Sanctification Monday – Episode 20: Action – Evangelism

Welcome to the Two Journeys Podcast. This is Sanctification Monday. My name is Andy Davis. In this podcast, we seek to answer the question, what is spiritual maturity? We believe that spiritual maturity can be broken into four main sections: knowledge, faith, character, and action. Today, we continue the action section. We’re going to be talking today about missions to non-Christians.

Last week, we talked about ministry to Christians. Now, we are going to go outside the walls of the church. And we’re going to look upon the lost world. The world of those that are, as Paul says in Ephesians 2:12, “Without hope and without God in the world.” As we do so, we seek to be conformed to the heart of our Savior Jesus Christ, who was moved with compassion at lostness. He saw that the fields were white for harvest, and he urged that we should intercede and pray to the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into the harvest field.

the salvation of sinners was the reason why Jesus left heaven.

He wept over the lostness of Jerusalem, and he was moved, continually moved. He believed and said that the Son of Man came to seek and to save what was lost. The angel that predicted his birth to Joseph said to give him the name Jesus, because he will save his people from their sins. So, the salvation of sinners was the reason why Jesus left heaven. Left the comforts of heaven and became poor for us, so that we might be delivered from eternal judgment. He has now involved us in his work.

He said after his own bodily resurrection from the dead, he went to the upper room and though the doors were locked for, fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood amongst his apostles. And he showed them the evidence of his crucifixion for them. He showed them his hands and his side. And then he breathed on them and said, “Receive the Holy Spirit” (John 20:22). He said, “As the Father has sent me even so I am sending you.” So, we are sent by the Lord Jesus into a lost world with the gospel message.

As a matter of fact, there are five Great Commissions or such commissionings in the New Testament, one at each of the end of the gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, and one at the beginning of the Book of Acts. They are all different from each other, but they cover the same ground. The most famous of the statements of the Great Commission is in Matthew 28:18-20, which says, “All authority in heaven and earth has been given to me. Therefore, go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. Surely, I’ll be with you always, even to the end of the age.”

In Mark 16:15-16, it gives a similar commission, “Go into all creation, preach the gospel. Whoever believes and is baptized will be saved. Whoever does not believe will be condemned.” Luke’s gospel roots all of it in Old Testament scripture, “This is what is written: The Christ would suffer and rise from the dead on the third day, and repentance for the forgiveness of sins will be preached in his name to all nations, beginning at Jerusalem. You are witnesses of these things” (Luke 24:46-48). This is what was predicted in the Old Testament. Then in the Book of Acts, he said, “You’ll receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you, and you’ll be my witnesses in Jerusalem and all Judea and Samaria to the ends of the earth.” (Acts 1:8).

So, in both Luke and Acts, these are literally Jesus’s last words to his disciples, and he’s taken up from them into heaven. So, it’s very significant. The final words of Jesus, it’s very significant how he says this and then leaves. This is what he left us to do, is to make disciples and to see them grow into spiritual maturity, to be instruments of salvation in the lives of others. We need to be active in this. We need to be involved in missions to non-Christians.

We need to care that we are surrounded every day by people who are without hope and without God in the world. That people who are on that broad road to destruction, as Jesus said, “Enter through the narrow gate for wide is the gate, and broad is the road that leads to destruction that is to hell). Many enter through it, but small as the gate and narrow the road that leads to life and only a few find it” (Matthew 7:13-14.)

Jesus means to send us out, out of safety, out of comfort, out of ease, into danger. Jesus said, “I’m sending you out like sheep among wolves” (Matthew 10:16). He means to surround us with his own spiritual sovereign protection. He said, “Do not be afraid. Even the very hairs of your head are all numbered” (Luke 12:7). But he said, “I am sending you out like sheep among wolves.” So, he means for us to go out, and we can’t stay there secure and comfortable within the walls of the church. We have to go out. In this section today as we’re talking about responsibilities and actions that sure Christians do, we need to be involved in evangelism and in missions.

Now, what do I mean by evangelism and missions? How do I make a distinction between the two? Essentially, they’re the same. It just has to do with the obstacles you have to go across in order to reach someone. In both cases, you yourself are the messenger, the ambassadors. Paul wrote in 2 Corinthians 5:20, “We are God’s ambassadors as though God, were making his appeal through us. We urge you be reconciled to God,” that kind of appeal. So that’s the gospel message. But if the person you’re talking to, the lost person you’re talking to is of your same language and culture, then that’s evangelism. If they are not of your same language and culture, that’s cross-cultural missions.

So essentially the same, but there’s certain difficulties that come in the second. We need to care about both. We need to be aware of missions and the fact that there are people living in places in the world where they are not going to meet up with any Christians all day long, all week long, all month long, all year long. They’re not surrounded by churches. They’re in unreached people groups. Many of those unreached people groups are unengaged. Nobody’s even trying to do anything with them. They are in a very remote place, and they know nothing about Jesus, and we need to care about that.

So, let’s talk about both of these: evangelism and missions. First of all, evangelism. We should care very much about the people who are in our lives, who are lost. First and foremost, we have to start with our own family. We have to start with people that are closest to us. So, parents that bring children into the world. We talked about this in the parenting section. You need to be intensely aware that the infants that are born into your family are born outside of Christ. They don’t know Jesus. They have not come to faith in Christ yet.

Now there’s all kinds of debates about what happens if they die in infancy. I’m not getting into that. I believe they go to heaven if they die in infancy. But I believe that little by little by little, they are more aware of the world. Their conscience develops, their minds develop. As soon as they understand right from wrong, as soon as they understand a creator God who has certain moral injunctions in their lives, they will sin. When they sin, they die spiritually. As Paul said in Romans, “Once I was alive apart from the law, but and the commandment came, sin sprang to life, and I died” (Romans 7:9). So as soon as you understand the law, you die spiritually.

We are dead in our transgressions and sins, and that includes your cute little children. At some point, they need to repent of their sins and believe in Jesus. That’s the central task of your parenting, is to bring your own children to faith in Christ. Now you have no direct control over it. You can control their behavior, you control their bodies, and their actions and their habits, but you can’t control their heart. Paul said, concerning all evangelism and all missions, “I planted the seed, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth so neither he who plants nor he who waters is anything but only God who makes things grow” (1 Corinthians 3:6).

So, we can’t control anything. Nicodemus, Jesus said, “You must be born again” (John 3:3). We can’t make anybody be born again. That’s something only the Spirit can do. But we have a role to play. That role is to speak the gospel. To speak it plainly and clearly and in an understandable way with passion and persuade people. The gospel is made up of four main points: God, man, Christ, response. We want to say things about God, the creator, the lawgiver, the sustainer of life, the judge, the ruler, the king. We want to talk about us as human beings created in the image of God but fallen into sin. We want to talk about how the law exposes our sins. And we want to share the gospel of Christ, how Jesus is the Son of God: fully God, fully man, lived a sinless life, died an atoning death on the cross, was raised from the dead.

That if we, hearing that message, repent of our sins and trust in Jesus, will be completely forgiven of all sins. That’s the simple gospel. We need to know what that gospel is and share it. So, start with your family. Start with your spouse if your spouse isn’t a Christian. Start with your mom and dad. We already talked about your kids, siblings, people you know. And then go out in concentric circles from there. Look at your coworkers or your neighbors. Look at the people in your life. Look at people that you interact with that you don’t really know their names, but you see them regularly at the grocery store, let’s say, or at the pharmacy or at your kids’ music lessons or at their sporting events. There are just people in your life. You should have a heart for them.

Then there’s just people that you meet up with, maybe only once, maybe you travel next to them in a plane. George Whitefield, the great evangelist of the 18th century, said, “God forbid that I should travel one quarter of an hour with anyone without telling the good news of Jesus.” That is something that’s really convicted me- is that if I get time with somebody, I want to share the gospel with them. Workplace is one of the best places of evangelism where you get to know people, they know you, they’re lost. And you can show an interest in their lives and their birthdays, or events in their family life, or if somebody’s sick in their family or if they get sick. You can show some love for them. You can show interest, but eventually at some point you want to share the gospel with them.

So we need to be active in evangelism if we’re going to be healthy, mature Christians. But beyond that, we have to care about cross-cultural missions, too.

So we need to be active in evangelism if we’re going to be healthy, mature Christians. But beyond that, we have to care about cross-cultural missions, too. Now, I think only a small percentage of Christians are called to actually go overseas and live and develop language skills and develop missionary skills as cross-cultural missionaries. I think that’s a small number of people, but every single Christian should care about cross-cultural missions.

William Carey, the great Protestant trailblazer in missions, went from England as a shoemaker. He was a shoemaker to Calcutta, India. And he set up shop there and led ultimately thousands, was responsible for thousands of Indians coming to faith in Christ. He had a tremendous passion for missions. He preached one of the greatest missionary sermons ever based on Isaiah 54. It had two main parts, which is expect great things from God, attempt great things for God. So, we should live for great things, and that has to do with missions.

We should care greatly that the overwhelming majority of people on earth today have never heard of Jesus. I mean overwhelming majority. Several, several billion people live in unreached people groups and have never heard the name of Jesus. Of course, beyond that, there are people that live in reached countries in Latin America or in Europe or different places where the gospel flourished at one point and now it’s beyond that. Like in Europe, a lot of empty cathedrals that have become boutiques or skate parks or museums. And the church is flickering and waning in countries like the Czech Republic or England, different other places, France. Yet there’s a remnant of genuine Christians in those countries, and yet many of the people there are unreached.

I think Europe as a continent is 97% or 96% unchurched, and so a tremendous need there. Then there’s Asia, communist countries like China, Muslim countries like in the 10/40 Window in North Africa, Middle East, Indonesia. There’s India, which is a vast world of lots of different religions. There’s a lot of Christians there. There’s Hindus, Buddhists and others. All over the world, there are people that need to be reached. We as Christians need to care about missions. So, William Carey said of his own mission, he said, “I’ll go down into the dark hole of Heathenism, but you must hold the ropes for me.”

So, for me, as somebody that’s not called to cross-cultural missions, although I did go with my wife for two years in Japan and we reached out there. And we learned the skills of being a cross-cultural missionary, but came to the conclusion that my calling was to be a pastor here in the United States. But I’m not discharged from concern about unreached people group missions. So fundamentally, as we learn missions, as we care about it, we are active in praying for and giving and caring for unreached people group missions. We are called on to do everything that we can that the gospel go to the ends of the earth.

We are called on to do everything that we can that the gospel go to the ends of the earth.

In my denomination, Southern Baptist Convention, we give money through the Lottie Moon Christmas Offering to the International Mission Board of the Southern Baptist. But there are many mission agencies that are doing incredible works, reaching lost people with the gospel. So, for you, if you’re going to be a healthy, active, fruitful Christian, you’re going to care about unreached people group missions. I want to commend to you a number of resources. One of them is a great prayer book called Operation World, which has gone through many iterations, and it gives you countries all over the earth and how we can be praying for them.

There’s something called Joshuaproject.net, which you can get an app on your smartphone and they’ll give you an unreached people group of the day and you can find out of some Berber tribes people in Morocco, or you can find out about specific people groups in Central Asia or in China that have never heard of Christ, and you find out what their culture is. Maybe they have animistic beliefs or maybe they’re Buddhist or they have some other worldview, and they’ve never heard of Christ.

So, for us just being active daily and praying for unreached people group missions, and then to give financially, there are some that are called to go as missionaries and that we are going to support them financially. It takes a lot of money, well over $100,000 per family unit to set up in another country and to have everything you need to minister. And that we would be active in caring about them, to be aware of the kinds of ministries that they’re doing overseas. To stay in touch with them through Skype or through some Zoom platforms, or FaceTime, or email, or other things that we can do to stay in touch and be aware and be praying about the details of what these church planting missionaries are doing.

So, we need to be active in both evangelism and cross-cultural missions. We need to be faithful in praying that the Lord of the harvest would send out laborers into his harvest field. We need to be broken with lostness. We need to care about it. Hudson Taylor, the great missionary to China, had such a passion for the inland regions of China. Up until he came along in China, all the missionaries were along the coastline like Shanghai and other port cities. This was in the middle of the 19th century. He did some traveling in the inland regions and realized there’s just vast teaming, hundreds of millions of Chinese that have never heard of Christ. And he started the China Inland Mission and trusted God to raise up missionaries to go in each of the provinces. Even that was woefully inadequate compared to the unreached population.

But he talked about the passion he had for the lost. And he was very zealous that millions and millions would die – he was zealous and concerned about the fact that millions and millions would die, never having heard the name of Christ. So, Hudson Taylor was worshiping with some other Christians in Scotland, and they were all singing and celebrating their salvation, and something became distasteful about that to him. Not that there was anything wrong with it, but the fact that they didn’t seem to care at all about the other side of the world and lost people.

So, he said on Sunday, June 25th, 1865, “Unable to bear the sight of a congregation of a thousand or more Christian people rejoicing in their own security while millions were perishing for lack of knowledge, I wandered out into the sands alone in great spiritual agony. There the Lord conquered my unbelief, and I surrendered myself to God for this service, namely of reaching the inland regions.” So, if you’re not called to go as a cross-cultural missionary, you are called in some way to support others who are called to go. But it may be that I’m talking to somebody who’s never really considered whether they’re called to go as a missionary.

If you’ve never thought about it and never waited, you should bring it before the Lord in consistent prayer until you get a clear sense of guidance from the Lord on that, asking the Lord, “Do you want me to go? Do you want me to sell my possessions and change my life and go get trained or prepared to go to an unreached people group or to go as a cross-cultural missionary somewhere?” Listen and see what God would have you do. But even if you’re not called to do that, you should pray and give and stay actively supportive of unreached people group missions and cross-cultural missions.

Well, beyond that, beyond that kind of evangelistic activity, there are mercy ministries that we’re called on to do as Christians. There are issues, some people call it social justice or meeting felt needs, issues of poverty, issues of social injustice sometimes that we are aware of in society. You can think about slavery in America in the 19th century, and Christians got active in the fight against slavery. There are other issues that Christians have gotten involved in, the pro-life, ministry and other things that are societal. They’re not directly related to the gospel, but they are related to the Christian compassion and concern that we have for other people.

So worldwide, there are issues of poverty, of health, of education, and other forms of mercy ministry that alleviate human suffering. So, you could think of it this way, Christians should be actively, continually seeking to alleviate human suffering. First and foremost, eternal suffering in hell through the gospel, through evangelism and missions. But secondly, temporal suffering that happens in this life through disease, through poverty, through ignorance and other natural disasters, earthquakes, mudslides, hurricanes, tornadoes, tidal waves, other things happen that are devastating. The Lord has called on his people consistently to go toward the outcry and the wail of anguish and suffering to minister in the name of the Lord, just as Jesus did with his healing ministry. So, mercy ministry.

Then even beyond that just being salt and light in society, we’re called on to minister to non-Christians in some way to restrain the spread of evil. Salt is a preservative. Jesus calls on us as the salt of the world- that the salt loses its saltiness, it’s no longer good for anything he said except to be thrown out and trampled by others. He said, “You are the light of the world, a city on a hill cannot be hidden. In the same way, no one lights a lamp but puts it under a bowl. Instead, he puts it up on its stand and gives light to everyone in the house; in the same way, let your light shine before others that they may see your good deeds and glorify your father in heaven” (Matthew 5:14-16).

So, we’re called on to be salt, which is retarding the spread of evil like a desiccant. Salted meat doesn’t rot quickly but can be preserved for a long time, whereas the unsalted meat might become rotten within days. So, when we’re the salt of the earth, we speak up against injustice, we speak up against evil, we speak up against evils that corrupt people’s souls, and we retard the spread of wickedness in the world. That’s a role that we have to play toward non-Christians, even if they never believe in Christ, and just being good citizens, citizens of our nation, what it means to be involved in the political process, to do civic duties.

I was the foreman in court trial in a trial, a jury, several years ago. Just being active as good citizens, paying taxes, submitting to God, ordained authorities. There are various things we do just in this world that just are being a good witness, and ultimately in this world, being willing to be as Christ Jesus has lived a certain way. 1 John says, “As he was, so are we in this world” (1 John 4:17). That’ll involve loving our enemies, being willing to be kind and patient and to turn the other cheek. If someone forces us to go one mile, go with him two. If someone wants to sue us and take our cloak, let him have the tunic as well. To be willing to show the love of Christ to people who are not yet converted so that they can see that there is a different way to live and to be witnesses in this world.

This is the calling of God on us as Christians: missions to non-Christians. So, as we conclude today, go into your week knowing that God has gone ahead of you and will be using everything you experienced this week to sanctify you and bring you more and more into conformity to Christ.