Ignorance

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Well, it was an unintentional but poor choice of words, as you may have seen in your bulletin already, to title a message on Father’s Day, Ignorance and Irrelevance. That wasn’t on purpose. In spite of the fact that that’s how society today views fathers and views men, and if you don’t believe me, just turn on any sitcom.

No, don’t go home and turn on a sitcom. But if you did turn on a sitcom, just about any of them, portray the father as an ignorant buffoon. And it’s gotten to the point where I’ve just offended constantly at how my kind are portrayed on television.

No, in speaking this morning on ignorance and irrelevance, it’s not because it’s Father’s Day. Today I’m speaking to you about discipleship and disciple-making, as I have been for several weeks. I spoke to you on Mother’s Day about discipleship.

I’m speaking to you on Father’s Day about discipleship. I think just about all the Sundays in between, we’ve talked about discipleship and for the foreseeable future, because discipleship is important. Discipleship is essential, not just important.

Without discipleship and disciple-making, the church not only will cease to exist, but has no reason for existing as long as it’s here. We were left here to make disciples. It is still relevant, I think, to Father’s Day, though, because I believe, I firmly believe, not just in an academic sense or an abstract sense of looking at it at the scriptures, in the scriptures, but in a concrete sense of looking at my own children.

I believe that fathers play an absolutely essential role in disciple making. It’s my job to disciple my children. Now, without me, they still could come to Christ on their own.

They still could grow into spiritual maturity on their own. And despite my best efforts, they may not trust Christ. They may not come to spiritual maturity. But ladies and gentlemen, fathers set their children up to have every advantage when it comes to attaining salvation and spiritual maturity.

Or they set them up to have every disadvantage. And I’d rather work for my children than against them. I’d rather present a godly role model and a godly leader in our home that my children can look to and learn from.

And hopefully that will lead them to trust Christ and to follow him. But this morning as we talk about discipleship, I’ve talked to you the last few weeks about what a disciple is, what they look like kind of in a general sense. When Jesus talked to his disciples about following him, what that looked like, what it means to follow Christ, for example, that we really give up this idea that we’re in control of our own lives, that we belong to ourselves.

We belong to him. When you trust Christ as your savior, he’s bought you, he’s paid for you, you belong to him. And we give up the pretense, or we’re supposed to give up the pretense, of having control and having a say and retaining the option to say no, Lord.

Folks, if no Lord is in our vocabulary, then we’re not really his disciples. And we talked some about how that it’s not just the responsibility of the church leadership to make disciples. And I want to reiterate this to you this morning, ladies and gentlemen.

It is not my job as your pastor to make disciples. It is my job as a Christian. It is my job as a member of this church to make disciples.

It’s your job as a member of this church and as a Christian to make disciples. My role as pastor is, in addition to that, helping you and coaching you and maybe cheerleading you, depending on which analogy you want to make. But it’s not my job because I’m the pastor.

It’s my job because I’m a Christian. And if we are not trying to make disciples, then we’re not doing our job. See, discipleship too, as I told you last week, is messy and it’s difficult, but it’s not as complicated as we’ve made it out to be.

When I say it’s your job to make disciples, I don’t mean you have to get a group of people together and teach a class. I’m leading a group of people through disciple way on Thursday nights, but that in and of itself is not discipleship, and that’s not the only way of making disciples, is to teach a class. Discipleship takes place during life and in relationships, and when you’re with another brother or sister in Christ, and you’re driving down the road, and you’re talking about life and talking about the scriptures, and you’re learning from one another, that’s discipleship.

When you teach your kids early on about Jesus and about trusting him and what it means to follow him, folks, that’s discipleship. When you get up day in and day out, and you model for people around you, whether it’s your children or people in this church, anybody who’s behind you in the spiritual journey of attaining spiritual maturity in Jesus Christ, when you for anybody behind you, what it means to follow Christ, that is discipleship. And it’s something that is meant to happen on a daily basis, not just in the context of a class or what I do from the pulpit.

It’s when we use our relationships and use our time together to help people get where they need to be in Jesus Christ. And just to clarify one thing too, I hear a lot of churches talk about discipleship and talk about spiritual life, and they talk about the journey. And it’s all about the journey, and it’s all about where we’re going. And churches will say, especially some of the trendier churches, I’ll read on their website, it’s just all about we’re in the journey together.

Well, it’s not just about being on the journey or being on the journey together. It’s also about where the journey is taking us. We’re not just in a journey to learn how to behave better or learn how to be more successful or learn how to be more upstanding.

For it to be discipleship and for it to be effective. It has to be about Jesus Christ. It has to be on a journey that leads us to faith in Christ and then following him and becoming like him. That’s discipleship.

And making disciples is simply taking people who are behind us in that process and getting them from where they need to be or from where they are to where they need to be. Does this make sense? And there will always be somebody behind us that needs to know what we know and needs to glean from what we’ve experienced.

And there’s always somebody ahead of us that we can learn from. Because on this journey, we’re never complete until we reach eternity. And I told you last week that I would begin talking to you about how to make disciples.

We’ve set up what, in very general terms, what a disciple looks like. And talked about how it’s all of our responsibility. But if you’re scratching your head sitting there thinking, okay, but it’s my job, I get that, but how am I supposed to do it?

Today we start talking about some ideas how to do it. Start talking about meeting people where they are and getting them to where they need to be. And we’re going to be in Acts chapter 17 today.

If it sounds familiar to you, it’s because I preach on Acts 17 all the time. I went and looked, and I think the last time was February 2nd, and that’s 127 days. That’s the longest I’ve ever gone without preaching on Acts 17.

So you’ll probably hear it a lot in the future, too. We’ll be in Acts 17 today. And a few years back, I sat down thinking about this process and thought about it where all the places somebody could be spiritually.

all the places they could be in relation to the gospel or to a knowledge of God, and thought about all the places somebody could be and tried to put them in some kind of logical order. And that’s where we find ourselves beginning this morning at ignorance and irrelevance. Again, it has nothing to do with fathers.

It has to do with where people are in relation to the gospel. And believe it or not, we’re going to read this passage today from Acts 17 that we’ve looked at before, and we’re going to see that some people in Greece, in the very earliest days of Christianity, when Christianity was just spreading out, of course they would be ignorant of the gospel. And we might have the idea that, well, we don’t really deal with that so much anymore because Christianity spreads.

Certainly we live in a so-called Christian nation. Everybody’s heard the gospel. Everybody knows who God is.

Folks, that’s not necessarily the truth anymore. And we could easily go to the jungles of Papua New Guinea or Brazil or some undiscovered island. I don’t think they have undiscovered islands anymore now that we have satellites.

I could be wrong. We could go to some remote corner of the world and we could certainly this morning find somebody who has never heard the gospel. We could find somebody who has no idea who our God is.

But today in the United States, in the Bible Belt, there are people who’ve never heard the gospel. That’s unbelievable to me and yet it’s true. We run into people all the time who’ve never heard the gospel.

Other industrialized countries, other so-called Christian countries, we run into people who’ve never heard the gospel. I shared with you last week that a few years ago, a young lady from Germany heard me talking and said, and we had some mutual friends, and she said, who is this God person you keep talking about? And I thought she was joking at first, because it’s only one sound difference in German and English.

In English, it’s God. In German, it’s Gott. I thought, surely she’s familiar with the concept.

I mean, you have the word in your language. I thought she was joking until we talked some more, and I realized that this young lady from the same Christian nation that produced Martin Luther 500 years ago, who stood for the truth of God’s word against the excesses of the Catholic Church, and this lady from the same nation who produced people like the White Rose Group, who stood against Hitler because their Christian convictions told them that it was wrong to kill Jews, and lost their lives for it. This young lady that came from this same nation that at one point professed to have a Christian identity had no idea who the God of the Bible was.

And I wouldn’t have believed it myself if I hadn’t talked to her myself. And I’m not saying all the people in the area of ignorance today have never heard of God, but they may have never heard the gospel before. And we could go in Fayetteville today and find people who’ve never heard the gospel.

Acts chapter 17, starting in verse 16, says, now while Paul waited for them at Athens, his spirit was stirred in him when he saw the city wholly given to idolatry. He saw that in every corner of the city of Athens, the people were worshiping false gods. Therefore disputed he in the synagogue with the Jews and the devout persons and in the market daily with them that met with him.

So he went everywhere he could get a hearing, everywhere he could draw an audience, and he began to, it says he disputed, I don’t know that that’s angry arguing, but he was certainly disputing their ideas and presenting the gospel to them. Then certain philosophers of the Epicureans and of the Stoics encountered him, and I’ve shared with you before, these are two rival schools of thought. Yeah, not only could they not agree with Paul, they couldn’t agree with each other because the Epicureans thought the greatest aim of life, the greatest value in life was pleasure, and the Stoics believed the greatest value in life was duty.

And so you had people that were bound to things like honor, and we must do our duty to the nation and to the family, and that’s where we get the word Stoic from. And you had people who lived by the motto, eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we may die. And these certain philosophers of the Epicureans and the Stoics encountered him, and some said, What will this babbler say?

They began making fun of him. Other some, he seemeth to be a setter forth of strange gods, because he preached unto them Jesus and the resurrection. And I’ve told you before, one of the stories, I believe it was about Zeus, with their Greek gods, was that he gave birth to another lesser god when one of the other lesser gods split his head open with an axe, and the other god popped out, and yet they said that because there’s resurrection from the dead, he was a setter forth of strange gods.

There is nothing strange about the God of the Bible in contrast to some of the bizarre stories of pagan mythology. And yet their minds were so intoxicated with pagan mythology that the truth sounded strange. That sound like any other civilization we might be familiar with?

And they took him and brought him into Arapagus saying, may we know what this new doctrine is whereof thou speakest is. For thou bringest certain strange things to our ears and we would know therefore what these things mean. For all the Athenians and strangers which were there spent their time and nothing else but either to hear or to tell or to hear some new thing.

So they brought him and said we want to hear more about what you’re saying because it sounds crazy to us. And that’s what the Athenians were all about was novelty and this group of people got together always wanting to hear something new or to tell something new. Then Paul stood in the midst of Mars Hill and said ye men of Athens I perceive that in all things you are too superstitious.

For as I passed by and beheld your devotions, as I walked by and saw you all worshiping in your city wholly given to idolatry, I found an altar with this inscription to the unknown God. They had so many gods and so many things going on, they were just terrified. What if we forget one of them?

In case there’s a God out there we’ve forgotten about or don’t know about, we’re going to make an altar to him. Because see, their gods were also vengeful, not in a way of the God of the Bible where he’s just, but a lot of times their pagan gods were like spoiled little kids if you read some of the mythological stories. And if they got their feelings hurt, they just set your crops on fire.

Or if they were mad at another god and you worship that god, then they’d steal your firstborn or something like that. And so they did not dare want to forget one of the gods, and so they’d set up an altar to the unknown god. And Paul says, whom therefore ye ignorantly worship him, declare I unto you.

Yeah, you’ve forgotten a god, all right, he says. And I’m going to tell you about God that you don’t know anything about. And God that made the world and all things therein, seeing that he is Lord of heaven and earth, dwelleth not in temples made with hands, neither is worshiped with men’s hands as though he needed anything, seeing he giveth to all life and breath and all things.

He said, the unknown God that I worship doesn’t dwell in temples made with hands because he made everything there is to be made. And he doesn’t need men to worship him and take care of him and bathe the statues like they would or feed the statues because he gives life and breath to you. And he’s made of one blood all nations of men, for to dwell on all the face of the earth, and hath determined the times before appointed in the bounds of their habitation.

That if they should seek the Lord, if happily they might feel after him and find him, though he be not far from every one of us. For in him we live and move and have our being, as certain of your own poets have said, for we are his offspring. For as much then as we are the offspring of God, we ought not to think that the Godhead is like unto gold or silver or stone, graven by art and man’s device.

So he says, the God I worship is sovereign in the affairs of human history. He’s been working things together that men might be able to find him through Jesus Christ, by the way. And we ought not to suppose that he’s like your gods, that he’s made out of these inanimate objects, this gold and silver and stone.

Then he tells them in verse 30, you know, you’ve gotten away with this pagan idolatry for a little while, but it’s time now to face the truth. He says, and at the times of this ignorance, God winked at. He let it go on for just a little while.

But now commandeth all men everywhere to repent, because he hath appointed a day in the which he will judge the world in righteousness by that man whom he hath ordained, whereof he hath given assurance unto all men in that he hath raised him from the dead. And when they heard of the resurrection of the dead, some mocked and others said, we will hear thee again of this matter. So Paul departed from among them, albeit certain men clave unto him and believed, among the which was Dionysius the Aropagite and a woman named Damaris and others with them.

Now tonight we will talk about people who have heard the gospel, who have heard of our God and find the whole thing irrelevant, and we’ll talk about how to deal with that. But in the few remaining minutes we have this morning, I want to talk to you about people who are completely ignorant of the gospel, who are completely ignorant of God. And I want to make sure you understand the first point in your bulletin is that those we try to reach may be ignorant of the gospel and its foundations.

Those we try to reach with the gospel may be ignorant of the gospel and its foundations You see there was a time in this country Whether it was because of the bible being taught in the public schools or whether it was because of the bible being taught in the family Or whether or because of the greater role of the church in society That even those who didn’t believe had some knowledge of the bible As a matter of fact, there was a time not just in this country But in western civilization where you could not be considered an educated member of society a productive member of society, if you didn’t have at least some knowledge of the Bible. I submit to you, you can’t understand the words of Shakespeare or the words of Milton or some of the other great writers of the English language from a few centuries ago if you don’t have some knowledge of the Bible. They quote extensively from them.

It’s incredible. It was incredible to me in high school when we couldn’t, you know, we could talk about the Bible but not during class. We couldn’t talk openly about the Bible, and there we are being taught Shakespeare.

And the teacher says, what does this reference mean? I was like, I got this one. Can I tell you?

And we got to talk about the Bible through Shakespeare. Folks, we are no longer in a country where there is a universal Christian memory. We’re no longer in a country where everybody, regardless of what they do now in their lives, went to church with their grandparents when they were little.

Not only do we live in a society where our homegrown folks have drifted farther and farther away from the God of the Bible, but we live in a society where we are increasingly surrounded by a mission field that has come to us from around the world. And people will come to us from Africa, from South Asia, from East Asia, from places where they may have never heard the gospel. And so we can no longer assume whether they are native-born Americans or whether they’re from somebody else or from someplace else.

We can no longer just assume that they know what we’re talking about when we say God’s going to judge sin or Christ died for your sins. In their minds, they may be hearing Christ died for your sins and they’re thinking, who is Christ and what is sin? A lot of times you ask Christians what sin means and they can’t give you an adequate definition.

Folks, sin is any place in our lives where we fall short of God’s standard of absolute moral perfection. It can be things that we do that God has said not to do. It can be things that we don’t do that God has commanded us to do.

But sin is any place where we fall short of God’s absolute standard. My question to you is how much sense would it make if you have no idea what sin is and somebody tells you Christ came to die for your sins? And then there’s the question, who is Christ?

They may not know who Christ is, or they may just know him as a good moral teacher. Folks, we cannot assume, just like Paul could not assume, that they have any knowledge of what we know from the Bible to be true. Now, as we’ll see in the next few weeks, if you come across somebody who’s not a believer, but has some of this Christian background, then by all means, go for it.

Talk to them about how Christ died for their sins. But we also have to be prepared to take them back to the beginning. And if you’ll recall, when Brother Lindsay was here talking about the work in Ghana and in other parts of West Africa, when they go into places where they’ve never been before and nobody’s ever preached the gospel before, they don’t begin by talking about Christ and dying for sins.

They take them back to the story of Adam and Eve in the garden. Now, I’m not telling you that every time we talk to somebody, we have to begin our gospel presentation with Genesis and go straight through to the maps. But we need to be prepared to deal with people who don’t have the foundational issues of the gospel down the way we think they ought to have them.

The second point this morning is that we must share the gospel understandably, including basic concepts we take for granted. We’ve got to be equipped to share the gospel understandably, including basic concepts we take for granted. We take for granted that people know what sin is.

We take for granted that people know that we have this inherited sin nature from Adam. We take for granted that people know that Jesus Christ was born of a virgin as the Son of God. We take for granted all these things that if you begin pulling them out, the gospel doesn’t make sense anymore.

I’m not telling you to change the gospel. I would never tell you to change the gospel. It says in Galatians, if anybody comes preaching to you another gospel, let him be accursed.

I’m not talking about changing the gospel. I’m talking about being able to explain it from the foundational doctrines that we take for granted. We need to be able to explain, as I said a moment ago, what sin is.

We need to be able to explain to people that they all have sinned. We need to be able to explain to people this idea of God providing a sacrifice, of God providing a payment. And you may think, well, I can’t make sense of all that to people.

Try making sense of the fact that Christ died for their sins when they don’t know what sins are. They don’t know about the holiness of God. You see, here in chapter 17 of Acts, he goes back and he begins telling them from the beginning of the world that God created everything.

And he talks about God being in charge of things and God not being worshipped with human hands, that God not being reliant on them. And he talks about the holiness of God, that God has let them get away with their idolatry and their pagan worship for a little while, but now God commands them to repent. And he goes back to the beginning and he lays the foundation so that the gospel will make sense.

And I fear that when we come to people, whether they’re, again, born in our country or whether they come from some other country that practices some other religion, we get to them and they don’t know what we know. And we’re just ready to write them off. Folks, it may be that nobody has ever explained that we serve a holy God who’s the creator of the universe.

And a holy God who didn’t just create us and is not just some impersonal being that we can have knowledge of but we can never actually know, but that the God of the universe created us so that we could worship him and have a personal relationship with him. And that yet because we chose not to do what he told us to do, even when there was just the one rule, We chose not to do what he told us to do, and that was called sin, because God is perfectly holy. And any transgression of his law violates the standard of absolute holiness, and we fall short of it.

And because of this, we all have the tendency to sin. We all have the sin nature. And God, because he’s so holy and so perfect, can’t allow sin into his presence, because that would be to ask him to lower his standards and stop being who he is.

And so God, being a God of justice, has to punish the transgression of his law. But God, being a God of mercy, also said, I can pay for that. The payment has to be made.

The penalty has to be handed down. So I’ll take the penalty. I’ll pay what’s due.

And God the Son came to earth as God in human flesh, lived a perfect sinless life as you would expect from a holy God, and was a perfect sacrifice standing in our place, taking the punishment that I was owed and that you were owed. You see, just like I’ve told you many times before, we cannot adequately explain the good news if we don’t talk about the bad news first. That’s where a lot of the modern evangelism programs, I think, fall short. As good as they may be, they start out with God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life.

Well, folks, the truth is God does love you, and he does have a wonderful plan for your life, but a world not acquainted with the holiness of God hears those things and understands them much differently than what we mean from the Bible. And the fact is, if salvation and if trusting Christ is just about a wonderful life, it doesn’t make sense to the world why they would want to give up all the freedom that they think they have and all the sin that they think they enjoy and trust Christ. See, we’ve got to come at the gospel from its foundations and explain that there has been a law broken and a penalty incurred and give them the bad news to help them to understand the good news.