Reaching Out
Part 1
by Mike
Stine
The following article is based on a sermon by
missionary Del Tarr who served fourteen years in West Africa with
another mission agency. His story points out the price some people pay
to sow the seed of the gospel in hard soil.
I was always perplexed by Psalm 126 until I went to
the Sahel, that vast stretch of savanna more than four thousand miles
wide just under the Sahara Desert. In the Sahel, all the moisture comes
in a four month period: May, June, July, and August. After that, not a
drop of rain falls for eight months. The ground cracks from dryness, and
so do your hands and feet. The winds of the Sahara pick up the dust and
throw it thousands of feet into the air. It then comes slowly drifting
across West Africa as a fine grit. It gets inside your mouth. It gets
inside your watch and stops it. The year's food, of course, must all be
grown in those four months. People grow sorghum or milo in small fields.
October and November...these are beautiful months. The
granaries are full -- the harvest has come. People sing and dance. They
eat two meals a day. The sorghum is ground between two stones to make
flour and then a mush with the consistency of yesterday's Cream of
Wheat. The sticky mush is eaten hot; they roll it into little balls
between their fingers, drop it into a bit of sauce and then pop it into
their mouths. The meal lies heavy on their stomachs so they can sleep.
December comes, and the granaries start to recede.
Many families omit the morning meal.
Certainly by January not one family in fifty is still
eating two meals a day.
By February, the evening meal diminishes.
The meal shrinks even more during March and children
succumb to sickness. You don't stay well on half a meal a day.
April is the month that haunts my memory. In it you
hear the babies crying in the twilight. Most of the days are passed with
only an evening cup of gruel.
Then, inevitably, it happens. A six-or seven-year-old
boy comes running to his father one day with sudden excitement. "Daddy!
Daddy! We've got grain!" he shouts. "Son, you know we haven't had grain
for weeks." "Yes, we have!" the boy insists. "Out in the hut where we
keep the goats -- there's a leather sack hanging up on the wall -- I
reached up and put my hand down in there -- Daddy, there's grain in
there! Give it to Mommy so she can make flour, and tonight our tummies
can sleep!"
The father stands motionless. "Son, we can't do that,"
he softly explains. "That's next year's seed grain. It's the only thing
between us and starvation. We're waiting for the rains, and then we must
use it." The rains finally arrive in May, and when they do the young boy
watches as his father takes the sack from the wall and does the most
unreasonable thing imaginable. Instead of
feeding his desperately weakened family, he goes to the field and with
tears streaming down his face, he takes the precious seed and throws it
away. He scatters it in the dirt! Why? Because he believes in the
harvest.
The seed is his; he owns it. He can do anything with
it he wants. The act of sowing it hurts so much that he cries. But as
the African pastors say when they preach on Psalm 126, "Brother and
sisters, this is God's law of the harvest. Don't expect to rejoice later
on unless you have been willing to sow in tears." And I want to ask you:
How much would it cost you to sow in tears? I don't mean just giving God
something from your abundance, but finding a way to say, "I believe in
the harvest, and therefore I will give what makes no sense. The world
would call me unreasonable to do this -- but I must sow regardless, in
order that I may someday celebrate with songs of joy."
Do we believe in the harvest? Do we
believe in a greater good to come that we are willing to sacrifice right
now so that one day we will see something greater come of what we have
invested? Are we willing to come to the point of tears, knowing the
pain and frustration of what we may need to endure because the sacrifice
needs to be made?
Each one of us has a bag of grain.
It is totally ours. No one can tell us what to do with it or can make
us use it in any way that we do not wish to. The grain is our time, and
talents, and our treasures.
We may feed ourselves and live
comfortably for some time on the grain that we have. But eventually,
the grain will run out. When this happens, we starve and experience a
slow and painful death. Or we may take our grain, ration it, and wait
for the right time to plant it. This requires temporary pain and self
sacrifice. But if we believe that the harvest will come, we look
forward to another year that we may live and a harvest that will bring
about dancing and rejoicing.
Now we aren’t here to discuss
growing food and bringing in a harvest but rather we speak of winning
souls and growing the kingdom of God. And when I speak of this, most if
not all of you will agree that this is something that the church needs
to do. Half of you are willing to do more than simply pay lip service
to the fact that the church needs to reach the lost for Christ. But
most of you are wondering how do we do this? We’ve tried every
technique and outreach we can think of. Why hasn’t this church
blossomed when these techniques worked for everybody else?
The first thing that anyone must do
before they undertake any sort of activity is to prepare. We have to do
this with even the smallest things in life, so why do we overlook this
when it comes to evangelism? When we go to work, we don’t wake up, jump
in the car and go. We have to shower, get breakfast, brush our teeth,
comb our hair, and get dressed. Even when I was in college, I at least
had to get dressed before going to class at the early hour of 11.
How do we prepare for evangelism?
Praying is a good start. Confess your sins. Prepare your heart so that
when you go out, you aren’t aiming for personal glory or even just to
add numbers to your church. Ask God to eliminate any and all pride so
that whatever is done would be for His glory and His alone. And ask
that God would use you to reach other people with the gospel of Jesus
Christ.
As you prepare, you need to know
what you are talking about. That’s why you need to be reading your
Bible and constantly searching the scriptures for truth. This isn’t
something that simply makes good sense, it’s something that we are
commanded by scripture to do. In 1 Peter 3:15, Peter writes, “Always be
prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason
for the hope that you have.”
This doesn’t mean that you’ll be
able to answer every question a person may have about Christianity. I
can’t answer every question about Christianity. But we can both look
for answers. What our responsibility is, is that we are able to tell
anyone why we are a Christian, the difference Christ has made in our
lives, and why they should be Christians to. And how they can become a
Christian. Believe it or not, many Christians, although they themselves
are saved, do not know how to explain to another person how to be saved.
Using phrases like, ask Jesus into
your heart, or believe in Jesus and be saved might mean something to us,
but to the unchurched, they sound very weird and confusing. How do I
ask Jesus in my heart? How do I know if he’s in there? How do I
believe in Jesus? I believe that he lived, he was a real person. Is
that enough? Know how to explain salvation to someone else without
using confusing terms!
Jesus said in Luke 14:28-33,
“Suppose
one of you wants to build a tower. Will he not sit down and estimate
the cost to see if he has enough money to complete it? For if he lays
the foundation and is not able to finish it, everyone who sees it will
ridicule him, saying, ‘This fellow began to build and was not able to
finish.’ Or suppose a king is about to go to war against another king.
Will he not first sit down and consider whether he is able with ten
thousand men to oppose the one coming against him with twenty thousand?
If he is not able, he will send a delegation while the other is still a
long way off and will ask for terms of peace. In the same way, any of
you who does not give up everything he has cannot be my disciple.”
In Building a Contagious Church
Mark Mittelberg has seven values that we must consider before reaching
out. I wish to examine the first three today.
We live in an increasingly secular
society today. Most of you can tell me how society has changed since
the 1950’s, starting very rapidly when prayer was removed from our
schools in 1963. I can chronicle how society has become a wasteland in
the last 15 years. The church, for the most part, has remained
unchanged. We hold the same doctrines that we did 2000 years ago. Sure
the music has changed some and the buildings have too, but our core
values are the same fifteen years ago as they were fifty years ago as
they were 2000. This means that we continue to grow farther and farther
away from what is normal for society. We can’t relate any longer. Most
of us, myself included, have been in a nice protected bubble where we
don’t even get influenced by secular society any longer.
Unfortunately, if we have kept
society at an arm’s length away so it can’t influence us, we’re also too
far away to influence it. So without compromising any moral values, we
need to take at least one step toward a secular society in hopes of
relating to it and being able to influence it and reach the lost for
Jesus Christ.
The first three values give us
motivation to take these steps.
Value # 1
People Matter to God
Just like the need for a church to
do evangelism, this value sounds like it doesn’t even need to be said.
We can repeat from memory John 3:16 that says that “God so loved the
world.” But we find it so hard to live this idea out. Do we really
live our lives like people matter to God? Do we act on the knowledge
that every one of our friends and neighbors who doesn’t know Jesus
Christ is going to hell unless they repent of their sins? Do our church
programs center around the fact that people matter to God- or are they
oriented to the idea that Christians matter to God- or even just we
matter to God?
If I may go off subject for a
moment, the church has become really self-centered. Our churches are
the way they are because we like it that way. The decorations that are
up are the ones that are acceptable to us. The music we play is that
which we are accustomed to. Even our method of preaching is the manner
that we have known for years. What we have before us, in this church,
and in most churches in America, is what it is because people in that
church like it that way. Even churches with more contemporary music
implemented because it helps to better reach non-Christians have the
music because enough people in that church like it.
Now, I believe that a worship
service is meant for Christians to worship. Whatever the style, it is
supposed to cause the Christians gathered in that place to worship
Almighty God. However, a Sunday morning worship service is the service
that non-Christians in most instances are most likely to come to. So we
have a dilemma that I don’t have an easy solution to.
All of this said however, if we held
an “outreach” service, say on a Sunday afternoon or evening, one where
believers were not intended to hear deep instruction or even gain a
truly worshipful experience but where non-believers could come into
contact with basic truths of the gospel – if we held an outreach service
– most of us would hate just about every element about it. But if we
truly believed that people mattered to God, we’d invite everyone we
could and come with them and suffer through the “terrible” service.
Believing that people matter to God
means that when we hold a community event like an Easter Egg Hunt or and
Ice Cream Social, we make a conscious effort to not even talk to people
from our church. We try to be friendly to everyone at the event that we
don’t know, to establish relationships with them, learn their names, and
hopefully even remember them the next time you see them in the community
or at another event. Believing that people matter to God means that you
sacrifice what could be a fun social event for you with your church
friends so that you can build relationships with the people who matter
to God and yet are going to hell because they don’t know about Jesus
Christ.
Mark Mittelberg writes, “When this
value really takes root, it dramatically affects our checkbooks and
calendars, because those are the places where it expresses itself in
daily life. We ought to be able to look back and say, ‘Here’s where
I’ve spent my time and energy trying to reach people outside the family
of God.’ We should be able to open up our checkbook ledgers and say,
‘Here’s where I’ve invested my resources to help make evangelism happen
through supporting the church’s outreach efforts; buying Bibles, books,
and tapes to give to spiritual seekers; spending money to take a
nonbelieving friend out to breakfast or lunch; or inviting
non-Christians into my home.’”
None of these things are done for
personal glory, a pat on the back, or an attaboy from the pastor. But,
if I knew most of you for more than two months, I’d be able to look down
every aisle and tell which people really believe this. If you do not
believe that people matter to God, if you don’t believe this deep down
in your soul so much so that it affects everything that you do,
everything else won’t help you in evangelism. All the skills in
techniques in the world won’t enable you to effectively win souls for
God because if you don’t believe God thinks that they matter, you won’t
really make an effort to save them. You’ll pay lip service to the
notion and tell me on the way out the door what a good sermon this was.
And then probably think I wish so-and-so was here to hear it.
Value # 2
People are Spiritually Lost
When I was in high school it really
bothered me the way people partied and drank and did other things more
stupid and harmful to their bodies. In my first year of college at a
secular school I was so immersed in it that it sickened me to no end. I
became enraged when a gay and lesbian club spoke to my class to try to
get people to join them.
Today, it doesn’t bother me as
much. Not that I’ve become numb to the sin that I’m surrounded with.
Instead, I’ve realized that people who don’t know God, live their life
like there is no God. We can’t expect any better from them and honestly
it is unfair to expect them to live by our standards. Make no mistake
about it, what they are doing is sinful and wrong and God will judge
them fully for everything they do. But what should we expect from
people who do not know better?
What we know that non-Christians
don’t know about themselves is that they have a hole in them that only
God can fill. They are miserable without God. Their lives have no
purpose as they chase after wealth and power and prestige with the
knowledge that in the end they will still die and no matter how wealthy,
powerful, or important they are they come to the same end as the
homeless man on the street. People drown their misery in alcohol,
drugs, sex, food, television, and an endless number of other things.
The Westminster Confession states
that the chief end of man is to glorify God and to enjoy Him forever.
If that is what we are here on earth for, how can the person who doesn’t
know God achieve this? No wonder they are so wretched.
All of this comes down to the fact
that people need God. People matter to God and these very same people
need God. They might not know it but they do.
Value # 3
People Need Christ
Values 2 & 3 are so closely tied
together, I already stated the value before. Because people are
spiritually lost, they need Christ. This creates two barriers in
evangelism. First, many people even recognize that they are lost, that
there is a barrier between them and God. They do not realize that
despite however good they try to live their lives, they haven’t lived a
perfect life and have therefore sinned. They do not realize that their
sin separates them from God, that no sin can enter God’s presence.
People need to realize this before they can even know that they need
Jesus.
Once they know that they are
separated from God, then they realize they need a solution. No other
religion offers a permanent solution to sin. Someone asks you why
Christianity is different from other religions, tell them this. Jews
had to continually make sacrifices to atone for their sins. Hindus must
go through a series of reincarnations before reaching nirvana and thus
cease reincarnating into this ugly world. Buddhists don’t even deal
with sin and just say that suffering is the result of sin and
enlightenment is the goal. Muslims have to cross their fingers and hope
they were good enough. Catholics have to say Hail Mary’s, have the last
rites performed, and go through purgatory. Christianity is the only
religion that offers a once for all sacrifice for sins. This is why we
need Christ.
The blood of Christ is what washes
away our sins and allows the sinner to enter into God’s presence.
These three values we need to truly
affirm if we are going to be able to be effective witnesses for Jesus
Christ. The next four values will help us to bridge the gap in reaching
a culture that we have difficulty relating to but nevertheless needs to
hear the gospel.
In review, before we begin to
evangelize, we need to be prepared. This means we need to pray and to
be studying the Word of God. We should be doing this anyway. Then we
need to affirm values that remind us of why we going out into the world
in the first place. People matter to God. People are lost. People
need Christ. These are simple but forgotten so often and lived out very
little. We need to return to them and dwell on them if we are to reach
our community.
Reaching Out Part 2
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