The Discipline of Witnessing

Listen Online:

Transcript:

We’re going to be in 2 Corinthians chapter 5 this morning. 2 Corinthians chapter 5. I want you to take and think about everything you know and complain about with doctors.

And I know some of us have very good doctors. I love my children’s doctor. There’s some very good doctors out there.

There’s also some very not so good doctors. There’s some that I’ve been to who just didn’t care. There’s one doctor in particular that I went to as a kid and as a teenager who is the reason why today I want a lady doctor.

Because this man was just, he wouldn’t listen. He just treated us like we were stupid. There were some not so good doctors.

And I think we all, I think we’ve all probably been to somebody like that. But they just wanted to rush in, rush out. You were just a number, that kind of thing.

Didn’t seem to care. And again, not saying that’s all doctors, but there are some of them out there. I want you to imagine a doctor like that.

Brilliant. Well-trained doctor. Knows his stuff.

Does his research. And has, he’s an oncologist and has come and arrived at a cure for cancer. And what a blessing that would be, right?

Our prayer list, I don’t know if we can fit any more people on it. Because every week we add more people who’ve got cancer to our prayer list. Now we’ll make room to pray for people. But our prayer list gets so long, and just an extreme percentage of those people who are sick on our list have cancer.

So imagine that there’s a doctor out there who’s discovered a cure for cancer, and he’s an oncologist. That’s what he does. That’s what his job is. That’s what he’s there for.

But he’s decided he doesn’t really care for cancer patients. It’s not really his thing. They’re too much trouble.

They need too much care. They need too much help. He just doesn’t want to mess with it.

I mean, he doesn’t mind filling out the paperwork and doing all that kind of stuff, the notes and the charts. He doesn’t mind stitching people up in the emergency room. He just doesn’t want to deal with those cancer patients.

They need too much help. It’s too sad. It’s too draining.

He doesn’t want to get involved. We would look at somebody like that with such an incredible gift, with such an incredible knowledge that, hey, you’ve discovered a cure for cancer. You can fix this disease that is killing millions of people.

You’ve developed this cure. You know how to fix it. The only problem is you just don’t want to.

You’d rather keep it to yourself and stay with your face buried in your books or your little things you’re doing in the emergency room. And we would look at a doctor like that and say, what is wrong with you? We’d say you’re squandering this hope that you’ve been given.

We might even look at it and say, you’re a terrible doctor. I mean, you’ve taken an oath to help people, and yet you’ve decided it’s too much trouble. Now, I can’t think of a doctor.

That’s just a hypothetical example. I can’t think of a doctor whose lack of care would be so extreme that he’d say, I’ve discovered a cure for cancer. I just don’t care to dispense it.

I don’t care to share it with anybody. I’m going to go over here and work on charts. I don’t think there would be such a doctor.

It would be shocking, and there’s a reason it would be shocking. If you’ve got hope for people, if you’ve got hope available to share with people, if you’ve got good news to share with people, generally, typically we want to share it, don’t we? Right?

I’ve been suffering from allergies all week, as many of you have. My mother’s been suffering from them, too. We’re into these essential oils.

I thought they were a bunch of hocus-pocus until Charlie gave me one one day for a migraine, and before I’d even finished rubbing it on my head, the migraine was gone. I’ve never experienced anything like that. She made a believer out of me at that point.

So now we’re into these essential oils. And how many times, I don’t know, I’ve called my mother this week and said, have you tried this one? It helps a little bit.

And, oh, I’ve got some good news. I’ve discovered eucalyptus can make me able to breathe a little bit again. That’s hope and that’s good news with just a little thing.

You’ve got good news. You want to share it. Charles’ brother and sister-in-law had their baby in Hawaii yesterday.

The phone lines were lit up. Pictures of that baby were yet to be named were flying through cyberspace. And we in Oklahoma had pictures of the baby on the phone.

It was good news and people wanted to share it. When we’ve got a message of hope and a message of good news, we typically want to share it. I mean, Jesus talked about lighting a candle and not hiding it under a bushel.

That was silly in his estimation. And yet, ladies and gentlemen, I feel like that’s what I do too often, and that’s what we, by and large as Christians, do far too often with the message of hope and good news that we’ve been given. We’ve been entrusted the cure for cancer.

When it comes to our spiritual cancer, the sin that eats humanity alive and kills us and leads us to an eternity separated from God, we’ve been handed that cure for that cancer. And yet we’d rather stick to our charts and our paperwork and stitching people up in the emergency room and actually going and treating the patients who need it. And I’m not telling you this this morning to say, shame on you.

You need to stand out on the street corner with a sandwich board and a bullhorn. I’m bringing it to your attention as someone who does the same thing and saying we need to be more diligent about this. We need to be more proactive.

We need to look for opportunities. The opportunities are out there. I think it was Wednesday night I was talking about, I shudder to think how many opportunities God has sent me, how many people God has put in my path for me to minister to, for me to help, for me to share the gospel with, and I’ve totally missed it because I’ve been focused on something else.

Because we need to be proactive in looking for opportunities because we’ve been given hope. We’ve been given good news. We’ve been given something that should make us want to tell everybody we know because a message of hope demands to be shared, doesn’t it?

If we had the cure for cancer, wouldn’t we share it? If a new baby is born in our family, don’t we share the pictures until everyone around us is so irritated looking at baby pictures? Don’t we?

If something great happened to us, if you won the lottery, wouldn’t you want to tell people, well, maybe not tell people at church because why were you buying tickets? But if you found a lottery ticket on. .

. I won’t judge you. Just buy me something nice with it.

Now, if you found a lottery ticket on the street and it was the winning numbers, wouldn’t you want to call everybody you’ve ever known? Maybe not. They’d want to share it.

Yeah, okay. I didn’t think that one through. But we all get the idea.

When you’ve got good news, you want to share it. You can’t wait to tell people. So the best news that we’ve ever heard, the best news that mankind has ever received should be something that we would want to run and tell everybody.

When we’ve got good news, when we’ve got a message of hope, it demands to be shared. We’ve got to share it. And so we look at 2 Corinthians 5, starting in verse 17, we see what God says about this good news and about what our response to this good news is after we’ve received it, what we’re supposed to do with it.

It says in verse 17, therefore, if any man be in Christ, he’s a new creature. He’s something entirely new. Old things are passed away.

Behold, all things are become new. So once we’re in Christ, because of what Jesus Christ did, and I realize most of you are familiar with this story, but on the off chance there’s somebody here who’s not, what he’s talking about about being in Christ is the forgiveness that Jesus Christ offers, the forgiveness that God offers as a result of what Jesus Christ did on the cross. When God looked at us and saw us in our sin, when God saw how we had disobeyed Him, and it had separated us from the Holy God, God looked at us and He would have been right, He would have been justified, to look at us and say, you know what, you like your sin so much, you just enjoy it, and you enjoy hell while you’re at it.

And God would have been, it would have been fine. No problem for God if He had just washed His hands of us and said, disobedient, rebellious children, I’m free with you. You like your sin so much, enjoy it.

If you like your sin, you can keep your sin. To paraphrase what our politicians tell us. If you like your sin, you can keep your sin.

Go have at it. And instead, this sin that is so offensive to God, that is so against everything that God is in his holy nature, God looked at that and saw beyond that sin, and saw people that he had created and who he loved in spite of what we’ve done. And God doesn’t look at us and excuse what we’ve done and say, it’s okay.

We’re real big on telling our kids when they apologize to each other. Don’t say, it’s okay. It’s not okay.

No, your brother punched you in the face. It’s not okay. Your sister pushed you down.

It’s not okay. You can say, I forgive you. Don’t say it’s okay.

It’s not okay. We’re not excusing that behavior. God doesn’t look at us and say, it’s okay.

You’ve stolen. You’ve lied. You’ve lusted in your heart.

You were a jerk to that person down the street. It’s okay. God doesn’t look at us.

He says, your sin is offensive and it’s wrong. And yet he loves us anyway. I can’t figure out why he loves us.

If that sounds too harsh, let me put it this way. I can’t figure out why he loves me. I know me.

Some days I don’t even love me. Some days I look in the mirror, and I’m not just talking about the physical appearance. Some days I look in the mirror and I know who I really am and I think, ugh, you again.

I don’t understand why God loves me. And as nice as I’m sure you are, I’m not sure why God loves you either, but He does. I mean, that’s good news, right?

There’s no human logical reason why God should love us. And yet He does. He loved us enough that instead of leaving us to die in our sins and suffer the consequences from our sins, He sent Jesus Christ to shed His blood and to die on the cross.

And He took all the punishment that we deserved. We didn’t deserve heaven. We deserved punishment.

and Jesus took all the punishment that we deserved and he didn’t deserve any. And he paid all the penalty that we owed for our sins and he wiped the slate clean. He shed his blood and he died to purchase our salvation and then to prove that he really could do what he said he would do.

To prove that he wasn’t just some guy who died but that he really was the son of God able to forgive sins. He backed that up by rising again from the dead on the third day. And now because of that God offers forgiveness and we’ll simply look at what Jesus did and realize we’ve sinned against God and need a Savior.

We can’t save ourselves. Believe that Jesus died to pay for our sins and ask God to forgive us because of what Jesus Christ did. There’s nothing for you to do.

There’s nothing for you to earn. It’s simply to realize how bad we are and to realize that Jesus paid to make up for that and then ask God to forgive us. And then as a result of that, God says, if you’re in Christ, you’re a new creature.

Let me dispel you of this notion if you’re under it. You don’t have to clean up your life to come to Jesus. We need to come to Jesus because we can’t clean up our lives.

Instead, we come to Jesus and He cleans up our lives. It says, if any man be in Christ, verse 17, if any man be in Christ, in other words, if he’s trusted in Christ, he’s a new creature. Old things are passed away.

Behold, all things are become new. So God has taken us and through Jesus Christ, He’s totally transformed our lives. He’s transformed our lives in Christ. The old man is dead and the new spiritual life has been raised up in its place.

That person I used to be was nailed to the cross with Jesus. And God has raised up something new with him in his resurrection. It doesn’t mean that we stop being who we are.

I mean, if you’re like me, and you’re somebody who has just personality traits. You’re not a morning person necessarily. You love hamburgers.

You’re afraid of elevators. I mean, those personality traits are still going to be there. God’s not turning you into a Stepford wife.

You’re not a robot. But as far as that old fleshly self that was in rebellion against God, that gets killed off. and God raises up something new in its stead.

Are we perfect after that? No, because God spends the rest of our life tweaking us and sanding us and transforming us into what He wants us to be. And there is an instant transformation that takes place.

There is a change in the heart that takes place immediately. And for some people, it’s so noticeable you can tell just by the look on their face that God transforms us from what we were, which was sinners in rebellion bound for hell, to now sinners who are forgiven, and sinners who have the capacity to do the right thing, with the aid of the Holy Spirit, and who are destined for heaven. So there’s a transformation that takes place in Jesus Christ. And I don’t know about you, but I think that’s good news.

Because the world, even when the world is lost in its sin, it realizes there’s something wrong here. Hey, I’ve got this addiction and I’m destroying my family, or I’ve got this behavior and it feels good in the moment, but there’s no joy in it, and I feel empty inside. They realize there’s something missing.

And the world will try everything it can think of to try to improve their lives. And yet, the only thing that will fix what’s wrong with us, the only thing that will make our lives complete and make our lives whole, is the transforming power of Jesus Christ. It’s not something we can do on our own. And yet God has promised to change us into what we’re supposed to be.

The old things are passed away, and all things are become new. Our relationship with God, it’s not just our lives here on earth that are transformed, but our relationship with God is transformed. I hear people talk about we’re all God’s children.

No, we’re not. That’s not what the Bible teaches. We’re all God’s creation.

But what I see in the Bible is that apart from Christ, we’re the enemies of God. As a matter of fact, the Bible says that it’s through Christ that we have peace with God. We’re born into a state of sin and rebellion where it’s not that God looks at us and says, you’re my enemy, I hate you.

It’s that we in our rebellion have looked at God and said, you’re my enemy, I hate you. And because we’ve chosen to disobey God, it’s like we are the rebels here. And he’s the good, wise king, and we’ve rebelled against him, and we’ve put him at arms and legs.

And we come into this world in a relationship where, because of our sin, we’ve made ourselves to be the enemies of God. And yet that relationship is transformed in Jesus Christ. In verse 18, it says, and all things are of God, who hath reconciled us to himself by Jesus Christ and hath given to us the ministry of reconciliation. There’s a transformation that takes place in our relationship where we’re no longer, as the Bible says, strangers and aliens.

That doesn’t mean green-skinned, doing this kind of aliens. It means foreigners. You don’t belong here.

You’re a foreigner. We’re no longer those strangers and aliens from God, but we’re adopted into his family. And through Jesus Christ, we go from this state of being at odds with God, this state of having God at arm’s length, to suddenly we are adopted as his sons and daughters.

The Bible says that to those who believe on his name, gave he the power to become the sons of God. And the Bible talks about by the spirit of adoption, we cry out, Abba, Father. That word Abba means Daddy.

I’ve told you before, that’s an intimate word in Hebrew and Aramaic. As it is in English, I don’t like people calling me Daddy who are not my children for calling me dad. As a matter of fact, when I’m dealing with my kids, like you’re sitting with a photographer, okay, now dad, we need you to put.

. . It comes across as patronizing, and it makes me want to hurt someone.

Don’t call me that. I’m not your dad. Now, I wouldn’t, but it just, you know, in the flesh, I’m just being honest with you here.

It makes me feel that way. I’m not your dad. Don’t call me that.

That’s for these two people right here. And God gives us the permission to cry out to him, Abba, to call him daddy by the spirit of adoption. There’s a closeness in this relationship with God that is only there because of Jesus Christ. So we’ve taken the king of the universe and we’ve rebelled against him.

We’ve spit in his face and we’ve thumbed our nose at him and we’ve rejected him in every conceivable way and we are his enemies and we’re under the penalty of treason here and yet he looks at us and says, because my son died for you, I’ll be your father. I won’t just forgive you in the sense that you get to come back and be my subject and all is forgiven and you get to serve me. you’re going to, you’re mine now.

You’re my child. The relationship is transformed because we’ve been reconciled to God. Reconciliation is so important.

It means everything’s been put back the way it’s supposed to be. And you can have conflict with somebody saying, well, we’re just going to leave it at the end. We may not talk about it anymore, but I won’t hit them if I see them on the street.

I won’t scream at them if I see them at the Walmart, that we’re never going to be. And that’s the way a lot of our relationships are. We just say, okay, I’m done with you, and we’ll go our separate ways.

I’m not going to hate you, but this is not going to get fixed. Some of the best relationships I have are with people that we’ve been at odds before, and then we’ve come back and said, we need to fix this. It’s kind of like how a bone, I’ve never broken a bone, but I’m told that when you break a bone and get it set and the bone heals, that it’s stronger in that place than it was before.

stronger in the place where. . .

Anybody else ever heard that? Okay. Some are saying yes, some are saying no. Okay.

If it’s true, then it’s a great illustration. I’ve been told that sometimes the bone will heal stronger than it was in the first place in that spot. That’s sort of how those relationships are.

But if we can come back and we can be reconciled to each other and everything’s out in the open, everything’s forgiven, then the relationship is stronger. Folks, we have a God that. .

. I say we need to be reconciled. God has nothing to apologize for.

and yet he’s done everything to make reconciliation possible. He sent his son to die so that we could be forgiven. And now we don’t have to come back to God and make some kind of peace offering and hope that he’ll accept us and come before him with trembling.

He’s already made the provision. And God stands there with open arms saying, come be reconciled to me. It says in verse 18 that he’s given to us the ministry of reconciliation.

It’s part of our job to help people be reconciled to God. Now, Jesus Christ has already done all the work of reconciling people to God. It’s our job to help them realize that that reconciliation is being offered.

That God stands there ready to forgive. Not just willing to forgive if they’ll do the right things, but God stands there ready to forgive. He’ll forgive you this instant if you’ll simply ask for it.

So in Christ, I think that’s good news. I think that’s a message of hope that deserves to be shared. that people who feel alienated and distant from God, and God could never forgive me after what I’ve done, you don’t know what I’ve done, it doesn’t matter.

God stands ready to forgive and to reconcile and to adopt you as his child through Jesus Christ. And he’s done all of it. He’s done everything that’s necessary for it. I think that’s good news that we should be sharing with people.

And our calling, our reason for living in life is transformed in Jesus Christ. He talks about giving us, in verse 18, the ministry of reconciliation, that now we have the job of going around and helping people understand what God has done for them, what Christ has done for them. And he says in verse 19, to with that God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto himself, not imputing their trespasses unto them, and hath committed unto us the word of reconciliation. See, he’s going back and he’s reaffirming, repeating, elaborating on what he’s already said, that we have the ministry of reconciliation.

And he says, and this is your message to them, That God, through Jesus Christ, reconciled the world to himself. That God has done everything necessary for reconciliation. That he’s willing not to count their sins against them.

Imputing their trespasses. That’s real biblical legalese language. What it’s saying is God is willing not to hold against them the things that they’ve done wrong.

Not because God looks at it and says it’s not a big deal, but because God says I can forgive you because Jesus Christ has already paid for that. There’s no reason to hold it against you. It’s already been held against Jesus, and he’s paid for it, and has committed unto us the word of reconciliation.

Now, we get to go to the world with a message that God stands ready to forgive them, that God stands ready to love them in spite of what they’ve done, and not hold against them the things that they’ve done, because Jesus has already paid for it. Now then, we are ambassadors for Christ, as though God did beseech you by us. Now, a lot of times we think of ambassadors now as somebody who lives in another country the embassy and they represent one government to another and you know they help people who are in jail, they do ribbon cuttings, that sort of thing.

There was no idea back then of an embassy, of a permanent building that they resided in. An ambassador was somebody that one king sent to another country when they had something they wanted to discuss. You didn’t just go there to set up camp and if something comes up I’ll let you know.

You went there because there is a message to convey. And so we would send an ambassador, say if we were mad at Russia right now, we would send an ambassador over there to talk to Putin and convey the message that our government sent. And vice versa.

So for God to send us as ambassadors means that he has a, it’s not just for us to sit here and represent him, it’s that he has a message for us to take to the world. And he says in verse 20, as though God did beseech you by us. He said our ministry, our calling, our reason now for living in Jesus Christ, is to take this message of reconciliation to the people with such fervor that it’s like God is asking them, that God is begging them through us to be reconciled.

That it’s like God is speaking to the world through us. That we’re supposed to represent Him in that way. We pray you in God’s stead.

And so Paul’s saying here, and so we beg you in Christ’s stead. We beg you in His place. We stand in His place and we ask you, be reconciled to God.

We implore you, be reconciled to God. There’s nothing that stands in the way here of you having peace and a relationship with God. Be reconciled to Him.

And He says, we take that message on Christ’s behalf as though He were speaking for us. For He hath made Him to be sin for us who knew no sin, that we might be made the righteousness of God in Him. So we were full of sin, and God took His sinless Son and made Him to be sin and be punished for us.

so that we could receive his righteousness. That’s not a fair trade on his end. We’ve gotten quite a deal there.

We traded our sin and our punishment for the righteousness of Christ. I think that’s good news. I think that’s a message of hope that demands to be shared. When we have a message of hope, it demands to be shared.

And the better the news, the more excited we usually are to share it. I can’t think of any better news than this transformation that takes place. And we didn’t have to earn any of it.

Jesus Christ accomplished all of it. And now God offers it to us at no charge to us. Simply believe that Jesus Christ died to pay for our sins and ask God to forgive us.

So what do we do as a result of this? We need to cultivate a lifestyle of witnessing. In the churches I’ve served in the past, I’ve been hesitant.

Not that it’s a bad thing, but I’ve been hesitant to ever say, we’re going to have a visitation night. Sometimes they want to do it on Tuesday night. We’re going to go do visitation and evangelism on Tuesday night or Saturday morning.

And I’m saying, why do we have a, again, nothing wrong with it, but why do we have to set aside a special time to go and do evangelism? Why is it not part of our every day? Now, don’t get mad at me if later on I say we’re going to have a time to go do these things.

I’m just saying, it should be a lifestyle. And if we come together to do it on a particular day, great. But it should be something that we’re doing every day of our lives.

It should be something that every day we’re sharing the good news of Jesus Christ in whatever way we have available, using whatever opportunity that God makes available to us at that point. Sometimes we’re going to have the opportunity to sit down, usually with somebody we know, and go through the whole gospel presentation with them, especially if they’re going through a difficult time and explain what Christ has done for them and the hope that God has given them for the future. Other times, other times, people are so busy.

Other times, we may have two seconds as we catch somebody as we pass them on the street corner, and we invite them to church because they’re going to hear the gospel here. And I don’t think either of those are wrong. I think we make the best of what opportunities we’re given.

But we need to every day be looking for opportunities to move people further, I’m sorry, not further, closer toward the gospel. If we have the opportunity to sit down and share the whole thing with them, great. But if we have two seconds with somebody, we can make those two seconds count as well.

But we need to be looking for the opportunities that God provides. Look for opportunities. Look for opportunities to invite people to Christ. We need to pray and prepare ourselves before we start our day.

Pray that God would prepare us to share the gospel and pray that God would prepare the hearts of people to receive the gospel. Pray that God would give us opportunities. Because when we do this, when we start looking for opportunities to be ambassadors, He’s going to give them to us.

because that’s the calling that He’s given all of us. It’s not just my calling as the pastor. Not just for the Greg’s calling, or Bill Rout’s calling as deacons.

It’s all of us. If you’re a believer in Jesus Christ, He has given you the ministry of reconciliation. He’s given you a message of hope that demands to be shared.

And if we look for those opportunities, He’s going to give them to us. And in spite of our frailties, He’ll use us. Sometimes I don’t talk so good.

As you all hear from time to time, but I get tongue-tied. And it’s even, I’ll let you in on a little secret. Talking to a group like this is much easier for me sometimes than talking one-on-one because I get really tongue-tied at that point.

Or God forbid on the phone. God will speak through you and God will give you the words that you need when you’re doing what He’s called you to do. And we won’t be able to be spiritually complacent.

We won’t be able to coast. Why does this fit in a series of messages on spiritual disciplines? Because witnessing is a spiritual discipline. and the more we’re involved in witnessing and sharing Christ with other people, we will not be able to coast in our spiritual life.

We’ll have to be prayed up. We’ll have to be studied up. We’ll have to make sure that we are running close to Jesus Christ because we’re depending on him to give us the words.

We’re depending on him to lead us to the right people. We’re depending on him to prepare the people. We’re going to have to make sure that we are right where we need to be.

So the more we commit to the discipline of witnessing, the less complacent we’ll be. and you know what, we might just see somebody’s life and somebody’s eternity transformed. We might just see that.

Were any of you there, okay, I was about to ask, were any of you there for the birth of your children? And women, hands down, I know you were there. Maybe I’m not firing at all cylinders this morning.

Any of you men there for the birth of your children? It’s incredible, isn’t it? It’s amazing to be there when somebody was born.

Both of my children were born C-sections, so there was a lot I didn’t have to see, and I got to see them when they were cleaned up, and I got to be the first to hold them. That was great. It’s so exciting to be there when somebody takes their first breath in this life.

Isn’t it? And when that happens to somebody spiritually, when you get to be there when somebody’s born again, it’s an incredible experience. And it reminds you just how amazing it is what God has done for you, what God has done for all of us when we see somebody’s life and somebody’s eternity transformed right in front of us.