try to discredit the Christian faith, try to discredit the gospel. And again, I believe it all boils down to they don’t want to deal with their sins.

But here he says, not only did he die for our sins according to the Scriptures, and he was buried and rose again on the third day according to the Scriptures, but he says he was also seen by Peter and the Twelve. And if that’s not enough, that he was just seen by these 12 Christians, he was seen of over 500 brethren there in Jerusalem. And he says to the church at Corinth, and by the way, if you don’t believe me, some of them have died already, but the majority of them are still awake until the present day.

They’re still there in Jerusalem wandering around. And you can go and ask them. And after that, he was seen of James and of all the apostles.

And last of all, he was seen of me also as one born out of due time. For I am the least of the apostles that am not meet to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God. But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace which was bestowed upon me was not in vain, but I labored more abundantly than they all, and yet not I, but the grace of God which was in me.

Therefore, whether it were I or they, so we preach, and so ye believe. And he tells them, you know, there are these challenges to the gospel, people that have questions, people that have objections, that they would raise when the church at Corinth tried to tell them about Christ. And he said, look, there are eyewitnesses here. He’s presenting apologetic evidence to combat these lies or these questions.

You know, some people say, well, he didn’t really die. None of these things happened. They’re just myths.

He says, there are eyewitnesses to this. The 12, then the 500, then James and the other apostles, and then finally me. And he ties it all back again together, saying the same gospel that he preaches is the same gospel that’s preached by the other apostles.

It’s the same one that they believed and received. It’s all the same gospel, and it comes back to verses 3 and 4, how that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, and that He was buried, and that He rose again the third day according to the Scriptures. Now, this passage tells us a few things.

If you’re one of those tonight that says, I want to tell people about Christ, I’m just not sure how, this passage has some things for you. And again, I’m not saying we’re going to sign you up to go stand out on the highway with a bullhorn. But if even the thought of talking to your oldest friend and sharing with them the gospel that you received, if that scares you because you think, I have no idea what to say, I have no idea how to present it correctly, I have no idea how to even begin the topic, we’ll talk about that a little bit.

The first thing is that we need to rely on the essence of the gospel. In verses 3 and 4, we’ve already hit on that pretty hard. In verses 3 and 4, it gives us the gospel in a nutshell.

A lot of times we think that in order for us to witness to somebody about Christ, in order for us to lead somebody to Christ, we’ve got to be able to completely answer every question they’ve ever had and their mama’s ever had and answer it to all their satisfaction and be able to blow them away with our brilliance and our presentation and all of these things. If you know the apologetic facts like he did where he’s answering their objections, If you know those things, those are good to know. If you can present evidence for God’s existence, if you can present evidence for the resurrection, that’s a good thing.

If you can show a Mormon or a Jehovah’s Witness from the Scriptures where it doesn’t say what they’re teaching and point them back to the Gospel, folks, all of those things are good things. If you’ve got it down where you know how to approach somebody, you know how to begin the conversation, you know the steps to take them through to get them to understand, That’s great. But it’s not absolutely necessary that you have everything figured out before you talk to somebody about Jesus Christ. The most important things that we need to know, the things we have to know, if we’re going to witness to somebody about Christ, the things we have to know in order to lead them to Christ, in order to help them understand, are the nuts and bolts of the gospel.

And there are four things in this passage, in these two verses, that they need to know. They need to know sin and its penalty. He says in verse 3, that Christ died for our sins.

Christ didn’t just die as a political revolutionary. Christ didn’t die because He picked off the religious leaders. Folks, those are all secondary reasons, but the real reason Christ died is because He came here to die on purpose for our sins.

He came here because we had sinned and sin incurred a penalty that we could not pay. And so for us to talk to somebody about Christ, we need to understand and believe sin and its penalty. And we need to make that clear to them.

That when Christ died, He died for our sins. And as I’m going through these, we’ll talk in just a few minutes. That’s why I’ve got this, wherever it went, oh, right here.

I’ve got this big stack of paperwork up here to kind of talk about some ways we do this. But I want to talk to you about the four things they really need to understand of the gospel. I think sometimes we make it way too hard.

The gospel is simple enough that a child can understand it. It really is when we get it down to the essentials. We need to understand sin and its penalty, that Christ died for our sins.

That the reason He came, the reason He died, was because there was a penalty that we incurred when we sinned and disobeyed a holy and just God. So when He came, He died because there is sin and there’s a penalty. And that sin and that penalty applies to every member of the human race that’s ever been born, except Christ, because He was God in the flesh.

The second thing is Christ’s payment for that sin. It says in that same verse, if you flip them backwards, it says Christ died. I started with the second part of that phrase, for our sins, because we need to explain to them, before we explain that a Savior came, we need to explain what He’s saving them from.

We’re not going to convince people. How many of you have seen the movie Titanic? Most people have.

Wow. I’m not going to say much about the movie. I’ve been fascinated by, I’ll just say I was fascinated by the story of the Titanic as a child, and then seeing the movie, which I probably shouldn’t have seen, was really a disappointment.

In contrast to everything I’d read. But in the movie, as in real life, people did not take the threat seriously and did not board the lifeboats because they didn’t realize the danger that they were in. A lot of times, when we do talk to people about Christ, we come and say, Jesus wants to save you.

He died for you. And I’ve even heard people say, Jesus wants to be your best friend, any of these things. And we try to pack the lifeboats without letting people know that we’ve hit an iceberg.

Does that make sense? There’s a reason those lifeboats went off half-filled. It’s because most people didn’t realize the severity of what had happened when they hit the iceberg.

Remember, the Titanic was unsinkable, so they claimed. And here we go trying to load the iceberg. I’m glad I didn’t take my allergy medication today because that’s me without it.

We’re trying to load the lifeboats without them understanding the severity of the problem our ship is in. We as humanity have this problem called sin that is a deadly problem and an inescapable problem. And the only rescue from it will lead us to hell.

It will lead us to destruction. And the only escape from it is through Jesus Christ, him dying and paying the penalty. And we cannot expect them to jump off of the big, safe-looking ocean liner and into the dinky little life raft in the middle of the North Atlantic if they don’t understand the severity of the iceberg we’ve hit.

If they don’t understand what he died for, what they are being saved from, then all we’re selling them is morality that’s not enough to make them acceptable before God. All we’re selling them is just a different kind of lifestyle that leads them to hell. A lifestyle of sin that just looks better.

We’re selling them church attendance. We’re selling them any number of things. Before the good news comes the bad news.

Sin and its penalty. And then comes the good news that for our sins, Christ died. See, there’s not just sin and its penalty, there’s Christ’s payment.

And we’ve got to understand and get them to understand that sin is there. They’re sinners. We’re sinners.

We all incur the penalty of death and hell. And yet Christ died for us according to the Scriptures. Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures.

If Christ hadn’t died, we’d still be dead in our sins. If Christ didn’t die for us, there was no other sacrifice that would have been acceptable to God. There’s no other way the payment could have been made.

There’s no other way that heaven could have been purchased on our behalf. We could spend the rest of our lives trying to do good deeds. We could spend all of eternity in hell and still never do enough and never suffer enough to earn God’s forgiveness.

Christ died to make the payment for what we owed and could not afford to pay. That’s the second thing they’ve got to understand. Then there’s Christ’s resurrection.

It says he rose again the third day according to the scriptures. I went for a job interview once at a Christian school. And the man asked me if you have to believe in the resurrection in order to be saved.

And I still don’t know exactly what he meant by that question. We went back and forth on that for about 20 minutes before we moved on. It has nothing to do with it.

But I ended up not getting that job because I wouldn’t sign off on a doctrinal statement that said I believed in the universal church. But anyway, so I wasn’t real sure where they were coming from and all that. But he asked if I thought you had to believe in the resurrection to be saved.

And again, I still don’t know what exactly he was getting at by that question. Because what I told him is the Bible says that you believe in Christ, you express faith, that he died for you, he paid the penalty. And I don’t want to add anything to that that the Bible doesn’t add, but at the same time, Paul said, if Christ be not raised, our faith is in vain.

And so why would we believe in Christ? Why would we have faith in Christ if he just went to the cross saying he was dying for us and then nothing ever happened? He just was still in the grave.

He was just any other man and any other man couldn’t pay for my sins. So if he’s trying to get me to say you have to sign off, You have to believe all these theological points in order to get into heaven. No, I don’t.

But at the same time, he’s not the Savior if he wasn’t able to rise again from the grave to prove that he was who he said he was and that he could do what he said he could do. And so he says that he rose again the third day according to the Scriptures. The importance of the resurrection is that it proved that Christ was who he said he was.

Proved that he could do what he said he could do. There were all kinds of people running around in Palestine at that time claiming to be the Messiah. There are still people who claim to be Jesus Christ. And you know what?

Some of them can even do miracles, or claim to do miracles, or make it look like they can do miracles. Only one person has ever been crucified and risen again from the grave and been seen by eyewitnesses, proving that he was God in the flesh, the promised Messiah. And so the resurrection is important because when we tell them about the resurrection, Jesus Christ isn’t just some man who died trying to pay for their sins.

He was God in the flesh who made the perfect sacrifice and then rose again from the dead to prove His claims. And then finally, faith in Christ. He says in verses 1 and 2, which you’ve received and by which you’re saved. Them receiving this message that Christ had died for them, on that basis they were saved. He doesn’t say Christ died for you, plus you’ve been good little boys and girls.

He doesn’t say Christ died for you, plus you keep up the sacrifices, plus you follow the Passover, plus anything. He doesn’t say that. He says this that you’ve received and by which you’re saved.

And then talks about this gospel. So really, if you want to distill it down to the most basic elements, the gospel as presented here in this passage, is that we sinned against God, Christ died to pay the penalty that we owed for our sins, rose again to prove that He could do what He said He could do, and that if we will trust Him, we will be saved. Pretty basic, isn’t it?

So simple and yet so amazingly complex that we never could have come up with something that simple. It takes an unlimited intelligence like that of God to come up with something so simple and yet so powerful. So if you’re thinking, okay, I want to share the gospel with somebody, but I’m afraid I’ll mess up the details.

And I’m afraid, you know, there are a lot of wrong things that you can tell people about the gospel. There are a lot of wrong things that people do tell people about the gospel. If you can keep it simple and keep it to these four points, it’s hard to go wrong.

Unless you add to this that you’ve got to do something to earn God’s forgiveness. unless you add to this that you can be acceptable to God, unless you add things to it. This is pretty basic stuff and hard to mess up.

A wise man has told me many times as I was planning lessons and things, he would say, kiss, keep it simple, stupid. Told me that on a regular basis. I made the mistake of telling my wife one time that he’d told me that, and now she tells me that when I’m struggling to get a message together.

Do not go into this. Do not go into sharing the gospel with somebody thinking you’ve got to explain every aspect of biblical theology. There are important things for them to believe, and that comes when we teach them about discipleship.

But if you’re trying to rescue somebody from the pits of hell, if you’re trying to rescue them before the ship goes down, show them the iceberg and point them to the lifeboat. Then when we get them in the lifeboat, we can explain all the mechanics and physics of how the ship fills with water and buoyancy and all that. If you want to confuse somebody, explain to them the Trinity.

I don’t even complete. I believe the Trinity because that’s what the Bible teaches, but I can’t completely explain the Trinity. If you want to confuse somebody, take them through our doctrinal statement.

You would not sit down with the BMA doctrinal statement and read somebody through it in order to lead them to Christ, would you? I hope not. I’m about as BMA as they get, and I would not do that.

No, we tell them how Christ died for them because of the sin and the penalty that they owed, that he rose again to prove that he was God in the flesh and that they can be saved by trusting in Him for their salvation. So if you’re thinking, okay, I want to talk to somebody about Christ, but I don’t know what to say, there’s what you say. You don’t have to use the exact phrases that I use, but that’s the idea we need to get across.

We rely on the essence of the gospel, not our presentation, not our brilliance or our eloquence, any of that. The second thing that may help you is to remember your own conversion. Paul talks to the believers at Corinth here about their conversion.

He says the gospel you receive. He talks about the gospel that he’s received. He talks about it in this passage.

He talks about meeting Christ. Where’s the verse I’m thinking of? Yet not I, but the grace of God which was with me. Therefore, whether it were I or they, so we preach, and so you believed.

He talks about their conversion. He talks about his conversion and the grace that he’d received from God. The simplest way to explain the gospel to somebody, if you’re thinking, yeah, but how do I set them down and get them to read 1 Corinthians 15 with me?

And I’m not saying you have to open 1 Corinthians 15 in order to lead somebody to Christ. This is not my answer to the Romans road. The easiest way is that if you’ve been saved, you know how to get saved. If you’ve received the gospel, you know what you did.

And I use the word did loosely. You know what you did in order to get saved. You know what you had to believe.

Tell them your story. It’s helpful to add scripture as appropriate because we don’t want them to think, hey, this is my opinion. I got saved.

I felt this. I experienced them. We want them to know that this is based on God’s Word.

But it’s, hey, you don’t have to be a brilliant theologian. You can take them back to the time when you were a child and your mother talked to you about Christ. That’s my story. I was five years old and I was scared to go to hell because I grew up in an independent Baptist church where that was talked about a lot.

And I asked my mother what I needed to do to be saved because I knew they had drilled into me that I had sinned and that sinners go to hell. Mom, what do I have to do to be saved? And my mother talked to me about Christ, told me He died for me, paid the penalty that I couldn’t pay, and all I had to do was trust Him, and I trusted Christ. Some of you may have walked an aisle at church and the preacher may have explained Christ to you and you may have trusted Him right there.

Some of you may have been at the darkest point in your life when finally you hit rock bottom and knew there was nothing to do but reach up and you found Christ at the darkest point of your life. everybody’s story is different, but it’s the same gospel if it points to the fact that Christ died for us when we could not pay the penalty for ourselves. So you want to know how to approach somebody with it?

If you want to know how to, how do I tell the story? Tell them what happened to you. People like talking about themselves and people like listening to interesting stories.

Conversation. Tell them your story. Don’t take them through a canned approach.

So we rely on the essence of the gospel and we remember our own conversion. A couple other ideas I want to give you just real quick is, number one, what we’ve been talking about the last few weeks with praying for people, praying that God will open their eyes, and praying that God will open your eyes to opportunities to talk to them. It’s a good thing if we pray for people before we share the gospel.

Now, there may be some people that we meet on the street, and the Holy Spirit, if we’re listening, tells us to talk to them. And we don’t really have an opportunity to spend time, Spend weeks and months praying for them and praying for the right opportunity. If the Holy Spirit tells us to speak, we speak then.

But if there are people in your world that you’re thinking, I really feel like I need to share the gospel with them, pray for them. Prepare by praying for them. Pray for yourself, too, that God will give you the words, that the Holy Spirit will give you the words to speak.

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