There is a lot of confusion about evangelism in the church today. Even within our own lives – we must admit, evangelism is not a subject we understand all too well. We come with baggage to church with our ideas of evangelism and sometimes our church adds even more baggage to our concepts. We’ve surfed the channels and crossed “Christian TV” and seen these men and women asking for money. We’ve heard their message of how God wants to bless your life – usually with wealth and health. If we avaoided those landmines, we can’t help but remember that one man/woman went before a large audience.

Billy Grham hasn’t helped church culture with his massive crusades. Sure, many people have come to faith by this man’s presentation of the Gospel and the efforts of the “crusade,” but once again, we’ve been blasted with this idea that one person must evangelize masses. Even our own church experience dictates that the Pastor give the Gospel and the “church” receives it. Baptist churches through the last century were notorious for Sunday after Sunday presenting the Gospel – demanding an altar call and hoping that some lost soul would walk the aisle or possibly raise his hand.

Evangelism is scary when you aren’t a public speaker or a fundraiser. For most of us, the idea of going before an audience and doing a “sales-pitch” isn’t our idea of fun – nor do we feel qualified to do so.

But evangelism isn’t about any of that. Evangelism isn’t about crowds, tv, money or the like. Evangelism is communicating the Gospel. Which of course – implies a working knowledge of the Gospel. Understanding the Gospel is crucial. Then all evangelism really is – is a communication of the Gospel message to another person. Sure, groups are great – but God is calling you to be faithful, to be obedient to present the ”Good News” to non-believers. Once this has been done – Evangelism has occurred.

Another reason we don’t evangelize is because of fear. Fear that we won’t be successful, fear of failure, fear of rejection, fear of being thought crazy. God covers all these in His Word. Failure is not telling another person the Gospel. Success is not “converting” somebody – success is being obedient to the task of testifying to the Gospel. The other fears – are quite all right – in fact warranted. Rejection is going to happen. Men and women will reject the message of the Gospel (don’t worry – its not your fault), they will reject you personally and they will think that you are crazy. All of which are signs of you doing the work God has already laid out for you.

The world hated Jesus – it will hate you. The world rejected Paul – they will reject you. The world thought both Jesus and Paul were crazy – they will think you are crazy. It’s guaranteed. Even Paul tells Timothy that those who live godly lives in Christ Jesus will be persecuted (2 Timothy 3:12).

So what are you waiting for? Why aren’t you evangelizing? What is holding you back? Who is in your family that is unsaved? Have you actually told them the Gospel – if not, what are you waiting for? What about your friends? What co-workers do you know that aren’t Christian? Why haven’t you told them? What about your neighbors? This is where evangelism starts. Are you waiting for their time to be up, to be judged by God, sent into everlasting darkness? Are you waiting until there are no more chances? Why wait? Will you ever find a more perfect time than the time that is near? Paul says “today is the day of salvation, now is the time of God” (2 Cor. 6:1-2). If you are waiting for them to like you more, think that you are more acceptable or even be “more of a Christian” – don’t wait. You’ve already developed relationships with these people. They know who you are, they know what you do, what your priorities are – tell them the Truth – tell them God’s facts. Share those facts, call them to change, call them to faith and repentance!

Now is the day of the Lord! Today is the day of Salvation

Sorry men – I obviously lost track and missed posting on this last week. So here goes.

Conversion. What happens in Christian conversion? What does Scripture tell us about conversion and how do we know it has taken place. Is conversion marked by tears? Abundant emotion? Overwhelming joy? How about deep sadness – even depression? Is conversion marked by walking forward and submitting to an altar call? How about raising the hand after a Gospel presentation. Is it a prayer we said after hearing the Good News?

We could speculate on a myriad of options for how we see evidences of conversion. But Scripture is clear – none of these things is in any way a marker of conversion. They may happen and could be byproducts of conversion, but they are truly that. Possible byproducts. And if they are only possible byproducts why would we ever want to take our stand on them as true evidences of real, genuine conversion.

If we truly realize that praying a prayer, raising a hand, filling out a card, and even feeling guilt or joy are not true evidences of conversion – we would do well to look for the real evidence.

Jesus says in John 14:12 I tell you the truth, anyone who has faith in me will do what I have been doing. He will do even greater things than these, because I am going to the Father. Jesus is saying that if you have “FAITH” you “will do” what he did. What is that exactly? In verse 10 he has stated that he is doing the fathers work (John 14:10).

Jesus continues describing what it means to have faith. Faith isn’t mere acceptance – it is trust. Like you are trusting the chair you are sitting in to hold you up – is the trust that God is calling all men to have in Him and the work of His Son, Jesus Christ. Jesus says in John 14:15, “If you love me, you will obey what I command.” Later he says the same thing again, “If anyone loves me, he will obey my teaching. My Father will love him and we will come to him and make our home with him. He who does not love me will not obey my teaching. These words you hear are not my own; they belong to the Father who sent me” (John 14:23-24).

Scripture is clear – not only is there a change in “religion” or even “morality.” Conversion is something that changes a man’s affections, his love and who he aligns himself to. Conversion’s byproduct, the only byproduct we can truly see and in some sense measure is in a man’s love of the Lord, demonstrated in obedience. Scripture tells us that to become a believer you must “repent and believe.”

But anybody can say they’ve repented and believed. We can train anybody to say those words. So what is the reality behind this – what does it look like in real life?

James 2:14-26 handles this argument. At the core – faith without deeds is dead. Dead faith = unsaving faith. Alive faith = saving faith. Alive faith is one that has deeds to match the profession. Those deeds may look different among people – but they demonstrate allegiance and obedience to Jesus Christ.

So church, Bethel Grace, where do you stand? Personally – do you have actions in accordance with your faith? What kind of actions?

If you believe it is God working through you to do good works (Phil 2:12-13)  - there should be no shame in sharing what God is doing in your life?

Unless – there really is no action?

Comment – don’t be silent on this one. 

1. Choose a blog entry you’d like to comment on. At this point you can choose from Mark #1-3 and the “Welcome” entry. 

2. Click on the title of the Blog (e.g. “Mark #3 – The Gospel). This will take you to the whole blog post for you to read what we’ve written. 

3.  Read the full length of the article. This will give you an understanding of what we are talking about and what questions to answer and dialog over.

4.  Scroll down to the bottom of the article – all the way down to the bottom of the page. There you will find a rectangle/box. Click in that box and then you will see a flashing cursor. Here is where you can type, just like an email. Type away – answering questions, asking questions, telling other men what you found insightful about the chapter and how it impacted your life. All we ask is that your comment be edifying and in some way encouraging and appropriate for the content discussed.

5. When finished with your response, click on the “Submit” button in black below the text.

6. Finished. You have just digitally interacted with our church and have engaged other men in a discussion concerning our Men’s Ministry. 

Doesn’t that feel great? Now your experiences are shared with others. In addition, if you have a question – other men can post to address your concern. What a blessing.

May your comments pour forth and bless the socks off the church!

The heart of any Church must be the Gospel. For no other social group can possibly be considered a Church without the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Jews have synagogues, Muslims have mosques, business men have the Rotary/Kiwanis/Lion’s Clubs. Christians organize as a Church. The central tenant that keeps Christians together is the Gospel. But what is the Gospel? As you have read through Dever’s chapter on the Gospel he points out some common fallacies with the Gospel.

The Gospel is not that I’m OK and you are OK. I thouroughly enjoyed the first chapter of this section where Dever points out that some view “church” as a religious therapy session, where we plumb the depths of our souls, trying to make ourselves feel better with a few Bible verses. On the previous page (79) Dever mentions that quite often the Gospel is just placed as a thin veneer over the cultural values we already have and taking shape accordingly. 
Question: Is Bethel Grace a place where this happens? And be careful here. It is easy to take somebody else’s culture, juxtapose it with Scripture and claim that we don’t conform to it. For example, we may look upon a sub-culture in America – American Youth, the skateboarding culture, the Rap music culture and see that Bethel Grace “hasn’t been swept up into that terrible state.” However, has Bethel Grace substituted those cultures for more traditional/acceptible cultures instead of the Gospel?

Continuing on with the “I’m OK, you’re OK” section,” Dever points out that sin has a lot to do with the Gospel. Dever states, “one of the early stages of becoming a Christian involves beginning to realize that your problems fundamentally are not that you have messed up your own life or that you have failed to realize your own potential, but that you have sinned, not primarily against yourself or even against someone else, but against God” (83).

Question: “Does the preaching and teaching of Bethel Grace conform to this message of the Gospel? When you look at your own life and testimony of salvation… where does sin enter into the picture?”

Dever continues the next section stating that another fallacy of the Gospel is that God is love. While the Bible does teach that God is love, mistaking the Gospel, the Good News, with God is love is fatal. It is a head-first dive into Hell. God is also Just, Holy and deeply offended by sin. The message of the Gospel is not that God is so loving He will forget sin and take you as you are. The message of the Gospel is that God is so offended by your sin, that you can’t clean yourself up for Him, but that He has provided a way to purify you through the life, death, resurrection and ascension of Jesus Christ.

Question:  Have you yourself experienced this line of thinking? How about while sharing the Gospel? Maybe even in your own thoughts before turning to Christ? Share with us how so.

The third section deals with us viewing the Gospel as the story about how Jesus wants to be our friend. This disturbs me a lot. Recently there has been much written about this issue. A few popular authors are stressing that the Jesus way of life is what we are to live, and if we live His way, then that allows us to be saved. God did not come just so that Jesus could be our friend – His sacrifice was not just for friendship, it was for redemption, reconciliation and restoration.

Finally, Jesus did not  come with a new set of rules for us to live morally right. If the Law was enough to save, there would be no Gospel. When I read Scripture, I find that Jesus is more angry, upset, sorrowful and sick when He encounters individuals who are trying to live morally right. Just take notice that the gentle answers Jesus gives are to the “morally unpure” who know they live sinfully. However, those who try to live morally upright lives, who claim God’s grace through Abraham, are the victims of Jesus’ rebukes. Religiosity is something that God abhors. Matthew 9:13 is a great picture of this.

Question: How does Bethel Grace stand in light of this? Of all four misconceptions, do you see any signs of misunderstanding as a whole in the church? How about in individuals lives? Take what you now know to those you see who misunderstand the Gospel.

MUST ANSWER QUESTION
According to the Bible – what is the Gospel?
Can you say it in a minute?
Can you tell me what God requires of me after I’ve heard it?
What must I do to be saved? 

Did you get a kick out of Bill?  I hope so. The fact is, many of us have been Bill before. When life is going well and according to plan, then God enters and seems to make you uncomfortable – God becomes “meddling.” But when times are hard and things “hurt” we want compassion. It seems often times, we want God to work according to our own timelines and our own fashions. Yet what we see in Scripture is that God is who He is and we are subject to Him, not the other way around.

As men, we desperately need to know who God is and what He is like, not what we want Him to be. In a day when all “truth” is being cast off as oppressive and the fashion is to form your own reality – we need a stable God who we can rely on. We need his story to liberate us from ourselves, our culture, and our sin. We need the Gospel not only of redemption, but of Truth, of Freedom so that we can truly enjoy God and bring the Light of who He is into a dark and soiled world.

Such truth impacts how we live. Dever basically asks us the question early on, “how important is truth to you?” On page 58 he asks “How relevant are your own beliefs to your daily life? When you last sat in church, how much did you examine the words of the prayers…the songs…. Does it really matter to you if what you said or sang in church was true?

Ultimately at the heart of this chapter is that a healthy church not only needs expositional preaching, it needs preaching that is in line with what the Bible actually tells us about God. The whole Bible, 66 books in their entirety are really about God. With multiple authors, spanning over thousands of years, one story remains central, God exists, He Creates, He loves His creation, He interacts with that creation, He is faithful to His promises, He is Holy, separate and Sovereign over creation, and He is loving enough to provide for His creation. God is the great hero of the Bible, and His Son Jesus Christ bridges the gap between our sin and His holiness for us to be able to experience Him. Amazing. This God is the one that we worship, the one that we need a greater and greater experience of so that we can live in a greater unity with Him appreciating and loving Him back for all that He has already done for us in Jesus Christ.

Questions to reflect on and possibly answer:
How do you respond God’s initiation in Creation and Salvation?
How do you feel? Think? React?
Have you tried to make attempts to please God to earn His favor? How so?
Did this help – or did you just find yourself more frustrated?
Do you truly rely on Jesus’ death as payment for your sin?
How do you respond to a faithful God? What do you think would happen if God was unfaithful? What about if He was as faithful as you are in your life?

How did your group interact with this chapter?

This is our first blog entry – so let me say a few preliminary things. I’m very grateful that God has allowed us men to meet together and invest this time into each other and into His Kingdom. It has been a blessing to meet with the men in my group as I’m sure if you are reading this – you feel the same way. So here is the deal – these blogs will post a few ideas about what I found and engage you the reader to post a comment to add to the discussion. In fact, the hope is that there will be more comment material to read through than there is “blog.” So please, don’t just feel free, but feel obligated to add to the discussion, adding a comment, agreeing, disagreeing, and/or imputing some other insights that may have been missed. Add the material your group talked about and allow other members of the discussion to learn from what God showed your group.

With that said, Mark #1 – Expositional Preaching.  Dever says that “it is far and away the most important of them all” (pg. 39). He even says that if we get this right, “then you have in place the single most important aspect of the church’s life, and growing health is virtually assured, because God has decided to act by His Spirit through the Word” (pg. 39).

Question: Where is this assured us in the Bible? Is it assured? Why does Dever have this perspective and do you trust him at his word – or is there something in Scripture that suggests/promises this to us?

I remember in our group also pointing out that while it is the main job of the pastor to exposit – explain the word, it then must be our job as the congregation to demand that he does this. In no way am I implying that our pastor doesn’t, but our responsibility is to make sure our Pastor does his job. In fact, if God takes us away from Bethel Grace, for work or retirement or whatever reason, this should be our main qualifier in finding a new church and keeping that Pastor accountable to do his job. In addition, it should be our job to encourage him when he does do his job to keep a constant reminder that we are walking with him and doing our part as Christians.

Question: Are you doing this? Are you interacting with Pastor Jeff and any other teachers before you? Do you remind them that they did a good/bad job in presenting what God’s Word says?

A large chunk of the chapter is dedicated to addressing the issue of God’s Word. Did people create it? Did they arrange it? Or did God speak and respond. All of us in my group loved the story about the Catholic guy and Mark Dever.

Question: How did your group respond?

Finally, our group talked through pages 50-51. We examined how we could create men’s groups that rally men together, or have kids groups that are dynamic and interesting, or rally behind a church service dedicated to traditional hymns and drum sets – but all these would be hardly strong centers for rallying God’s people. Rather, our strength comes from rallying around God and His Word, two things that never change. Our desire however should be that we be changed by God’s Word. God himself, unchanging, but the church, God’s people, always changing. At the bottom of page 51 – “We need God’s Word to be saved, but we also need it to continually challenge and shape us.” And later – the Reformation cry “The Church reformed, always being reformed, according to the word of God.” Dever points us in the direction that we as individuals and corporately as the church must constantly be changed by God’s Word. We are never finished works of God. We are always in transition, being transformed according to Christ, step by step. Dever points out that “a healthy church is a church that hears the Word of God and continues to hear the Word of God. And such a church is composed of individual Christians who hear the Word of God and continue to hear the Word of God, always being refashioned and reshaped by it, constantly being washed in the Word and sanctified by God’s truth.”

Question: Are you being shaped by God’s Word? Are you daily reading and getting immersed in the Word of God? Are you willing to see your life change, your church change, your marriage, job, family change so that it might be molded closer to Jesus Christ?

Respond by answering some of the questions or tell us what your group discussed as it reviewed this chapter. Remember – nobody who has answered these questions is perfect, nobody in our church or God’s church is “there yet.” We are all in progress, so tell us where you and your group is at. You might just be an encouragement to another man in the church and helpful in how you answer these questions or respond with how you and your group discussed the chapter.

~ Drew

God Bless